Current Affairs

The Caste of Our Insecurities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. 

The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. 

She makes the case.

And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously for most people, expressed by body language, word choice, social assumptions, and a kind of cognitive aphasia in which people simply do not see what they’re doing or who they’re doing it to. Difficult to get the why if the what can be so smoothly unrecognized.

It’s hard reading, and yet fills in blanks that other attempts at addressing racism and class bigotry fall short. For instance, we tend to default to the occurrence of racism based on appearance, and to a great degree that is a major aspect. But any look at the history of it in this country reveals certain baffling inconsistencies, as when Irish immigrants were seen as nonwhites in the mid-19th Century, and how Jews have long suffered a conditional status. Italians, East Europeans, and so forth, all passed through periods of being regarded as, functionally,  not White.

At times, the idea that class is at work more than race, but that will not answer the fact that “success” is no guarantee against automatic relegation to inferior status. Over the last century and a half that African Americans have been removed from enslavement, wealth has proved to be insufficient to overcome systemic biases, even as wealth makes certain interactions easier. 

In the afterwash of the Civil Rights era, many white people would like to believe that the issue has been settled, but we are constantly reminded that it is not. Partly, this has been a consequence of not identifying the problem correctly. The frustration of seeing our best intentions regularly thwarted by behaviors which seem to have no manageable foundation dogs us through history. The key factor in this persistent misidentification is the fact that all our public declarations, beginning in 1776, overwhelming stress our commitment to equality. This pledge masks intentions that run directly counter to the stated goals. It is more than special pleading, it is a refusal to adhere to principles that require us to stop being White.

By White I do not mean the surface markers of what we semi-scientifically term Caucasian. Because, as noted, many groups that have met those qualifications in the past were, at one time or another, regarded as Not White. White is a social and political designation. The term did not exist as a group marker until the 18th Century and was intended as a hierarchical label. It quickly established a kind of “natural” pecking order upon which the future designations of racial groups could be slotted into categories. This quickly became both political and economic fuel for purposes of group identity and justification for exploitation. In America it was used to legitimate not only slavery but miscegenation laws and later eugenics programs. But more consistently, it evolved a rigid caste system with which we live today, albeit diluted sufficiently most of do not recognize it.

Not recognizing, it becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

Wilkerson’s book is, as I say, hard reading. The savagery with which we have treated African Americans, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and establishing the principle of participatory equality, is made all the more terrible because of the ideas on which our country has been founded. To be sure, caste may not be the key to undoing the systemic disregard experienced by millions of people, but upon reading this book I have found some purchase on the problem that, while not rendering it sensible, at least suggests the degree to which the problem is rooted. 

It has also given some slightly more discernible explanation for what just happened in our recent election. And if true, it is a sad and pathetic reality. 

The apparent need sewn into the fabric of our being to somehow be Better Than is a double-edged blade. One can use that need for self-improvement without it becoming a toxic excuse to constantly keep someone else down, to perfect one’s gifts, to aspire to personal achievement. Or it becomes a need to just exercise a false sense of self-entitled privilege over others by virtue of the arbitrariness of birth or group affiliation. This can justify anything from cheating on exams to murder, depending on the pathology of the obsession to simply Be Better as opposed to Doing Better. And of course, if the latter is the path chosen, the goal is already lost. All that remains then is to do all one can to hide one’s inabilities, infelicities, and lack of empathy. 

Expunging this apparently integral notion of caste may be the only way to become the better angels of our stated aspirations. But how does one do something without first recognizing it?

An Observation: The Personal and the Proetic

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Formative influences can be doggedly resistant to reassessment. There’s some accuracy in suggesting that they should be left alone. But once the idea occurs, leaving it alone can become a species of stubbornness rather than any kind of self-nurture. 

Still, care is required, especially in an age in which so much information, much of only marginal relevance to the main subject, is available and forms the basis of a kind of revisionism that too often only serves to widen the gulf between beginnings and the present. Analyzing a body of work in the light of personal revelations is tricky. Certainly there’s a connection, but how and with what effect is a subtler question than the ready dismissals of previously seminal work in the light of a creator’s shortcomings allow. 

On those rare occasions my opinion about this is solicited, I say that “If you find someone whose work you really like, then go read it all, see it all, hear it all before you find out one personal detail about them. What you later learn about the artist may alter everything, but you should give the work a fair encounter.” Obviously there are exceptions, but few I’ve found that cannot be deduced from the work itself. Deciding in advance that X is a bigot of some sort may be accurate and fair, but even a catastrophe of a human being is capable of producing worthwhile art. (Ezra Pound is still regarded as a poetic genius despite the fact that he was an apologist for fascists. I assume the fascism does not manifest in the work in any deleterious way—I wouldn’t know, I’m simply basing this on the reputation, both of the man and the work.)

On the other hand, I always found something off-putting in D.H. Lawrence in his treatment of women. In its day, perhaps, it seemed radical and somewhat enlightened, but despite the beauty of much of his writing, it somehow struck an off note. Later, when I learned about his life, some of this made sense. But had I known about him beforehand, I might never have read the work. Worse, I may have dismissed it as not worthwhile in a more general sense. As it is, my understanding of the work is enriched by the later knowledge in a way that does not bleed the work of its artistic value.

We can go down the list. Great artists with personal characters problematic at best who nonetheless produced amazing work the world would be less for ignoring because…

The quasi-academic practice of reanalyzing such works in light of current standards of behavior only to relegate such artists to a suspect file can do damage in a different way. Among the various problems is the conclusion that an artist cannot be more than his or her personal limitations. That, somehow, a given artist cannot be “trusted” once such personal scandals are revealed.

Trusted how?

This can be particularly difficult in our own personal relation to, say, first influences.

I credit Isaac Asimov with the work that set me on a path to being a writer. Of late, his personal tendencies to be a, hmm, “dirty old man” have cast a pall over his reputation. Fair enough. He wasn’t an exemplary human being. His habit of forcing himself—publicly—on unwilling women with uninvited kisses is cringe-worthy. This is the hallmark of someone who in many ways was still an adolescent, albeit one with a sense of privilege born of reputation.

But what does that have to do with the Foundation Trilogy?

I read Foundation and Empire when I was 13. Because of the nature of where I got my books then (Luekens Drug Store, from a spinner rack just inside the door), I got what was available. I had no idea about ordering or anything, I just perused the rack and bought what looked cool. (This was the same place I got my comics.) So the second book in the series was the first one I saw. It surprises me now that I fell into it so easily, but then when later I learned that these three books are really just compilations of short stories and novelettes, it made sense. I didn’t have to read them in order, though that helped.

There was something vast and impressive on the page, the scope he conveyed in a few paragraphs, and the epic importance of what was happening. This connected with my young imagination in ways that are difficult to convey, other than by pointing out that first encounters that become touchstones seem to carry with them a universal sense of vitality and significance against which everything else is diminished. (I find the same issue when discussing with anyone under, say, 45 the impact that the original Star Trek had on us.) All I remember afterward was how badly I felt the urge to create something that did the same thing. Later I realized that this meant writing.

Soon after, I discovered I, Robot and then the rest of Asimov’s novels and short stories.

His treatment of women was, in retrospect, prepubescent. Virtually blank slates. There were women. Sometimes men married them. (He managed Arkady as well as he did by sticking to her youth sans sexuality. Which made her like Nancy Drew or a Bobsey Twin. Unsatisfying for a more mature reader, but nothing terrible.) The closest he came to maturity in fiction was in The Gods Themselves, but that is a curious case, and nothing much is actually there. It might be argued that his lack of female characters as characters who are women is pathetic, but I see it as someone who knew virtually nothing about women avoiding the topic lest he make a fool of himself. (He did anyway, as in The Stars Like Dust, but this is a matter of complete cluelessness, not a manifestation of hidden perversity.)  Much of science fiction published in the 1940s and 50s is like this. Many factors played a role, not least of which was editorial expectation. The general expectation of women’s “place” was pervasive and retrograde and awaited the social revolutions yet to come before people raised to not notice would become aware. Two magazines were launched partly on the grounds of writers feeling constrained by such innate prudery,  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, but even in these examples of what we might consider responsible views of women and relationships were the exceptions. Mostly, it was a vast unexplored sea that awaited writers with the chops to deal with the subject more fully. And a publishing environment that allowed for it.

My point being, his later personal proclivities, unpleasant as they were, seem to imbue his fiction not at all except by an absence. 

There are many writers (and painters and musicians and actors, etc) who I doubtless would dislike personally and some of whom I would have serious problems with, whose work I nonetheless have enjoyed and value. I do not believe we are reduceable to single traits. When engaged in an act of creation, my past certainly comes into play, but the requirements of the work put me in a mode outside of my daily tactics. I give the work authority over my private foibles. It may not always work, but I hope (and believe) that the result defies analysis by biographical specificity.

In other words, the work is a thing unto itself. It may be flawed, it may fail, and certainly some of those failures may be traceable to personal aspects of the way I see the world, but the work remains its own thing, to be judged by its own content. This is a standard of apprehension that, for me, is only fair, and seeks to avoid a priori condemnation based on similar personal aspects of a given viewer/reader/listener. The work is the work. 

Exposure to honest work done by flawed people is one way to learn to recognize propaganda, which is dishonest work done for flawed reasons. If we do not learn the difference, then art has failed us.

Clear-Eyed And Informed

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

One of the quickest ways to end conversations in casual social gatherings is to contradict someone expounding on myth, hearsay, and bad history. You’ve been there; we all have. Someone at some point starts holding forth on some chestnut of popular apprehension and repeats a story that has suffered the manifold revisions of a game of telephone that render the story factless, in service to a line of self-aggrandizing chest-beating at the expense of the truth. Stories many of us take for granted in the first place and, because we’ve never heard or bothered to find out the real story, assume to be accurate. We grow accustomed to thinking about these stories this way and then, when it might matter in ways we never anticipated, we don’t know that they have prepared the ground for us to swallow bigger misconstruals and even outright lies.

Into this, occasionally, steps someone who knows better and points out the flaws in the presentation. A curious thing usually happens. Either the conversation turns away from that topic or everyone gets angry. Not at the one disseminating the broken narrative but at the lone voice that contradicts the nonsense. Such reactions lead eventually one of two interpretations—either that people in general don’t care what the facts are or, adjacent, they like the error-laden chestnut more than the reality.

The reception of the corrective information can have a chilling effect on the one offering the facts. No one likes to be ostracized,

It can be puzzling. What is it about these skewed narratives that people preferred? Well, almost always there is something about them that makes people feel good about themselves—about their patriotism, they beliefs, their affiliations, but mostly about their ignorance. Once we leave school, most of us feel we are done with homework, which no one really liked anyway, and the idea that we may be less knowledgeable than perhaps we need to be just suggests that we need to do more homework. I suspect there’s an unexamined aspect of psychology that says that to be an Adult is to already have all the skills and knowledge we need. More study seems justifiable only if it leads to higher income. Even then, excuses can be made to avoid it.

