Doublethink

[avevale_intelligencer]

The inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents can be a bit of a bugger sometimes, whatever HPL may have said.

A writer friend of mine posted on FB recently that if she writes only white characters she's accused of "whitewashing," and if she writes non-white characters the same people accuse her of "cultural appropriation," and she asks "Which is it, guys?" The obvious inference is that they just want her to stop writing altogether (because, sorry, the White Writers quota is all filled up, Dickens and Trollope and Faulkner and Hemingway and all those guys just got there first, and now it's other people's turn) but I don't think that's it. I think we get excited about what we get excited about on a given day and don't necessarily realise that that, and the thing we got excited about yesterday, are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or between them consume all the available space.

Another example. Most of us believe, on some level (and isn't that a wonderful weasel-phrase? Even if you're sure you don't think something, on some level you really do--trust us, we know), that there are absolute moral truths and that we know them. I have a deep-seated inner conviction that in a moral society eating people is wrong. I have friends who are equally convinced that eating animals is wrong. (I don't think I know anyone who extends it to plants as well--I fancy they don't get out much.) Other cultures may have different moral axioms, but we know that they must be wrong, because, well, we're right, and we can't all be right.

But if there are absolute moral truths, and we know them, and others don't, then that must mean we are better than them; that our culture, which taught us every moral axiom we ever knew, is better than theirs. And that's privilege, and arrogance, and elitism. But if there aren't absolute moral truths, or there are and we don't know them, then maybe the other cultures are right and we're wrong, or maybe nobody's right. And that's moral relativism, and the doctrine of expediency and the end justifying the means are but a step away. There really aren't any two ways about this; you can't apply quantum indeterminacy to moral issues and say that eating people is right and wrong at the same time and in the same place. It's one or the other. And in practice it tends to be one one day and another another; moral relativism seems right when we see some conservative banging on about razing the entire Middle East to the ground because they're Evul, and wrong when we see reports about what some African tribes do to their women. Yet it can't be both at once, or on alternate days with Sundays off. Reality doesn't work like that.

Elsewhere on FB I came across an article entitled "No, It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong," about climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, creationists and those lovable people who still believe in what the Texas Articles of Secession called "the beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery" and who reject "the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men." So I left a comment which began "All opinions are not equal," and ended with the logical conclusion "People should be ruled by liberal intellectuals like us for their own good, because they don't know any better and need a strong hand." It's another instance of the same thing. Either all people are equal, in which case they must have an equal right to a voice in the government of their country, or all people are not equal, in which case we who know best need to dump democracy and take over as a ruling class, because they're wrong and we're right and our opinions are better than their opinions. We can't have it both ways. Reality doesn't work like that.

And it's not just a case of educating people and informing them so that they will agree with us, because educated and informed people still hold Wrong opinions. "If we just showed them the facts" is a lovely thought, but it doesn't work. There are Christian scientists (not to mention Christian Scientists) who know all about evolution and evidence and still believe in God, conservative economists who've studied their subject for years and still believe in the trickle-down effect, and people who've been working out in the weather all day every day for forty years and still don't think there's anything wrong with it at the moment. Either they have as much right to an opinion and a vote as we do, or they don't. There's no halfway point here.

So we go on, blowing hot when it's cold and cold when it's hot, democrats one day and unwitting fascists the next, and we think we're the same people every day. And of course we are. We just can't seem to make up our minds--our whole minds--who that might be.

Comments

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

I naturally write "white" characters because that's what I was born like. I also, however, write aliens, and some of my "white characters" may not have white skins, and a lot of them I suspect don't but I've never looked close enough to know.

One thing on which I do try to insist is that, unless it is vital for the story for the villain to be a particular ethnicity, I try to write them as white, male, roughly Anglo-Saxon, and claiming to be of a moral ilk. Mainly because most of the villainous people I've ever met or read about, fit that kind of mould.

Please do not flame Zander about this -- we are different Nyronds: my views are not his.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Ungh. Painful though it is, I think most of this is right.

One exception, though, which I'm willing to write off to oops-while-composing:

There are Christian scientists (not to mention Christian Scientists) who know all about evolution and evidence and still believe in God

Theism ≠ Creationism.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

True indeed, but theism is as unsupported by evidence of the scientific kind as creationism is. You know that I have no personal objection to theism, since I'm prepared to accept that there are forms of evidence that don't fit scientific criteria but which people find personally satisfying, but a rigorous scientific outlook would be harder to reconcile with such beliefs. And yet people do.

And having said that, I'm sure it would be possible to find a creationist or two who was educated, well-informed, intelligent and still managed to believe that God created the world in six days. We're just that mentally flexible.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

¶2: OH yes, there are such.

¶1: But not everything in life requires, or even should have (IMHO), a "rigorous scientific outlook". Love. Cookies. Enjoying the open air and blue sky with a few clouds. Too much rigor leads to petrifaction or shattering, or both.

¶0: Not that there's any need to continue this, since ISTM that we're each allowing enough latitude.

¶?: And how's the weather at your latitude and longitude? 'Round here it's been way too hot.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

When it's not way too hot (and I have a far lower threshold of "too hot" than most, as Soren will confirm with ghoulish glee) it's chucking down rain by the bucketload. And then there are the flies. Looking forward to October.