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:

A word that keeps coming up in people’s memories of Gene Wolfe is “kind.” We should all live our lives so as to be so remembered.

Gene had strong beliefs and could be flinty in their expression. But he always acted as if other people, different from him, also mattered.

— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) 15 April 2019

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.