But the reality is we need always to know more, especially about stories we think we know. The how, why, and wherefore of our history feeds into present issues in ways that, if we are ignorant, can lead to political and social traps.

When reading a first-class historian like Jill Lepore, one becomes aware of how tangled those webs into which we might fall can be. For those of us who may delight in being that one person at the party who will speak fact to ignorance, her books are a delight.

Her latest, The Deadline, is a collection of essays designed to counter the shallow, poorly-understood history that underlies so many of the canards foisted upon us daily as truth. As well, they are a delight to read.

In several books, Lepore has displayed an approach to her subjects that bypasses the various filters with which we view our history, opening side entrances into the underlying realities of which modern myths are formed. She examines the cultural touchstones by which we navigate the pathways of our presumably common identity.

Here, we find a range of essays that cover most of American history, topical subjects, thorny personal issues, memoir, and observations about the nature of knowing—or not knowing—what’s going on. Quite a few pieces are about the business of news itself, covering processes and personalities, and giving us a glimpse of how what we think we know comes to us too often “prepared” so a particular message is put forth, even while it is possible to find out what the other facts are. To that problem, we learn that there is nothing new about “fake news” other than the delivery vectors (and perhaps the speed with which it comes at us) but that even when such distortions seem impossible to counter, somehow we seem not to be fooled for long. That may be changing, though, and Lepore gives us her perspective on that as well.

Essentially, Lepore gives us a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our proclivities, often with the unpleasant but unsurprising conclusion that if we are fooled, it’s because we wish to be. But really there is no excuse for blindly reacting to hormone-spiking jabs at our panic buttons. We just need to know a little better.

As I say, Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians. She has a quirky set of interests (she did a marvelous book about the creator of Wonder Woman as well as penning one of the most interesting histories of the United States I’ve read in a long time) and this allows her to approach even the most convoluted subjects in ways that consistently illuminate. Along the way, she lets us know that one of the best ways to not be fooled is to refuse to accept the soundbite, the meme, or the two-minute report as the end of the story. While each may well contain a grain of truth, we have to understand that it’s only a grain and all that went into it is so much more interesting, richer, and liberating.

Ministering To The Present…For The Future

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Among the most attuned voices in the climate change discussion, outside of straight-up science, Kim Stanley Robinson has long held a commanding position as a legitimate observer. The power of fiction combined with clear-eyed assessments and a grasp of practical as well as philosophic morality is nowhere better demonstrated than in his long career addressing “real world” issues through the lens of science fiction. 

Go back to the Mars Trilogy, the core of the three novels is climate. The politics, the economics, the science, all anchor the characters to a set of questions demanding attention. Iy is possible to see that early work as a stand-in for what could be reclamation work here on Earth.

Over time, book after book, Robinson has focused on one major conceptual question—what is the optimal relationship between humans and their environment? Even his interstellar exegesis, Aurora, is about this. In a way, it’s a central question—for science fiction primarily, but really for any literature to greater or lesser values of relevant—mainly, what is it possible to do without a viable environment in which to do it?

In The Ministry For The Future, Robinson brings it all to the fore and gives a novel that is as much handbook as dramatic narrative. In many ways, this is a species of “thirty-minutes in the future” with all the immediacy of the current climate conference in Egypt. He sets it a decade or so hence. After a harrowing opening, the book settles into “how do we deal with this” mode and for all its didacticism it is engaging and often riveting—mainly because he never loses sight of the people directly involved.

And that opening is masterfully horrific. The first line sets the tone—”It was getting hotter.” We then watch a massive heat cell boil a large section of India. 

Quite literally boil. There is one survivor, Frank May, who is there as part of an international mission. We follow Frank through the rest of the book, the outraged, scarred activist, who finds himself in an unlikely relationship with Mary Murphy, the freshly-appointed head of an agency within the UN which gets dubbed in the press as the Ministry for the Future. The agency has the unique mandate of being a voice for the future and becomes pivotal in the challenges facing the world with climate change that is no longer deniable.

Between the two of them we are given entrée to both ends of the political and social dynamics of dealing with a global problem. Robinson shows us all the major components that must be dealt with, including a solidly-explicated look at the economics involved (a difficult topic to make interesting at the best of times, but vital and here, in Robinson’s hands, far more engaging than one might expect), and walks us through the multiple scenarios that might pull us back from the brink.

This is not the kind of miracle-working overnight fix one often gets in science fiction. (The problem with those is, scale aside, that while the science may be good, the sociology is usually hopelessly utopian.) This is a look at one possible road to a viable set of solutions and even here the roadblocks are enormous and the politics maddeningly frustrating. This is as much an explication of the challenges as any kind of anticipatory celebration of potential problem-solving.

And for all its didacticism, it remains a very readable novel. He never loses connection with the characters and he lets us care about them as the best fiction does. The science, the economics, the politics, all the elements requiring thorough explanations to make the drama meaningful are salted through the story in a manner that breathes life into the concerns and the people dealing with them. We find ourselves invested in what all these people are doing because we understand what they’re doing. In that sense, this is a celebration of humanity at its best. The catastrophes are of human origin and so the solutions are ours as well and Robinson is telling us—showing us—that we have this.

If we so choose.

People, Problems, Politics, and Possibilities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I remember as a child I once asked my dad where all the smoke from the smokestacks went. Into the air, obviously, but after that? I don’t remember exactly what he answered, but it was reassuring, something about how it just got diluted until it sort of wasn’t there anymore. Years later we would have debates about pollution and climate change and it was clear that he simply could not grasp how, the Earth being so big, that we mere mortals could possibly have the kind of impact environmentalists were claiming. It was frustrating and oddly appealing, because reassurance works that way.

One of his arguments rested on the production of CO2 and methane by the Earth itself, among other particulates such as my be spewed out by volcanoes, and how meager our own output was by comparison. Like other such arguments, its legitimacy rested on those factors left out, like accumulation over time. Some of the first work done on what we now call Anthropogenic Climate Change was down in the first half of the 19th Century. The problem was already apparent to some, but of course the question then was, so what? We have to stay warm, we need energy to build things, how are we supposed to do this thing called civilization if we don’t burn things? While this begs many questions (what is it you want to do? how do think “civilization” should manifest? just how much “progress” do we actually need in certain directions?) the fact is no one could construct solar panels in 1850.

And all the other localized signs that spoke to the hindbrain and the skin that told us nothing was changing. Winters were still cold (depending on where you were) summers still tolerable, water seemed plentiful, and so on. Everything is fine in my neighborhood, why the alarmist talk?

Now more of us are aware that self-deception has played a seriously negative role. Yes, politicians and industrialists have reasons to deceive us about these things, but the fact is many of us have been for decades inclined to believe everything would be fine.

With more frequent hurricanes, droughts, floods, and receding glaciers and our collective eyes on all of it almost obsessively (via media, documentaries, book after book) it has become impossible to calmly ignore the reality. And now we are here, a couple of degrees of global temperature away from the stuff of apocalyptic science fiction. Even the big corporations, while still often trying to underplay the crisis, are investing more and more in renewables and alternatives.  (I’m convinced we’re not farther along that road because the corporations took too long to figure out how to bill consumers profitably.)

Now that the ice sheets are receding and the oceans rising and the number of devastating storms is rising, before panic and collapse set in, what is there to be done?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry For The Future, offers a set of possibilities.

Robinson has been writing ecologically-concerned science fiction all his career. The Mars Trilogy is nothing if not a study in potential human impact on an environment. It is clear from even a cursory perusal of his work that he knows from whence he speaks. What humans are doing, what we will do, what we will have in the wake of our collective doing inform the basis of almost all his work. And in a field that has often offered but seldom achieved viable glimpses of the future, his work carries an efficacy difficult to discredit.

The Ministry of the Future follows the work of a department established by the United Nations sometime in the near future (there’s overlap with the present) whose task becomes to speak for the citizens yet to be. Which eventually includes wildlife in an attempt to include all life in a concept of Citizen in order for them to be granted legal standing. The director of the ministry, Mary Murphy, is Irish, and reminds one a bit of Samantha Powers. She has talented people, many of them visionaries, some of them capable of surprising solutions not always legal.

In the wake of one of the worst ecological disasters in history—a heat wave that descends on India and ends up killing twenty million people—the mission of the Ministry acquires an urgency and a momentum that carries through the rest of the novel. Along the way we see solid analyses and examples of the consequences of climate change and glimpses of the costs of doing nothing.

But as well we see on offer solutions. Robinson pairs gloom and doom with possibilities and potentials in a series of elegant portrayals of what can be done. In this, he covers a wide range of the various aspects of the situation with skill and authority, from geo-engineering to economic revisions to migration policy and the kind of international coalition-building that will be essential. His projections of where we may be politically in thirty or forty years are compelling, suggesting the power of SF to predict the future has some legitimacy.

Though these are just possibilities. Grounded in real science and technology and in a pragmatic “read” of human political tendencies. Some of the factors he examines are less tractable and in some instances brutal. But given the Givens, as it were, he gives us a plausible picture of the next few decades and what it is possible to do. Whatever may actually happen will be different, but within the 560 pages of this novel are a suite of approaches that rise to the inspirational.

Regardless of what may happen, one thing emerges from the novel that is inarguable—any solution will necessarily be a collective endeavor.

As well, Robinson skillfully gives a personal story. Mary encounters the lone survivor of the India heatwave and over the course of the novel a relationship evolves that is one of the most heartfelt and poignant to be found. Through this, the personal challenges of the world as it will change emerges. He keeps the larger story firmly grounded in the personal throughout.

One comes away with the conviction that not only can we solve this problem, but that we will become better for having met the challenge, and afterward we might actually have world worthy of the best in us.

Fatal Prose?

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

The year of the fatwa, an acquaintance of ours hurried to a Walden Books store that still had copies of the book. He had called around to find them, only to be told time and again that they had been packed up and returned. This one outlet had not yet sent them back and he asked—demanded, really—that they not, he would come in and buy them all. I’m not sure why they believed him, but he told us afterward that as soon as he walked into the store all the employees showed stark terror. He was dark, black hair, what you might call Mediterranean. He looked to them, apparently, Arabic.

They had ten copies and he did in fact buy them all. He gave us one, which we still have. It’s a First Edition, second printing.

Until this global scandal and the media coverage attendant upon it, I had never heard of Salman Rushdie. This, I learned, was his fourth novel. Prior to this he was among the literary writers praised by academies, taught in creative writing courses, and of little interest to me as I was at that time pouring all my energies into trying to become a published writer of science fiction. What Rushdie wrote, I discovered, was from the literary borderlands known as magic realism, which put him in company with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Manuel Puig and, to some degree, Carlos Castenada.

I read The Satanic Verses from a kind of voyeuristic viewpoint—what is there here that might earn a death sentence for the author? There was a sensationalist aspect to it all that was related to books that had been banned or challenged, books that had stirred public outcry or denunciation. The celebrity of the circumstance drew in readers and I confess that I wondered very briefly if this were as serious as it seemed. But bookstores, especially the chains, were yanking the book from shelves out of fear of reprisals, so if this was a promotional gimmick it was backfiring horribly. My suspicions along those lines did not last long and as details emerged, it became clear that the Ayaltollah Khomeini had indeed decreed a reward for Rushdie’s death for blasphemy.

Part of the privilege of living in America, at least until recently, is the security of greeting that kind of news with complete dismay. You don’t kill someone for blasphemy. What does that even mean? (As the Religious Right has gained more prominence in public awareness, we may be learning that.) It’s a novel, for goodness sake! Fiction!

And at some point you wonder, just how thin-skinned can they be?

After reading the novel, I was still baffled. The title and the events referred to by it are part of the lore and tradition involved. As far as I could learn, Rushdie misrepresented none of it. I honestly could not see cause for an accusation of blasphemy, but then, I am not Muslim and my own relationship with the traditions in which I was raised has been problematic since adolescence. I thought it was a good example of its kind but nothing special.

But there is a section of the novel that I thought did make sense in terms of insult, and that is the parts concerning the Imam. This character is clearly based on Khomeini, a cleric living in exile who is given a chance to return to his country and overthrow the oppressive government. It is not a flattering portrait.

‘We will make a revolution,’ the Imam proclaims…’that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history.’ For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies—progress, science, rights—against which the Imam has set his face.

And then a bit later:

‘Death to the tyranny of the Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek eternity, the timelessness, of God. His still waters, not her flowing wines.’ Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word…

I thought then and still do that this is what drew the ire of the clerics. It was personal and had nothing to do with any presumed blasphemy. But then, it also demonstrates how the personal had become political, in that the thing desired, according to this, was to stop anything and everything that might detract from the exaltation of a stasis anchored by a changeless devotion.

Rushdie had to go into hiding. He lost access to much of his life. He lost his wife.

Khomeini died, but the fatwa remains, reaffirmed in 2006 (on Valentine’s Day, curiously enough) that the vow to kill him is permanent.

It is still difficult for us to accept that a work of fiction could result in a death sentence, but then we have that privilege here. Though it’s not like books aren’t regularly challenged and sometimes it seems those in the forefront of condemnations might work themselves into a killing frenzy. Words are powerful and we need to remember that.

For that reason, we should cherish them and protect them, because in that power we find the capacity to conceive the world and acquire wisdom and grow. Words that cause discomfort, that stop us in our self-satisfied tracks and make us look at the world in different ways are among the best tools we have to find justice. If what we read causes the kind of dismay that only offers condemnation as a response, it may be our preconceptions and prejudices that need examination. We will never know what we can become if we arbitrarily silence the diversity of other voices.

Collisions of cultures can often result in incomprehension. As an aside, I had occasion once to discuss this issue with a Muslim, who told me she supported the fatwa because of the blasphemy. I attempted to learn what about the book was so blasphemous. Instead, I received a jeremiad on its obscenity. Now, there is talk of sex in the novel, but to my mind it is far from graphic, but she insisted, especially given the depiction of oral sex in the first chapter.

“What oral sex?” I asked, completely baffled then.

The first chapter depicts the aftermath of an airliner bombing—probably Lockerby—which has dropped the two principle characters into freefall. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, who are bound in odd ways through the rest of the book and exhibit spiritual (and physical) mutability in very clever and insightful ways, tumble through the air and fall into a rotation around each other, head to toe, as they fall. When I read it the first time, I immediately saw it as a physical metaphor of Yin and Yang, and as the book proceeded this was clearly intended.

“What is that?” my communicant asked. She had never heard of it. The cultural literacy that might have made the scene make sense to her that way was absent. Instead, she drew the inference that they were in a 69 position, fellating each other.*

Later, I couldn’t help but wonder, what am I missing because of a lack of cultural knowledge? It’s easy to slip into judgmental mindsets without noticing that such blindnesses go both ways. Expecting everyone, everywhere, to possess the same set of cultural awarenesses is another form of privilege that fails to serve.

Burning the books would leave us bereft of the kind of global and cross-cultural familiarity that is essential to understanding each other.

But then, such knowledge leads to choices, and for a certain mindset, choices are the ultimate blasphemy. (I am mindful of the spasmadic rejection of education and information in the aftermath of 9-11 that swept this country, that any attempt to understand, to contextualize, to become aware was seen as somehow treasonous.)

Now finally someone has managed to assault Mr. Rushdie and damaged him horribly. The kind of unquestioning commitment to narrow causes is also something we often are unable to comprehend, although that may be changing even here. It still leaves us with a puzzled dismay. Why? On the one hand, it’s just a book. (Killing Rushdie will not change that, the book will not magically disappear should he die, and in fact this event will cause even more people to buy it and read it, so by what logic is this even construed as effective?) Then again, it is that the ideas in the book—in any book—cause so much fear that the choice seems to be to yield and learn or lash out and destroy, and the latter is preferable somehow.

This is something many of us have experience with, people so terrified of ideas that they will move heaven and earth to keep such things at bay. Books are being challenged and removed from libraries all the time. It’s never enough that we allow people to make such choices for themselves, some demand their fears be enforced on everyone.

So let me leave my own statement on the “virtue” of absolutist positions here:

Nothing is so sacred that it justifies killing someone because they express a different opinion about it. Nothing. The concept of blasphemy is only fear in ritual garb. We must overcome terror in the face of new ideas.

____________________________________________________________

*When I asked her how her initial reading held up through the rest of the novel, she admitted she had not read past that first chapter. On that basis she was willing to accept that Rushdie’s death was justified.

Intrusions

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

The latest eruption of reaction from certain viewers of the new Sandman series on Netflix is another example of a phenomenon that I, in my 20s, would never have thought to indulge: the intrusion of the audience directly into the aesthetic choices of an author. I grew up in a time in which you either liked or did not like something, and if you did not like it you would then go off to find something you did like. What you did not do was presume to publicly dictate to the creators what was wrong with the work as if you had any place in that process.

Professional (and amateur) critics would analyze and examine and write pieces about a given work to explain what does and does not work, but rarely, if ever, would you find a demand that a work be different. Certainly lively discussions among those interested over a given work were common and healthy, but that work would be accepted as presented, to be dissected and studied, liked or disliked, as it stood.

Today it would seem the audiences harbor elements that take it as given that there is a right to tell the creator to rewrite, reconstruct, or otherwise revise a given work, based on the apprehension that said work is “wrong” and should be fixed. Among this group there seems little interest in examining those objectionable aspect to discern the whys of the creator’s choices—and thereby maybe learn something from them—or even the consideration to simply say “this is not for me” and go find something else. This intrusion of a self-assumed participation (which becomes strident, because obviously it ought not and seldom does have any result on the work in question) has become a fixture of the current literary and media zeitgeist.

We see this presently in the splenetic condemnation of so-called Woke aspects in something and an implied—or explicit—demand that they be gotten rid of. It seems not to occur to such tyros that maybe an examination—of self as well as the work (which, in the best of worlds, become one in the same, because that is what the best work does for us)—would be edifying and perhaps personal growth might result. It seems not to occur to them (and others not so vocal about their personal discontents) that the whole purpose of engaging with a work that may challenge preconceptions is to force a bit of self-analysis.

Given that the United States now ranks far down the ratings of literacy in the world today, it would seem that we have a massive group of people who have decided that the literary world, be it in print or film, must conform to their definition of acceptable and allow them the comfort of never getting out of their heads.

This is a level of intrusion I find toxic. Even though it may well be a minority, these days numbers seem not to matter in relation to degree of attention. For the purposes of this essay, let me just speak to the lone individual who, disgusted by Dr Who being a woman or the aspect of two boys or two girls kissing, or the appearance of any minority in a role long-assumed to be the province of white people, reacts with a public display of condemnation and a demand that this not be allowed.

You are to be pitied. You have locked your soul into a box so that it is never touched by anything other than the presumptions chasing each other inside your skull. You do not know how to read (and by that I mean the vicarious immersion through connection with a character and a text that offers something New for consideration; indeed, consideration itself would seem a foreign and hateful thing to you) and you no doubt have caged your empathy in such a way that you flinch at any suggestion that the world is not what you wish it to be. You see something like this (Sandman) and you look forward to being dazzled by the special effects and the novelty of magic and other worldly mysteries, yet any hint of the personal that might challenge your prejudices is unwelcome because what you want is to be wowed, not enlarged. Literature is, at its best, a gateway to parts and places in the world you have not had and might never have direct access to—that is the point.

You do not have the right—nor fortunately, as yet, the authority—to tell a writer he or she should take something out because it disturbs you. Go read/view something else and leave this to those who do appreciate it.

It’s this attitude, this sense of privilege that suggest because you are a fan you own the property and can dictate the landscape, that troubles me. It’s ugly. It’s selfish and small and poisonous. And, as I said, pitiable.

And just an observation…if something bothers you that much, odds are it’s not irrelevant at all. Rather it may be the most relevant thing about it and it would be a good idea to maybe look into that a bit deeper. If it was genuinely gratuitous, it likely would not cause even a minor stir in your psyche.

Visceral Coding

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Few things generate sustained anxiety as much as genetic engineering. Both positive and negative, for the possibilities and the dread. Since Watson and Crick revealed the double helix of DNA, the science has proceeded apace, and we now live in an era wherein “programming” can refer to both computers and our genes.

Jennifer Doudna is a name to conjour with in this transformational time. In 2020 she won the Nobel Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work on CRISPR cas9. CRISPR has become the label in media stories for a process of “editing” genes with the use of a form of RNA. (Almost no one outside the biochemistry and medical community seems to no what it stands for: Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeaters.) Basically minute segments of code in a strand of RNA that repeat and can be used to, effectively, insert modified segments of code into a gene sequence.

What began as “pure” research into the methods by which bacteria defend against viruses became a revolutionary method of dealing with all manner of genetic circumstances, including potential treatments and vaccines for the most recent scourge, COVID-19.

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Doudna (pronounced DOWD-na), Code Breaker, is also a history of the sometimes chaotic, sometimes life-affirming, often unexpected world of scientific research and its interface with the rest of the world.

Isaacson has given us not only a biography of a remarkable individual, but a look at the often surprising world of research and development. The image of the scientist, austere and removed, still to some extent dominates our imagination. It comes as a surprise (and occasionally something of a betrayal) when we are forced to recognize that scientists are human, just like the rest of us, with all the flaws and foibles to which “ordinary” people are prone. One aspect of the public conception of The Scientist I think requires adjustment is the fact that scientists continue to grow, to mature, to evolve. Too often, it seems that once the Ph.D. is earned, the scientist becomes a static icon, unchanging, and is expected to Know All or at least is frozen into an unchanging assemblage of stereotypes. On some level, this seems to offer comfort—one of the things people tend to be bothered by is an admission of not knowing. Worse still, is a change of mind, which is inevitable in the light of new evidence. But ordinary people can do both. A scientist is not supposed to.

This has led to unrealistic expectations, loss of trust, and the unfortunate “gaming” of science (never mind truth) in public policy. Primarily, this is from a profound lack of understanding on the part of the public. For another, it emerges from the misuse of science as a political talking-point.

Isaacson does an excellent job of taking the reader through the various aspects of a discovery, its initial reception, its development, its transition from pure research to useful tool, and the social and political impact along the way. And along with this, he explains just what that science is.

Jennifer Doudna is central to the unraveling of genetic codes and the inner workings of the templates of life. Basically, she became a nexus for many strands of research, each adding to the overall picture. Her work with French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier ultimately earned them a shared Nobel Prize.

What they have developed is a tool by which the template for biological forms can be modified. Edited. This offers the possibility eventually of correcting genetic “errors’ that produce diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs, and many others. The drive to “decode” the human genome contained the hope and ambition to one day be able to deal with these things, which are different from pathogenic illnesses. But even in the case of viral and bacterial infections, the ability to address illnesses from at a genetic level offers exciting possibilities—and in fact has been vital to the handling of the COVID-19 outbreaks. The speed and facility with which the scientific and health community have been able to respond is in important ways attributable to Jennifer Doudna’s work.

There is drama, intrigue, fascinating people, and the makings of a good thriller in certain aspects of this story. But the most important thing is the profound humanization of a complex community and the people in and from it. Scientists are not fundamentally different from anyone else. Their interests may seem esoteric and the degree of concentration they bring to their passions may seem other-worldly at times, but in truth what they have is a deeply useless set of tools and the willingness to abide by the rules those tools require for sound use. What must be understood, and often is obscured by the dizzying aspects of the science itself, is their humanity and how they represent, often, the best possibilities of all of us. (Of course there are those who are not as good at what they do as they should be, those who are more concerned with fame or wealth than the work itself, those who are flawed in unfortunate ways—just like any other group of people in any other area of activity—but we should look to the best for our examples and not allow the worst to color our perceptions of the people doing amazing work.)

Finally, understanding something is the best way to stop being afraid of it. At the end of the day, that is the real gift scientists give us—they work to understand things previously hidden and unknown and thereby help the rest of us to stop being afraid.

Why Read

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In light of the last few years, the question bites. Indulge me in a venting plea.

In my experience, limited though it is, I have found that the better read a person is, the more likely they will be to cope with reality, to defend against the twisting delights of both conspiracy theory and pseudoscience, and to be less vulnerable to charlatanry.

Not always. Some deceptions come wrapped in marvelous packages that can appeal to the puzzle-solver in us all and present as aesthetically compelling. In my own life I have followed white rabbits in tweed down a number of holes, some part of me convinced that truth lay in some hidden recess along the way.

I have been relegated to many sidelines since childhood because of reading, sidelines which at the time seemed harsh and unfair, but in retrospect were actually relatively safe places. Time and space are necessary for a mind to develop. Exposure to stimulating material does not work its magic immediately, sometimes not even soon, but eventually all those books and stories and articles result in a set of pathways and memories and organizing concepts that allow for the skills to deal with what may otherwise be just confusion.

No, let me be more definite—“may” has little to do with it. People who read, in my experience, are generally more present, more conscious, more adaptable than people who only watch and subsequently go through life skimming a surface which too often becomes a mirror and allows them to ignore what is beneath. In fact, those surface presentations often depend on not knowing what underlies them, may actively resist analysis, and with few exceptions deceive by suggesting there is nothing more.

Not all. But it is also true that those not intended to deceive largely depend on an audience that reads to reveal their full meaning.

There are many studies about the physiological and cognitive benefits of reading, especially fiction. Here’s one. There is an increases in synaptic structure associated with regular reading. Memory improves. Your brain responds by providing better tools.

Then, of course, you have to apply the tools. For me, this makes fiction and, in a similar way, history indispensable. Reading other kinds of books, while important in many ways, can leave you unaware of irony, of conflict, or paradox, all of which are fundamental to the so-called Human Condition. We read novels to grapple with the contradictions of being human. We read fiction because in doing so we learn the value of Other Minds attempting to do this thing we all own as a birthright—-living.

Occasionally we see a nod to this in popular entertainment. In the tv series Castle, Detective Becket is presented as an exceptional and gifted detective. In the first episode we hear from one of her colleagues that he likes “a simple Jack killed Jill over Bill” rather than the “freaky” ones. Becket responds, “Oh, but the freaky ones require more.” And then she challenges them: “Don’t you guys read?” As the series progresses we can see that she just brings more to the game and in that first episode the difference is made explicit.

We undervalue reading, often while making a big deal about it. Writers become celebrities, usually once one or more of their books is made into a film. And their fans may well read everything they publish, but that’s not beneficial reading. Like anything else, if you do not expand your horizons, complicate your diet, move out of your comfort zone, you end up trapped in a self-referential, reaffirming loop that grows nothing.

We must read so our apprehension of the world is less frightening, amenable to recognition, and manageable. So that people are not so alien and culture not so forbidding. Certainly someone can read a great deal and still be unable to decipher the world, but I believe such people to be a minority, and most of us benefit from the increased clarity that comes from an ongoing encounter with Other Minds.

The greatest benefit comes from a catholic indulgence: read widely, daily—fiction, science, history, philosophy, memoir—because at some point you will find it all reinforcing, that insights gained in one place can be enriched and enlivened by another source. And somewhere along the way, we may find that we are no longer easily fooled.

The most valuable ability of late would seem to be this, the awareness to not be fooled.

I make no prediction that a sudden upsurge of deep reading would solve our problems. Humans can be contradictory, perverse creatures. But it seems obvious that an illiterate populace is an easily-tricked, easily swayed populace. Given that those who are invested in people watching their shallow offerings rather than go off somewhere to read are generally those who would sell us shiny bits that delight and fail, it would be a good strategy to take up books and stop being led like myopic sheep.

But I have a rather more personal reason for urging people to set aside whatever prejudices they acquired in primary and secondary schools that turned them against reading-for-pleasure. When I set a book aside, as one must, and go out into the world, I would like to have meaningful contact with other people, and ignorance is a depressing barrier to that.

Why read? To be more. To hopefully be yourself. And possibly to be free.

2020 and Reading for Purpose

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In a year that felt more like some surreal historical melodrama that ought to be safely turned into a documentary rather than something to cling to the future like a belly-full of bad booze, what we read may have been one of the most important choices we were able to make. Our lives constrained by a pandemic, we may have lived more vicariously than ever before, but we also dealt with the world as a landscape of impending doom in ways that perhaps our parents and grandparents may have in different ways, but was unique in the manner of it collision with reality and ignorance.

I think it fair to say that never before has so much information, understanding, and intellectual resource been so available to so many and yet rejected in turn to such a degree as to challenge one’s sanity. It seemed like the more we knew, the more concrete things we could say about so many things, the more too many people flat-out denied those very things that might have made the world a better place. Watching and listening to the news day to day was an agony of frustration.

So we—some of us—turned to reading for answers as well as escape. Answers to try to make sense of things, escape to give us the spiritual resources to cope with what we learned and what we saw.

I read, cover to cover, 63 books in 2020.

What science fiction I read was related mainly to the reading group I host. I read a lot of history, political philosophy, mysteries. I did not quite finish a rather excellent biography of John Maynard Keynes, which has proven to be a timely work that throws light on the history that brought us to where we are now. Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace should, I suggest, be read with Binyamin Appelbaum’s The Economists’ Hour. Between them they illuminate the 20th century struggle with finding our way through the morass of slogans, competing theories, political opportunists, and national identities that seem to rely on the 19th Century concepts of poverty, property, and progress to justify a kind of fearful reluctance to simply adapt.

Along with these, Shawn Otto’s The War On Science is history of the anti-intellectualism in America that has dogged us since the beginning and has resulted now in a precarious moment in which the knowledge we derive from sound scientific practice has never been more necessary to our survival while living in a time when more people refuse to acknowledge anything outside their own concepts and prejudices. Along with this, a somewhat more theoretical but complimentary work is Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oseskes.

It would seem that our greatest enemy remains ignorance. Demagogues and con artists have become far more adept at manipulating and defrauding us in greater numbers than ever before and the only defense is our ability to reason, to sort through and measure and recognize nonsense, especially when it seems enriching, empowering, and edifying. Everything has taken on an urgency that strips us of time and room to judge, to assess, to think through. Decisions must be made now, while the offer lasts, don’t be late, get yours now.

In this struggle, the only thing that we can personally do is equip ourselves with the wide gaze of grounded perspective. History, economics, philosophy. They can appear daunting. But you only have to pick a book and start. It accrues. In time, something seemingly so removed from our present experience as Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, about King Phillip’s War, which set the pattern for the European conquest of America, takes on currency in the here and now. Speaking of Jill Lepore, her newest, If Then, about the forgotten Simulmatics Incorporated and its effect on American (and global) politics is an eye-opening expose of how we managed to corrupt our political systems with introduction of demographic analysis, ad-agency thinking, and datamining.

Economics, history…what about philosophy?

Outside specialized texts, I believe one cannot do better than good science fiction. Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest in her Lady Astronaut series, Relentless Moon, offers some surprising relevancy to the present as well as a terrific yarn set in an alternate history. Annalee Newitz’s Future of Another Timeline is a rumination on choice as well as a good time-travel story. Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller examines near-future global changes and the consequences of corporate capitalism disguised cleverly as a quest/revenge/rescue narrative.

I’ve been reading aloud to my partner for a while now. We did John Scalzi’s most recent trilogy, starting with The Collapsing Empire. His approach is in some ways perhaps “irreverent” but once you get past that surface facility, it’s a first-class trilogy.

Possibly the most beautiful writing I encountered this year was Robert MacFarlane’s Underland. He’s a naturalist/explorer whose previous work has been concerned with climbing mountains and related landscapes. In this he went down. In a magnificent rumination on ecologies and the underground, both natural and artificial, he has written beautifully about a world we ignore to our peril.

Alex Ross, music critic for the New York Times, whose previous book The Rest Is Noise, about music and 20th Century history, is wonderful, has published his intricate study of Wager and the impact he had on, well, everything. Wagnerism in some senses is an expression of the often-unacknowledged influence of art on politics and identity. Ross examines how Wagner became the focal point for movements and countermovements up till the present with his outsized presence in film scores. An aspect of history that deserves a bit more attention.

I have my to-be-read pile already building for 2021. It includes several books that I hope will help me ride the unpredictable currents of our ongoing struggle with the world. But never more strongly do I feel that the encounter with other minds through the agency of the written word is one of our best tools for managing and emerging from darkness. We have such a wealth of resource. I look around at the world and cannot help but feel that if more people simply read more and more widely, things would begin to resolve. Never before have we had it thrown in our faces with such force the costs of ignorance.

Here is wishing you all a safe and aspirational year. Read on, read well.