The Archdruid Report: In Praise of the Reprehensible

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

In Praise of the Reprehensible

Last month’s post here on cultural senility and its antidotes discussed the way that modern education erases the past in order to defend today’s ideologies against the lessons of history. While that post focused on the leftward end of the political spectrum—the end that currently dominates what we still jokingly call “higher education” in today’s America—the erasure of the past is just as common on the other end of things. Between the political correctness of the left and the patriotic correctness of the right, it’s hardly surprising that so many Americans stumble blindly toward the future in a fog of manufactured ignorance, sedulously shielded from the historical insights that could give them a clue about the troubled landscape about them or the looming disasters ahead.

This week I’d like to discuss another aspect of that erasure of the past. I’ll be concentrating again on the way it’s done on the leftward end of things, because that’s the side that’s doing the most to deform American education just at the moment, but I’d encourage my readers to keep in mind that the issue I have in mind is a blade that has two edges and cuts both ways. That issue? The censoring of literature from the past in order to make it conform to the moral notions of the present.

It so happens, for example, that quite a few works of American literature talk about people of color in terms that many people today find extremely offensive. Now of course just as many works of American literature discuss women, sexual minorities, and just about any other group of people you care to name, other than well-to-do, college-educated, white male heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in highly insulting terms, but let’s focus on racism for the moment. In American universities these days, it’s fashionable to insist that such works should either be tossed into the dumpster, on the one hand, or reissued in new editions from which all the offensive material has been expurgated.

The justifications for these projects are appropriately diverse. On the one hand, there’s the claim that members of groups that have been subject to racial oppression should not be required to read books containing language or ideas that justify the oppression they’ve experienced. On the other hand, there’s the claim that people who don’t belong to those groups should not be allowed to read such books, so that they don’t adopt the language or ideas in question. Off in the distance lies the utopian vision of a society free of racism, and eliminating the language and ideas that were once used to justify racism is proclaimed as a step toward that goal.

Fair enough. What does history have to say about projects of this sort?

As it happens, it has quite a bit to say about the results of censoring the literature of the past to support the moral crusades of the present, and in that connection I’d like to introduce you to a gentleman who was once quite famous in his way, though nothing more than his last name survives in our collective imagination these days. His name was Dr. Thomas Bowdler; he was an English physician who lived from 1754 to 1825, and in his retirement he put together a new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions were omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Yes, he’s the guy who inspired the verb “to bowdlerize.”

He was on the cutting edge of one of the great cultural projects of the 19th-century English-speaking world, the quest to eliminate every reference to sex from public discourse. The era that would take its enduring name from Britain’s Queen Victoria reacted against the relatively freewheeling sexuality of the preceding Regency era by embracing a more than Puritan horror of sex. This wasn’t simply a pose; people in Victorian society were profoundly sickened and offended by human sexuality and anything even distantly related to it. The result was an era in which the legs—excuse me, “limbs”—of pianos in respectable English homes had little starched cotton skirts put on them to cover their overly erotic curves; in which the British ambassador bullied the Florentine authorities into putting pantaloons on Michelangelo’s David, so that lady tourists from the British Isles would not be scandalized by his state of undress; and in which we all started referring to the male of the domestic fowl by the newly minted term “rooster,” because what had previously been its normal English name, “cock,” had the same genital connotations then that it does now.

The Victorian rejection of sexuality achieved the level of cultural unanimity that today’s advocates of political correctness hope to achieve for their rejection of racism. All through the public sphere, rigid censorship of sexual content and strenuous denunciation of improprieties were universal; reputations were ruined and careers ended by incautious utterances or, in many cases, so much as a rumor of the same; across the English-speaking world, public figures spoke approvingly of the triumph of modern morality over the disgusting habits of the past, in much the same tones of self-satisfaction you’ll hear these days at the American university of your choice.

There’s our comparable historical example. How well did it work?

That’s where things get interesting. Human cultures are governed by something not too different from Isaac Newton’s famous third law of motion: “every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.” The Victorian moral crusade against sexuality thus generated its inevitable countermovement, and for most of a century—from the 1890s until the late 20th century—just about every avant-garde literary, artistic, and cultural movement in the English-speaking world went out of its way to reject Victorian sexual morality and glorify casual sex. In the mid-20th century, that same reaction burst into popular literature; some of my readers may remember the torrent of science fiction novels from the 1960s—Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the most famous of them—that proclaimed uninhibited orgiastic abandon as the next glorious step in human evolution.

The difficulty that Thomas Bowdler and his many equivalents had not foreseen was that erasing sex from literature and popular culture doesn’t make people innocent and pure, it just makes them clueless. Growing up in respectable Victorian society, young people were kept ignorant of every attitude toward sexuality except the one hammered into them day after day by all the officially approved voices of their society, and the result was that they had never learned to think critically about the ethics of sex. If you raise lab rats in an environment completely free of pathogens, and then turn them loose, quite often they’ll drop dead from common diseases that a normally raised rat will shrug off with ease, because they’ve never acquired resistance. Keep young people ignorant of sexuality, and the resulting lack of resistance may not be as lethal but it’s every bit as dramatic.

If the partisans of political correctness in today’s world achieve their goals, in other words, one very likely outcome is a period up to a century in length, starting some decades after political correctness becomes the conventional wisdom of society, in which every avant-garde literary, artistic, and cultural movement in Europe and North America will go out of its way to reject political correctness and glorify racial prejudice. I doubt that the professors who are advocating the political bowdlerization of literature realize that this is where their efforts are leading, but then history has a nasty sense of humor, and seems to delight in playing such tricks on those who don’t pay attention to the lessons she has to offer.

Let’s go deeper, though. The strategy of bowdlerization assumes that the best way, or even the only way, to discourage undesirable expressions and ideas is to keep people ignorant of them. The history of previous attempts at moral censorship shows that exactly the opposite is the case: since it’s never yet been possible to get rid of every expression of an undesirable idea, making people ignorant of that idea simply means that they’ll react to it uncritically when they do finally encounter it—and while some of those reactions will amount to uncritical rejection, there will also be cases of uncritical acceptance.

What’s the alternative? The capacity for critical thinking about whatever issue is in question—and that’s a capacity that can’t be produced without exposing people to the whole spectrum of ideas that relate to the issue, even those that happen to be offensive to modern sensibilities. For reasons we’ll be exploring further on, and in future posts as well, literature is particularly well suited to this kind of examination, and it’s precisely the literature that modern politically (or patriotically) correct thinkers find reprehensible that’s most valuable in this context.

A specific example will be more useful here than any number of generalities, so let’s take a look at a writer who’s come in for quite a bit of condemnation along the lines just sketched out: the American horror-fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. Was Lovecraft a racist? You bet; he proudly described himself using exactly that term in at least one of his letters. (You could get away with saying that in America between the wars. A significant fraction of Americans described themselves as racists in that era, before Auschwitz et al. made it too uncomfortably clear what kind of results then-popular notions about racial superiority could have when put into practice. I mentioned history’s nasty sense of humor earlier; one solid example is the fact that the single most enduring impact the career of Adolf Hitler had on Western culture was to make overt racism and antisemitism unfashionable in many circles.)

Lovecraft’s racism wasn’t simply a privately held opinion, either. He put racist tropes into many of his stories. With very few exceptions, the people of color who appear in his fiction fall into a handful of classic stereotypes—the deferential drudges who “know their place,” the mindless masses who can do nothing right, the sinister and swarthy figures who deliberately serve the Wrong Side—if you know the pop culture of the time, you’ve met them all. Multiracial people tend to get even worse press at Lovecraft’s hands, with all the usual tropes present and accounted for; in particular, when you find out that a group of people in a Lovecraft story are multiracial, you can pretty much take it for granted that they’re in league with the tentacled horrors who are out to devour mankind.

Now it’s entirely possible to make a case that Lovecraft deserves to be read despite these unpleasant habits. That case has been made by a range of gifted writers, who point out that Lovecraft is among the greatest figures in 20th century horror fiction, and that the imaginative depth and the extraordinary richness of the philosophical issues with which he deals justify keeping him out of the dumpster to which politically correct opinion would consign him. I think there’s a lot to be said for that case, but it’s not the case I propose to make here. Rather, I’d like to suggest that if you want to get a clear sense of the underlying psychology of American racism—an understanding of the sort that will make it impossible for you to take racist notions seriously ever again—a close reading of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is a very good place to start.

Let’s start by noting something that hasn’t always been given its due in studies of Lovecraft: people of color weren’t the only people who came in for abuse at his hands. His attitudes toward poor rural white people, as set out in such stories as “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “The Lurking Fear,” were just as bigoted. In Lovecraft, with few exceptions, if you’re not a well-to-do, college-educated white male heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you’re probably being demeaned.

For that matter, what gave the nonhuman critters at the heart of his most famous stories their frisson of horror in his eyes wasn’t so much that they’re hostile, as that they have the effrontery to exist at all. Consider “Dagon,” usually considered the first of Lovecraft’s mature stories, in which the narrator witnesses a huge, vaguely humanoid, vaguely froggy-fishy creature worshipping at a monolith that’s been thrust up out of the ocean by an earthquake. This sight drives the narrator to drug himself with morphine, and when his cash runs out, to fling himself out the window to a certain death.

Why? The froggy-fishy thing isn’t overtly hostile; it doesn’t even appear to notice the narrator, much less resent the intrusion on its religious practices; but the mere fact that there’s another intelligent species on the planet, one with its own religious and artistic traditions, is apparently enough to unhinge the narrator’s mind so deeply that suicide is the only way out. “I cannot think of the deep sea,” Lovecraft has his narrator say, “without shuddering at the nameless things that may be at this very moment be crawling and floundering in its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.” Would he have felt better if the nameless things were worshipping our idols and carving our detestable likenesses?

With one extremely important exception, in fact, Lovecraft’s whole approach to horror centers on trying to make questions of the sort I’ve just posed impossible to ask. The unhuman creatures at the heart of his most famous stories are dim incomprehensible shapes seen only at a distance, revealed to the narrator of a story by a babbling, frantic description uttered by some half-reliable figure unsure of what he’s seeing. Thus the closest the reader gets to the mighty devil-god Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s most famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” is a narrative written by one man and summarized briefly in a narrative written by another—and that’s why the story works. Get any closer to Cthulhu and you start to wonder what things look like from his perspective, and then the whole thing falls to bits.

Lovecraft’s tentacled monsters and sinister cultists have been accused of being two-dimensional, but that misses the point entirely. They work as figures of horror precisely and only because they’re two-dimensional. Give them a third dimension, an inner life, a name and a perspective of their own, and they lose much of their capacity to terrify. If you’re going to project your own fears onto something, one might say, the recipient of the projection needs to be treated as a flat screen—a point that has more than a little relevance to the prejudices that Lovecraft himself embraced.

The one time in his fiction that Lovecraft deliberately broke with the approach just described is the exception that proves the rule. At the Mountains of Madness, one of his three novels, features a team of Antarctic explorers who discover archaic life forms, apparently long dead, in a cavern beneath the ice. Shortly thereafter, radio contact is lost, and when other members of the expedition go looking they find that the team and their sled dogs have been torn to bits; the camp has been destroyed, and the critters are gone. It’s classic horror—except that as the story progresses and two members of the expedition follow the trail of the critters, it slowly sinks in to the reader that the critters’ actions are precisely what a group of human explorers, suddenly awakened in the far future and assaulted by bizarre alien creatures, would have done.

It’s a stunning reversal of perspective that adds tremendous force to the story, but Lovecraft can only maintain the horror by bringing in another, even more ghastly monster, whose perspective is excluded from the story by the usual means. It was also, if I may insert a personal note, one inspiration behind my new novel The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, which stands Lovecraft on his head by placing the tentacled Great Old Ones and their multiracial worshippers at center stage, and letting them speak for themselves.

There is, though, another way in which the monster’s-eye view enters Lovecraft’s fiction, and it’s deeply revealing. Over and over again in his fiction—in “The Outsider,” “Arthur Jermyn,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” to name only the best examples—the revelation that brings the story to a close is the discovery that the main character belongs to the monsters’ side of the equation after all. The connection’s nearly always via an ancestress who wasn’t what she appeared to be—this theme recurs so obsessively in Lovecraft’s fiction that I frankly wonder if Lovecraft himself knew or suspected that someone on the distaff side of his ancestry was merely passing as white.

That sort of skeleton in the mental closet is far from uncommon among racists, by the way. I’m thinking here, among many other things, of a book I read years ago about the neo-Nazi scene in the United States. The author commented in his introduction that practically every one of the neo-Nazi leaders he interviewed claimed that some other neo-Nazi leader was really gay, Jewish, or not entirely white. The author went on to note that in a good many cases, those allegations turned out to be true. I hope I don’t have to remind my readers, along similar lines, of the number of gay-bashing preachers who turned out to have boyfriends on the side. Jung’s cogent discussions of the habit of projecting the shadow are relevant here: we hate most what we can’t tolerate seeing in ourselves, and our most savage denunciations are always directed, in one sense or another, at a mirror.

You can hear that said in so many words, and it might or might not sink in. Watch H.P. Lovecraft doing it, and if you read him closely and pay attention to what he’s doing, it’s impossible to miss. He took his own frantic terror of other races, blended it with the ethnic, cultural, and economic divisions of a troubled time, and turned that bubbling mix of status panic into some of the twentieth century’s most iconic horror fiction. In the process, like all great writers—and I would argue that despite his problems, Lovecraft was a great writer—he took his own idiosyncratic experience of the world and universalized it, creating literature’s most unsparing portrayal of the hatred and terror of the Other that every human being feels at one time or another: a hatred and terror that is always directed at some part of ourselves.

Grasp that—and a close reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, again, is a good place to start grasping it—and you’ll never be able to listen to racist cant again without instantly recognizing that the racists are projecting onto the blank screen of another human life something they find intolerable in themselves. For that matter, plenty of other modes of denunciatory cant stop being plausible once you grasp the lesson Lovecraft unintentionally teaches—and a good many of those modes of cant, dear reader, are to be found on the leftward rather than the rightward end of the spectrum. That’s what literature can do, when it’s not gutted of its power by bowdlerization. That, in turn, is why reading literature that upsets you, written from points of view with which you disagree, is a crucial element in the kind of education that might just get some of us through the profoundly troubled times to come.

*********************

Homework Assignment #2

As previously noted, since this sequence of posts is on education, there’s going to be homework. Your homework for the next month, let’s say, is to read a work of literature that offends you. The choice of book is up to you; if there’s an issue that’s too emotionally traumatic for you to tackle just now, read something on another topic instead, but don’t go too easy on yourself without good reason. You’re not expected to agree with the author—that would defeat the purpose of the assignment—but rather to understand why the world looks the way it does to the author and some of his or her readers. The same rule that governs the creation of good villains in fiction applies here: you aren’t there yet until you can imagine some set of circumstances in which you would have ended up doing the same thing.

314 comments:

Roy from Cascadia said...

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Send Queries and Comments to roysmith95[at]live[dot]com.

6/22/16, 5:48 PM

Twinruler334 said...

That was a particularly interesting post today. Mind you, if any would today find HP Lovecraft's ideas unacceptable, it would be The Christian Right. After all, he was an Atheist, in addition to being a racist after all. And, he suggested an uncaring universe, full of aliens that we cannot understand. Thank you very much for changing the way I perceive things!

6/22/16, 6:17 PM

Leo Knight said...

I appreciate your perspective. I'll have to choose a few books to read. Maybe I'll take another stab at Ayn Rand.

Regarding political correctness, I don't travel in academic circles. Does PC have such pervasive and powerful reach? Myself, I hear far more complaints about political correctness than I see actual incidents of political correctness. But then, I don't get out much.

6/22/16, 6:39 PM

Breanna said...

My most pressing question right now is: at what age should such offensive literature be introduced? A great many older children's books have a vexing combination of linguistic richness (not dumbed-down) and racial/gender/class ideas I don't want my children uncritically imbibing. So many of the bigotries and prejudices around are subconscious, acquired from cultural background - so I'd like to combat that as much as possible. But I agree with everything in this post. Should such literature simply be delayed until critical thinking is possible?

6/22/16, 6:40 PM

Ray Wharton said...

I finished the assignment yesterday. Glen Beck's Agenda 21; borrowed to me by a friend. We were trading political thrillers to make sense of the craziness of the world these days. My friend received 'Twilight's Last Gleaming', and the better end of the deal.

If I decide to take another book for the assignment I think I need to find something better written. Maybe more Ayn Rand, though she isn't much better written, she at least has Glen beat. I am kinda curious about Anthem. Hmmm, I need to think on this some, about what's really been getting my goat recently.

Anyway, Agenda 21 review. The UN passed some laws that said that humans had to respect the environment. At some point in the future there are handsome and "solid" god fearing folk from the American Midwest locked up in concentration camps which were half way between the Giver and 1984 in general evilness. Spoiler Alert they escape their camp and, mercifully, the book ends. Apparently evil people wanted to take away their America Rights to Suburban Life on rural old family style mega farms; so the people from the coasts moved everyone to concentration camps. People are starving but the squirrels (possibly the only wild animal Glen could think of) are fat.

The prose is what you would expect if a middle school short story by Ayn Rand were padded out to the lower threshold for being a novel.

Sorry Glen, I am picking on you, and, really I feel for you. The book, and the afterword more so, seems saturated with a feeling that the American Dream of the Reagan/Rand flavor is dying. Yeah, I get that feeling too. But, the books explanation for that feeling is very different from my own. To me the cause is complicated enough that a guy could blog about it for a decade, if so minded to, but simple enough to call fate. To me the death of that dream is, at this point in my life, a given. For Glen, not so, he doesn't display any interest in the issues that seem more explanatory to me. The book seems to float on a suspicion that a malicious and cruelly misguided intention must be directed against the American Dream.

I think so much of the American Dream here because the book reads much better if one takes it as the account of a bad dream. I grant that some of its critiques of how power corrupts are painfully accurate when projected on to 'The Authorities' and that poetically it does represent the feeling of being trapped against a vague and threatening future that is deafening right now.

6/22/16, 6:42 PM

Repent said...

"but rather to understand why the world looks the way it does to the author and some of his or her readers."

Brilliant !

In my own personal quest for enlightenment and spirituality I have run face first into the concept of non-duality. This is something really hard to wrap your head around. Everyone is part of God, and there are no dividing lines. We are each God subdivided, yet a part of the whole nonetheless. We are each drops of water, and together we form the ocean of God.

Everything is one, there is only one creature in the multiverse and that is God.

This is still difficult for me having lived an apparent life of duality. I believed (believe) that I'm not you and you are not me, and someone in a cave in Afghanistan is someone else entirely. Still an understanding and a movement towards non-duality seems to be the direction life and my pursuit of truth is taking me, despite my reservations.

To admit to yourself that every evil or disgusting thing out there is really a part of yourself sends a cringe down my spine. Everything I hate, the opposite of every preference that I have, and also of other yet unknown of things that I have yet to experience or judge are all a part of the one thing that IS. To know truth, to know God, is to experience non-duality firsthand.

I think I will be troubled with your 2nd homework assignment, but it is the process at hand.

6/22/16, 6:45 PM

alex carter said...

What we call the N-word now, was merely a descriptor. Now it's a combination of descriptive and pejorative, mostly weighted toward the pejorative. I grew up where people of my skin color and facial features were and are called a term, "Haole" which again is a combination of descriptive and pejorative, with probably about a 50% weight on each. But I can see it eventually leaning toward being more pejorative as times passes by. I can see how myself, in say another 30 years if I'm still around, using the word as I grew up using it, would really grate on the ears of the young.

I could never figure out what was supposed to be so scary about H.P. Lovecraft's stuff. I read one story of his that had these frog-beings who could happily swim around anywhere underwater, and were part of some ancient and planet-faring civilization, and then the supposedly horrifying part is where the protagonist finds out he himself can swim around underwater and in fact is part frog-creature. Disregarding the biological impossibility of this, my reaction would be something like, "Wow, cool!" because I'd get to explore the oceans, and learn all this neat ancient spacefaring civilization stuff.

But I guess to a white, straight, Anglo-Saxon patrician from New England, being anything but such is a horrifying thought, and Lovecraft was only able to get such thoughts published by couching it in terms of frog-creatures.

6/22/16, 6:50 PM

Dylan said...

Speaking of Robert Heinlein, that might be the author I'll have to return to for this month's homework assignment. I got halfway through Stranger In A Strange Land before giving up, and not more than one or two chapters into Starship Troopers.

The class lecture that followed however, followed a similar line of investigation to what you've done here- Heinlein's insectoid evil aliens are, like the hive-minded Communists that were menacing all dutiful, virile Americans in those days, projections of the dark side of a culture of conformity and fear that had taken hold on this side of the ocean. I remember thinking after class that maybe I would have done better to overcome the intense feeling that I was being polluted by reading the book at all.

This lecture, it's worth mentioning, took place on the other side of the ocean, while I was on a semester abroad in the UK.

Last, I've polished up my submission for this year's Space Bats contest, which can be found here: http://awizardofearth.blogspot.ca/2016/06/something-to-look-forward-to.html.

Thanks for another great post.

6/22/16, 6:52 PM

Wizard of Tas said...

I left Christianity while doing my third year of bible college in part because I could no longer accept the 'mono-everything' aspect that couldn't accept anything outside of its own little worldview (gays, other gods, etc). However, one lesson I remember taught by the dean was (in relation to an east European atrocity raging at the time) was that the only difference between 'us' and 'them' was circumstance. Growing up there, developing along those lines, given a gun... Probably.

I have been a white master and a black slave. A gay and a gunman. I have slept in sheets and worn them. A priest and a prostitute. A monotheist and a polytheist.

But not bl00dy Irish!! :)

6/22/16, 7:05 PM

Chris Smith said...

Great post today!

I had a slightly different experience when I read HP Lovecraft back in the 1980s as a teenager. I read "Call of Cthulhu" and "Shadow Over Innsmouth." I caught the whole senseless brown savage trope in "Call of Cthulhu," but kept reading anyway. My take away at the end of the story was that our white protestant hero (as a sort of stand in for respectable white protestant culture) just got shown that his whole way of thinking and mode of living was unadulterated bovine feces. His logical, scientific, and Christian worldview was entirely bunk. Instead, those senseless brown savages from the beginning of the story had a firmer grasp about truth of things than the fragile bubble of protestant white culture. I credit Lovecraft (ironically as it turns out) with allowing me to be open to critical theory. (I'm talking about Jurgen Habermas and Derrick Bell and critical legal and social theory, not Derrida and critical literary theory). "Shadow of Innsmouth" left me with the same impression.

Then I found out what a colossal racist Lovecraft was from some of his poems and letters. Whatever - still a great writer who got me thinking about things. It was also an object lesson not to turn your literary heroes into role models for your personal life.

I recently read "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle. The author was interviewed on "Fresh Air" and said that as a black author who loved HP Lovecraft's writing he'd reimagined "Horror at Redhook." I bought the book and it did not disapoint - either a straight weird fiction or a dialogue with Lovecraft. To me, that's how you deal with literature or (as in this case) authors you find disagreeable - you enter into a conversation with them. You don't Bowdlerize it.

6/22/16, 7:05 PM

Cherokee Organics said...

Hi JMG,

Oh yeah, I hear you. Robert E Howard with the Conan tales was in that up to his eyeballs. The black characters in those stories fitted a lot of those particular stereotypes, and I just sort of read it, had a quiet chuckle to myself about it and then went on and did something else. I also recall that Robert E Howard eventually took his own life by shooting himself, so clearly he had some demons riding him hard.

Some of my friends are gay and I've had other people tell me that: "oh, I couldn't hang with them" and the implication is that other than friendship there is some sort of ulterior conversion motive going on. Those fear comments makes me laugh, because I'm secure in who I am, and those comments say so much about the people making them and their own insecurities. I'm always surprised that they themselves can't hear the fear, uncertainty and doubt in their own voices. What a strange world we live in.

The weather bureau reckons it just may snow here tomorrow so I'm excited as snow here is rare and getting rarer!!!

Cheers

Chris

6/22/16, 7:12 PM

John Roth said...

Well, part of this reminds me of George Orwell's political diatribe disguised as a novel, 1984. It's got the same theme: limit language and you control the mind.

6/22/16, 7:33 PM

RepubAnon said...

This is why the Democratic Party's top political consultants are so worthless - they can't see themselves as others see them - or understand opposing views. For all the sneering about Mr. Trump's campaign in venues such as the New York Times, he knows that frightened people who have lost faith in the "experts" are easily shifted into anger and fear. We could see President Trump next January - and the plot of "Twilight's Last Gleaming" by 2020.

6/22/16, 7:49 PM

Mike said...

I am reminded of having stumbled upon and read - mainly because it was short - Swift's A Modest Proposal. I was too young to understand satire, and horrified, asked my mother how such terrible things could be publicly advocated. She patiently calmed me down.

I also firmly believe that live theater can have the same beneficial effects as literature.

6/22/16, 7:56 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Twinruler, good! Yes, and one of the great lessons of the past is that constellations of prejudices and beliefs change over time. In Lovecraft's day, Christians were more likely to be liberal than not, and atheists were very often staunch conservative racists -- read H.L. Mencken for another classic example. A century from now, people will look back on our current belief systems and find them just as baffling.

Leo, political correctness is mostly influential in the academic industry these days; it also has a hold in some coastal states. Outside of those, not so much.

Breanna, how old are your children? If they're old enough to read complex narratives (say, Tom Sawyer) they're old enough to begin thinking about what they read, and you can begin introducing that sort of thinking in conversations with them -- the sooner you begin that, in fact, the better.

Ray, good. The sense of having the American Dream snatched away is very widespread in our collective life right now, and the range of scapegoats being blamed for it is truly impressive.

Repent, I'm forcibly reminded of one of the Beatles' lyrics: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together." Whether or not people believe that in a theological sense, it's certainly a psychological reality -- since each of us can only understand another person by modeling that person's thoughts and feelings on things we've experienced within ourselves, whatever we hate is always something we are.

Alex, I know! The only Lovecraft story I find actually scary is "The Color Out Of Space," and it's the one piece where he forgot about being prejudiced and focused on the experience of pure alienness. The others? As I noted a while back in the other blog, I find them delightfully funny, with a kind of earnest absurdity that shines through his efforts at spookiness. But then I think octopi are cute, I kept lizards and snakes as pets in childhood, and if great Cthulhu rose from the sea I wouldn't expect him to destroy humanity -- why on earth should he care enough about humanity to bother destroying it? (It's like expecting Donald Trump to devote his presidency to destroying the world's population of chipmunks.)

Dylan, got your story -- if you'll put through a comment marked "not for posting" with your email address, you'll be in the contest. As for Heinlein, I grew up reading him, and still find some of his fiction entertaining -- but the political subtext is often pretty cloying.

Wizard, nah, being Irish is reserved for your next incarnation. ;-)

Chris, exactly! One of the unintentional lessons of Lovecraft is that white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants have no clue about what's actually going on in the world. I'm looking forward to reading LaValle, but I've made it a strict rule not to read any post-Weird Tales Cthulhu mythos fiction until I've finished writing The Weird of Hali series -- I want to contend with Lovecraft and his sources and peers straight up.

Cherokee, best wishes for snow! No question, Howard was a man of his time -- I'll be referencing him, over on the other blog, in the process of placing Julius Evola in his historical and cultural context. The two men had a remarkably large number of ideas in common, and not by accident.

6/22/16, 7:58 PM

RepubAnon said...

I've always thought that the fish-people in Innsmouth should come up from their underwater cities - and file class-action anti-discrimination lawsuits against the neighboring towns...

6/22/16, 8:00 PM

Peter VE said...

I cheated by reading Gilgamesh for our last assignment: it's short. When thinking of the most non PC book possible, Mien Kampf springs immediately to mind, and there are many copies available in the local libraries. My neighbors who denounce Lovecraft for his racism, whilst living across from one of the houses where Lovecraft lived will really go through the roof....

"we hate most what we can’t tolerate seeing in ourselves, and our most savage denunciations are always directed, in one sense or another, at a mirror." I read that while trying to avoid the argument with my wife about how we should react to our teenage daughter. Ouch.

6/22/16, 8:03 PM

Marcu said...

The next meeting of the Green Wizard's Association of Melbourne will be held this Saturday. All interested parties are invited to attend. For those people who are unsure about the nature of our meetings, imagine a long descent support group with some intentional living discussion mixed in.
If you are interested to join us, meet us this Saturday, the 25th of June 2016 at 13:00. The venue is, Vapiano, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne Victoria, Australia.

Send queries and comments to limitstogrowth1972[at]gmail.com.

Just look for the green wizard's hat.

P.S. I have created a webpage where I will post the details of the next meeting and any further details for those who don't frequent the comments here. The webpage can be found at wormlamp.com/gwam

6/22/16, 8:08 PM

MayHawk said...

So I'm guessing that "Tom Sawyer" would be rejected as politically incorrect by our guardians of racial inoffensiveness. One book that takes on Racial prejudice head on which is what makes it one of the greatest books ever written.

For my assignment I'm thinking of something by a climate change denier or else something by Rush Limbaugh though the latter idea makes my stomach churn!

6/22/16, 8:12 PM

Bob Patterson said...

You do not have to go very far back in history to see the "eraser effects" The treatment of the 1960's in historical literature is laughable to anyone who lived through them. It was as if the older generation just decided it was a cute aberration of society. Those poor misguided, drugged out, naive utopian dreamers. Have you ever noticed that for 20 years it was almost impossible to get any copy of the more radical films of the period (examples - "Putney Swope", "Getting Straight")? The ideas of financial and cultural independence are only now beginning to reappear due to the dire financial situations many of us find ourselves.

6/22/16, 8:13 PM

drhooves said...

Great post, JMG. Shouldn't be too difficult to find offending material to read for the homework assignment.

History does indeed have a nasty sense of humor, and like Mother Nature, doesn't like being fooled with. The backlash from the efforts to morally censor history, literature and speech on race is well underway, as 7.5 years of "Hope and Change" have taken race relations backwards at least 50 years.

It's not totally unexpected though, as the future seems to be headed towards a two class system (master and slave), in which critical thought, polite discourse and the truth will be discouraged. The Social Justice Warriors of today are the unwitting foot soldiers whose efforts will take us to exactly the opposite of the intended safe spaces.

6/22/16, 8:19 PM

Rob Rhodes said...

I think I have already seen the seed of reaction to political correctness growing around the blogosphere. In unmoderated comment sections I read people being rude, racist and using ethnic and religious slurs while bragging about being not politically correct. Trump seems to think anti political correctness gives him leave to be all or most of the aforementioned.

Does "literature" maintain the same definition for this assignment; pre 1900? I notice some commenters have mentioned much more current works they might read.

My local used bookstore presented an anthology of Mark Twain for the last assignment. As a retired coastal and river boat skipper reading a former river pilot I enjoyed every minute of Huck and Jim on the river, usually those trying to write marine fiction induce laughter then putting the book aside as unreadable. In the currents and back eddies (easy water to Huck) Twain is faultless. Still one of the highlights for me was Jim's hilarious and intelligent critique of Solomon's solution to the baby ownership dispute.

6/22/16, 8:40 PM

Steve Carrow said...

For last month's homework, I read Xenophon's Cyropaedia. Learned a lot, not just the history, which might or might not be accurate, but Xenophon's ( and his era's) view of what a good ruler should be.

Offended.. Hmmm. There are plenty of books out that there that I would strongly disagree with, but I'll have to think about actual offense.

6/22/16, 8:48 PM

Raging Bull said...

A very interesting post, JMG. When I studied literature at university, there was a strong emphasis on historicism - reading texts in the light of their historical context. So, for example, we read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and understood the Doctor's "workshop of filthy creation" as a metaphor for the industrial revolution. We read The Tempest and tried to find in Prospero and Caliban a critique of early colonial encounters: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

There is nothing wrong with historicism as a critical idea, but when it is taken too far, it can obscure the deeper imaginative meanings of a work of literature. This fact became apparent to me when we read Joseph Conrad's great tale of European imperialism, Heart of Darkness and my teacher emphasized the racist aspect of the text to such an extent that I felt he was questioning its place on the syllabus.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Heart of Darkness is racist. It uses the native people of the Congo as a metaphor for human savagery and fear, and describes them in an amorphous, almost mystical style. But if you get stuck on that point, you might easily miss the deeper meaning of the story – its critique of European colonialism in general and of that extraordinary character Mr. Kurtz, an ivory trader who is unable to resist the lure of “primitive savagery” because, in spite of his sophisticated European civilization, he is “hollow at the core.” The racism of the book is even undercut by its opening line of dialogue, in which Marlow describes London in the time of the Roman conquests: “This also has been one of the dark places of the world.”

Great artists tend to evade partisan political readings of their work because they seek the ambiguous depths in human experience. This fact alone ought to be enough to deter calls for censorship. But then, what is a great work? That’s another can of worms…

6/22/16, 8:56 PM

Kfish said...

I accidentally completed this assignment during the last one - 'Quo Vadis' is both more than 100 years old, and completely alien in its mindset. It's a novel about Christian martyrdom in the days of Nero as a metaphor for the Polish experience with, well, everyone. Trying to understand the mindset in which a gruesome death for Christ could be something to welcome was an interesting experience. As a bonus, it includes a Roman character who is struggling to understand the appeal of Christianity from his own alien perspective.

6/22/16, 9:00 PM

Josh said...

JMG - off topic again sorry...

You've highlighted how Hilary has been running an inept campaign - but she's going to win, for reasons that you yourself have pointed out previously. The Democrats only have to wave the scary Republicans in front of affluent liberal/progressive voters and they perform dependably every time. Now the Republicans have the scariest possible candidate to wave. So many former Sanders sympathizers are lining up behind Hillary now because they are afraid of Trump. Victory for the Establishment is ensured (as if it was ever in doubt, with so much Wall St backing?). People are talking about how Trump will be unseated by sketchy means at the convention - but why, from the elites' perspective? He's the guarantor of Hillary's election.

Why doesn't Trump just ask Sanders to be his running mate? Wouldn't that spell certain (popular) victory over the widely-hated Hillary? Liberal/progressives would scream over the idea of Bernie joining forces with Trump, but wouldn't that be the only chance for their candidate to achieve a high office? What is the argument against it - that with a Trump-Sanders ticket then people in the gov't would argue all the time and not get anything done? How is that different from now? Yeah so why not?

We thought it was impossible but this is going to be a kick-the-can-down-the-road election and Hillary is going to take the next 4 or 8 years. What do you think?

6/22/16, 9:01 PM

Jo said...

Many years ago a friend and I were both reading the Dr Dolittle books to our children, and I mentioned to her that I had quietly excised all racist references. She replied that she had read them out and talked about them with her children - she saw that as a form of armouring them against taking the written word as gospel. At which I mentally smacked myself on the forehead and have been doing the same with my children ever since.

6/22/16, 9:05 PM

Jim said...

I recently (before the assignment!) re-read Hucklebery Finn, Tom Sawyer and read, for the first time Life on the Mississippi. I was a little taken aback by Twain's casual rascist language but when I calmed down I was pleasantly suprised to see his underlying sympathy for the plight of antebellum blacks. Twain was a giant.

I tried two other pre 20th century books. Failed at both. I couldn't get through Lord Jim just because it was so badly written by my measure. I found it, and the second book on a list of best books ever.

the second book was Tom Paine's Common Sense. Wow, what a difference in language between the 18th and the 19th centuries! Lord Jim was easily readable but, to me trivial. Paine was writing political advocacy with a vengeance and sometimes, because of archaic vocabulary and word order, tough going. I got through Common Sense and some of the other essays but being familiar with much of the detailed history of the period I didn't feel I got much out of the struggle.

6/22/16, 9:23 PM

zach bender said...

i do not want to pretend i do not get the larger point, but i want to ask whether it is actually the case that lovecraft has been stricken from a reading list at some american college on the ground he was racist.

6/22/16, 9:27 PM

Steve Thomas said...

As I'm wracking my brain for things I find offensive there's one title that keeps coming up. Everything I've read about the author to date kind disgusts me, I loathe the political movement that the author is connected to, and I do not want to read the book. I guess that's the one I ought to go with, then.

You mentioned the way that political groupings reverse themselves over time. This election is showing the way that happens, and it's doing it in a way that makes me feel like I've been sucked into a bizarro funhouse world. Did you happen to read Donald Trump's Big Speech about Hillary Clinton? There is so much that is loathsome about the man. But then he openly attacks the Iraq War, criticizes the decision to intervene in Libya as more of the same, and talks about the disastrous effects of NAFTA and other free trade agreements. It's hard for me to see how anyone who was involved in the anti-war or anti-globalization movements of 15 years ago-- you know, the ones that disappeared without a trace once the Democrats started managing the foreign wars and neoliberal trade agreements-- can vote for anyone but Trump. I made the mistake of saying this in a public forum and was attacked because "Trump could literally be the next Hitler."

The drying up of protest movements once the protesters' preferred political party takes power isn't new. But I wonder if the change will become more permanent this time, and the Democrats will just openly be the Imperial Party from here on out.

On last month's assignment-- I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I tandem-read Little Women and the Mayan Popul Vuh. I was surprised by just how disturbing I found the second of those. Some of its images and moments are powerful, moving... And then there's the part where the followers of a trio of stone gods start secretly kidnapping people for use in human sacrifice. Eventually they become powerful enough that they can step out of the shadows and openly conquer cities and found dynasties. These are the heroes of the story, fulfilling the role of a Moses or an Aeneas. And they would work perfectly as villains in a Lovecraft story!

Speaking of Lovecraft... I also don't find his stories scary, for the most part. I find them strangely comforting. I often turn to Cthulhu when I'm feeling down. As for his racism... It does make some stories unreadable, but it doesn't bother me as much as it might because I just don't buy it. At various times in his stories and his private letters he attacks blacks, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Asians, "poor white trash," the Irish, the Scandinavians, the Eskimo-- I once described him to a friend by saying "He's great once you get past the fact that he was prejudiced against you, all your friends, and everyone you've met." And once you realize that he was sort of raised as an overprotected shut in, you realize that his "politics" are really just his own terror of the outside world. I guess that's part of the lesson here though, isn't it?

6/22/16, 9:47 PM

beneaththesurface said...

This week's post and especially the homework assignment reminds me of a quote I came across only in the last week: "A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” -Jo Godwin

When I was a child my family went camping every summer in Maine, and when we had a rainy day, we'd use it as an excuse to spend the entire day near Ellsworth at the Big Chicken Barn Used Bookstore and Antiques -- a chicken barn full of old books of all kinds on the second level. I have fond memories of exploring rare, old books I never saw elsewhere, and I was allowed to buy a few of my choice (your Homework assignment #1 brought back good memories of being introduced there to books published before 1900). Once I purchased some of the Bobbsey Twins books -- some of the first ones written in the early 1900s. I then remember my mom reading them to me at bedtime, and later on she reminisced on how it had made her uncomfortable. There were a lot of overt racist sentiments and remarks in the stories toward people of color, and prejudice against Gypsies. But I'm glad that despite her discomfort, she didn't stop reading them to me. It was educational to listen to a story from that time, reflect on it, and use it as a springboard for discussion. Later last century, a lot of the Bobbsey Twin books were rewritten and sanitized.

http://www.vintagebooklife.com/2014/12/top-ten-racist-moments-in-bobbsey-twins.html

6/22/16, 9:50 PM

jessi thompson said...

I'm running into the same problem, not much offends me. I may have to do some research to find something really misogynistic, I think.

As for the discomfort with people like Hitler sharing a place in God with us, take heart in this: the other side of the coin is than no soul, no fragment of a soul, no bit of experience is ever lost. That comfort (especially when a lived one dies) far outweighs the discomfort for me.

6/22/16, 9:59 PM

Unknown said...

I am late in my first assignment - I am actually reading "The Pilgrim's Progress" based on your suggestion. I am about halfway through and I was ready to give up a couple of times but still going. I cannot say that what he says offends me but it definitely annoys me to no end. I realized how well written some parts of the Bible are - direct and very human as opposed to pompous and moralizing like Paul Bunyan. So I guess it pays off already to stick with reading a book that I disagree with... To be clear, I am not a believer. I read the Bible out of curiosity and in turns amazed me, horrified me and opened my eyes to actual human nature.
As for the current assignment, I am tempted to actually try to read news in mass media. I haven't in a long time and I realized I cannot explain my position in conversation with friends. They refer to BBC or other liberal media, I refer to blogs like this and we cannot find any common facts. Yes, I mean actual facts not ideas. How can I provide concrete facts to support my assertions when I don't have any of their context from what they read or listen to. I felt very out on the fringe...
I wonder if you have any idea how to bridge the gap without spending all my time digging through the official story? That would be too offensive for me...

6/22/16, 10:01 PM

LewisLucanBooks said...

Salutations, Mr. Greer - Just about the time Dr. Bowdler was busy with Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson was busy cutting and pasting (with a real pen knife and paste!) the New Testament. He was cutting out all the parts that had to do with miracles, magic and the supernatural. Age of Reason, critical thinking, or, bowdlerization?

I belong to a 12 Step Program, that was started by a bunch of white, anglo-saxon, well educated guys, who had, clearly, read a lot of Jung. It is "suggested" (everything's a darned suggestion) that if we resent or dislike someone, perhaps it's because we don't like something about them, that we do not like in ourselves. That maybe, we might want to "take a look" at that.

I'd use that holding a mirror up to someone, so they can find the intolerance in themselves, with great caution. It can set off a violent ... even murderous reaction.

I often urge people I know to read widely ... outside their political comfort zone. Not that anyone pays attention to me :-). I read left, right and center. Part of it is, I just am very curious about what makes people tick. Part of it is "know the enemy, and what they're up to." Enemy from my point of view, which I know is very binary.

After the Oklahoma City Bombing, I read "The Turner Diaries", which were very much in the news, at the time, as a blueprint for what happened. I thought it was a poorly written, nasty piece of work. But, I could see what the mindset of the bomber was, and, even found a few of his grievances ... understandable. Lew

6/22/16, 10:17 PM

thenoteswhichdonotfit said...

One of the reasons I like reading Westerns (and wish to devote more of my time to reading Westerns) is that it is one genre where white American writers, even nowadays, are willing to confront the issue of race, and include non-white characters, rather than write only about white people and forget that other races exist. Is there racism? Yes - though the level of racism varies a lot from writer to writer (and interestingly, older Western fiction is not necessarily more racist than more recent Western fiction). However, white Western writers at least have non-white characters and think about race, and the writers which I bother to read try to think about it from the non-white people's perspectives (even though their prejudices may make these attempts seriously flawed). That is more than I can say for a lot of sci-fi / fantasy by white Americans, which often have no non-white characters at all, and even when they do, they often aren't as well written as the non-white characters by white Western writers.

I've also noticed an impulse that, when I criticise a work of fiction for displaying a certain prejudice, people assume that I want to censor that work (for example, if I am critiquing a play, people assume that I mean that the play should never be performed). That's not necessarily true. After all, if a work is censored, then people won't know what I'm talking about when I'm critiquing it!

6/22/16, 10:20 PM

LewisLucanBooks said...

PS: Gosh. What was that black and white, 1940s (?) British horror movie. The "real" Lord of the Manor, turns out to be a giant frog that flops his way down from his tower, by night, to wend his way through a hedge labyrinth to take a moon light dip in a pool. Much to the horror of the Lord of the Manor's, brother's new bride ... who didn't know she was getting mixed up in family curses. Or something like that. It's been a long time. But, as a small child, it certainly gave me a bad case of the fantods :-). Lew

6/22/16, 10:23 PM

Yucca Glauca said...

Regarding Dagon, I've always tended to wander in idle moments toward thoughts of other species religious feelings. I lean towards thinking that they do have some and am fascinated by some thoughts on the matter--I think it was in a book by Ivo Domniguez jr. that I encountered the idea that there may be some gods who are primarily concerned with animals but who lean into human awareness now and then--but generally consider it to be fundamentally unknowable. Witnessing another species' religious practice and being able to recognize it as such would be among the coolest things I can think of. Clearly, a similar difference in sensibilities as to why many of us don't find Lovecraft's stories particularly terrifying.

Picking a work for this week's homework is going to be hard! Perhaps the biggest challenge is that in high school I had the embarrassing habit of reading works I disagreed with under the pretense of understanding other views when really I just wanted to gloat in superiority.

6/22/16, 10:33 PM

Bekah Evie Bel said...

I have long been of the opinion that changing or removing such hotbed words from classic lit, and even not using them in modern lit that is set in such times, is a bad idea. The best way to learn from history is to learn about history, removing all examples of it is to almost deny it happened and most likely lead to it happening again. I like the way you've discussed it much better than my attempts to do so though.

For your homework assignment, I wonder... What if I can think of nothing that offends me? Some things upset me - violence to children inevitably leads me to envision such happening to my kids, for instance. There are things I don't like - the obvious, like racism, sexism etc but I don't know that I actually feel offended by it. Even when people aim pejorative terms at me that I do not like, I don't know that I ever feel offended. Just annoyed maybe, but more often amused, to be honest. I don't know what that means about me. It also means I can't think of any books, nor even any types of books that I could read for this sort of assignment. Any suggestions or alternatives?

6/22/16, 10:34 PM

steve said...

apropos from wired:

“The Beauty of Laplace’s Equation, Mathematical Key to Everything”

http://www.wired.com/2016/06/laplaces-equation-everywhere/

Does ego’s unmet expectations, squared, multiplied by the desired characteristics of the homogeneous, always equal zero ?

6/22/16, 11:11 PM

Yucca Glauca said...

I've always appreciated the Discordian way of putting this: Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder.

I've read some commentary on this law that says that the more severely Order is imposed, the longer it takes for Disorder to escalate, but the more dramatic the disorder will be when it finally does.

And of course, Order is simply whatever agenda someone wants to impose on the underlying Chaos.

6/23/16, 12:06 AM

ed boyle said...

I'm almost finished with divine comedy and have read hard times and great expectations. Next I go back an finish Iliad and I dug out Niebelungenlied. Epic poetry is preprosa. Paradise lost was excellent and Pushkin's Onegin.

excellent post. Know thyself goes the old saw and 'walk for a mile in a man's mocassins befoore criticizing."

PC thought is deeply ingrained in the West in a particular way. In Eastern Europe and monoethnic countries like Japan or China with independent cultures racism is much more readily acceptable. Americanization means acceptance of US films, music, TV series and ideology which have since hitler and 60s race riots become a pamphlet for racial toleration and integration of women into workforce. Latter is universally accepted and pop music based on jazz, rock coming out of US black music streams. People from the East however are more direct and often racist in their attitudes. Contact with minorities was negligible. Two germanies still exist side by side in point of fact in this regard. OTOH in the west PC does not mean tolerance but ignore till it is too late and white flight, similar to USA liberal white thought. Impoverished ghettoes are not romantic and the limits of ethnic contact is eating at a take out or using public transit. My Russian wife came from a Russia where, similar to USA, all 'whites' were really mongrels from various ethnic groups and one never noticed it until after end of soviet union. Now though racism, combined with identity search in newfound nationalism out of chaos of collapse creates stereotype thinking of every group. Jugoslavian war had similar trajectory. Decades of 'imagine' from john lennon mindset reverts to severe primitivism. The same is happening now to EU. It collapses soon likely as not and then it's 'every man for himself'. Millions of noneuropean whites here will then be all the more suspect if the french and german and brits begin to despise one another. Racism would appear to be their only commonality in 10-15 years. Collapse will lead to deportations of long tolerated minorities without national passports or local religion or local ethnic marriage partner and children. Integration will likely come to mean assimilation.

Everyone has character faults and external group 'x' is always a good foil. In USA Africans have served whites as scapegoats. In Europe jews were always available during a crisis to kick around and blame for own mistakes. Now I imagine Islam will be to blame for ECB incompetence and climate change in Europe. And so the story goes.

6/23/16, 12:17 AM

Meg Tapley said...

You seem to imply that college academics are largely behind the bowdlerization of literature. Having recently completed a four-year tour of duty in higher education, I'm not sure that's entirely the case. Though my degree is in the relatively non-controversial field of music, I still had to take core classes in topics like English and history, and didn't really pick up on much political-correctness-motivated tampering with curricula. Instead, I saw "banned books" being celebrated, and the urge for censorship examined. And a bit of research suggests that the majority of book bans are the result of parents complaining to middle and high school administrators - not college professors pursuing the latest intellectual fad. ("Harry Potter", which is pretty inoffensive except to fundamentalist Christians, tops this list of last decade's most-banned books - which, in a beautiful piece of irony, also includes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.)

Then again, it's entirely possible that academic types just have more subtle ways of making sure certain "offensive" books never see the light of day than by outright banning them, and I wouldn't know anything about it - as noted, this isn't my field at all.

6/23/16, 12:38 AM

John Michael Greer said...

John, well, it should. It's not often remembered that Orwell was criticizing the Left of his time ("Ingsoc" = "English socialism").

RepubAnon, oh, I think Clinton would be at least as well qualified to fill Jameson Weed's shoes, with her monomania for regime change!

Mike, plays are literature. Of course watching live theater can have the same effect -- can you imagine the impact of Shylock's soliloquy in The Merchant of Venice on its original Elizabethan audience in the Globe?

RepubAnon, funny. That's a story I'm not going to write, but would love to read.

Peter, Mein Kampf is a good choice for most people these days. I'm rereading Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World -- that's partly because I plan on discussing him at length on the other blog, but partly because I'm also doing the assignments.

MayHawk, Limbaugh's a really, really bad writer, so there's some real amusement to be had watching him struggle with the English language and lose. That might be some consolation...

Bob, that's a good point, too. I'm also thinking of the way that the Seventies conservation and environmental movememts have been erased!

Drhooves, nah, "masters and slaves" is a brief transitional phase -- Toynbee calls them the dominant elite and the internal proletariat -- and is followed by total collapse, the slaughter of much of the dominant elite, and the emergence of a standard dark age society. My book Dark Age America will cover that in detail.

Rob, nope, that was the last assignment. This one can be from any period from the invention of writing to hot off the presses, so long as it offends, disgusts, or upsets you.

Steve, disagreement will do if you can't find something that gets a stronger reaction. Still, I'm sure if you look for one, you'll find something that makes you want to fling it across the room.

Raging Bull, any approach to criticism makes a mess of things if it's the only approach that's permitted. Historicism is a very useful tool for making sense of writing, but of course it needs to be combined with other approaches in order to give a properly rich sense of a story's meaning.

Kfish, but did it offend and upset you?

6/23/16, 12:43 AM

John Michael Greer said...

Josh, there I think you're quite wrong. Clinton is running a campaign that appeals powerfully to the wealthiest 15% or 20% of Americans, and to certain pressure groups outside that class, and pretty much nobody else. I've heard from a lot of people who voted for Sanders, and the vast majority of them say they wouldn't vote for Clinton if she was running unopposed. She's defining herself as the candidate of business as usual at a time when business as usual has most Americans up against the wall. Could she still win? Of course -- it's not over 'til it's over, as Yogi Berra liked to say -- but the tactics she's trying to use are the same ones that got all those other GOP candidates steamrollered by the Trump phenomenon, and my guess is he's still more likely to be sworn in next January than she is, by a significant margin.

Jo, glad to hear it. That's exactly the sort of insight, and change of direction, that helps teach children to think for themselves about hot button issues.

Jim, Twain was definitely a giant, and America has had few authors who could stand beside him -- though there have been some. Paine and Conrad, well, not my favorites either...

Zach, I haven't the least idea, and I didn't claim that this has happened, either. I simply said that this has been advocated. His image has recently been struck from the World Fantasy Award (formerly the "Howard") for the reasons I cited, though.

Steve, "Little Women and the Popol Vuh" would make a really, really good band name! Yes, I did read Trump's speech, and in an upcoming post will talk about what it means that the Republican candidate is considerably to the left of the Democratic candidate on the whole range of economic, political, and military issues. If the mainstream pundits keep yelling "Hitler! Hitler!" while Trump keeps hammering on Clinton's neoconservative warmongering, this may turn into one of those elections in which the media loses control of the dialogue and things go spinning off in strange directions!

Beneath, that sounds like my favorite kind of bookstore! Thank you for the reminiscence.

Jessi, one of the things I've noticed is that many people have no idea just how offensive some published literature is. You can find stuff that will turn even the stoutest stomach. Go hunting!

Unknown, you may just have to get yourself a new set of friends.

Lewis, I don't recommend trying to make other people acknowledge their own shadows. I recommend that each of us make the choice to get to know our own. Trying to force knowledge on another person never ends well.

Notes, fascinating! I've read next to no Westerns. Can you recommend a good author or two?

Lewis, I don't remember that one at all. By the way, congratulations for using the word "fantods" -- a fine bit of ornate vocabulary!

Yucca, me too -- I'd hope to have the chance to watch the whole ceremony.

Bekah, if mild dislike is the best you can do, you may have to settle for that. Still, it might be worth looking for stuff out on the fringes, as far as possible from your own viewpoint; you may be able to find something that will set off a stronger reaction.

Steve, I'd be willing to take that as a working hypothesis!

Yucca, no argument there. Fnord.

Ed, racial antagonisms rise in the early phases of collapse, and decline thereafter as new aggregations emerge from the husks of the old. I see no reason to expect anything different this time.

6/23/16, 1:10 AM

John Michael Greer said...

Meg, by all accounts a lot of it depends on which institution you attend. You may simply have been lucky.

6/23/16, 1:11 AM

Mikep said...

Too late. You are suggesting a feasibility study into costing a new stable door when the Alt-Right horse is already disappearing down the road with the wind in his mane. Too many idealistic young white liberals with their smug heads stuffed full of ideas of their own moral superiority, have gone out into the world expecting to bestow the benefits of their tolerance upon the long suffering "Noble Negro" only to have the "Truculent Dindu" relieve them of their illusions along with their wallet and mobile. For too many people the cognitive dissonance created by the difference between Hollywood/BBC/Media etc picture of modern "Post Racial Society" and their own experience of living in a multicultural reality is too great to overcome.
On the other hand once meaningful economic growth as measured on a per-capita base re-starts, then all we have to do is increase the proportion of public spending going to affirmative action programs and the damage will no doubt be speedily undone.

6/23/16, 1:23 AM

Yossi said...

JMG
"I've read next to no Westerns."
Try Cormac McCarthy.

6/23/16, 1:41 AM

Chloe said...

Here's an irony: the phrase "political correctness" is itself now undergoing erasure in certain areas by means of an internet-based app/widget/thing which replaces the phrase with "treating people with respect" wherever it shows up. Now people no longer have to even see that they're being accused of political correctness… The term's never been non-controversial, and a large part of the problem is that it conflates two sets of ideas: the set of beliefs espoused by the left, and the imposition of orthodoxy relating to those beliefs such that all other discussion is shut down or, as we see now, treated as if it simply doesn't exist. The beliefs themselves may be reasonable enough (the only major quarrel I personally have with what we might call the "social left", or the feminist/LGBT/minority rights constellation, is its unshakeable conviction in its own righteousness) but that's going to quickly get lost in the backlash against being told what to think by a cultural mainstream that doesn't necessarily reflect the ideas of the majority of the population. (The loss of critical faculties in the process, as you've highlighted, certainly doesn't help.)

Your use of the word "justify" ("… containing language or ideas that justify the oppression they've experienced…") raises an interesting point, though I don't know if it was intentional on your part: a thing can only be justified if it is justifiable. That is, if the ideologies of these banned works are as flawed as people nowadays believe, then the works cannot justify the ideology - they can only excuse it. And this does seem to be the case, as seen in the ways Lovecraft unwittingly deconstructs his own racism and provides insights into the psychological causes of it, rather than providing any compelling reason to adopt the racism itself. So why erase it? Do the censors simply believe we're all too stupid for a critical reading, and will become racist by merely being exposed to racist works? Or do the zealots of anti-racism struggle with that critical reading themselves? (After all: we attack our mirrors.)

Anyway, I'm another one struggling to think of any work of literature that will actually offend me. I think I'll join a few of your other commenters and hunt down Ayn Rand.

And I have a Space Bats entry! Here you go: http://pannarransinthenorth.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/blackfin.html

6/23/16, 2:10 AM

Joel said...

Good point about unintended consequences.

I have to say, though, my experiences match Leo Knight's. Having spent more than a third of my life at West Coast universities, I've never seen an academic advocate that people remain ignorant of past or current racism.

There is pressure not to adopt or employ offensive terms for groups of people, but I haven't encountered any "let's never read that, the author was racist". Lot's of "let's all stand around and point fingers at this dead author," which may have other sorts of unintended consequences, and certainly lots of "let's read this one, too, because the author was unfairly ignored for the last couple decades".

I did have the experience of using the term "hysteresis" in a circuits lab and having a classmate take offense at it (she had conflated the Greek terms for history and for uterus), but when I explained the term's actual etymology she didn't push the issue.

6/23/16, 2:28 AM

Max Osman said...

Personally, i prefer the theory that 1984 showcases Orwells notorious hatred of the other irish/catholics.

>I had the great pleasure of reviewing [two pro-Catholic books]:It was the first time I have been able to lay the bastinado on a professional RC at any length.

>I found Vacandard’s history of the Inquisition quite interesting:It appears:that the pendulum in Poe’s story was actually used:Torture [was dropped] in the middle of the 18th century, but the Pope did not formally abolish it until 1816. Our hedgehog has disappeared.

Consider the real names of the men who have governed Britain-and then explain why Orwell named his villain “O’Brien.” Bad conscience trumped sense yet again. He hates the O’Briens so much that he foolishly imagines they’re going to rise to the top in the coming Soviet Britain and take their revenge on the Orwells

Also the fact that in the appendix, the first thing INGSOC did was change the engkish time to a continental clock. “It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

I could add the obsession he has in homage to catalonia with burning catholic churches, but i'll leave that beside.

6/23/16, 2:31 AM

L said...

I definitely feel that reading viewpoints by people you currently oppose often leads to a new understanding of where they come from. I've taken quite a meandering road in my (admittedly relatively short) years of considering politics, moving from right-wing based on ignorance and upbringing, through a few years of gradually moving left in an uncritical manner as I discovered that section of the internet and made left wing friends at uni, through discovering this blog, and then briefly considering myself anarchist, before ending up in my current opinion of vaguely left libertarian with strong belief in limits of growth. There are definitely multiple issues on which I no longer agree with my left wing friends.
I actually read a reasonable amount of things written by more right wing libertarians these days. After the Orlando shooting, my entire social media feed (yes, I know, it's a timewaster...) was filled with people expressing how tragic it was and calling for America to increase its gun control (gun control in the UK is pretty much taken as a given, being as we are at the moment where carrying anything bigger than a 3 inch folding knife without good reason is illegal, and self defense isn't counted as good reason, and if you carry something else with intention to use as an offensive weapon, that's also illegal) but I felt this really wasn't the whole story so I went looking for pro-gun accounts of the event and actually ended up on the Donald Trump reddit, which I discovered was surprisingly not homophobic.
On the topic of the homework, I will have to think what will cause me offense. I think it would probably be something that was overtly and unapologetically homophobic, seeing as I am a lesbian. Not in a just pretending gay people don't exist at all way, but in a "we included gay characters and portrayed them as sinful/mentally ill/depraved/evil and this didn't change by the end of the book" sort of way. But I don't know what books would be like that, so I could probably do with some recommendations...
The Brexit vote is today (actually, I will probably have voted by the time this comment goes through) and I'd like to thank JMG and the other commenters who commented on it. I've pretty much decided to vote leave because I want sovereignity, not to be dragged into ridiculous trade deals like TTIP, better control over borders in the face of the fact that the UK is the 3rd most populated country in Europe that isn't one of those super tiny countries that's basically a city-state, and I think that despite likely short term pain, it'll enable us a better chance to survive the escape from the status quo in the future.
Thanks for another excellent post,
L.

6/23/16, 2:40 AM

YCS said...

Hi JMG/All,
Might I suggest something that will terrify contemporary Red Guards? The fact that our own beliefs and actions will be regarded as wrong and hypocritical in the future.

What else could you say when university students in affluent countries protest racism while wearing sweatshop made clothes? Send youth delegations to faraway places, burning fuel to protest climate change? Our apparent obsession with sexuality while we trample on working class people?

It's heretic to imply that morality is an evolutionary, not a progressive construct, that there's no perfect 'utopia' and even today's 'progressive society' is oddly oppressive in many ways. I always get the feeling that people who denounce racist thought crime (particularly privileged people) in others have some deep-seated insecurity or guilt themselves. They're perfectly happy to loudly proclaim things while doing nothing to actually mitigate the harms of privilege (Hillary Clinton, case in point).

YCS

6/23/16, 2:51 AM

John D. Wheeler said...

And another cherished myth gets destroyed by John Michael Greer.... I always pictured the Dark Man helping Cthulhu as a mystical Man-In-Black, a universal Shadow, a patch of darkness in humanoid form. How disappointing to learn that Lovecraft was picturing a mere melatonin-rich human.

And amusingly, for last month's assignment, I went to The Gutenberg Project's Top 100 list and started scanning down. I was pleasantly surprised by just how many were disqualified because I had already read them. I was a little annoyed at the ones that were disqualified by being non-fiction. And I didn't particularly feel like starting something as long as War and Peace. So, the book I chose was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Which, as it turned out, fits very nicely with this month's assignment, as I only got a few chapters in before I couldn't stand it anymore.

6/23/16, 3:16 AM

Monica said...

Another excellent post, thank you. Brings to mind a little conversation I overheard at work - a colleague was taking a phone call on a dog complaint, with the caller saying to my colleague "Oh my dog wouldn't ever hurt another dog, I even feed it vegan food!". Another one for the utopian vision of the future, where all dogs are vegan and all unpleasantness has been eradicated.

On a separate note thank you for your recommendations on drawing an astrological chart by hand without log tables, and also thank you to the couple of commenters who recommended books - I do read all the comments here even though I don't comment that often.

Monica

6/23/16, 3:30 AM

Twinruler334 said...

I may as well read Joseph Stalin's books then. For he is about the only historical figure I hate more than Adolf Hitler himself!

6/23/16, 3:47 AM

Kim Arntsen said...

The same urge to censor literature from the past is on full display on this side of the Atlantic too, unfortunately. For example, here in Norway there was quite a fuss a few years back when someone decided re-issues of beloved (Swedish) children's classic Pippi Longstocking had be edited for political correctness. At least the PC editors met significant resistance, even if they were ultimately successful.

I've also got a quick question about the homework assignment. Does it have to be a work of fiction, or is non-fiction fair game as well? If so, I have the perfect book in mind, if I can get hold of it (out of print, apparently, even though it's fairly recent).

Finally, for anyone who's having a hard time finding an offensive book, there's always ,Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts by Leigh Phillips. A very explicit defense of the Religion of Progress (it's even in the sub-title), and a polar opposite of the world view and values I'd assume most readers of this blog would hold.

6/23/16, 4:31 AM

Don Plummer said...

Well, since I work in a community college, not in a four-year university, I don't know whether the kind of censorship you describe here is happening in such places anymore, but I know it's not happening where I teach. Your comments about expurgating the teaching of literature that contains racist notions might have been current twenty years ago during the height of the campus speech code movement, but I'm not so sure they're current anymore.

In fact, the reading anthology we use in our composition classes contains an essay that was written during the height of the speech-code period--that would be the mid-1990s--written by Johnathan Rauch and called "In Defense of Prejudice." In this essay, Rauch makes essentially the same points you make here. I assign Rauch's essay to my first-year composition students and usually find it's one of their favorite readings.

I am honestly far more concerned with the historical revisionism going on in the Right, in particular their rewriting of American history to support the notion of America's founding as a "Christian nation" and supporting the nationalist and militarist notion that all our actions have been just and right. I think the Right's revisionism has far more chance of causing negative consequences down the road than anything happening the left is offering these days; the Right, in truth, is far better organized, far better funded, and far more conscious of their goals and objectives than the scattered and tattered remnants of the Left are.

An aside: since the term "political correctness" has become such a common term with such a vague meaning (including it's frequent use as a snarl term), it would be very helpful for one to offer a working definition before using it, if one decides to use it at all. I don't use the term myself because I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean.

6/23/16, 4:32 AM

C.L. Kelley said...

BeneathTheSurface, The Big Chicken Barn is still there! I drive past it every Saturday on my way to peddle our long-ferment breads & bagels at the small-but-growing farmers market in Ellsworth. Your recollections have made sure I will stop there this week as I've been meaning to check it out. I will give the old place your regards.

6/23/16, 4:59 AM

Matt said...

My question, from the other side of the pond, is how much of this bowdlerisation is really happening?

I ask because most of the PC stories over here turn out to be either outright fabrications or the attitudes of a very few individuals being blown out of all sensible proportion. After all, in a world of billions you can find someone who believes anything! I don't want to make assumptions about it being the same over there, but it would be good to have some kind of evidence to help form a judgement.

I'm finding the stuff about projection very interesting. I think a while back JGM talked about the US government's negotiating stance as being one which seems unable to attribute interests to the opposite party - there's no need to do that if you think you hold all the power and can get your way with enough bullying. And this essay adds extra weight - without interests they can be the Other on which we project.

Cheers,

Matt

6/23/16, 5:01 AM

Justin said...

JMG, you really should listen to or watch Trump's speech rather than reading it - the delivery was incredibly good, and although I don't know too much about these things he seemed like he was using some vaguely hypnotic techniques. When I get home from work today I'll come up with a few timestamps from his speech that I think were interesting because of how he delivered them, not necessarily what he was saying (to the extent that they can be separated).

I was thinking about Evola this week - I haven't read any of it yet, but I have become very skeptical of democracy lately while still keeping in mind the idea that it's the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. I think that if a country like Norway, Israel or Switzerland made the periods of military service optional, but tied voting rights to service, that might be the best form of democracy yet - and yes, I've read Starship Troopers. I think the idea that Heinlein was projecting the fear of antlike, conformist communists from within an antlike, conformist, communist institution (the military) is certainly valid but agree with the premise that voting rights should have a cost higher than surviving to a particular age and that the price should be paid in time rather than money - we all get more or less the same amount of time after all.

6/23/16, 5:29 AM

David, by the lake said...

John--

Not caught up on the comments yet this morning, but I wanted to get a few thoughts out. First, I have been a long-time fan of HP Lovecraft, from the time I first discovered his stories back in middle school and the RPG associated therewith (being an old-time D&D gamer, it was a natural fit). At the Mountains of Madness and Shadow Over Innsmouth were my two favorites. My copy of your first installment in en route.

Second, a quick report of last month's homework. I read The Moonstone, which turned out to be rather fascinating adventure/mystery written told with multiple narrators (similar to Dracula). The aspect of the world portrayed which stood out to me was how significantly personal the inter-class relationships were and how the loyalty was reciprocal -- not just retainer to master/mistress/family, but the reverse as well, particularly in terms of care of retainers in their old age. (Also, despite my first impression, the story turned out to be rather sympathetic to the perspective of the Indians whose gem had been stolen in the first place.)

Third, a quick shout-out to Joel, as my first issue of Into The Ruins arrived the other day and was quickly devoured. Story ideas a already bubbling in the back of my head and perhaps, just perhaps, I will actually finish one and get it submitted before the next scheduled apocalypse.

I will have to give some thought to this second assignment. No work leaps to mind, but I'm sure I can find something relevant.

How does one foster an educational environment supporting a free and open examination of ideas? Is such a thing sustainable or can it only exist under certain, transient circumstances?

6/23/16, 5:59 AM

Twinruler334 said...

I used to desire to write Science Fiction. I remember, I even endeavored to write stories, a whole series of novels even, set in a Galactic Empire. Looking back now, I realize how Colonialist that idea really was. I now decided that I should write fairy tales instead.

I think that would be a good idea. For, fairy tales last longer!

6/23/16, 6:06 AM

234567 said...

I am a son of the south. Ancestors in the Sons of the Confederacy on both sides. If you think your blood is pure after being in this country for 7 or 8 generations, then you need to get your genetics checked.

I think George Carlin has the feel of things with respect to racism - the intent is to remove the humanity. It is to make a group of 3D folks into 2D caricatures, replete with every stereotypical slur ever tossed their way. One of the things Twain did was to 're-inflate' these stereotypes by restoring their humanity.

Now, to be fair, I am part black but appear white. Where does that leave me with using the term 'nigger'? I can tell you that it upsets those more black than I am, so even within the culture of a particular race, there are degrees of tolerance. Carlin would say that my family isn't "openly black", because unless we share our heritage nobody can tell we aren't white-bread. We look white and thus we are white - genetics be damned because they are inconvenient.

Many of us are in this boat of mixed racial heritage. Once you know, things change in your worldview. It also makes you very inconvenient for those trying to keep their boogeymen 2D - you can deflate most efforts at dehumanizing from either the black camp or the white. And it can be fun to do...

6/23/16, 6:20 AM

Johnny said...

Hi JMG,

Another great post. Some of your thoughts about Lovecraft remind me of Michel Houellebecq's "HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" - he also thinks that the source of Lovecraft's horror was his racism. I got the impression that at the time he wrote it (around 1990) this was quite against the grain. He thought it was just foolish to deny this and seemed interested in the way Lovecraft had really dug into these feelings and amplified them.

Houellebecq's fiction might interest you, I think he has some similar questions about the validity of progress (I thought his novel "The Possibility Of An Island" was quite good for this), questioning what "our project" in the western world really is all about and ridiculing it's values. I am not always completely sure if he agrees with everything he discusses or is just entertaining the ideas and exploring them - his process I think is the opposite of yours, you have said that you are deliberately working through a single idea where I think he is just feeling his way through things, trying to expose some truths society seems desperate to hide, also I believe you are genuinely hoping to help people where I don't think that is true in his case, but still I find I get things from him. He's also quite a bit more vulgar than you, I should warn.

6/23/16, 7:02 AM

Jon said...

I started reading Thucydides last month. Right from the first chapter some of his statements reminded me of the internet, like People believe the first thing they hear without verifying it. I read Mein Kampf years ago. Maybe I should dust it off.

6/23/16, 7:10 AM

RPC said...

Tangential to this week's topic, but keeping to H. P. Lovecraft's legacy: I just realized the character "Davey Jones" in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is physically modeled directly on Cthulhu!

6/23/16, 7:10 AM

Eric S. said...

I thought you might enjoy this open letter to Yale students about that very necessity of sitting back and working with older material even when it offends you, it’s a little apologetic for my tastes (it is, after all, A: from a fairly liberal publication, and B: attempting to get through the delicate sensibilities of modern college students)… but it gets the point across: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/24/yale_students_want_to_remake_the_english_major_requirements_but_there_s.html

I was discussing equal and opposite reactions yesterday right before this came up with a friend in a conversation about the referendum. We were talking about how, in an attempt to prevent the rise of the sort of malignant nationalism that brought about the world wars, the EU had transformed itself from a reasonably benign trade and border agreement into a political institution that took things to the extreme of denying national sovereignty itself, and the result was quite reliably, an equal and opposite reaction across Europe with radical nationalist movements of the early 20th century variety currently on the rise all across the continent.

As for finding something offensive… Hmm… I think I’m going to go with… The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie…

6/23/16, 7:13 AM

John the Peregrine said...

Hi JMG,

If your Newton's Third Law is valid, then there doesn't seem to be a way to "win" or come out ahead. If the educational system tries to foster critical thinking, then the inevitable outcome will be a counter-reaction that rejects critical thinking in favor of emotionalism, superstition, or Romanticism, leading to the growth of a puritan movement similar to what we have today. There is no end-state here. It's an endless back and forth of temporary fads and no ultimate winners.

6/23/16, 7:28 AM

MayHawk said...

Oops! My previous post should have referred to Huckleberry Finn, not Tom Sawyer.

6/23/16, 7:45 AM

Allexis Weetman said...

Considering some of the filthy horrid things I've read I think I better go get a copy of the turner diaries to be truly offended. I think a lot of the books I've read have been upsetting rather than exactly offensive ('the source' and "chains" come to mind), but I'm guessing you want true moral offense at the authors message rather than just visceral disgust in reaction to horror. Can you clarify?

I read mien kampf once when I was babysitting for my neighbors. When I'm alone in someone elses house I always like to peruse the bookshelves. I found it too badly written to be offensive even with the aid of contemporary hindsight. A hell of a lot of words but very little meaning.

Will self truly makes me want to hurl in his short story anthology "A Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz" so I recommend it to ya'll if you hate yourself that much. Definitely written with offending the reader in mind.

Ian banks book "song of stone" turned my blood cold. An unsympathetic read.

Frank Herbert's written some horrible books, for example "the white plague"

Can anyone else recommend an offensive book that they have already read?

6/23/16, 7:53 AM

Professor Diabolical said...

Since Huck Finn is coming up, I'd like to make a pitch for the modern edition (Kaplan I believe) that re-adds the chapter "Life on the Mississippi" which he sold off for rent, includes some other events he meant to add but didn’t make the printer, and mercifully reduces the long pointless end with Jim's escape. It's not "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"; all the passages are Twain, and much of it the way he meant to do it, just reassembled.

Since most of us have read Huck Finn anyway, it makes a nice second counterpoint and investigation into the author's process, as well as IMO, improving some of the failings in the standard edition storyline.

While Twain was laudably or even dangerously advanced for his time, modern Americans are so hypnotized to the Call/Response of racism they cannot even hear the word Huck without speaking of racism, so I'd be amiss not to mention that while they fascinate endlessly on the use of the most or only common word for African-Americans at that time, they're hilariously blind to the overt racism against the Irish, i.e. "Finn", **the very title of the book** as shown in Huck and his stereotypical, terrifyingly alcoholic father. -- A standard scary Irish trope of the time, as in the 1850’s it was those immigrants who "need not apply", could not intermarry, and lived in their own ghettos the previous wave of immigrants (English) burned from time to time. Now all forgotten, so racism is only by color now. –As shown by our own and far better, far more read, far more insightful commenters repeatedly talking about "white" (hetero, saxon, evil, etc) men...as if their targets like Lovecraft would not have blown a fuse if their daughters brought home a Slav, a Celt, an Italian, or even a Catholic. Nope, all gone, never happened. "Race" is only color. And that's the most dangerous Bowlderization of all.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain

6/23/16, 7:57 AM

cat said...

You are right that "political correctness" broadly defined is being used for manipulative purposes by both the right (Trump uses an anti-"political correctness" stance as an excuse to be racist and sexist) and the liberals (Clinton campaign in a different way to dismiss the left). However, as a university professor at a mid-level state institution I don't see any evidence that university professors are the chief perpetrators here. All the university professors I know in the humanities teach books that reflect their times, warts and all, precisely because those offensive ideas give students a critical perspective and handle on both the past and the present. Education should shake people up - that is the whole point for the many professors I know.

6/23/16, 8:00 AM

Owen said...

It is already happening, this uncritical acceptance. /pol/ is in the saddle and is riding mankind.

6/23/16, 8:11 AM

Owen said...

Trump is not Hitler. A modern day Hitler would be a guy who liked D&D or video games, didn't do well in school, was something of a dorky cut up. Tried his hand at indie game dev (or something vaguely artsy in this era) and failed. Went into the military and did 5 years in Afghanistan or Iraq. Afterwards hung out in a college town and joined a fringe party nobody had ever heard about. And then started to attract followers.

Trump is more like FDR, born into wealth, got an Ivy League education, traitor to his class, etc. And most important, only guy other than Sanders who saying "Let's face the problems and fix them. Here are some ideas on how to do it. Some of them are probably risky, but here we are and we need to do something." There are differences (his wife is hotter), but there are more similarities than differences, IMHO.

Rest of establishment didn't like FDR too much either. And he more or less gave America another 80-90 years of life.

6/23/16, 8:21 AM

Jason Heppenstall said...

Thank you for reminding us (in your comment to John) that Orwell was often critical of English socialism. I am 'feeling the heat' right now due to the EU referendum, on which people are voting as I write. I've been backing 'Brexit' for reasons of thinking national democracy is preferable to whatever the EU has become. This puts me in a minority of one among my peers and I have received various messages ranging from the 'you're a misguided fool' variety to full-on accusations of being something far more sinister. My favourite comment directed at me was that by opposing the increasingly authoritarian policies of an unelected supra-national authority I was 'Disrespecting the millions who died during the last two world wars so that you could vote'.

The takeaway lesson for me here is that people will tolerate musings on peak oil and civilisational dysfunction etc. right up to the point when they feel their (highly privileged) lives threatened. I have effectively committed social suicide - although there is some slight solace in the fact that I managed to persuade one person to break away from the collective two minutes' hate, and actually think for himself.

As for all the rest, sadly, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

6/23/16, 8:23 AM

Allexis Weetman said...

I Just recalled now that the most offensive book I ever read was Brave new world by Aldous Huxley - give it a go as its also a cracking read and it forces you to confront some deep assumptions. It made me fiercely angry at it.

6/23/16, 8:42 AM

Rebecca Brown said...

Hey JMG,
Thanks for another great post. I'm also on the side that's never found Lovelace actually scary. I'm going to have to go back and do some rereading now, because it's also been so long that I can't remember a lot of the racist connotations you're talking about (either that, or I missed them; I was pretty young at the time).

It's not just universities that are bowdlerizing literature. People on both the left and right are doing it to all sorts of children's literature. We've recently begun looking into options for homeschool curricula for our daughter (there's no way she's going to public school in this day and age) and we keep running into it. Take Huck Finn for example. It's a classic every child should read. The right has released editions scrubbing the profanity and the left has released editions scrubbing the racism (when they don't just recommend dropping it altogether).

Nor is it limited to literature; I'm having a difficult time finding core curricula such as history that isn't slanted one way or another. Even math. Why would you want to create a Christian version of a math program?????

6/23/16, 8:53 AM

Erik Vanderlieb said...

Racism or ethnocentricity is far too natural and "baked into the cake" to ever be excised. So it just goes underground where it thrives.
I'm put in mind of life in the old Soviet Union where people spoke in a certain way in public and another "between 4 eyes".
Once you get away from the muzzled press and the cultural suppression of the universities, you'll find tens upon tens of Americans who happily use racial, cultural, homophobic slurs when speaking amongst like minded peers.
In the life of public America a "party member" may have his career destroyed by an injudicious slip of the lip. Look what happened to Helen Thomas and others.
Meanwhile though, your plumbing contractor ( who may be wealthier than the profs at the local university) is still enjoying the freedom to use all those expressions recently ascribed to the Clintons in Dolly's tell all book about them.

6/23/16, 9:01 AM

Twilight said...

It seems like the common thread is the belief that ignorance provides some sort of protective function in society - that we'd be better off if we didn't know about this particular thing. If we feel the thing is negative, then it will go away if we hide it well enough and long enough that it is forgotten about. It's true that keeping one's eyes open can sometimes be a painful burden and takes a lot of time and effort, but ultimately that is nothing compared to the costs of ignorance.

I can see how the elite of a declining society may feel that an ignorant population provides protection to them, but in the end the cumulative costs of an ignorant population will also overwhelm any short term advantages.

6/23/16, 9:14 AM

zach bender said...

there may be a difference between striking an author's work from a college reading list and deciding not to use his image on an object someone is going to put on display in their home. i liked your comment about using historicism alongside other tools. some of your readers might be amused by an excellent book written probably fifty or more years ago by a guy named frederick crews, called "the pooh perplex," which purports to be a collection of critical essays from an assortment of very disparate camps on the subject of winnie the pooh and milne. there is actually a nugget of "truth" in each of the essays, no matter how ridiculous the [fictitious] critic's pose.

6/23/16, 9:22 AM

Ray Wharton said...

I am thinking about reading something from the Celestine Prophecy series. I think that will really get me steamed up. I think for offense it has to be something fairly close. Too great a distance of time or culture and I am over whelmed by the difference, and loose the inclination to judge. But something close, something that rots the minds of those I know, that I can get steamed about! I read one of the books with an ex some 6 years ago, we would laugh much at the book. I will see about borrowing a different book from the series.

Louis L'amour and some of James A. Michener's works are nice starting places for western fiction. Other commentators who are more widely read could certainly offer better suggestions.

6/23/16, 9:27 AM

Clay Dennis said...

JMG,

I like to think about the things and attitudes that we have in our literature ( and visual media) that we think are perfectly normal and wholesome that future generations will find abhorrent. Of course, we can only guess at what things that seem normal to the average american of today will seem downright evil to our decedents. Will future academic institutions censure references to Children being made to play football, or teenagers getting licenses to drive petroleum powered automobiles at the age of 16, or of words such at bank account or interest? Only time will tell.

6/23/16, 9:39 AM

Hiero said...

Before the time of sparkly vampires, Bram Stoker's Dracula was another tale of existential horror of the eastern European "other" - a creature intent on sucking the life-blood of good Christian women and enslaving mindless Renfields to do their horrible bidding. A creature produced by England's audacity to explore those deep dark corners of the earth - which all good Christian men have a duty to go and destroy.

Whats particularly amusing to me is that a large number of these literary horrors have been usurped and turned on their heads, from Anne Rice's bodice rippers, all the way to Mormon-highschool-workshop-fiction-gone-wrong Twilight. The horror of the originals has been colonized by curiosity borne of ignorance, then elevated to supernatural ideal.

CSB: The university classes I took in fiction chose not to ignore these "low brow, poisonous texts" and instead chose to investigate them with precisely the close readings that you are advocating. I read texts such as Dracula, Trilby, and A rebours while being guided through their subtexts and contexts by skilled instructors. And afterwards, I was not interested in typecasting all others as Svengali (which, god forbid, I finally get the cultural reference, or understand what the heck is a Trilby) or becoming a hedonistic naturalist pasting gems on turtles - instead these readings began to reveal the echoes and counter-echoes in modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern lit which shines a light to the culture that I inhabit.

What worries me is that this type of literary education is siloed away from general population by puritanical culture warriors, both on the left and right. The dominant culture is the only acceptable one; to examine those that don't agree or inhabit a separate cultural-tribal space is a taboo. You could possibly become infected, and become a Lovecraftian monster after merely even brushing against the other.

It takes effort to analyze "offensive" texts within their cultural context (and don't get me started on people who focus ONLY on either pure textualism or intensionalism); it is much easier to bowlderize Huck Finn or toss it into the dust bin than guide people through the viewpoints that Twain is playing with.

6/23/16, 9:40 AM

Alexandra said...

Okay, I confess I haven't yet done the last homework assignment. I love old literature and read a lot of it so I figured I'd inevitably accomplish the task. Procrastination, in other words.

But thinking about this month's homework assignment, at first I was stumped: If I haven't already read a book, how do I know if it's offensive? Of course I could just surf Facebook for a while...but while it's almost guaranteed to offend my sensibilities it's also guaranteed to contain nothing potentially edifying whatsoever. No, the best bet, I thought, would be to find an author who could reliably be counted upon to offend.

And then I hit on the perfect one: H. Rider Haggard. I don't know what is more offensive in his works, the racism, the misogyny, or the reveling in the wanton slaughter of animals (most of them now endangered). I encourage those of your readers who are having trouble coming up with a suitable book to give HRH a try. (Plus it can also satisfy Homework Assignment #1.)

6/23/16, 9:41 AM

onething said...

Dear Repent,

My take on the conundrum you brought forth is two things. First, a lot of times I see people (in my opinion) slightly misunderstanding nonduality. That is, they get the concept but somehow come to the conclusion that because unity is the ultimate truth that duality is somehow not (also) true. Duality is the juice that gives rise to the manifestation of the universe. One does not overcome evil by proclaiming it a delusion. So duality is a subsidiary of unity, it is indeed LESS real, but it operates within its sphere. Brick walls and all that.

The other point somewhat follows from the first, and it is the idea of "not either or, but both-and". We don't have to fully understand it but we are all one and we are all individuals, it is a simultaneous truth.

In support of my argument I offer the Tao Te Ching verse 42: The Tao gives birth to One, the One gives birth to two, the two gives birth to three, and the three gives birth to the 10,000 things.

6/23/16, 9:49 AM

Myriad said...

It's easy to see why the book I chose, Uncle Tom's Cabin, has been not so much denounced or censored but rather quietly ignored for the comfort of all sides of U.S. racial issues. It strongly and eloquently suggests that one can oppose monumental injustice on the basis of shared universal humanity, without loudly asserting universal equality. It could certainly complicate things, if that idea (which I suspect remains privately widespread) were admitted into present-day public discourse. (For instance, it might undermine the polarity of present positions on illegal immigrants and Muslim refugees, threatening the necessary deadlock of the status quo. Worse, it might lead to comprehension of the actual moral basis of present class dynamics in the U.S.)

For the new assignment, well… I've been meaning to read the Quran, but I don't expect to be greatly offended by it. Just a bit more of the same kinds of unease and disagreement I have with portions of my own preferred scriptures.

That means, instead, I'm going to have to read another Sherri Tepper novel. Yes, that's what came to mind the moment I read the assignment, as something that offends me, all the more so because the prose is good and the plots quite enjoyable. It's the combination of Tepper's adulation of nature with her evident, unbounded, and exquisitely expressed loathing of human nature that puts me off.

And is that because it reflects something in myself? Oh, no doubt.

Still, the assignment could have been harder. You might have asked us each to write the novel that would most offend us. There's a good chance a number of masterpieces would result, but at what cost?

6/23/16, 10:00 AM

WW said...

One lengthy series of books I loved as a child was "Bomba the Jungle Boy." It reflected all the racial attitudes one would expect of a boy's adventure serial of 1926-1937. Looking back, the unadulterated glee with which my mother approached hamming up these parts when reading them aloud to me is probably why I have always regarded these notions of racial superiority as... the author presenting me with the gift of hilarious nonsense.

Really, if you're never taught to spot the strange notions in a text, and don't enjoy doing it, how are you ever going to get good at it? Reading a book is not necessarily like drinking Coke, where if you're going to do it you have to ingest all the ingredients and suffer the consequences.

On the other hand I have noticed the trend in higher education. Colleges now are a lot like cruise ships, competing on amenities and the quality of the entertainment.

6/23/16, 10:03 AM

Clark said...

Tao Te Ching, Chap 36, Mitchell's translation, "If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish..."

6/23/16, 10:17 AM

thenoteswhichdonotfit said...

I'll give three suggestions for (white) writers of Western fiction:

- Dorothy M. Johnson. She was meticulous in her research on the lifestyles of the people depicted in her fiction (Blackfoot Indians, cowboys, etc.)

- Larry McMurtry. He's considered one of the greatest Western writers of all time, and he is so highly regarded he's even been acknowledged who aren't fans of the genre. I am not sure of the genre of all of the Pulitizer-Prize winning novels, but as far as I know, Lonesome Dove (by McMurtry) is the only Western to ever win that prize.

- Owen Wister, specifically The Virginian, which is often considered to be the first Western novel every written. I admit that I found the descriptions of how people saw the world in 1902 more interesting than the actual plot, but since you are also interested in that kind of thing, you may find it worth reading.

6/23/16, 10:17 AM

S.Treimel said...

For the previous homework assignment, I read "The Epic of Gilgamesh". You were right about noticing the change in cultural perspective between then and now. My negative and positive judgements of the hero's behavior were flying left and right, alternating from "what a jerk!" to "smart move!". An insightful assignment.
This week's homework seems a bit more burdensome. Oh well, I suppose I could read some of the Clinton campaign literature.

6/23/16, 10:31 AM

Scotlyn said...

I'll have to think about being offended... but another interesting assignment, thanks!

I'm thoughtful about the attempts you reference to "excising references to racism" (political correctness) which aren't the same thing at all as ending racism.

Racism is itself a phenomenon operating in part by excising from the dominant cultural narrative any evidence of the humanity of people of colour, and is itself continually reacted to and pushed back against in a myriad of ways - both overtly in social political movements and "behind closed doors" with deliberately opaque alternative cultural narratives.

I don't see the main energy for the "Political Correctness Crusade & Censorship project" coming from people of colour, but more as the dominant political elite's Rescue Game writ large, stoked by their fear lest the rest of us find common cause with each other.

This means that "pushback" and "reaction" could take diverse forms, some involving unabashed racism, and some involving, perhaps, a mixing and matching unprecedented in America's stubbornly unmelted pot...

6/23/16, 10:44 AM

Thomas Parker said...

JMG, isn't The Shadow Over Innsmouth, from the perspective you've laid out here, a rather ambiguous story? After all, it's a first person tale in which our narrator goes over to the enemy, deserts the ranks of clean humanity, and joyously anticipates his full initiation into the ranks of slimy abominations - and judging purely from the tone, it has the most upbeat ending in all of HPL's fiction. Maybe that's why it's always been my favorite...

6/23/16, 11:01 AM

nrgmiserncaz said...

JMG - I've started to steer back to fiction after a couple of decades of primarily non-fiction. Primarily because it forces me to think about the characters and context instead of having information spooned into my brain.

Off topic - from last weeks discussion: I went for the straight razor. It took me about a year, on and off, to get it nailed down. Now I can shave easily, maintain my razor on stones and a strop and have developed a skill that I'm kind of proud of. Plus, my razor will likely last me my entire life...

6/23/16, 11:07 AM

Donald Hargraves said...

I'm preparing to read Hunter by Andrew MacDonald, the same guy who wrote The Turner Diaries.

As for Hillary/The Donald, the sanctimoniousness of many of the Hillary supporters keeps pushing me into the Donald's camp – especially those folks who act like I'm only able to not vote for Mme Clinton out of privilege. If it weren't for an allergy to the blind hatred I heard from some Trump supporters I would have pledged my vote to him by now.

6/23/16, 11:18 AM

Twinruler334 said...

I think Great Britain will break up before America does. Not only will Great Britain break off from the European Union, but England shall, in its turn, break off from the rest of The United Kingdom. Indeed, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Northern Ireland shall each go their own ways, if not necessarily in that order.

What makes me truly sad to think about is that once enough White Britons flee London, that Great City will be sealed up. This is not something that I look forward to thinking about, especially since Great Britain will no longer be great, in any sense of the word.

And it is already happening. There is slowly beginning to be a Politically Incorrect avant Garde, even as we speak.

6/23/16, 11:22 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

Anyone who wants to find something offensive in someone's body of work need only read Catullus in an unbowdlerized translation. Something besides his love-hate poems to Rome's mist notorious populist flapper.

6/23/16, 11:32 AM

pygmycory said...

I'll have to see if I can find the first one one of the Left Behind series again. I got about two pages in last time.

6/23/16, 11:44 AM

MayHawk said...

Off topic but is your book "The Weird of Hali: INNSMOUTH" going to be available any time soon in a trade or paperback version. I would like to send several copies to friends and relatives. I loved it by the way.

6/23/16, 11:44 AM

Cú Meala mac Morrígna said...

"That’s where things get interesting. Human cultures are governed by something not too different from Isaac Newton’s famous third law of motion: 'every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.'"

How strange—at almost precisely the moment this essay was posted, I was having a conversation with a friend about the EU and today's 'Brexit' referendum, and used this exact analogy of society being every bit as susceptible to Newtonian law as matter is. We were tracing the history of the European Union, trying to determine the point at which it stopped being a series of perfectly sensible trade agreements and open borders between a relatively small region, and started acting like a federal government, which erased the sovereignty of a host of nations with long and storied cultural histories reaching back for centuries if not millennia. Turns out the straw that broke the camel's back was laid in 2009, with the Lisbon Treaty, and in the seven years since we've seen the spread of the exact sort of extreme nationalism that the EU was first put into place to try to prevent!

The Newtonian Society analogy first occurred to me a few months back, during a discussion with my wife about how the rabid Christian defense of 'traditional' marriage is largely a reaction against the increased secularism and (purported) de-mythologizing of society, the dismantling of the long-standing complex of symbolism and myth that surrounds the Christian concept of marriage, and the consequent crumbling of the concept of marriage in secular society as it stands as a grandiose hollowed out shell with no myths to fill in the void (at least, in many circles).

The myths-of-marriage thing is of course off topic, but you using just about exactly the same metaphor as myself, almost word for word, at the exact same time, gave me the eerie feeling of having my phone tapped! Tell me, do you keep a crystal ball by the side of your keyboard, or are we just tapping into the same frequencies?

6/23/16, 12:04 PM

avalterra said...

Lovecraft was certainly a racist but a racist of a very particular type. If you take him at his word then he was more of separatist than a supremacist. For example from his letters:

"Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman — heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world — an “inferior” of any sort… & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences — & even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer’s physical aspect forms a constant reminder of his outside origin."

and further:

"Living side by side with people whose natural impulses and criteria differ widely from ours, gets in time to be an unendurable nightmare. We may continue to respect them in the abstract, but what are we to do when they continue to fail to fulfil our natural conception of personality, meanwhile placing all their own preferential stresses on matters and ideals largely irrelevant and sometimes even repugnant to us? And don’t forget that we affect alien groups just as they affect us. Chinamen think our manners are bad, our voices raucous, our odour nauseous, and our white skins and our long noses leprously repulsive. Spaniards think us vulgar, brutal, and gauche. Jews titter and gesture at our mental simplicity, and honestly think we are savage, sadistick, and childishly hypocritical. […] What’s the answer? Simply keep the bulk of all these approximately equal and highly developed races as far apart as possible."

I am actually just finish up "The Weird of Hali". I am enjoying it but it is not very "Lovecraftian". The existential horror is missing. Which is ironic as you have written what I would consider one of the best modern "Lovecraftian" pieces. Care to guess which one?

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html

You even point out the fact that for some there will be a feeling of dread at this, " Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold?" Those who are horrified are experiencing what Lovecraft was aiming at.

AV

6/23/16, 12:11 PM

Gabriela Augusto said...

Dear JMG,
Whereas it doesn’t directly address this week topic, I would like to bring the thought of the French philosopher, Michel Onfray, was saying that while polytheism prevailed people looked at their surroundings to understand the world, but monotheism imposed one book as the reality and many and more stopped to look around them and had only eyes for the book. I do fill that there is really something in here.
At a certain point in History, the intellectuals stopped looking at the nature, sun, stars, lightning’s and storms, to examine the world. The only reality was the one described in one book containing some histories and legends of the cradle of civilization. Did we overcome that, or are we still looking at (other) books to try to understand what the reality is?
Never read a book that I considered offensive, some have disconcerted me though...

6/23/16, 1:13 PM

Spanish fly said...

I'm thinking on reading Marquis de Sade, a writer that is very popular between as lot of "free thinkers" and bondage&SM sex freaks...but probably a few of them know from first hand the marquis perverser imagination (and practice).
Some years ago I started watching Passolini "Saló, or the 120 days" and I didn't manage to resist that movie until "the end". It was too disgusting.
However, dear John, I accept your challenge and I'm going to read "120 days of Sodom", better in original French; if I can't cope with it, the spanish translation. Here in English, for everybody who wants "enjoy" it:

https://www.odaha.com/sites/default/files/120_days_of_sodom.pdf

I expect the worst atrocities, more even than in the film version (Pier Paolo idyosincrasy changed some aspects, according to film pundits).
I will read it fasting like a pious monk and after some enemas, because I don't want wasting my reading time going to the toilet after getting sick...
---------------------

6/23/16, 1:28 PM

Spanish fly said...

About PC topic, I agree with Ed Boyle. Russian/Ukrainian and Romanian immigrants here in Spain are not abduced by PC orthodoxia yet, at least the Eastern ones that I've known (a lot of them having been living more than 5 years here and anothers married with spanish people). Romanian people promoted several years ago an image campaign (with some official support) against criminal stereotypes: "Hello, I am Romanian" (indoeuropean, not gypsy!). Russian people I've known don't like very much Arab immigrants, and are "a bit" homophobes...but I've seen them in a party shoulder to shoulder with African black people with much less problem than "native" spaniards.
Spanish people is a lot more xenophobic against Romanians than Russians, although spanish press, like other western media, is selling every day Russian-phobic propaganda.
Spanish gypsies are here from the 15th century, and even nowadays are sometimes discriminated.

However, they are themselves xenophobous against non-gypsies ("payos"-including their hated
competitors for subsidies: Arabs and Blacks) and a lot of men are very macho attitude against their women.
I think racist and xenophobic attitudes are very fool, but they provide some membership
feeling for people that cannot think about social life in positive and inclusive terms: upper elites...or low class and/or non-integrates minorities.
My girlfriends is Brazilian, so he doesn't my mockery about laziness, funny language and Olympics. She is from the northwest, where African ADN is far less abundant than coastal and north-east zones. She has a beautiful light-brown skin, long dark and straigh hair. I guess that she's the product of 3 centuries mixing-up Portuguese people with Native 'Indians'. If I see her long nose I think that first Jew guetto in Western Hemisphere was settled in colonial Brazil.
However, she consider herself mainly as "white European", racially and culturally. She is a
devout catholic and she tals about Lisbon as her "great-grandparents" home. She likes
sunbathing, but not too much because they doesn'ty want to seem a "black woman". Her family
are low class people, they are called "caboclos" by others "ethnical" groups in their country.
She has black and mixed black&white friends. She had a daughter with a "moreno" and a son with another man (supposedly "white Portuguese ancestors"). You can bet what child looks like Caribbean and what could be mistaken with Italian or Spaniard people.
She has come from the mixed-up country par excellence, but she has that little racist
attitudes. At the same time, she sometimes complains about legalist bureaucratic xenophobia
and cliches against Brazilian people (They work hard, they aren't only lazy and lusty samba
dancers!; they are the biggest country in Latin America, they are richest between the poor
countries, and so on).
Last year my father hired two bricklayers that were from El Salvador. They didn't like much
Chinese people, and they overtly hated Moroccans and Algerians as thieves. I think that they were not exactly racist men. they were deep christian believers (Evangelical) so they shared conservative Right bias (islamophobic and israelophile, of course). It was funny and shocking hearing these Jerry Falwell style prejudices spoken by these dark skinned Centro-American men...from Mayan or wathever indian ancestors they have had.

6/23/16, 1:32 PM

ganv said...

Thanks, that is very insightful.

I like the provocative comparison of modern attempts to suppress racism and Victorian attempts to suppress sexuality. The obvious response from the modern left is that sexuality is inextricable from what it means to be human while racism can be overcome. But in the end, I think you are right that modern abhorrence of racism will be replaced by avant guard embrace of racism. The root reason is rather unpleasant, but one great thing about the Archdruid report is that truth isn't avoided just because it happens to be unpleasant. At its roots, racism is also inextricable from what it means to be human. We are the result of evolution. And evolution will continue. No question that eugenic racism has created terrible suffering. But we continue to evolve and humans are going to take an active role in the evolution of our species and that will likely continue with species that descend from us....maybe more than one species at once. It is hard to see a far future that doesn't have multiple 'human' races or species that compete with each other. Even utopian visions like Star Trek regularly come back to the problem of genetic enhanced augments and the intractable conflicts that ensue. It might be simple selective breeding or it might be high tech genetic engineering, but it is hard to see a future more than 100 years after Adolf Hitler that continues to suppress what we know about how humans came to be. To be clear, I don't like it one bit. But if we take our history seriously, we may need to conclude that evolution includes genetic competition (which is a kind of racism) which is inextricably linked with what it means to be human (or any other biological creature). Of course people claim that we should rise above our history...and we 'should'. But that is exactly what the Victorians claimed about sex. If the analogy holds, the conclusion is that we probably won't rise above our history.

6/23/16, 1:41 PM

Yellow Submarine said...

Speaking of Mein Kampf, I have a copy that I bought a while back but only got a few chapters through before giving up, partly because of the turgid prose and partly because it was such an offensive read.

So that settles it. For this months homework assignment, I am going to go back and read Mein Kampf cover to cover.

6/23/16, 2:03 PM

Yellow Submarine said...

Speaking of HP Lovecraft and political correctness: many of you no doubt remember the recent tempest in a teapot over the terms "Black Lives Matter" vs "All Lives Matter" and the competing accusations of racism from both camps directed against one another.

Well just the other day, I saw a Cthulhu for 2016 bumper sticker with the slogan "No Lives Matter", hehehe...

6/23/16, 2:19 PM

Amy Olles said...

Ye gods - I have a terrible feeling this homework would have me reading ultra conservative christian works (bill gothard anyone?), conservative christian pro life literature, and anything creationist/god will save us/climate change deny-ing. Having grown up under some of the influence of that brand of conservatism, I've spent most of my adult life not so adroitly avoiding anything connected to organized religion unless social situation demands it. I will take a deep breath and a long pause before choosing my topic. Maybe some bourbon will help with this homework. Are we allowed that luxury?

6/23/16, 3:09 PM

Justin said...

Jason, I'm not British, but would be thrilled to see Brexit succeed. It requires very little mental effort to be a statist social liberal these days - you get a constant stream of confirmation bias starting in school and continuing into adulthood from the traditional media and social media.

Ganv, there are worse things than a racist government, sometimes even for the oppressed race. I would rather be a black person in Apartheid South Africa than say, a Ukranian shortly after the Russian Revolution or a Cambodian during Pol Pot's day.

262,000,000 people were killed in the 20th century by their own governments, not including war deaths. I don't particularly care for the notion that people should be free to own any sort of gun they want, but on the other hand maybe we should have gun control for the state rather than for the citizens.

6/23/16, 3:13 PM

Dammerung said...

It's already happening. /pol/ is of course the internet's foremost theater for the political avant-garde, and they openly embrace Nazi regalia with an irony so passionate it could almost be mistaken for sincerity. I doubt they really mean to resurrect the excesses of the Third Reich - they've taken it up in the same way teens took up Satanism and Death Metal in the 80s. They joyfully disfigure Ben Garrison's political cartoons to include anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi imagery, and this is a guy with whom they agree about politics. But it makes for a good goof, which is the entire raison d'être of the site.

The Know Your Meme article about /pol/ is a treasure trove. I won't link it but it can be found easily by the curious.

6/23/16, 3:16 PM

Brian said...

I wonder if Canadian universities are different than American ones? Over the past five years I've spent a fair amount of time in the history department of a Canadian university, and while there's been lots of discussion of racism, I've never seen any work censored - or even heard the suggestion that something should be censored.

At home when my son was little, we used to enjoy reading the 'Tintin' books together. I liked the fact that the stories hadn't been sanitized and Disneyfied to protect the delicate sensitivities of modern children, and it provided the opportunity to talk about the racist stereotypes in the stories - especially the earlier ones. I also liked the fact that the stories are complex and multilayered, making them interesting for both kids and adults to return to for rereading.

6/23/16, 3:38 PM

Tomuru said...

Speaking of reprehensible, take a look at this historical article that Raul Illargi just dug up. Truly mind opening.

http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/06/the-european-union-government-by-deception/#post-28905

6/23/16, 4:17 PM

team10tim said...

Hey hey JMG,

Two examples sprang to mind when I read this, both from the realm of higher education.

The first one happened at my alma mater while I was there:
https://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-new-mexico-censorship-of-professor-after-joking-about-pentagon-attack/

On September 11th, 2001 this tenured professor (an awesome teacher by the way) said to his western civ class "Anyone who can bomb the Pentagon has my vote." and there was a huge up roar. People wanted him fired or banned from scaring the minds of large classes of impressionable freshmen. The thing that stuck in my craw was that the vast majority of the students were old enough to vote, serve on a jury, and get drafted.

The second happened later elsewhere:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/18/emory-president-sets-uproar-statements-three-fifths-compromise-and-then-apologizes

Here is the short version: Emory University President James Wagner has infuriated many on his campus and scholars elsewhere by using the president's letter in the new issue of Emory Magazine to say that the "three-fifths compromise" of the U.S. Constitution was a model for how people who disagree can work together for "a common goal."

The salient issue here is that universities exist in large part to develop 'critical thinking skills' (mentioned whenever there is an opportunity to do so) but both examples illustrate the huge push back from exposing students to real world examples that require critical thought.

Thanks,
Tim

PS Looks like it's finally time to read Atlas Shrugged.

6/23/16, 4:17 PM

sgage said...

@Justin said...

"JMG, you really should listen to or watch Trump's speech rather than reading it - the delivery was incredibly good, and although I don't know too much about these things he seemed like he was using some vaguely hypnotic techniques."

Of course he's using a more than vaguely hypnotic technique - he's a demagogue for godz sake! That's why I steer away from videos and such, and prefer written transcripts. The you can see what ideas, if any, are being put forward, rather than emothional hot-button pressing.

6/23/16, 4:35 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Mikep, the Alt-Right is a fringe movement. It may turn into more than that, or it may be a flash in the pan; we'll see. In the meantime, I hope to convince readers of mine who might have imbibed either the politically or the patriotically correct viewpoint that there really is a point to reading things that upset and offend them. Oh, and are you so sure that meaningful economic growth on a per capita basis is going to start again? I'm not, for reasons already discussed at length here.

Yossi, thanks for the tip. The reviews I read of The Road had basically convinced me never to read anything by him, but I'll consider revisiting that.

Chloe, political zealots on all sides of the continuum have a vested interest in discouraging critical thinking, since it might be applied to their own arguments, with awkward results. Thus they encourage uncritical acceptance or rejection of ideas in order to keep themselves in business. Got your story, btw -- you're in the contest!

Joel, I did my BA at a West Coast university and I heard quite a bit of it, so it does seem to vary from place to place.

Max, well, yes. Keep in mind that an author can, and usually does, have multiple axes to grind in a single books.

L, I don't happen to know my way around homophobic literature, so can't offer any suggestions -- still, no doubt somebody can come up with something!

YCS, good. If I do another narrative set in the middle future -- say, a hundred years from now -- I'll have to include the spectacle of people huffing self-righteously at something we do now that nobody, but nobody, thinks is morally problematic.

John, in Lovecraft's eyes the melatonin and the patch of darkness are the same thing. That's one of the features of his that leaves him open to parody.

6/23/16, 4:57 PM

Justin said...

Dammerung, although 4/pol/ is pretty silly and best avoided, a certain other /pol/ actually discusses neo-nazi ideas in a more serious sense. On the one hand, it is a fringe idea, but on the other, so was the NSDAP until it wasn't. I suspect that we will see another round of Jew persecution, which will in no way be unrelated to the Arab 'immigration' to Europe - Mein Kamph is a very popular book in the Arab world, and nobody has too much love for Israel these days. Whether or not it will happen in North America remains to be seen.

Regarding JMG's 'Strange Bright Banners' post (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/2009/10/strange-bright-banners.html), there is absolutely no question in my mind that I would have been a card-carrying Nazi - from where I sit, I can see the problems with the ideology but I find it hard to imagine that I wouldn't have been marching in those first parades when the NSDAP still polled in the single digits.

I still think the Nazis were right about most things except for the moral imperative to build something more humane on top of the eternal fascism of nature.

6/23/16, 5:00 PM

latheChuck said...

When "The Road" was assigned reading for my high-school student son, I read it. The whole world has apparently been rendered biologically sterile (not even algae can be found in the water) several years before, and yet somehow SOME semblance of life goes on. Even the offensive slavery/cannibalism wouldn't sustain human life THAT long! And yet, somehow we're supposed to think that it has a happy ending...

6/23/16, 5:02 PM

Varun Bhaskar said...

Archdruid,

Do climate change skeptic books count for this assignment?

6/23/16, 5:15 PM

latheChuck said...

What might seem as absurd to people 100 years from now as a Roman feast of peacock tongues seems to us? How about loading a pair of bicycles onto a car, driving for two hours (100 miles), to ride the bikes up and down a trail which used to be a (useful) railroad bed, and then put the bikes back on the car to drive home. 10 gallons of refined hydrocarbons converted to CO2, for no apparent purpose, just because they could!

6/23/16, 5:22 PM

Ahavah said...

For my previous homework assignment I read an anthology of four works by H Rider Haggard: She, Cleopatra, King Solomon's Mines, and Alan Quartermain. The perspective was that of a wealthy white Anglo Saxon protestant male who was educated and from a family of relatively high social class living off investment income along with some earned wages. In other words, the author's wealth and privilege made it seem like simply deciding to go on safari or take an extended vacation or tour were ordinary things that everybody does and nobody is surprised about.

It is also clear that in his era, men and women had completely different and often separate lives, which is very odd to modern Americans (but not so much to me, being familiar with ultra Orthodox Judaism...).

His biases were, frankly, white male supremacism. His views of the so called primitive Black Africans was patronizing at best, but he held several of these characters in high regard for their bravery and faithfulness. Female characters? Hardly. Literally the only female character in all four stories that was not portrayed in a negative fashion was a small child. Even "good" females were depicted as being led around by the nose emotionally, incapable of rational decisions.

But mostly, women are conspicuous by their absence in the main characters sphere of normal activity. It's like the whole world runs fine without us.

Being in love with a woman is described in very disparaging terms, rather like being taken over but a hostile alien force.

As for being offensive, the biases are strong but I wouldn't say it was enough to enrage anyone.

Not sure what would enrage me or offend me greatly. Perhaps Ayn Rand as some have suggested? Or are we sticking with the pre-1900 rule?

6/23/16, 5:29 PM

Rita said...

I would like to observe that the Victorian attempt to tame sexuality by eliminating all public reference to it did not just backfire in the following generation's embrace of sexualized literature. Victorian London was rife with prostitution. At one point the age of consent was 12. An anti-trafficking crusader named Stead, purchased a virgin girl from her mother and wrote about the ease of so doing. He and his fellow crusaders were tried for abduction, partially on the grounds that they had not procured the father's consent, only the mother's. He served three months in prison. And while Victoria herself may have been "Victorian" her son Prince Edward was notorious for his affairs. Being royal, he had to confine his affairs to married women, so as not to clutter the field with possible claimants to the throne.

The Tarzan series is another wonderful (in the sense of causing wonder) display of Anglo Saxon racism. The African tribes are portrayed as savage cannibals, morally inferior to the great grey apes (not gorillas) who raise the infant Tarzan. As one might expect from a fantasy version of an English lord, Tarzan is a superb physical specimen and also excels intellectually. He is able to teach himself to read English with the books left behind in his parent's tree house. He teaches himself French by eavesdropping on the Belgian officer in the European expedition that penetrates the jungle in which he has grown up. He quickly adapts to civilized ways, but prefers the pure company of animals to the corruption of modern society. The books--not the films.

6/23/16, 5:34 PM

Jim of Olym said...

John, you touched on Victorian sexuality and Wilde, but not on the pervasiveness of the 'sexual underground' of the time, where prostitution, BDSM as well as the caning of school boys andother hanky-panky went on behind the scenes. For every action there seems to be an equal reaction, eh?
Jim of Olym

6/23/16, 5:54 PM

Jim of Olym said...

John, you touched on Victorian sexual mores, but I think it should be mentioned that there was an underground equal and opposite reaction: rampant prostitution, dalliances between upstairs and downstairs, caning of schoolboys etc.

6/23/16, 6:06 PM

Don Plummer said...

I suppose I ought to read something by Anne Coulter because I find her public persona to be thoroughly disgusting. But I don't know if her language arts skills are any better than Rush Limbaugh's. Or are her books ghost-written?

6/23/16, 6:15 PM

Unknown said...

(Deborah Bender)

@Patricia Mathews--

Lesbia does it in doorways.
Lesbia does it for free.
Lesbia does it with Senators' boys.
I wish she would do it with me.

6/23/16, 6:17 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Monica, I bet the dog kills and eats her one dark night when it just can't stand the vegan food any longer. You're most welcome, btw -- getting under the hood of a horoscope by doing the math yourself gives an insight into the workings of the chart you just don't get when you cast everything by computer.

Twinruler, by all means!

Kim, by all means read nonfiction if you prefer.

Don, glad to hear it. As for patriotic correctness, I did mention that it's just as much of a problem, you know.

Matt, I'd encourage you to do the research yourself -- in the age of the internet, that's not too difficult, after all.

Justin, I'll pass -- I much prefer to read such things. I'll take your word for it that Trump is an effective speaker.

David, your last question doesn't yet have a known answer...

Twinruler, true enough. Nothing is so dated as yesterday's vision of the future.

234567, did you ever read about the process by which Louisiana finally dumped its law requiring everybody to be labeled by race? As I recall, they still followed the "one drop" doctrine, whereby if you had any black ancestry at all you were legally black, and the legislature refused to repeal the law. Then some activists thought of doing genealogical research into wealthy and politically influential families, and went public with lists of the rich white people who, under Louisiana law, should have had to be registered as black. The law got repealed in a matter of days.

Johnny, I've read Houellebecq's essay on Lovecraft; I'll definitely look at his fiction once I'm done with the Weird of Hali project -- I'm avoiding all neo-Lovecraftian fiction until that's done, to keep from being influenced.

Jon, Thucydides makes excellent current headline fodder -- read his chronicle of how Athens destroyed itself via too much military adventurism, watch what America is doing right now, and the parallels are harrowing.

RPC, haven't seen the movie, so I'll take your word for it.

Eric, thanks for the link -- and by all means enjoy Rushdie.

John, no, there's no way to win. All you can do is try to solve the problems of your own time, knowing that every solution is the cause of the next round of problems. Isn't life fun?

Allexis, I'd prefer to be vague. As long as you find yourself completely out of sympathy with the author's viewpoint, that's good enough.

Professor D, yes, we discussed the complexities of the American caste system here a while back -- Irish ranked below Germans but above Italians, who looked down on Jews, and so on; the very top of the ladder consisted of white Episcopalian men whose ancestors came from England before the Revolutionary War, while the bottom was occupied either by blacks or Native Americans depending on region. The flattening out of a finely textured caste system of that kind, into large unstable groupings such as "white," is a common feature of a society on its way down.

Cat, I'm glad to hear that that approach is still out there.

Owen, good. I've been considering a post comparing Trump to FDR for a while now -- or, to cite an even more explosive parallel, Trump and Lincoln. Have you read the vilification the East Coast establishment heaped on Lincoln all through his presidency, until his assassination turned him into a plaster saint? Let's just say there are remarkable similarities.

Jason, over here, if you mention that you don't support Hillary Clinton, you can expect the same treatment. I had an old friend hang up on me in midsentence because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for her -- and he hasn't called back. Fascinating, that the privileged have become so fundamentalist about their causes!

Rebecca, used book stores are your friend; the older the edition, the better. As for Christian arithmetic, I suppose it helps in claiming that 1 = 3 in the case of the Trinity... ;-)

6/23/16, 6:48 PM

Patricia Mathews said...

@team10tim - so you're another Lobo? Berthold comes regularly to Bubonicon, our annual s/f convention, usually with a lecture on classical history on the program. If you'd like to attend, it's the last weekend in August at the Uptown Marriott. Type Bubonicon into your search engine for the website, I think it's www.Bubonicon.org but won't swear to it.

Pat

6/23/16, 6:58 PM

Patricia Mathews said...

I am currently on a Golden Age of British Mysteries reading binge, and just ordered the first 4 Lord Peter Wimseys. The dates given on the blurb are quite recent: it would be worth seeing if they've been bowdlerized, or if the period attitudes are still intact. Though in the case of Unnatural Death, they'd have to be or there's be no plot. Another thing to see is if I've become too 21st century in my attitudes to accept them for what they are.

6/23/16, 7:10 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Erik, I'd put it more broadly. Xenophobia is hardwired into the human nervous system, and so is xenophilia; we want to attack and drive off what's strange to us...and we also want to mate with it. Those two instinctual drives flow together into some remarkably strange behavior patterns.

Twilight, good -- and of course in our society, the dominant elite stopped thinking about the long term a long, long time ago.

Zach, I remember The Pooh Perplex well -- in fact, I own a copy. Great fun, and yes, a good reminder that any one critical stance will give you certain truths and a great many more absurdities if practiced exclusively.

Ray, by all means. I once considered writing a parody titled "The Cellophane Prophecy."

Clay, good! Yes, and that's one of the other benefits of reading offensive literature from the past.

Hiero, and that's why I'm trying to drag that kind of approach to literature out of the silo and hand it out freely to my readers. It deserves more attention than it gets.

Alexandra, by Frith, that'll do!

Myriad, I haven't read any of Tepper's later works, but The Awakeners, A Plague of Angels, others of that period? That's another matter. A very capable writer, and I'm used to the kind of SF that treats testosterone as the Original Sin, so had no trouble with them. Has she gotten into a more general misanthropy (as distinct from misandry) at this point? That could be entertaining.

WW, I somehow managed to miss Bomba the Jungle Boy. Thanks for the recollections!

Clark, good. Still good advice...

Notes, many thanks!

S. Treimel, didn't Hillary Clinton have one of those ghastly ghostwritten politician's books published under her name? That might be a fine choice.

Scotlyn, here in the US the mixing is well under way. I live just south of the Mason-Dixon line, in a poor neighborhood dotted with small churches, and I see mixed-race couples and multiracial kids every single day.

Thomas, it's a favorite of mine, too -- but you need to keep in mind that to Lovecraft, the ending wasn't upbeat at all. To him, the ending was a plunge into the shrieking heart of terror, because the protagonist got sucked down body and soul into the abyss, and ended up wanting that. Ambiguous? Of course. Revealing? You bet. But it's precisely the gap between Lovecraft's interpretation of those final scenes, and yours (and mine), that I find most interesting.

Nrgmiserncaz, I read mostly nonfiction, for a variety of reasons, but no argument -- fiction works a broader range of mental muscles.

Donald, the sanctimoniousness is a fascinating thing, when you remember that Hillary Clinton supports all the policies that Democrats insisted they'd never forgive George W. Bush for supporting.

Twinruler, well, we'll see. I have a different take on the way things are probably headed over there.

6/23/16, 7:18 PM

Bruno B. L. said...

JMG, I've chosen my novel. It is "The Handmaid's Tale", by Margaret Atwood. In the former US government, a Christian theocracy has risen and submitted women to their will, taking away all their former rights. Why have I chose it? Because the presentation of the novel's theme - the institution of a patriarchal society as something that can go horribly wrong and do little to no good and many evils - is unsettling to me. I will report back when I've finished it.

6/23/16, 7:33 PM

pygmycory said...

I remember getting thoroughly ticked off at the greek gods in the Iliad for their lack of morals and compassion when dealing with human beings, and feeling some bewilderment as to how people could worship anything that behaved like a pack of unusually selfish children afflicted with adolescent hormones and superpowers. But if it was simply paying respect to capricious power that they feared, I can understand it.

The world certainly looks different through Homer's eyes.

6/23/16, 7:38 PM

Christophe said...

Everyone's tastes are different, but for those quite stumped about finding a book to offend their sensibilities, I would like to suggest anything from the repetitively consistent canon of the late Ayn Rand. Her themes are reliably blunt and her characters reliably two-dimensional. Not that I would wish the experience on anyone, but it might well satisfy the needs of the assignment.

6/23/16, 8:47 PM

Myriad said...

The Tepper novels I read, I read in the early noughts, so I don't know about later ones either (but it looks like I'll be finding out!)

After enjoying Six Moon Dance, I read two other Tepper novels: The Family Tree and A Plague of Angels. Since we've both read the latter, I'll focus on that [with a strong spoiler warning for others]. It was very well written and entertaining adventure story, a very enjoyable read. What I objected to was the revealed back-story. The "angels" who were responsible for diverse acts of genocide, including introducing irresistibly addictive lethal drugs and AIDS-like diseases into the inner cities and releasing mythical monsters to ravage rural areas, were cast as the good guys on the side of God (literally) and history. Of course, the only characters opposing the "angels" were the most loathsome of villains, even stooping so low as to try to use (shudder!) technology to try to survive. I also found it it a bit questionable that the suburbs were spared the devastation (by having been literally elevated—they merit this why?), and the last straw was the dialogs near the end, stating outright (or at least strongly implying; I don't recall the exact wording) that real-world AIDS itself is a warning from God that we're foolishly failing to heed by seeking cures and treatments via medical science (rather than, I suppose, some sort of "just shut up and die" campaign). The Family Tree had charming qualities of its own, but no need to get into that one.

6/23/16, 8:52 PM

Grebulocities said...

I made a comment last week about the increasing pace of historical change in the past year or two...and yet another interesting change just happened. It was of course totally missed by the pollsters, who expected the other side would have it. Apparently some of the Remainers are consoling themselves with the fact that low education level was the single biggest predictor of a Leave vote, so it was a decision by the ignorant masses. They don't see that education is itself a bias far more than a way to determine who is intelligent or informed. And of course the amount of critical thinking that higher education provides is somewhere between zero and highly negative.

I'm amazed that something finally happened in an important Western country where the entire elite was united in one opinion but failed to get their way because they were unable to sway the masses despite endless scare stories about economic disaster. Propaganda doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. Now we get to see what happens to the EU now that the first domino has fallen. The neoliberal order is definitely now collapsing, and we officially live in Interesting Times.

6/23/16, 9:31 PM

Renaissance Man said...

Well, thank you for the previous assignment; I'd been meaning to read "Gulliver's Travels" for ages.
Apropos of language and blinkers and being able to formulate ideas and, more critically, being un-able to formulate such things, a friend forwarded this item from JSTOR on the current use of ((( ))) by racists online.
http://daily.jstor.org/the-deafening-echoes-of-marked-language/
What is interesting is the discussion on the use of assumptive norms in language, i.e. happy versus unhappy, where happy is the default which requires modification.
I believe that racism or, to put it in more concrete terms, 'differentism' will always be with us. As a kid nicknamed "Duracell", I quickly learned that people in general, and children in particular, place a high premium on conformity. Any deviation from a putative norm is subject to social ostracism partly as a means of re-enforcing normative forms amongst the in-group. (This is why sub-groups like goths or mods or technos or biker gangs adopt very stringent yet unwritten rules about acceptable clothing and hairstyles.) thus, in all-white schools, absent anyone more obviously different, I got picked on for red hair and buck teeth and glasses. Wasn't any good at team sports, either.
I am in no way claiming discrimination typical of racism in my life, but I was picked on for being different.
I found out recently that, apparently, "Ginger" is considered a term of disrespect, akin to "nigger" according to some, both those who use it and those who are called it. All that I have left is a vestige of russet hair growing on the lower part of my face (the rest having long since turned dark, then mostly departed, leaving behind but a rime of frost around the back and sides). Still, it is curious to become aware that there are people who think of me that way.
It is equally curious to pull apart the thought processes that demand people stop reading literature from previous times because it contains thought patterns deemed unacceptable to our current sensibilities, when George Orwell explored what happens when officialdom tries to erase or re-write the past in "1984".
Personally, I'd rather know about it, explore it, and understand why this is wrong and thereby inoculated against adopting such ideas, gain the ability to see racism for what it is, especially when it comes wearing a different guise, than to be ignorantly susceptible to the lies about the past and about other people that is required by racists in order to perpetuate their hatred.
Apropos of this current assignment:
1) do political speeches of current candidates for the Presidency of the United States count as fiction? I'd argue that they do, because they are pretty much full of it and are very offensive to my sense of rationality, but I'd like your call on it, please.
2) How would I know if I'll find some piece of writing to be offensive until I've read it, especially since I find myself offended mostly by the absence of any valid logic or objectively provable reality on which the writers base their arguments? My sensibilities are otherwise pretty robust. Any advice?

6/23/16, 9:39 PM

Cherokee Organics said...

Hi JMG,

The BREXIT referendum vote has just been announced down here as 52% in favour of leaving the EU. I do hope you have a chance to critique the campaign to stay at some point in the future? Did you know that articles in the newspapers here this morning, were still confidently proclaiming that the vote would be in favour of staying within the EU? The articles I did read on the subject over the past few weeks spoke endlessly about the risk to the banking sector and not much else, but that may have something to do with the source of the articles. It was weirdly one sided though and objectivity appears to be a far distant memory.

Oh, Mr Evola is a fascinating character, and wow, did he have his prejudices or what? Of course, he had the confidence of birthright and he allowed his opponents to believe that they were using him. A clever strategy! Also, he was quoted as saying something about the fascist party, which I once wrote here on your blog about the anarchists! It still amuses me to this day, how quickly I was shouted down. (This next bit is not to you, but to those cheeky so called anarchists) Honestly, people get a grip! :-)! Sorry, I couldn’t help myself from poking them!

Back to this weeks topic at hand. The English weren't the only ones in that game of censorship. The German's had a deft hand for censorship too and I only discovered today that the original story of Rapunzel told a delightful tale of a rather appealing and accommodating young lady who engaged in a bit of erotic play with her Prince and only had to spill the beans when she became knocked up. The Grimm brothers re-write was a fascinating case study in censorship where they took out all of the naughty bits whilst changing the underlying morality and also feeding the prevailing attitudes of male / female roles into that story! They had sharp minds those brothers. Incidentally the Grimm brothers notated the original story, but their motivation for censoring and shaping all of the rest of the tales too was for the pragmatic reasons of having to make some money. Their tale was one of a couple of hard working intelligentsia fallen on hard times, through circumstance and outspoken anti-establishment views.

Cheers

Chris

6/23/16, 9:51 PM

Cherokee Organics said...

Hi JMG,

Almost forgot to mention that it lightly snowed here today!!! Woo Hoo! I took some photos of the snow falling on the solar panels (apologies for my sense of humour!) which I'll post on the blog next Monday, as well as other more aesthetic places on the farm too. Snow! Ooooo! Nice!

Cheers

Chris

6/23/16, 9:56 PM

Kevin Warner said...

I had selected the book "Mein Kampf" as an obvious candidate for this months assignment as I wanted to select a book that had a murderous impact on humanity causing untold grief and misery but you said that it should be a book that you would feel the need to fling it across the room in disgust so right, Ayn Rand it is. Last month's assignment certainly threw me as, when I was reading the "The Canterbury Tales" the Canon's Yoeman's Tale on the alchemists and their lives I realized, my god, these are exactly the same sort of people that 500 years later would be working in the financial industry. Check it out yourselves. Now to this week's essay.
In reading about your thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft and how some of the horror in his stories were centered around the fact that there could be another race of intelligent beings with their own souls I thought - that is something that has changed. What to H.P. Lovecraft was ultimate horror can now be regarded as a potential away-mission for first contact in today's fiction. That is an certainly an improvement. The horror of the unknown now seems to have been replaced with horror of ourselves leading to a raft of rules and laws to outlaw human nature and feelings i.e. if you outlaw it, it will all go away - just like sexuality in Victorian society. Now how did that work out?
It seems that the obsession over the correct terminology is no longer content to be limited to questions of race but is now seeking new horizons as it moves into the area of gender as can be seen by such new acronyms such as LGBTQIA+ Saywhat? This is starting to verge on the insane rather than the obtuse. Recently in the Parliament of Brandenburg, Germany, a motion was lodged to extend hate speech laws to matters of gender which caused one politician to make the following response at http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/brilliant-german-politician-mocks-pc-addresses-parliament-60-different-genders-video

6/23/16, 10:10 PM

Owen said...

Problem with comparing Trump to Lincoln, Lincoln never grew up in wealth on the East Coast. He was a flyover from the very start (although I guess the distinction between the coasts and the interior wasn't as - stark - as it is today). His daddy didn't make or inherit a fortune, nor did his granddaddy either.

Perhaps Trump's money is slightly less of a legacy and is somewhat newer than FDR's but they both had the backing of generations of ancestors that built a deep foundation.

I suppose the original Roosevelts were somewhat more respectable - the original Trump basically made his money building brothels disguised as hotels in gold rush regions. I think Trump's father made his money building legitimate housing in Brooklyn? And the Big Haired One made his money building and speculating in Manhattan, and more or less selling himself and anything else he could make money on to the world?

Now I'm kinda curious what the original Rooosevelt did. Huh. One of FDR's grandfathers was an opium dealer to China! :P Ok, I guess neither family was all that respectable. Both were pirates, more or less. Arr, shiver me timbers.

I'm not sure who the Lincoln would be in this era, someone who is rising in politics due to sheer smarts and hard work but came from humble backgrounds with a no-name family lineage of farmers and such.

6/23/16, 10:55 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Patricia, good point! He's even more, shall we say, colorful in Latin than in English, but there are some tolerably good English translations.

Pygmycory, that'll certainly fulfill the requirement!

Mayhawk, I'll have to check with the publisher. I know a trade paperback edition is in the works, but I don't know the timeline.

Cú Meala, either synchronicity or the simple fact that it's a good description of many aspects of the universe, take your pick.

Avalterra, oh, I know; that's why I call it a Lovecraftian epic fantasy. It's not horror -- how could it be, when it's from the perspective of the other side? To the worshippers of Cthulhu, Cthulhu isn't horrible and the thought of his reappearance isn't a subject of dread; it's the fulfillment of their wildest hope. I wrote it, if you will, from the perspective of the people who had the other reaction to the post you cited -- the people for whom the claim that "Man is the measure of all things" is as arrogant as it is absurd. (Owen's comment is mine: "Here's a child's six inch ruler; go measure a galaxy with it.")

Gabriela, I haven't read Onfray, and that's a mistake I'll have to rectify. Lynn White Jr., in a famous essay from almost fifty years ago, made some of the same points, and to my mind they're entirely valid.

Spanish Fly, de Sade will certainly do! As for prejudices, everyone has them, and the only significant difference -- and it is significant, though not as universally so as sometimes alleged -- is that some people, and some categories of people, have more power to act according to their prejudices than others.

Ganv, exactly. As I noted in a comment above, xenophobia is hardwired into our nervous systems for valid evolutionary reasons -- primates are generally wary about admitting outsiders into their troops, though they'll do it under the right conditions -- and so is sexual xenophilia; the combination of the two makes for explosive emotional reactions in response to anyone perceived as the Other, who becomes at one and the same time an overt target of hatred and a covert target of desire and jealousy. Try to suppress that bubbling cauldron of passionate reactions and the result is going to be a mess.

Submarine, by all means -- but hey, at least it's more readable than Ayn Rand.

Amy, you are indeed. The drink of your choice can be a necessary tool for getting through assignments like this one.

Dammerung, 4chan is well outside my reading list, so thanks for the heads up.

Brian, it's quite possible that Canadian universities have stayed outside the sort of thing I'm discussing. Canada is a different country -- yes, unlike most people in the US, I know this! -- with its own distinctly different intellectual culture.

Tomuru, and totally plausible, given the behavior of the Brussels bureaucracy.

Tim, many thanks for the examples. Atlas Shrugged -- gah. I had to put on hip boots to get through Anthem ; that was bad enough.

LatheChuck, yeah, that's one of the reasons I decided not to bother with McCarthy. Another was that gratuitous wallowing in shock value just isn't my cup of tea. Your example of modern absurdity, by the way, is very good.

Varun, sure, but only if you can read it without feeling a sense of superiority. Try to find something that irritates you.

Ahavah, no, you don't have to stick to the pre-1900 rule -- that was only for that one assignment, not for all assignments.

6/23/16, 11:26 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Rita and Jim, true enough. There's a fine book, The Other Victorians by Steven Marcus, which discusses the Victorian sexual underworld in quite some detail.

Don, I have no idea -- I haven't read any of her screeds, as I find her picture on the front cover sufficiently off-putting that I've never gotten past that.

Patricia, certainly my wife's copies show no sign of bowdlerization!

Bruno, so long as it offends you, it's a suitable choice.

Pygmycory, good! And I imagine you've had days -- I certainly have -- when the world does seem as though it was being run by a bunch of Homeric gods...

Christophe, you seem to be in the majority here!

Myriad, oh, granted. I enjoyed the story, having occasionally wished -- for the benefit of the other living things on this planet -- that there were a lot fewer of my species here. I definitely recommend The Awakeners -- it was originally published as two volumes, Northshore and Southshore -- which has a whole series of fun features of its own -- though it's also brilliantly written, with a fine sense of atmosphere and some images that still remain in my imagination.

Grebolucities, I'm going to be discussing the Brexit vote at length in an upcoming post. You're quite correct, of course -- this is huge. (One might even say "Yuuuge"...)

Renaissance, I'd rather you tackle something more substantive than a campaign speech, though I have to admit I could be talked into making an exception for either or both of the current candidates. As for bad logic, there's plenty to feast on -- do you enjoy wildly illogical books about Atlantis, for example? I can recommend some doozies. (There are also some very good books about Atlantis, but for some reason that subject seems to attract people who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag if you hand them a bowie knife and a booklet of instructions.)

Cherokee, I didn't know that about Rapunzel! Good to know; it sounds like it was a better story before it got bowdlerized. Congrats on the snowfall -- it's hot and humid here tonight, and the thought of a little snow is rather appealing.

Kevin, the acronym I've seen most in use is QUILTBAG -- don't ask me what all the letters mean; at least it's memorable. I'm personally rather sympathetic to people who just want to live their lives, including the sexual and gender-related aspects of their lives, without being harassed by others; as Clark Ashton Smith pointed out in a typically funny story of his, the capacity to mind one's own business is way up there among the social virtues -- but whether yet another round of regulations is the best way to foster that useful habit is quite another matter.

Owen, the comparison with Lincoln I had in mind was purely one of the level of vitriol that's been flung at the two men by the establishment. You're right that in most other ways, FDR is a lot closer fit.

6/23/16, 11:58 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Also, I'd like to congratulate those of my British readers who voted for Brexit, and who faced down very nearly the entire British political and cultural establishment in the process. As I hinted in a comment to Grebulocities above, this is immensely important -- quite possibly a significant turning point in modern history, and one that might just enable the industrial world to avoid, or at least postpone, the lethal disconnect between the dominant elite and the internal proletariat of which Arnold Toynbee warned so presciently most of a century ago. More on this in an upcoming post!

6/24/16, 12:05 AM

Jasmine said...

Dear Mr Greer

As I predicted last week Britain has voted to leave the EU. I don’t know what the end result of it will be, but the jigsaw has certainly been thrown onto he floor. It should make interesting viewing. Mind you, even though I expected it, I still have a sense of shock that its actually happened. You usually expect people to prefer the status quo on the basis that its better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. The establishment, big business, the world of finance, academia, the IMF, the EU and even the President of the USA have tried to put the fear of god into us to stop us voting out. All the experts including the Bank of England, hundreds of economists tried to convince us that voting out would be a disaster to our economy. Hundreds of A List luvvies from the world of film and theatre have pleaded with us not to vote leave. The fact the the people have been prepared to vote out in the face of this shows just how disconnected the elite has become from ordinary people.

6/24/16, 12:25 AM

Jasmine said...

Dear Jason

I left a comment on your blog last week. I’ve had the same experience as you from most of the middle class liberals I know. They seem to think that if we vote to leave the EU, then we will lose all our human rights and descend into some kind of racist, bigoted hell. You wouldn’t think that they lived in a country that had a tradition of human rights and rule of law that dates back to the Magna, a country that chopped its Kings head off a 140 years before the French got round to doing the same to their King, a country with and a democracy that survived two wold wars and a great depression. Don't get me wrong, there is a hell of a lot wrong with our system of government and democracy; but at least we still have a democracy which enables us to kick a government out. And yet these middle class liberals prefer to be ruled by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels. They always talk about reforming the EU, but it is difficult to do this if you can’t kick your rulers out at an election.

The one thing that has really shocked me is how dismissive many middle class liberals are about democracy. I have had some pretty arrogant responses to my arguments that we need to leave the EU to get our democracy back. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about this, as democracy threatens the class interests of the middle classes and it gives the working class a vote. They don’t appreciate that democracy that might prevent them from hanging from a lamp post.

The one thing that really annoys me is the way middle class liberals claim to have a monopoly if virtue and portray the brexit side said as being racists and bigots. I suspect that there is a real class snobbery behind this as much of the impetus for brexit comes from the working class. There is that tweet from Will Self that goes

“Not all brexiters are racists, but most racists will vote Brexit tomorrow”

You could respond

“Not all Remainers are rich sociopathic neoliberals who invade other countries and cause hundreds and thousands of deaths, but most rich sociopathic neoliberals will vote Remain tomorrow”

Thankfully democracy has triumphed and the next thing is to heel the wounds this vote might cause and start making cups of tea. So that will be the end of my rant

6/24/16, 12:35 AM

averagejoe said...

Thanks, I was one of the exit voters. But as the result came in, it left a bitter sweet taste. Because as I recall you writing before, that the result does not necessarily guarantee the outcome I desire! As an example, one of the biggest failings of the EU, and there are many, is that about 40% of the EU budget is spent on agricultural subsidies, which have no cap. The largest beneficiaries of this in the UK are the uber wealthy land and gentry who largely own most of the land. And they have many representatives in this current government. You can rest assured that as part of the exit plans they will do their level best to preserve the flow of subsidies to their own pockets. Other benefits that goes to the masses, will be chopped, as will environmental protections that hinder corporate business. However, it improves democratic accountability, and I felt that was worth the risk. As a Scot, I also support Scottish independence for the same reason. Hopefully that is one step closer. The evidence is that the smaller the country the more democracy works, and the poster child for that is Iceland, with a population of a few hundred thousand. Look forward to your post on this.
Cheers.

6/24/16, 1:32 AM

Twinruler334 said...

You really have a genius of thinking way outside the box, Mr Greer. I deeply admire you for it!

6/24/16, 2:11 AM

Travis Marshall said...

The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.

6/24/16, 2:28 AM

Travis Marshall said...

(It's like expecting Donald Trump to devote his presidency to destroying the world's population of chipmunks.)
Did Mao not begin the four pests campaign? Maybe not as absurd as you intended it.

6/24/16, 2:47 AM

Phil Harris said...

JMG
Correction on British referendum. Most British newspapers with the largest readership are owned by plutocrats with political agendas. These came out as a bloc in favour of Brexit. The Guardian and FT are distinctly minority flavours.

Note also that the internal proletariat in Scotland already decided last year it was Scottish and voted Scottish Nationalist (SNP), dumping a British Labour Party allegiance of long standing. (In your phrase as a class they "went under the bus" decades ago and finally seem to have woken up to the fact.) Yesterday, however, it looks like they added enough of their vote to stay with SNP policy and remain in EU. SNP has tried and will probably try to preserve the previous British post-war social settlement in the form of re-distributive public goods, mostly health, pensions and welfare and educational services, which serve a good political as well as sensible economic purpose. (I rely on people like Steve Keen for my understanding of monetary function of public goods.) The Scottish working class having found they probably no longer exist politically had a fairly rational choice to make.

We await further analysis but my understanding is that younger people (<30?) voted 60/40 majority to remain in EU.

I hope of course you are right about turning point. Other people whose analysis like yours I very much generally respect, including economist Steve Keen, took / take a dim and terminal view of EU, so this is nothing personal. Clearly the larger English internal proletariat did not have Scottish identity to vote for and in my view thereby were not faced with rational choice. We await outcomes but our PM David Cameron will certainly go down in history. Arguably, bad economics leads to bad politics. Economics is not working and if we double-down on 'austerity' (i.e. cut off those in the bottom third) then the real explosion could yet be to come.

best
Phil H

6/24/16, 2:52 AM

Maria said...

I think I covered both assignments in one by reading Huckleberry Finn. It was not on the curriculum when I was in school in the 70s and I somehow hadn't got around to it since then, so while I was aware of the controversy surrounding it, I came to it with fresh eyes. It was a great book, despite the fact that there was plenty in it to make me flinch.

Still, I'm intrigued by this new assignment...

6/24/16, 3:10 AM

Don Plummer said...

I certainly agree about Ms Coulter's appearance on her book covers! She could easily stand in for the White Witch in a stage production of one of CS Lewis' Narnia tales, and she could probably do it without wearing any makeup.

6/24/16, 3:24 AM

Phil Knight said...

JMG,

Actually, we faced down a large portion of the international establishment as well.

Personally, for the first time ever I'm grateful that I'm congenitally irresponsible.

6/24/16, 3:40 AM

Quos Ego said...

Dear John Michael,

I must admit I fail to see how the English and Welsh move is wise in any way : England has a population density of more than 400 inhabitants per square kilometer (and quickly growing!). The country cannot possibly feed itself in isolation.

The EU in its current state is a complete disaster, of course, and yet to me, Brexit is akin to suicide.

6/24/16, 3:52 AM

Cherokee Organics said...

Hi JMG,

Thanks, the snow was fun. Sorry to hear about the humid night. I reckon our planet is getting hotter and wetter, but what do I know...

I thought you may enjoy this short extract from the 1812 edition of the Rapunzel story, which was taken from the original work of the German brothers Grimm. It casts a whole new light on the story:

"At first Rapunzel was afraid, but soon she took such a liking to the young king that she made an arrangement with him: he was to come every day and be pulled up. Thus they lived merrily and joyfully for a certain time, and the fairy did not discover anything until one day when Rapunzel began talking to her and said, "Tell me, Mother Gothel, why do you think my clothes have become too tight for me and no longer fit?""

That is really funny and was probably part warning for young ladies and part bawdy joke! The later 1857 edit reads differently enough that the bawdy humour was taken from it completely and Rapunzel sounds like a simpering mooncalf rather than the more likely young lady in the 1812 version. Anyway, the living merrily and joyfully bit sounds like a lot of fun!!!

I'd also like to congratulate the clever British readers who have had the excellent common sense to walk away from a failing empire for a second time in recent history. For what can't be sustained, generally won't be.

Cheers

Chris

6/24/16, 3:59 AM

Phil Harris said...

JMG
Correction for myself. I wrote just now of Scottish working class transferring allegiance from the 'British' Labour Party. No such thing, of course. I should have written 'The British Labour Movement'. The English Labour Party is going to have a hard time re-inventing 'Britishness'.

best
Phil H

6/24/16, 4:03 AM

Alex Blaidd said...

Sorry this comment is not about the above post, it's of course about Brexit, so please do feel free not to publish if too off topic. I feel very lost and confused with it to be honest. In a different context and sentiment I'd have voted leave, but I fear that the leave vote will just strengthen the grip of the neo-liberals. I fail to see how we'll be better off with Johnson, Gove, IDS, etc. I don't see how the average British person will be better off. I'm not pro EU, I'd happily leave the EU, but I'm concerned where that takes us next. So with all that in mind I voted remain.

I didn't want to vote remain, but I didn't want to support Johnson and Gove. It was one of those votes where I wanted to vote against an undemocratic EU, and the big banks, but also didn't want to vote for the alternative. Is that what it's like in these situations? I have such mixed thoughts, so very much looking forward to your post - it's particularly hard over here to remain objective, though I have tried my absolute hardest to do so. I didn't feel an allegiance to the remain campaign nor the leave. I don't feel like either side represented me. And I find the comments from the remain camp today arrogant, yet I find the comments from the leave camp ignorant.

One thing for sure, it's huge! Expect the collapse of the EU and the Eurozone pronto.

6/24/16, 4:05 AM

latefall said...

Such an apt title for this weeks diplomatic developments.
I tend to think that "the right thing" happened yesterday (for the wrong reasons). But this really is only where is starts to get interesting. I don't want to derail the discussion more than necessary, and will try to keep this short and undiplomatic.

I found the debate difficult to bear due to the abysmal quality of most of the (most) voiced opinions/arguments. The term "Independent United Kingdom", the fact of claiming not to be able to get rid of a layer of politicians, while being in the process of a referendum to do exactly that, and somehow accepting the caricatures of statesmen from an elite pipeline one layer below as god given perhaps makes this point quickly.
Of course the other side is not significantly more "professional" about it, though I feel much better about their intentions. One thing I find unforgivable is to equate anti-European with anti-EU (or EU-critical), where you could perfectly well use the simple term "anti-Union" (avoiding the ill advised monopolization of "European Union" - like there could be only one).
Still, I think the safest path may not be the straightest nor the most obvious path by now. This one certainly is not the fairest if you look at how the young population voted (or wasn't even allowed to) when most of the economic forecasts (for whatever they are worth) predicted that the largest effects would come to bear 10 years from now. I think all this could have been avoided, perhaps in a mere 10 years by a demographic shift of the sentiment, but it was not to be. Perhaps something can be arranged with Ireland or Scotland. We'll see how things turn out, and it certainly is a good opportunity to straighten a few things out on the continent.

If you can find yourself in some of that, or just wonder about a non-elite continental perspective I would recommend reading this pro-Brexit rationale from a German perspective. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fkrautreporter.de%2F1537-zeit-zu-gehen-grossbritannien
I very much look forward to next weeks installment.
By the way if someone wants to vent steam into the direction of the World Bank, I'll be sitting down with some of the MENA people after the weekend. If you have good rants (preferably with references I'd like to hear them).

For my homework I will try to give the Koran translation by Paret's a shot.

6/24/16, 4:16 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

And, John, as predicted, they'll probably be exiting Scot-free. The logical next step has already been proposed north of the border. Or revisited. The English bookies have just lost a bunch of money right now, too.

6/24/16, 4:23 AM

Alex Blaidd said...

You know, what I wanted was a third option. An option to leave, but not being led by Johnson, Gove, IDS and Farage. Not because of xenophobia, but because the EU has become undemocratic, supports the big banks, is neoliberal etc. etc. Am I just naive? I voted remain, purely because of my doubts, yet am partly excited by leaving. What a strange species we are!!

6/24/16, 4:26 AM

luna said...

I don't think it's true that most of the British establishment were agaist Brexit - most of the right wing press and some senior Tories were on the Brexit side. I disagree with Grebulocities on the propaganda issue - for example Rupert Murdoch's propaganda machine was in full throttle for Brexit, using a classic Rescue Game tactic (ie. blame the immigrants).

I share the ambivalence towards the EU and it's Byzantine ways. There is also wage class here too that has been thrown under a bus and wants it's voice heard.

However I feel that the most of the pro-Brexiters are even more pro-austerity than the EU, and that British political institutions, being stuck in the 18th century, will be unable to protect us. For that reason I voted Remain.

I'm keeping my fingures crossed that things will ultimitely work out for the best...

6/24/16, 4:30 AM

donalfagan said...

Brexit: Cenk Uygur says he was for staying, as was the murdered Jo Cox, but Uygur understands that the vote expresses a rejection of austerity and desire for change.

Regarding other books by Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men is stay with you kind of frightening, and All The Pretty Horses is somewhat romantic. McCarthy's prose, of course, is notable for the absence of quotation marks, quote identifiers and most contraction marks. It just flows and you often have to go back to figure out who said what.

I read The Fountainhead in high school, before I knew it was supposed to be loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn't hate it. They showed the Gary Cooper film at college, and all the architects laughed when Roark's mentor told him, on his deathbed, to remember that form follows function.

I suppose that one of Bill O'Reilly's screeds would probably be fairly offensive, but I ain't giving that tool a nickel.

6/24/16, 4:46 AM

Justin said...

JMG/Kevin, QUILTBAG is great - it's an actual pronounceable word, likely includes the identities of 999 out of 1000 people, and is resistant to endless appending of just one more letter. Of course, this makes it utterly unacceptable to a certain subset of the 'intelligentsia'. Unlike a rainbow, a quilt implies a degree of unity.

It's occurred to me that Trump's visit to Scotland and his frequent claims to be a "great builder" are quite possibly related - what do you think, JMG?

Owen/Dammerung, it's quite something to see various imageboards, including a 'fringe' one taking the notion of magic seriously - less so on 4/x/ and /pol/ but on others...

6/24/16, 5:09 AM

John Roth said...

Re: Western fiction

I grew up on Zane Grey. I recently tried to read one of my early favorites, “Wilderness Trek,” the story of a multi-year cattle drive in Australia, and found it unreadable. It wasn’t the story, the plot or social/political/racial/etc context. It was his habit of using “eye dialect” for the way the characters spoke. There’s only so much of that I can take these days. Your tastes may differ.

Zane Grey precedes Louis L’Amour. He was wildly popular in his day.

@onething

Yeah, that’s a common problem with the non-duality thing. The illusion of duality has a purpose, and that purpose is not less important for it being illusory. We will, in the fullness of time, realize that separation is an illusion; there is no need to hurry the process, which in any case can’t be hurried.

@Spanish fly

Justine and Juliet aren’t that vanilla either.

@JMG

I like your take on the Brexit vote; it’s one of the better ways to end the 80-year cycle without a Crisis War. However, I saw that Britain did it twice before, unfortunately I didn’t make a note of the dates. One was more-or-less peacefully letting the British Empire go; I think the other was a financial crisis in the 19th century. More research is needed.

@Kevin

A lot of the stuff out of the LGBTQIwxyzectpdq crowd seems to be self-destructive in the extreme if they want to get the great mass of people on their side. The wheel turns, and the next piece up will be a tightening of standards - an “anything goes” attitude is more than likely to get you stomped on 15 to 20 years down the road. I personally think we need two new pronoun sets; we don’t need “everyone has a right to their own personal pronoun.” The way things are going, though, we’re likely to be stuck with using the grammatically absurd “they” as a singular. It will not be a singular until it takes a singular verb.

6/24/16, 7:05 AM

Rumighoul said...

Hello JMG,
I'm storing your homework assignments for a future date and for now I'm still participating in spirit with the blog's larger reading list - I recently finished Decline of the West and was powerfully affected by much of it; really astonishing stuff. It has made me want to tackle more philosophy and I've ended up now trying to chew my way into Kant's Critique, as a prelude to schopenhauer (as recommended via your other blog).

In some ways Spengler fulfills your criteria of reading stuff that offends, (although the effect will have been softened via your introduction to his ideas): I'm sure I recall that the first time I heard of the Decline was in a Guardian article about 10 years ago. The description made me think "that sounds kind of interesting actually", but the author then huffily dismissed it as reactionary anachronistic nonsense of some kind or other,and I'm ashamed to say I probably just thought "oh well, better not bother with him".

If a response to your Brexit aside is permitted...I'll certainly be eager to read your post. As I'm sure you are aware Scotland voted entirely to remain by council areas, 62% of the vote overall, but we are set to be dragged out nonetheless. Everyone I know is pretty shell shocked. My wife is Spanish and she is frankly heart broken. She tends to see the whole thing as largely xenophobic, though I don't necessarily agree with that myself, and the feeling of being cut off further from comity with Europe is a very real thing to her.

I voted remain myself also, but would welcome your analysis of why it could be a good thing a marginal majority of people didn't. I don't think I've every seen you make such a strong statement regarding another country's political decisions BTW.

6/24/16, 7:06 AM

Dammerung said...

I figure you'd have something instructive/amusing to say about 4chan's current purgatory - it was geniuses pretending to be complete idiots for so long that the actual idiots showed up and thought they'd found their true home.

6/24/16, 7:39 AM

Dirk & Joh's Wildswan said...

Yes Brexit is that brick pulled from the wall of elitest denial that JMG has educated me about.
Onward through this current fog of neo-liberal delusion.

6/24/16, 8:09 AM

aunteater said...

I finally read Pudd'nhead Wilson, for the first assignment. Perhaps when my kids are older, I'll have the time and focus to tackle something challenging again ;) But for #2 it is obvious I should finally vet the Limbaugh kids' books that have been sitting untouched on my dresser since the grandparents gifted them at Christmas. The thought fills me with loathing.

6/24/16, 8:13 AM

Ursachi Alexandru said...

JMG,

Your British readers who voted for Brexit seem to be mostly from England (notably without London who voted overwhelmingly to remain) and Wales. Also, they are likely not among the youngest age groups:

http://www.brookson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/CltL7MtVEAA9j7y.png

Scotland and Northern Ireland, who mostly voted to remain, are already hinting at going their separate ways. I don't live in the UK so I'm not for or against Brexit because it's not my country, but I'm just trying to understand the figures. And the future now seems uncertain not only for the EU, but also for the UK itself.

Ironically, some are already blaming Cameron for destroying not one, but two unions.

6/24/16, 8:58 AM

Sylvia Rissell said...

I suspect I will probably end up slogging through a copy of "Left Behind", but I havn't decided what to drink with it.

I'd like to recommend a couple of books.
Feminists will be offended by Rose Peale's "The Adventure of Being a Wife", who cannot imagine that there would ever be a good reason for a woman to refuse sex with her husband.

For the reader considering "the Handmaid's Tale," if it does not sufficiently offend, try "Native Tounge" or "Judas Rose". (can't remember the author)

I'm not looking forward to this assignment.

6/24/16, 9:15 AM

avalterra said...

Finished the book. Nicely done. Not what I was expecting but interesting and fun. I will definitely buy the sequels.

6/24/16, 9:18 AM

pygmycory said...

Actually, reading both your blogs gave me a bit more of a clue as to why people might see the world through those eyes, and what it might look like.

I see the world as someone who believes in a singular God who is ultimately just and merciful, although he operates on a much longer timescale than a human lifetime, and much of the balancing act occurs after we die. And yes, he gets thoroughly angry with the human race sometimes, and often allows the consequences of our own foolishness to catch up with us.

So seeing a bunch of gods running around like children squabbling over toys came as a shock, and a large part of me insisted that had I been there I'd make a rude gesture at them all and walk away. (Though were they real and as portrayed, that would probably be suicidal).

After reading the Iliad, the Odyssey really didn't shock me, though I enjoyed it.

6/24/16, 9:30 AM

pygmycory said...

I'm watching what happens after the Brexit vote with bated breath, given that the vast majority of my relatives live over there.

6/24/16, 9:31 AM

Glenn said...

I think I'll finally have to read "Mast and Sail in Europe and Asia" by Herbrt Warington Smyth (1906). I've browsed it casually due to my interest in boats, but not bothered with the text. A cursory glance at the first chapter reveals some horrible racist attitudes dismissing black Africans and American indigenes as inferior and never having developed sail or ocean going craft. Among other things this displays a stark ignorance of the great canoes of the Pacific Northwest. I suspect a thorough reading of his comments in the text will reveal a Protestant Anglo Saxon male attitude of centrism and superiority right up there with Lovecraft.

Glenn

in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia

6/24/16, 9:59 AM

Zach said...

Regarding Westerns...

I have not read in the genre, but there is a film I can recommend. The 1993 film "Geronimo: An American Legend" is chock-full of good acting, splendid vistas, and was nominated for an Oscar for its musical score. It (thankfully!) avoid the "noble savage" trope, and lets both the Apache and the U.S. Army be populated by three-dimensional humans with strengths and flaws. It's easy to be sympathetic to both sides of this final Indian War.

More to the point of this week, it gives an interesting study in prejudice. One is reminded that the Civil War was still a living memory; a character might be "white", but their being a Virginian or a Texan is hugely significant. (Robert Duvall's Scout is prejudiced against everyone. "Texans!" he spits. "That's the lowest form of a white man.")

peace,
Zach

6/24/16, 10:17 AM

Owen said...

>4chan is well outside my reading list

Although you really can't think of just 4chan, it has now mutated into a whole archipelago of chans. And it really is the subconscious of the internet, every forbidden thought on promenade to be examined and considered.

It will seem to be stupid and juvenile but don't make the mistake of underestimating the chans, they can smarten up frighteningly quick when they get motivated to do so.

You will probably facepalm after visiting /x/ for instance, which is probably the more relevant board to your interests.

The establishment is just beginning to try to get their head around the phenomenon and they are failing. And failing. And failing.

6/24/16, 10:19 AM

RPC said...

"As for prejudices, everyone has them, and the only significant difference -- and it is significant, though not as universally so as sometimes alleged -- is that some people, and some categories of people, have more power to act according to their prejudices than others." I'd argue that another significant difference is that some people are more aware of their prejudices than others and so at least have the capability to compensate.

"Owen, the comparison with Lincoln I had in mind was purely one of the level of vitriol that's been flung at the two men by the establishment." Amen to that - "monkey in a top hat" is about the mildest of the epithets of which I know.

On Brexit, I'm interested in seeing whether Parliament is willing to ignore the will of the people and choose to remain - it wasn't a binding referendum, after all, and as you've pointed out the gap between the elite and their constituents is widening rapidly.

6/24/16, 10:27 AM

BoysMom said...

I suppose I shall go hunt down The Communist Manifesto, though Mein Kampf in translation would also do. Or perhaps there's something by one of the revolutionaries of the First French Revolution: their results tending to be offensive probably their writings would be closely enough related to qualify and stretching my French would be good in and of itself, or a translation of Mao. I don't really find many ideas to be offensive (though Charles Darwin managed to do a darn good job at one point, but I've already read his pro-racism arguments--someone else might find him useful, and he should be read anyway for his other ideas), most of the time, (and I'm not going to read kiddie erotica for any assignment, no matter how important!) it's more the execution of them that bothers me--the idea of communism is quite pretty, really, it's just that humans are far too messy and complicated to achieve it on any large scale: it seems to work rather well on the very small scale.

On the subject of old books and home schooled kids, the key is always to talk about it. It is sometimes better to introduce some of those materials before the child can read them alone, so the conversation can happen as you read the book aloud, mid-text. Otherwise, find a good way to talk (my boys are fond of in-van discussion, rather than at home!) and have a talk. Language changes, there's always 'ass' in the Christmas story, if your kids are exposed to a traditional reading annually, and 'gay' in Deck the Halls, as prime examples of word-meaning-shifts that kids naturally meet early on. So a word may have been commonly accepted at one time for one meaning, then later become a slur. It's worth discussing. Huckleberry Finn is great for this, because the moral of the story is so good and so strong. Sure, the ending is neatly contrived and perhaps a bit unsatisfying to us these days, but the kids can easily follow Huck's change in how he feels about Jim.
There are some very problematical new books out there. A friend gifted one of my kids an award winning book for Christmas this last year that ends with the kid who is the main character dying in the Holocaust. Which would be well enough, had it been aimed at fourteen-year-olds rather than seven-year-olds! (For those of you not around many seven-year-olds, a good many of them are still afraid of the dark and the monsters under the bed: books where the protagonist dies, horribly or not, tend to cause nightmares.)

6/24/16, 10:53 AM

David, by the lake said...

Vicious attacks on the Brexit, absolutely vicious. Express support for the result and bam! -- you are instantly an ignorant, bigoted, racist moron. Wow.

Another chink in our imperial armor, however...

6/24/16, 11:51 AM

Violet Cabra said...

Love the homework. Last month read Frankenstein. What a fantastic book and primal narrative of Science! Love the framing of the narrative - letters and new attempts of navigating the globe, plus the characters of Dr Frankenstein and his verbose monster are both so endearing.

When I was younger I would frequently read books that I disagreed with "to see what the other side thinks" Now that I'm older it seems clear that since humans think it stories and symbols and different people from different backgrounds, cultures or even just life experiences have different narratives and symbolic frameworks there will often be extreme differences in principals, ethics and outlook. the darker side of this doesn't really irritate me except when there's bad writing. the lighter side, the one promising of a better tomorrow does deeply offend me (as detailed so brilliantly by Barbara Ehrenreich Bright-Sided) and so this week I will finally grit my teeth and read The Secret.

6/24/16, 12:03 PM

Myriad said...

"… having occasionally wished… that there were a lot fewer of my species here."

Exactly. Me too. But there's a difference between wishing things were otherwise, and cheering for an intentional genocide, or even for a tsunami. Isn't there?

And that little doubt, "isn't there?" is where revulsion for the self-shadow sneaks in, turning the fictional plague of angels (for me) into black humor that's too close to home to be funny, or outright monkey's paw (be careful what you wish for) horror.

Of course, I didn't understand any of that fifteen years ago, I just had the emotional throw-the-book reaction. So as a lesson, this week's essay and this discourse seems to be working. Thanks! I'll read The Awakeners next.

re Brexit: Would you call it a victory for the contraneoantidisestablishmentarianists?

On another forum I wanted to post a joke about "Texit" being next, but I discovered that term (inevitably) is already in use.

(That got me thinking about other states' possible "exit" coinages. Massachusetts would seek to lead a MassExit, Connecticut would demonstrate paradoxical separatist solidarity with a Connexit, Ohio would turn away in disgust and cry "Ohexit," Wyoming would ask "Wyexit?", Florida would try to keep multiple options open with a Flexit, and California would settle for nothing less than a Supercaliforniaisticexitalidocious.)

6/24/16, 12:09 PM

Juhana said...

I don't know if archdruids living in US know about bygone girl band called Spice Girls, from the UK. When that band started to break up and eject it's members, it was end of the world for many pre-teenage girls around Europe. Today, next to nobody cares about that band anymore. I believe that Brexit started same process for European Union. It is like artificially constructed girl band long after it's "best before"-stamp, just waiting to erode one notch farther. EU has been total disaster for anyone below the wealthiest 20 % here in Europe. Same processes that drive popularity of Trump upwards are working here to shift balance of power towards nationalist Right. And not a day too soon. There is no reason to believe that "fear of the Other" is somehow wrong. It may be that those fears are deeply rooted in reality. This dual "either-or"-thinking you have been talking about, you call it binary thinking, it has been hardwired into human nervous system for a reason. Evolution doesn't make mistakes in basic instincts, or the story of said species on Earth would be abysmally short. At least in Germany, where all expression of nationalist pride is strictly shunned and forbidden if it isn't expressed with connection to football, they are realizing that these teddy bear Others from Middle East come with very, very sharp claws and teeth. While in Germany during European Championship game, the long-shunned nationalism which natives expressed had a new flavor in it. There was one spoonful of despair, and other spoonful of awakening. One whole street was closed, and German flag was flied with such a pride with young men that nobody has seen it in Europe for decades. For a random traveller, chance of mood was palbable. They were truly championing their nation, in guise of football.

If people doesn't share ancestry, bonds by marriage, religion, primary language or cultural norms with each other, it is pure insanity to have trust towards others. Human beings are not gentle, co-operative creatures as a default mode, towards all and everyone. They save their tender feelings for their own, whomever they may be, and outsiders are seen as neutral force or threat.

This fact has been proven myriad times through history. I am not saying that common identity has to be centered around one said quality like race. It can be religion or even bonds of marriage between groups, which solidify certain level of basic trust between two groups. But John, are you not playing down the part of slow collapse that means fracturing of safety? It leads directly into in-group morality, where every group fights only for it's own. Universal moral ideals of humanism, derived directly from monotheistic worldview anyway, shatter as result. Universalism is offspring of high trust. If you offer your hand and it is bitten every time, only fool would keep on trusting. So why to pretend? Why to pretend that civilized, high-trust modes of behaviour are going to extend into future without abundant energy?

Maybe Lovecraft was right after all. Maybe all "foreigners" are really monstrous, scary shapes in the dark, to be expelled at all cost. Point is that all these shattered groups are foreign landscapes to each other, as they all are shivering around their campfire of shared identity, in the dark of the night. They all cast monstrous shadows to all the other campfires which are on the range to see them. What Lovecraft missed is that as they are foreign to "us", we are foreign to "them". And when these differing worlds collide, it is scary, alien landscape opening before each other, from both points of view. Then it is only question who has might to stamp his imagined reality over the imagined reality of the other. Is it us or the fish-people of Innsmouth? For the loser, history has reserved a sad part to play.

6/24/16, 12:20 PM

whomever said...

JMG: You know, you've prompted me to go visit my (very good) local public library to browse for offensive stuff, a place I've not been to for a while (used to borrow stuff all the time, but just got busy etc etc). So for that alone, thanks!

Meanwhile, back here in reality, apparently Puerto Rico has...1 week until they completely run out of cash. Unless congress acts first of course. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/puerto-rico-governor-island-debt-nightmare-scenario
Nice to see that the US has their own version of Greece.
BTW, turns out a surprisingly large number of US people own Puerto Rican debt without realizing it because of it's tax-free status, so it tends to show up in the various tax free "municipal bond funds".

6/24/16, 12:30 PM

Timothy Dicks said...

Great challenge. We are currently in the process of selling our home and may be living in a camper for a while. My racist, jew hating father in law (who self admits to being part jewish) has loaned me a book about how 'everything is fine with the world', climate change, resource depletion, etc are not to be worried about. I won't know until I read it if the author is simply denying they exist or if he thinks we will tech our way out of it. Should be interesting.

6/24/16, 1:27 PM

Gabriela Augusto said...

It must be wonderful to ha such a vast culture :), Lynn White Jr., and the acceptance of the superiority of the book leading to the disrespect of reality and nature, thanks for the hint! I will read it as soon as I can.
And also, I think, how well do we accept the developments in virtual reality as amazing technological advances. Are they really? When I bought my car for the second time in my life (I drove the first during 20 years), I was surprised by the lack of technological innovation. This car has a few extra filters, but everything else is very similar. My husband says that it is because I asked for no computer on board - for good reason, most of the money he leaves in the repair shops is for the computerised parts of his several cars! So there is where all technological innovation went in one of the more dynamic industries of our days?
Are we being "possessed" by our brains? Is our book-conceptual-abstract educated brain blinding us to all reality?
That said I totally agree that all the "politically correct" is extremely dangerous, as it will necessary cause a reaction, in Europe we are starting to see that reaction may be violent.

6/24/16, 1:30 PM

Space Seeder said...

So I'm here at the library with some time to kill, and I remembered the "homework assignment." Now obviously I didn't sign up for a course, so I'm in no way obligated to do it, but neither do I have any real reason not to, and it sounded interesting.

It's hard to know something I'll disagree without having read it first. The book that immediately suggested itself was "The Secret". There's two different (ahem) non-fiction books by two different authors with that title, and I don't know which one it is. Still don't, because it turns out neither one is in.

So there I was in a section of spiritual and religious related material. It occurred to me that you have probably read many of the books I found around myself, Mr. Greer, and I had the amusing thought that I might unwittingly choose as my "disagreement book" something that you are firmly on board with.

So what I actually selected was something called "The Pocket Dictionary of New Religious Movements", by Irving Hexham. Advertised on the cover is "Over 400 groups, individuals and ideas clearly and concisely defined". I thought amusedly to myself that as someone who has mostly tended towards rationalism, I ought to find, at a conservative estimate, at least 50 things to firmly disagree with. In reality, I actually only expected to be informed about some things I know little or nothing about, having paid scant attention to them. I found that acceptable as I'm not here at the library to complete your assignment, but to charge my phone, before I finish my daily duties and then go get shalefaced. No expectation of having a mental debating exercise or anything of the kind.

So, imagine my surprise at the following entry:

"druids: An ancient pagan religious priesthood found in Celtic lands, including Britain and areas of France. The Romans totally destroyed druidism, with the result that our only knowledge of it comes from Roman sources that describe it as entailing a bloody system of human sacrifice. Since the eighteenth century, various new religious groups have claimed to be druids, but there is no historical evidence that any of them are remotely related to ancient druidism. Today, many "druid" groups seek to perform their rituals at Stonehenge, which was a ruin long before the Celts entered Britain and has no connection with ancient druidism."

Now, my own knowledge of modern druidry is limited at best. But I have been reading TADR for the last five years. Also, I caught up on the previous blog entries, and even read the material related to the AODA one summer when I got laid off and was looking for a way to fill the time. I don't remember much about it, but didn't Hexham set up a straw druid here? I don't recall where you guys say that you have any kind of a historically verifiable connection to the ancient Celtic druids. Isn't Hexham refuting a claim that you're not even making?

I don't have much else to say about that entry or about druidry itself, that not being my thing, but I think I should stop reading this book, lest I fill my head with road apples.

Probably the types of mistaken ideas that circulate about your religion are well known to you, but I thought you should be informed anyway.

Everyone else: I'm sorry. I usually try to at least read all of you on the rare occasion that I comment, and in fact I'll sometimes go back and read the comments on old posts. It's awesome, you guys add really great stuff to what Mr. Greer says.

I think next for this assignment I'll try "The Singularity". About 25 years ago I wasted some money on a book called "the next 50 years". It was nothing but technology fantasies run wild with no supporting logic, never mind evidence. It made me angry, so much so in fact that I tore it along the spine and threw the two halves one after the other into the wall. And this was years before I was disabused of the belief in sustained progress.

6/24/16, 2:00 PM

Yellow Submarine said...

As an American who lived in England for three years and has relatives from the UK, let me also congratulate the people of Great Britain for their declaration of independence from that undemocratic, bureaucratic monstrosity known as the European Union. In particular, let me congratulate them for looking past the fear mongering and smear tactics that were aimed at those who wanted to leave.

The EU started out well enough as a customs union and free trade zone for Western Europe, but morphed into a dysfunctional and increasingly intrusive leviathan state ruled over by an unaccountable and largely parasitic elite. Its no surprise that a great many Brits, Frenchmen, Italians, Swedes, Greeks and others want out.

I think that one thing that contributed to the outcome was that the crassly manipulative campaign of fear mongering and attempting to tar the "leave" campaign with the sort of guilt-by-association smear tactics that we were discussing on The Other Blog backfired.

It has been noted that the opponents of British independence tried to use the murder of MP Jo Cox to smear those who wanted to leave the EU by claiming they had "created a climate that contributed to violence" and all of the usual standard-issue rot like that, as well as generate sympathy for their side. It's been noted that while the proponents suspended their campaign for a few days out of respect for the deceased, the establishment continued to engage in blatantly manipulative propaganda by using the death of MP Cox for partisan political advantage.

Nick Griffin, the former head of the British National Party, wrote a scathing editorial about the attempts by the establishment to exploit Cox's murder for the Vineyard of the Saker, a blog run by a Russian exile living in the US. Whether you like Griffin or not or agree or disagree with his political views (I most definitely do not on both questions), its well worth reading.

It seems to me that towards the end, people realized just how unscrupulous the establishment's tactics were and how they were trying to play the British people for fools. I also think President Obama's blatant attempt to interfere with the referendum and sway the vote by making thinly veiled threats ended up backfiring as well. Imperial bullying is seldom popular with those who are on the receiving end. It overjoys me to see that all of this backfired in the end and the British people voted to regain their independence.

Again, my congratulations to the great British people, who so bravely faced up to some of the greatest tyrants in history, including Napoleon and Hitler and saw them fall.

6/24/16, 2:07 PM

Hereward said...

Great sequence of posts (again!)
As far as reading books outside of your comfort zone goes, I did that quite comprehensively when I moved to the Netherlands 30 years ago.
The great thing about learning another language is being able to get into the psyche of the people who habitually think in that language by reading their literature. What you then find is that language really does determine how you think and how you express yourself.

Once my Dutch had reached a sufficiently good level, a colleague gave me a whole list of books I might like to read. The titles came from his high school reading list.
One of the first books I read was Willem Frederik Hermans' De Donkere Kamer van Damokles (The Darkroom of Damocles). Set in occupied Holland during WWII, the ending absolutely astounded me; it is already a very dark, brooding kind of a story and then things just get so much worse. I had no idea from reading standard English-language literature, that people could have such a black outlook on life. That's not to say that Dutch people are gloomy ordinarily, but from reading the book I realized that deep down they have an unspoken fear about being overrun be it by the Germans in the Second World War, the French in Napoleonic times, the Spanish in the 15th century and ultimately the sea.

The next book was Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight) by Jan Wolkers. In the England of my youth this would most certainly have been classified as pornography and very graphic it is too! Even so, it was on the high school reading list! The story opens with the main protagonist, Erik, who has taken a fancy to a girl who has just moved into one of the rooms in the same house, draws round his "member" with a pencil on a piece of paper, writes next to it "My penis" and shoves it under the door. Such an act would be seen as sexual harassment at the very least, these days. Anyway, after a catalogue of sexual antics all described in the minutest of detail, a beautiful and very moving love story emerges. Erik, the sexual deviant, wins you over, if not to his particular predilections, at least to see that, rather than a monster, he is another beautiful human being.

After a series of Dutch literature, a girlfriend recommended I read Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Now, I have never even been to the American South and I am a white heterosexual male, so to find myself inside the mind of an abused black girl who is terrified of all men and finds lesbian love, was about as far away from my world as possible! This book gave me a whole new perspective on life, the vulnerability of women and the abuse of power.

The last book I shall mention here was another recommendation from a girlfriend: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Which, I am sure everybody reading this knows, follows Humbert Humbert's pursuit of the twelve-year-old Lolita. As horrendous as this sounds, I eventually found myself feeling pity for Humbert. I am not trying to justify paedophilia here, just that Humbert knows that his feelings are wrong but cannot help himself.

PS On the different tiers in Retrotopia, I am coming round to your way of thinking, also thanks to Ray Wharton. To do so involved me finding out more about the geography of Ohio and quickly seeing that the population density there is much lower than here in Holland. In addition, the counties are similar in size to English counties, rather that the twelve Dutch provinces. Holland has a population density similar to that of New Jersey - the US's most densely populated state. I can certainly imagine that it would not be feasible to have all the counties at the same tier. I do think that, in general, it would be unlikely to go directly from tier 5 to tier 1 for neighbouring tiers.

6/24/16, 2:17 PM

LewisLucanBooks said...

Dear Mr. Greer, et all - Someone mentioned reading Bill O'Reilly for the assignment. Years ago, in the interest of reading some things I might not agree with, I read a bit of O'Reilly. I forget which book of his I read, but I was very surprised. Being an Irish Catholic, and attending some pretty preppy and Ivy League east coast schools, he has a really sensitive grasp of status and class. At least in those areas, the guy really "gets it."

Late last night, when I was reading around a bit on the Net, when it became clear the exit vote would prevail, I ran across an article from the Atlantic Monthly magazine, about the vote. I don't know how tongue in cheek the article was, but the author speculated that what it was all about, was this. The people voting to leave are Anglo-Saxons. The people voting to stay are Normans. The Anglo-Saxons voted to leave because for almost 1,000, they have been butt hurt over the Conquest. I suppose over the next few months, several other equally bizarre theories will be floated.

But another article said not to worry. The TV production of "Game of Thrones," probably won't be affected. Much. Maybe not as high of production values, but still watchable. What a relief. I can sleep at night. :-) Seriously, though, I've never been a fan of either the series, or books. Once I found out that I'd have to keep track of 7 royal houses, well, life's too short. Lew

@ Violet Cabra - Barbara Ehrenreich is a genius writer. And, while I've got your attention, I'd just like to say that I really like your posts.

6/24/16, 3:28 PM

Leo Knight said...

JMG, off topic, but I wonder if you heard of the untimely death of actor Anton Yelchin, who was crushed when his Jeep SUV rolled backwards and pinned him against a pillar? It seems the "advanced" electronic shifter has a flaw, in that it always rebounds to a neutral position. Just looking at the shift lever, a driver has no way of telling if the vehicle is in gear, neutral, or park. Progress!

6/24/16, 3:28 PM

latefall said...

@Alex & luna
I am sincerely sorry for the situation you find yourself in. If it is any consolation, you could look at this as the fast lane towards something like Retrotopia. I would strongly suggest to try out (partially) non-English media (e.g. via google translate) that may not have a horse in the race.
Regarding (democratic) alternatives for Europe I can recommend this relatively long discussion of Varoufakis and Chomski on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4Pvk-HtreA (perhaps also qualifies as a homework for Juhana?)

@Phil Harris Thank you for those points.

@Juhana The "Spice Girls" may be gone but the genre (sadly) still is pretty popular. Where we may agree is that there is a realistic chance that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus will go out of style for some time. But that was not a European invention, certainly not a German one. (Within) The EU may have been the most convenient way to influence important decisions though. So that is where the other end of the Atlantik Brücke comes down.
Regarding the cooperation issue I think we're currently going into a direction you would be increasingly correct. However I would say it is not always that simple. Explained a little dryly here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3c5jfwOQOo

6/24/16, 3:31 PM

Unknown said...

JMG

off topic but worthy of note:

My local, non mainstream, news source just ran this article about the Kessler Syndrome.

http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/what-happens-when-the-sky-starts-to-fall/

Its worth a read because it recognises the problem and its ramifications, but then goes on to promote the "off earth" solution.

Florid is the term the psychology profession use to describe such nuttyness, I believe.

eagle eye

6/24/16, 3:52 PM

onething said...

JMG,

"since each of us can only understand another person by modeling that person's thoughts and feelings on things we've experienced within ourselves, whatever we hate is always something we are."

I'm struggling with this here, which has been said in a couple of ways throughout the commentary and the main post. Are you talking about a kind of knee-jerk hatred? If you take the offensive thing calmly you are all right?

Because this is confusing. For example, I loathe the neocon agenda, the mindless killing and assumption of the right to do so and to lie and dissemble publicly about it. So that means in reality I want to kill?

Is there then no such thing as actual virtue, character traits that are real? Or the best people have little emotional reaction?

I understand the way projection works, but it cannot always be the case that any indictment carries this twist.

On another note, and partly for this reason, I am not at all sure what to read. Suggestions by the commentariat are welcome. If I read something offensive there ought to be some redeeming value in it.

6/24/16, 5:44 PM

Atilio Baroni Filho said...

Hello JMG!

Regarding my homework, reading Ana Karenina, what I took most from the experience wasn't exactly the parts that gave me pause or a sense of strangeness, and there were a few. What astonished me was how much similar we still are, as a culture and more broadly as a civilization, more than a century after it. Many, many things are more a measure of different (larger) scale and (greater) quantity of energy used than deep, foundational differences, specially in human relations, expectations, goals and organization.

There was a feeling of frustration behind this realization, but then I also learned how deep the myth of progress goes, because it's only frustrating if your expectation is that things have "progressed so much" over the decades, how come it's not so different...

For the next homework I plan to read from an author who is considered a brazillian classic, writer of a series of famous children's books. He just happened to be part of the north american eugenics project and described in letters how his books were doing a "racial cleansing" of a subtler kind...

/|\
Atilio

6/24/16, 5:52 PM

alex carter said...

I never really had an opinion on the brexit thing, but hearing on what shippets of the BBC news are allowed here in the States, where pro-brexit voters are being called "peasants" and "uneducated" etc., I'd say it's a good thing. Anything that pisses off rich people is pretty likely to be a good thing.

6/24/16, 6:13 PM

Unknown said...

SamChevre says:

I finished the previous assignment, reading The Blithedale Romance; what struck me was the background assumption that looks and character are related.

I'm trying to think what to read for this assignment: I'm not willing to read the thing that irritates me most, which is arguments that make sense when made well, made badly (think the typical self-help/airport-kiosk management book). I may try "The Handmaid's Tale", but would welcome suggestions that show a pro-Jacobin view from inside/

Suggestions for books that others may find offensive (I find all these thought-provoking).
Michael Pearl, To Train Up a Child--very dominance-focused child training book.
Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource--the ur-text of the unlimited growth crowd.
Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan--a first-person picture of a controlling church/family. I have read it multiple times, but my wife says it makes her feel like scrubbing her brain with bleach.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse. The competent version of "Hitler and Stalin were on the same side." (Also, the first politics book I ever read--I found a copy in a dumpster when I was 15.)

6/24/16, 7:15 PM

Kevin said...

Great news about the Brexit. I confess myself astonished by the display of backbone on the part of the public of a developed western nation (how often has that happened recently?). Meanwhile, here's a somewhat off-topic data point concerning the decline of empire:

http://m.news24.com/news24/World/News/thousands-of-california-college-students-homeless-and-go-hungry-20160622

The short version: in the USA's largest university system, the California State University, ten percent of students are homeless; twenty percent don't quite know where their next meal is coming from. The source is a study conducted by that institution in February 2015.

The Spanish language TeleSur news network reports that food prices in Argentina have recently tripled. President Macri is a neoliberal whose policies appear to consist of dismantling the institutions created by his predecessor, President Kirchner; my guess is that this probably has a good deal to do with developments there.

Last time around, I read H. Rider Haggard's "She." Or rather, I listened to it on Librivox. I hope they have something sufficiently annoying to listen to this time around. That book has its share of racist content - pretty standard for the period - and a really gorgeous romantic description of sunrise, and of moonlight on the ancient ruins of Kor. I loved the latter. Didn't care so much for the part where ancient mummies are used as torches to light up a dance party that doesn't come off so well anyway. Too macabre by half. (Also, why would a brilliant beautiful woman want to spend 2,000 years in the company of bad-tempered people who have no conversation to speak of?)

Incidentally, I'm a graduate of CSU. Anyone care to guess how many great jobs my diploma has landed me in the past couple of decades?

6/24/16, 7:32 PM

latheChuck said...

Quos Ego said...
I must admit I fail to see how the English and Welsh move is wise in any way : England has a population density of more than 400 inhabitants per square kilometer (and quickly growing!). The country cannot possibly feed itself in isolation.

But no one said England was going to ISOLATE itself! Norway is not an EU member, and it trades with the rest of Europe. There was plenty of trade before the Lisbon Agreement. But even more to the point, the vote seemed to turn on the issue of unlimited immigration. If the country "cannot ...feed itself" now, how will welcoming more immigrants address that predicament?

6/24/16, 7:35 PM

Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...

Coordinated Universal Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20160625T021606Z

(A) Well, I may as well express polite dissent - although some say Brexit is an exercise in political courage, I suspect that it hurts Europe (Germany, for instance, now loses a hitherto effective diplomatic counterweight). I further suspect that what hurts Europe will in the long run hurt that European nation which is the UK. I argued these points in a restrained way in my blog, a few days ago, less by outright assertion than through a short line of editorial-voice questioning.

(B) We can perhaps, however, all cheer up a little by contemplating British political comedy from the 1980s. Perhaps the wittiest thing the BBC ever did was that old series called "Yes, Minister". On this sticky day in history, we can all, regardless of our political convictions, get a laugh from the short clip called "Yes Minister — Why Britain Joined the European Union", and uploaded to YouTube on 2016-03-18 by YouTube user "Hostis Humani Generis". (Nope, that user is not me - no idea who it is: as they say in Britland, "No idea at all, actually-actually; and I'm not even lying.")

Although different people will have different surfing experiences, some MAY find that the clip can be found at URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37iHSwA1SwE. If that URL fails, one can search in the YouTube interface under the strings "Yes Minister — Why Britain Joined the European Union" and "Hostis Humani Generis".

Tom

(in Estonian diaspora, just north of Toronto in Canada)

toomaskarmo.blogspot.com

PS: I hope that I will not give too much offence if I add on a serious note that I have today received from a London friend a PDF of some "Leave" literature, a one-page flier. If this flier is indicative of the general tone of the Brexit debate, there are things to worry about. (a) The flier frames the question in almost exclusively economic terms. (b) The flier has in essence just ONE economic argument (it seems to be pitched at people who do not study issues) - that argument being that the EU costs the UK 350 GPB per week. But if we are to argue honestly, we have to say something about terms of trade - if only (I am trying to put this from the standpoint of my political opponents, the people in the Leave camp, as fairness here requires) that terms of trade are "Nothing to worry about," that the UK can "Negotiate favourable trading arrangements from outside the EU, as Norway already has," something like that. (c) The flier has a map which shows Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey in red, as candidates for membership, and additionally shows Syria and Iraq in orange (with that orange colour left unexplained in the accompanying words). The rest of Europe is in shades of grey. But the grey is not uniform. The grey is quite dark over the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Ukraine (conveying to the incautious the suggestion that Byelorussia and Ukraine are in the same current treaty position as the Baltics). The shading is lighter over western continental Europe, with Portugal virtually disappearing on my screen (while Spain and Italy are duly visible). The oddest thing of all is that while Northern Ireland is correctly visible, Eire disappears altogether, at least on my screen. Was the artist trying to make the prospective voter forget the treaty position of Eire?

PPS: No, no, no: I GENUINELY did not upload that short YouTube clip. Honest.

6/24/16, 7:44 PM

Caryn said...

Thank You, JMG. I am very much looking forward to reading your thoughts on Brexit. I was shocked at the result, really didn't think it would happen.

Reading assignment #1) I read Turgenev's "Father's And Sons", as we had a copy, I've always loved the Classical Russians and their heavy-on-the-metaphor, kitchen-sink-dramas; and it was short enough to complete in ample time. I was very surprised that within the first few pages, I found myself in completely alien territory simply with the pace and formality of the writing. I had not realized how my brain has changed to a digital processing speed. It took awhile to get into the groove of the slow, singular focus of the story. You have to go slow to catch the clues, metaphor as well as to let the scene and pace of their lives sink in. It was a wholly different mental exercise. Thank You for that!!

This week's reading assignment: As I've said before, we're in the process of moving and have now cleared out all of our books and tchatches, We're leaving in 1 1/2 weeks, so I may have to hand this on in late. I'm in the camp of commenters who have read dissenting views extensively, so it will be a challenge to find one that can repulse me for more than simply being horrifically poorly written. Even Ayn Rand, I can see where she and her fans coming from. IMHO she's wrong cherry picking scenarios to support her scenario and I often suspect just being a provocateur, but I understand the impetus of their fandom to such scenarios and philosophy. It helps that my father and one of my closest friends were at times in their lives fans and followers.
I don't think your proposing this assignment was simply to find a book that repulses us for any reason, but a point of view - expressed in a book, no? I think this would disqualify reading a book we expect will be rubbish - like "50 Shades Of Grey", (just terrible writing) or Ann Coulter, who seems to say anything weirdly provocative to stay in the news, (not likely to be genuine); but an honestly held belief that we disagree with or find grotesque.
I'm sure we have a copy of Mein Kamph in our books in the US, but I think it would serve me better to stay away from disagreeable perspectives centered on race and prejudice - as that is the blind spot we are trying to illuminate. It's often best illuminated from the side - a.k.a. from a completely different issue that can be analogous.
The only book I can remember throwing away in disgust 1/2 way through was Henry Miller's "Tropic Of Cancer" due to his strong and boorish self puffing authorial voice. He just came across as a self-important azz to me and I couldn't believe so many women were clamoring to bed him as he bloated on. Blech! ((OK so maybe I need to get a copy of it again from the library when we get home.)) Like "Lolita", I found Anais Nin ((short story, "Little Birds)"), very unsettling and squirmy, but beautifully crafted. Definitely put me in the shoes of someone I find abhorrent and expanded my empathy-muscle.

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite writers, IMHO, if you are interested in giving him a go, you might start with his magnum opus: "Blood Meridian". I've read it 4 times to delve deeper, and gotten much out of it each time. Not to delve deeper, but for different odd reasons, I ended up reading "The Road" 3 times. It did get better, I did see the hopefulness in it finally. It IS a good book, but it is not why he is considered a master or one of the most 'important' writers of the 20th Century. "Blood Meridian" is why, so I would offer: go for the gold and read it if you try anything of his. "No Country For Old Men" OTOH: is I think much 'easier' to parse and digest, therefor somewhat more enjoyable and in tune with a traditional Western paperback. A good read :)

6/24/16, 7:50 PM

Unknown said...

(Deborah Bender)

@BoysMom--Have you read At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald? It qualifies well for the first homework assignment.

This is a children's fantasy novel in the style of an extended fairy tale or fable. According to Wikipedia, it was serialized in a magazine in 1868 and published as a book in 1871. When I read it twenty or thirty years ago, a number of things stood out apart from its literary quality, which is pretty good.

The protagonist is a young boy who is very ill at the opening of the story; the text holds out no hope for him and eventually he expires. The mortality rate of children in that period was such that no young reader would have been shocked or surprised by that situation. The religious value system of the book is interesting because it is saturated by the same late Victorian Christian sensibility as Little Women, in which children are assumed to be innocent and the suffering of innocents is valorized. Yet it is also rather an openly pagan book like The Wind In the Willows; the second most important character in the book is clearly the Goddess of Death, and she is presented as a kindly and sympathetic figure. Finally, the tone of the book and the way the tale is told made it appear to me to be aimed at pre-adolescent readers roughly age nine to twelve, but the complexity of the vocabulary and sentence structure would make it a challenging read for many high school students these days.

6/24/16, 7:50 PM

Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...

Coordinated Universal Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20160625T030543Z

Woops, sorry: when I posted some minutes ago, under timestamp UTC=20160625T021606Z, that the intellectually thin pro-Brexit flier whose PDF I got today in e-mail from a London friend was costing UK membership in the EU at 350 GBP weekly, I misreported its argument: the flier in fact says that the cost is 350 million GBP weekly. I did not mean to do this. I got a bit worked up over politics, and left out the necessary word "million".

I should perhaps also have taken the opportunity to remark that at my blog, I have this week addressed the ADR discussion from around 2016-02-17, on the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Hastily,

Tom

toomaskarmo.blogspot.com

6/24/16, 8:11 PM

Caryn said...

Another difficult book to question preconceptions is Iris Chang's "The Rape Of Nanking". Horribly difficult to get through without throwing the book across the room or put it down to have a good bitter cry, but a tremendously important and enlightening book nonetheless.
Apart from that: The only thing I'm reading these days, (and there is soooo much of it!) is my facebook feed of reactions to Brexit amongst my fellow expats. None of whom know anyone who could have possibly voted Leave, as it would encumber THEM in the immigration line at the airport on their next European holiday! The very NERVE of some people! The pearl clutching and snarls of 'Racist', Xenophobic Idiots!" flying through the blogosphere...And yes the 3 pro-Leave or even moderately dissenting voices have been shot down, shut up, cursed at and expunged from the group of our enlightened, liberal progressive inclusiveness. Now, I can definitely 'empathize' as I kind of am and used to be one of them. When life is easy for 'You', it's much more comfortable and easy to ignore the concerns of anyone who is not 'You'. As much as I like to see myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Prole-Snob, I'm sure during my husband and my salad days, I must have said and done things to make my working class/military family's hair curl. I get where these fellow expats are coming from, it's just never been a defensible position.

6/24/16, 8:15 PM

Alex Blaidd said...

Well the morning after and all I can see everywhere are toys strewn all over the floor. The whining this morning is quite repugnant from the remain camp. People claiming they've lost their 'right' to live and work abroad. Young and old complaining that people over a certain age shouldn't vote and that 16 year old should be given the vote. Why not stop there I asked why not euthanise the old and give the vote to 12 year olds? I'm a bit worried some might have taken that seriously...

With regards to the assignment. Shudder. The first book that comes to mind is the god-awful God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I can't stand that man. Do I have to read it?!

@latefall - thanks for your words and for the link, I'll give that a go. Good idea to suggest non-English media. I can read Spanish so should give that a go.

@luna - I'm with you there. I can't see how we're going to avoid even further austerity, more neoliberalism and more hollowing out of our infrastructure and economy coupled with more fracking, nuclear power and GM. I sincerely hope I'm misguided. I think That Brexit is only the beginning; my current belief is because Brexit will make little difference except more of the same, I'm expecting a bigger revolt in 5 years time, and I think that's UKIPs longer gameplan and that will give them a genuine chance of election. The 16 million that voted leave, will be very angry if the UK doesn't improve in the way they think it will. Seeing as the Labour Party are disintegrating, and people will be looking to take out their anger at the Tories, UKIP will be in a strong position. go. I happen to like Jeremy Corbyn - but he's not going to win, and will be stabbed in the back at some point from within Labour. A shame because he's a euro sceptic too - but he didn't/couldn't play that card because of his party being divided. Labour will turn into the Neo-Liberal party that Blair created and the Corbynites will go elsewhere, and a large number of the working class of the party will go to UKIP.

6/25/16, 3:03 AM

Alex Blaidd said...

If I may be indulged with yet another post. Penny... dropped.

So I finally read the above article - should've done sooner as it would have helped me no end understand my own mixed feelings over the last 24 historic hours. It would have been easy to throw a tantrum like many who voted remain, but I instead decided to descend into the murky depths of trying to make sense of it all, instead of just denunciating it all. It's easy to point the finger and scream "Racist!" at the top of my lungs, but harder to try to make sense of it.

The analogy with the Victorians really helped. Makes sense. If there is no outlet for an element of human expression - 'good' or 'bad' - then it will pent up, and find a more aggressive, violent outlet at some point. That can't be avoided it seems. I'm trying to view the whole thing like I would disease. Suppress and it will come out worse, express and you'll return to greater balance.

Perhaps it's time that Britain, like many countries, needs to accept that it's got a huge amount of racism, xenophobia, and perhaps most particularly islamophobia. I come from a small city, in an area dominated by white people, with very little racial diversity, and thus know very well how much racism exists in the UK. For those brought up in a multi-racial part of the UK, it may well be shocking to them to hear such racism and/or xenophobia expressed. But then being shocked by it, and 'outlawing' it clearly doesn't make it go away.

So now that it's out in the open. As it will be soon in the Netherlands, Denmark and France. What now? How do deal with it without violence and hatred? That I have no idea of. But communication and understanding must form the basis of that.

Looking back into the mirror - It's not lost on me that with a different context - let's say Wales voting to leave the UK - my own xenophobia would come to the front - but because it's socially more acceptable I'd be 'allowed.' So if I'm going to connect with the xenophobia in others, understanding my own, is a good place to start.

And xenophobia, racism and islamophobia is only one aspect of this whole thing.

Seems like I need to read Lovelock too! Also, need to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde again.

6/25/16, 4:55 AM

trippticket said...

Cameron resigned after the vote? Or am I getting bad info?

6/25/16, 5:42 AM

trippticket said...

Never mind, here it is:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36615028

Cameron is resigning...

6/25/16, 5:46 AM

peacegarden said...

The concept of hating what we see in others reflecting something within ourselves…often something dark and scary…has given me the ability to (sometimes!) catch myself as I slide into “them vs us” thinking…the old binary trap, and searching for what it is that is making me so uncomfortable. Sometimes, I can actually see what I fear, and that gives me food for further reflection. Shades of grey start to appear where black and white once stood firm. It’s unsettling, but gratifies me to think I might be able to approach understanding the other.

My son and I were having a conversation about his father several years ago…he accused me of “making excuses” for his dad (they were estranged at the time). I explained gently that I was not making excuses, but giving reasons for the behavior, that his dad had been doing the best that he could with the tools available to him at the time. