Wednesday 17 April 2019

Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin, and Friendships Across the Divide

Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin were friends. (Wolfe talks about this a little bit in the interview I linked to yesterday.) Nothing unusual in that, you would have thought; they moved in similar circles, were roughly the same age, and there is a certain similarity in their approaches to narrative.

But you couldn't get two more different people politically. One a traditional Catholic conservative; the other an ardent advocate of left-wing thought of the anarchist variety and a feminist icon. I bet they didn't agree about abortion; I don't have hard evidence for this, but it seems a reasonable supposition (and I'm certain they would have disagreed about plenty of other things). 

Yesterday, when I was googling for news about Wolfe's death, I came for some reason across P Nielsen Hayden's twitter account. (I hadn't heard of him either; he's apparently the Editor-in-Chief at Tor.) Here's him tweeting in response to the news:

Something made me scroll down and look at his other recent tweets, though, and here we find this, nestled in among a very long list of other extremely partisan tweets:




The irony won't be lost on you, but there's a broader point to be made: the texture of life has changed a lot since Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin were in their heyday, hasn't it? You don't just agree to disagree any more; people from the other end of the political spectrum are unclean.

Now, this is twitter, which is all about people completely losing their minds, and sense of perspective into the bargain, so you wouldn't want to read too much into it. But as a foreigner in social media, I find it more than striking: here you have all these apparently intelligent, reasonable people, successful in their fields, collectively acting out a descent into a kind of Reformation/Counter-Reformation style of politics that you might have thought had gone out of fashion with the Patent of Toleration. That can't fail to have some sort of influence on the culture in general.

Long-term readers of the blog may be tired of me harping on about this issue, but it's an important one for us nerds. Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin were nerds, and their shared interests allowed them to set aside profound political differences and get along. That was a good thing. Modern day nerds (P Nielson Hayden can, I think, be put into that category) seem at the forefront of the movement to drive wedges between oneself and others on the basis of political differences alone, and that's a bad one. I feel it's important for those of us with a bit of perspective left to keep pointing the finger at divisiveness in order to emphasise how silly it all is - and how unkind. Nobody chooses to believe anything; neither politics nor religion works that way. You arrive at the views you have for host of very complicated reasons, and pure free will is never one of them; you're at the end of a very long chain of circumstances which led you to where you are today. If somebody thinks something radically different to you, it's because they're at the end of a very different, but equally lengthy, chain of circumstances to yours. You've got two alternatives with such a person: you can treat them with kindness and respect because they are a fellow human who is just as much a victim of circumstance as you are (which does not have to mean inviting them round to dinner, by the way; it can simply mean being civil), or you can vilify them for being bad and wrong. Which one, ultimately, has the stronger chance of turning them round? And which one will make you fearful and stressed-out and a narrower, meaner-spirited sort of person?

Answers on a postcard.

37 comments:

  1. Other interesting examples of this are Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Despite hugely differing judicial and personal philosophies, they were apparently great friends.

    https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/justice-scalias-unlikely-best-friend/

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    1. When people have to interact with each other normally through work and whatever they tend to find out they're not so bad after all. Social media allows you to hive yourself off from normal interaction and therefore you never end up finding that out.

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  2. Joking aside, I agree with all of this. I try every day to be more kind. You won't convince most people of anything.

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    1. I would go even further and say nobody ever convinces anybody of anything! People do change their minds but it comes indirectly, from experience, rather than through a reasoned argument (and it NEVER happens through vilification and abuse - that just makes positions harden).

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  3. American politics is an off the rails nuthouse right now, I'm guessing that's where Hayden is coming from. I could list all the reasons while reasonable discourse isn't going to work here, but it's mostly that the conservative side of the US is no longer interested in acting in good faith.

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    1. Somewhere a conservative is right now saying exactly the same thing about the liberal "side".

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    2. They would be wrong, right now we have the senate majority leader, a Republican, refusing to vote on bills that pass the house with bipartisan approval. The Overton window has shifted so far to the right, that our "liberal" side is really just slightly right of center. Eisenhower would be run out of the current conservative parties here. A working conservative party that would actually support policies that would benefit our nation would be great. Instead we have a kleptokakistocracy of comically evil cabinet members and a president that's increasingly erratic. I could provide a bulleted list of bad faith actors and actions from the right in my country, I'd be surprised if a similar list would be possible to generate about the left.

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    3. So it's all their fault. If only they were acting in good faith.

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    4. In the microcosm of US politics yes. How closely have you followed what's going on over here? Refusing to even conduct a hearing for Merrick Garland was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. Between Trump and Brexit we're essentially following the Russian playbook for destabilizing the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

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    5. Unknown - US politics are charges, but there's no huge shift. Left and right still operate squarely in the bounds of neoliberalism. The actual policies pursued by the state are no different; Trump is at most slightly more mercantilist than his predecessors, but the right as a whole is not. The main speakers for both sides are vitriolic, but that's not a reflection of politics in practice. The problem is the way people treat that small gap, and those on the other side of it.

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    6. Unknown - I think the idea that Trump and Brexit are all down to Russian shenanigans is exactly the kind of thing I'm concerned about. Instead of figuring out why it is that people voted in the way that they did in a way which treats them as adults with brains, Democrats and Remainers respectively have instead seized upon the idea that it's all the Russians' fault. This is partly a soothing fantasy (those people don't really disagree with our nice bourgeois liberal values deep down inside - they were just hoodwinked!) and partly a result of a complete failure of politics (we don't need to make the argument why liberal values are the best ones; we just need to stop the Russians tampering in our elections!).

      People need to start treating those with different politics as sane adults who happen to think differently to them. Then it becomes a matter of persuasion: how do you get a Trump voter to want to vote Democrat next time? That's much harder but much fairer and more realistic than the alternative, which seems to be, "How do I stop those stupid, gullible morons from falling for Russian tricks against next time?" (Or just "Let's put our fingers in our ears and hope the stupid, gullible morons just go away.") Politics is the art of persuasion, not the art of vilification.

      (I voted to Leave the EU, by the way.)

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    7. "Democrats and Remainers respectively have instead seized upon the idea that it's all the Russians' fault."

      I can't speak to the Brexit issue, but this is not a correct read of the Democrats' reaction to the rise of Trump.

      There is certainly a concern that Russia acted to influence the election, and perhaps a slight concern that it might have subverted the process a bit on the margins.

      There is also a concern that Trump is on some level personally compromised, or at least that his presidency strongly coincides with Russian interests that are bad for the US and the world.

      There is also a lot of animosity towards people who voted for Trump.

      But there's not a serious sense that "it's all Russians' fault." To the American left, the blame is more or less squarely on the shoulders of the Trump voters and the Republican party.

      It should be noted, however, that the primary tactic of choice is not really to persuade Trump voters that they made a bad choice, it's to vilify them and Trump as extremely vile and dangerous in order to convince Dem voters to come to the polls. If turnout is high, the Democrat will almost invariably win, so they just need to ensure that there is sufficient urgency.

      That said, Trump truly is vile and I am very disappointed that my nation elected an amoral, self-serving reality TV star as president.

      I believe that the overwhelming majority of Trump voters are acting in good faith. I think it is very difficult to seriously look at Trump and believe that *he* is.

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    8. I didn't claim that Trump and Brexit were solely the result of Russian interference, though they did interfere. It's in Russian's best interest that both of those things happened, and the Mueller report confirms that they conducted widespread and systematic operations to that effect in the US at least.
      If somebody still supports the Republican party after what has been done policy-wise since 2016 and after reading the Mueller report, I don't really have any way of swaying them, even assuming they've been paying attention. There is a deep undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in this country which undermines attempts to have an informed electorate.
      I'm not trying to argue against the point that people should be civil when talking to people with different viewpoints. It's that by and large we're dealing with a large chunk of our population that disagrees about basic reality.
      There's a hardcore constituency that will never vote for a name with a D next to it no matter what based on absolutely nothing of substance and objectively counter to their own best interest. Single issue voters, racists and reactionaries are abundant here.
      We have ICE putting asylum seeking children ripped from their parents into detention facilities any getting sexually assaulted over here and 30% of the population is nodding along. I don't know how to teach these people empathy or if it's even possible.

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    9. Unknown - Most voters only vote for one side - campaigning is about getting people out and convincing a small subset of swing voters. Most people in general can't name their representative. The US is involved in foreign elections constantly; keep in mind that the entire 1990s saw the US rigging Russia's elections with Yeltsin, who did more harm than Trump ever could. Education is headed mostly by the left of center outside of private religious schools and some areas in the south and midwest; there's a reason a lot of right-leaning areas distrust the media and academia, and it's because nobody likes being looked down upon as inferior because of class difference. For immigration, recall that Obama's administration saw dramatically higher numbers of deportations and greater ICE activity; it just wasn't a political hot topic yet. And in any case, the right isn't looking at the people in camps, it's looking at domestic citizens harmed by illegals, and praising the deportation of criminals. But if you you see a bunch of people who "lack empathy" then you miss that, as well as the broader picture.

      There's nothing wrong in holding a political belief, or in laying out facts. But try to account for more than just what seems obvious.

      Ivan - Most Trump voters I know voted for him solely to keep Clinton out of office. If the Democrats had nominated a ficus in a suit, it would have stood a better shot. The remainder did so for religious regions - abortion being the big topic here - or business/fiscal reasons. I have no proof, but I imagine it's little different elsewhere. One unifying factor - nobody likes him as a person.

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    10. Rosenritter: I have no doubt that that coincides with your experience, and certainly there were many who voted for him holding their noses. But if most R voters truly disliked him as you describe his approval rating would not be so high among Republicans. It's pretty clear that there's a substantial subset of Republican voters that are fiercely loyal to Trump and really really like him. It seems to be about 30% of voters (and well over a majority of Rs). It's that part of society who really wants a nativist authoritarian strongman who will rail against foreigners and tell them who the "ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE" are. His huge rallies don't come from nowhere. Again, I do not include in this people who roll their eyes at his rhetoric and voted for him for pragmatic economic or religious reasons.

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    11. I am not American so I can't comment really, but I bet there is a big element of bloody-minded perversity in voters getting behind Trump. I think, rightly or wrongly, there is probably a fairly big constituency of people who feel like they are constantly being told they are bigoted, stupid and small-minded, and they think, "Well, fuck you then," and go the whole hog for the one person they know will NEVER accuse them of that.

      I bet there's also an element in it of, "Yes, he may be a complete prick, but at least he's OUR complete prick."

      Finally, I have to say...much as I dislike his politics - and I do - from a distance I do find him strangely likeable, in the sense that I bet it would be fun to have a few beers with him. I think he is odious and nasty, but also oddly entertaining. I know me saying that will drive some people to paroxysms of fury.

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    12. I don't think we should interfere in elections or allow other countries to interfere in ours.
      I didn't mention the media or academia, I was talking about anti-intellectualism and having an informed electorate. If basic economics, civics, history and science aren't taught how are people supposed to vote adequately?
      I didn't support Obama's immigration policies, and I didn't mention him.
      We're at a 46 year low for illegal immigration and the studies about illegal immigrants committing crime more than natural born citizens are conflicting. Most illegal immigration is done by overstaying a visa after entering legally.
      https://www.npr.org/2017/12/05/568546381/arrests-for-illegal-border-crossings-hit-46-year-low
      https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/is-illegal-immigration-linked-to-more-or-less-crime/
      https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecutive-year-visa-overstays-exceeded-illegal-border-crossings

      Comparing crimes committed by presidential administrations however shows a strong pattern.
      https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/18/1796668/-UPDATED-Comparing-Presidential-Administrations-by-felony-arrests-and-convictions-as-of-9-17-2018

      Why is the right ok with separating children of legal asylum seekers from their parents if they're not even paying attention to the camps? What's the point if not cruelty for cruelty's sake?

      I'm a fourth generation California public school teacher whose family split off from a variety of fundamentalist religions. I currently live in the Central Valley and routinely visit the border. I've had this conversation multiple times with people slightly right of center and straight up fascists. I'm aware of all of the arguments for this administration's immigration policy, and it's not supported by the facts. We're largely responsible for asylum seekers from Central America, we're the cause of most of the instability in that part of the world.

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    13. Noisms--

      You're absolutely right. That's the "pwn the libs! everything else be damned, let's get some liberal tears!" element of Trump's support. It's also worth recognizing that there actually *are* people who are bigoted, small minded and stupid. Traditionally both parties have catered to these people to a degree (the Dems were the party of the bigots until the 1960s). Trump is the presidential candidate to just eschew any sense of high-mindedness at all and really be a shining light to their ranks -- if you always wanted a president who makes up hilarious derogatory names for all his detractors just like a schoolyard bully, and who will lead you in chants about throwing his opponent in prison, it's finally your chance!

      I'd be surprised if you'd actually like a beer with Trump. He just seems to be a pure salesman who's "on" all the time and constantly talks about himself. Who wants to get a beer with that guy? My money is more on your general pleasure in being a contrarian. I'm 93% sure you wrote that just to take a position that is at least somewhat at odds with your Trump-hating peers and so you could satisfiedly note that "some people" would be driven into paroxysms of fury by your unorthodox choice.

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    14. Well, he's what over here we'd call a pantomime villain and what I suppose over there you'd call a heel? Even liberals clearly get a bit of a thrill about having him around - it's somebody to boo and hiss at, and who doesn't love that, at some level at least? Politics is partly a circus, and that goes for everybody.

      Trump reminds me of a lot of wannabe alpha male types I've known in my life who you wouldn't want to be friends with but are great on a night out because they tell good stories and bring a lot of extrovert energy. I can think of quite a few such guys I've known down the years. They are the kind of people you would never introduce to your parents or girlfriend, and who you would never arrange to meet at a weekend, but who are great craic on a Thursday or Friday night if a group of you are going out after work and you don't want to have an intense discussion about current events.

      That kind of person is not who you would want in charge of a country but to act as the social lubricant for drinks after work - why not?

      As a non-American I also think it's possible to appreciate his splendid isolationism, at least in comparison to previous presidents and what American foreign policy would probably have looked like under Hilary Clinton. Not having destabilised a large Middle Eastern country is quite an achievement for a US president in foreign policy terms.

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    15. He's a teetotaler who likes well done steak with ketchup, so beers are out.
      He pulled us out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. He vetoed a bipartisan bill which would have ended US support for the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen.
      His secretary of Energy brokered a deal to sell the Saudis nuclear technology and they tried to keep it secret.
      Oh, and the Khashoggi murder.
      Then there's the whole refusing to apply the sanctions to Russia that were universally voted on bicamerally, and lifting sanctions that were previously in place.

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    16. I guess I can understand the "beer" comment on that level. Trump could be fun as on member of a bunch of dudes going out to rage. I usually interpret the "have a few beers with" comment to mean someone who you'd like to sit down and chat with one-on-one for an evening.

      I'm sure there are people who take a gleeful pleasure in Trump bashing. I cannot feel anything but sick that our politics has reached the point where the president is literally an absurd reality TV star. Maybe it's a mellow-old-world vs. idealistic-new-world thing. A heel is fun in WWE wrestling. He's nauseating as the actual leader of the country.

      As to your last paragraph, yes. Of course there are some elements of Trump's policy that reasonable people could be pleased with. And I can even understand people voting for him (or being glad that he won) because they view those policies as important enough to outweigh anything else. I think the long-term damage of having a US President who is essentially an un-serious, narcissistic wanna-be strong man far outweighs any possible short term political benefit. Reasonable people may disagree about this.

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    17. Unknown - There's a reason I didn't move for numbers on immigration; I explicitly mentioned perception because, for voting, that's more important. "How can we worry about these people when we have so many homeless in our own streets? A crime is a crime. One bad apple spoils the bunch."

      I bring up Obama not to defend Trump, but to point out that none of this is new. The difference is not in policies; it's in how people fight over them. And that's simply not confined to the right-of-center.

      As per education, that is not a problem of the right. The electorate as a whole does not grasp economics beyond, perhaps an abstract understanding of supply and demand; nor in fact do most college graduates. Other topics are only slightly less bleak. But as someone who grew up in a (underfunded) California public school with a mom who is a teacher, I think we're both more in agreement here than not. Things are bad.

      Ivan - His approval ratings are hardly amazing, and further, there are plenty who approve of his policies, not him. I'm admitting fallibility, and make allowance for major supporters to exist (rallies), but wouldn't overestimate it.

      Also, Trump is hardly novel for the US. Andrew Jackson is the most presidential example up until now, but we've had a habit for a long history of voting in "people's champions" and others of the sort whenever people start to get unsatisfied.

      noisms - I've seen fraternities made up of no less than 20% of people exactly like that. The alcohol is really the key.

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    18. Unknown - all those things may be true, but he's not actively engaged in foolhardy military escapades. That makes him in, foreign policy terms, possibly the best president since Bush Senior (who of course did engage in a military escapade, but one that was probably necessary).

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    19. Rosenritter: I'm not sure what "amazing" is, but among Republicans his approval ratings are extremely high. They are consistently 85-90%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx

      Only 20% of Republicans would support a primary challenger to Trump. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/20-percent-of-republican-voters-would-support-a-candidate-other-than-trump


      Those are hardly the ratings of someone who is fundamentally disliked among Republicans, or who was supported on a purely situational basis "solely to keep Clinton out of office." (It does seem that he's a lot less popular among young Rs -- nearly 40% would support a primary challenger. Maybe that's your cohort?)

      Populism is, of course, nothing new in the US. But since there has been a good sized federal government and been a real world power, we've never seen nativist authoritarianism like Trump represents. He certainly is unique and I don't think comparing him to Andrew Jackson is remotely fair.

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  4. It's a point you're right to press.

    One of life's most civilised pleasures is a vigorous discussion with people whom you like but disagree with. I'm afraid that social media's amplification of our in-group/out-group instincts is making that pleasure rarer *in real life* (it's long dead on social media itself).

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    1. It is making it rarer, but it's still not all that unusual (thankfully). Maybe I have a more sanguine perspective on it because I'm a conservative in an extremely left-leaning profession. All my friends, pretty much, are from the left of centre through to the absolute extreme hard left. We get along fine - because our friendships aren't mediated through social media.

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  5. It's important to remember, as I think you imply here, that two people "getting along" can be much more nourishing and positive than simply tolerating each other. LeGuin and Wolfe could have just ignored each other, and both would have been worse off than if they managed to create the relationship that they did. I can understand if someone finds it difficult to make that kind of relationship, and it's not possible with most people you'll meet, but closing yourself off to the possibility doesn't serve your ideals unless you favor purity over your own journey of improvement.

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    1. Yes, absolutely. I suppose the problem is that some people seem to think that purity and one's own journey of improvement are the same thing. Life is about becoming more pure for those people.

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  6. I think that most people, though generally well-meaning, are fans of conflict. Now that we have the internet, you don't even need to watch sports as an outlet for it - You can go online and start your own fights. And most nerds don't even have sports, which just exacerbates the political blood sport.

    Even then, I've yet to understand what makes people okay with their general level of hostility to each other. It was one thing on early 2000s forums when hostility was a joke people were consenting to, but I can't understand how a person can take their public profile and spew hateful rhetoric, let alone do so with such a degree of self-righteousness. But what makes it especially sad, is how at the end of day, most people agree on more issues than not.

    Still, cases like this, and those I get to experience in my day-to-day life, leave me hopeful that there's still some space for things to get better. Optimistic? No. But hopeful.

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    1. I think the sad thing is that it's exhilerating to spew hate and be rewarded for it by a cheering horde of likers, re-tweeeters, and followers. People love that feeling: the sense of being right and being seen to be right.

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  7. My best friend of two decades is very, very different than myself, both in terms of religion and of politics. What a small, sad world it would be if our friendships were dependent upon religious and/or political agreement.

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  8. I think its important to note that there's difference between tolerating/accepting someone with different political/religious beliefs than you and tolerating/accepting someone, for lack of better word, who is evil.

    Now there's a lot in the left/liberal who don't seem to make a line between someone , for example, who differs from them in issues of immigration and someone who thinks races are non-arbitrary categories therefore thinks some of them should have less human rights.

    Which, yes, historically was merely a political difference of opinion and now I hope for any form of progression of civilization is now a evil view.
    Now there are extreme elements who are trying to get such evils seen as merely a political difference and they are ironically helped by liberal/left wing knee-jerk condemnation of any dissent as akin to nazism.

    However I feel nearly everyone has a line in which they will accept a belief as merely a difference of opinion and what they will see as evil.

    Imagine if you will talking to someone who good naturedly express a desire or an acceptance of adults seducing children or murdering you for fun if they could get away with it.

    It wouldn't be tolerance or open-mindness to not feel a visceral disgust and horror but a dangerous foolishness or naivety.

    So I think whenever one is challenged about ones tolerances or acceptances , to think hard about what they tolerating and if it is truly with-in the bounds of what they want to accept in civilized discourse or if in-fact it isn't and they are tolerating the person because it convenient or pleasant to do so.
    Especially if one isn't necessarily on the "pointy-end" of said persons beliefs.

    Recently I'm trying to not fall afoul of "purity-politics" and not disregarding people that hold different beliefs or understandings than me, as long as I feel its something that can still holds merit in being meaningfully discussed.

    So sure if you think trans-women are actually men, I still think there's a lot to that topic that can be discussed and won't disregard you. If you think they are all dangerous predators that should be shot, it's not acceptance on my behalf to tolerate you , but foolishness.

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    1. I understand what you mean, but I think the number of people who genuinely are "evil" or have "evil" beliefs is actually tiny. Almost everybody arrives at the beliefs they have because of a genuine, good faith understanding of the world, for reasons they think are perfectly sensible and justified (this has to be the case, really, because nobody has views they *don't* think are sensible and justified). There are some psychopaths, of course, and there are also some people who are very "damaged" and so have hostile and nasty bigoted views. But they are a really small percentage of the population. Most people come from the perspective of thinking their views are what is best for society.

      I'd even go so far as to say that even for people who are quite bigoted on the surface (who are a small minority in my experience) if you scratch underneath that surface you'll usually find a reason why. That won't provide a justification but it will provide understanding. One of my grandmothers was given to making racist comments about black people and as a teenager it always used to horrify me, but eventually I realised it was because in her view immigration was going to make it harder for her grandchildren (i.e., me!) to get jobs. She associated immigration with industrial decline in my home town. I didn't come to respect her racist comments but I did come to understand the reasons. The absolutely wrong thing to do with people like that - my grandmother was otherwise a very kind, generous person - is not to vilify them, because that will just get them angry. You have to try to make a convincing argument as to why mass immigration doesn't mean local working class people losing out on jobs, and also, ideally, keep the economy thriving so it doesn't become an issue. But that effort has never been made by the British political class.

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    2. Yeah the past until current liberal attitude of addressing bigotry in the working class by doubling down on condescension and dismissal is not a favourite of mine.

      I think a lot of the time if you get people to understand the people they are bigoted towards are in fact people it goes along way to combating prejudice.

      On reflection I should clarify for myself what is difference between an evil person and an evil belief and a person who holds evil beliefs and what tolerance looks like for each.

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    3. Yep, when people mix they generally get along. The crucial point I guess is that it works both ways. A lot of so-called liberals are actually highly bigoted towards working class people and/or traditional conservatives and are often the least likely to want to mix with such people. I once heard an professor saying that she wouldn't recommend a gay or black person go to a rugby league match for fear of being the victim of violence. I was like...come on, are you for real? Have you ever actually been to a rugby league match?

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  9. Admittedly there are examples of people tolerating and engaging with people with "evil" beliefs and helping them changing their minds. I think in this case they did not merely tolerate them but actively argued with them.
    And their example is often claimed as being followed by people who are wishing to carry on a far more callous or apathetic approach and must be regard cynically.

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  10. Noism that was refreshing, and well defended in the comments. From the responses, well, it would seem there will perhaps always be a segment of ideologues for whom such messages will fall on deaf ears and hardened hearts, but that's no reason not to keep saying it.

    It's sad, and surprising to me, that we seem to have entered a world where people are seeing traitors or fascist behind every tree and racists behind every disagreement. The irony is not lost on me that the continuous attacks on "republicans" and "Trump supporters" as ignorant and stupid bumpkins is itself racists, or more properly, elitist othering. It's not helpful to hate, insult and belittle your neighbor just because you see things differently, no matter what "side" you are on.

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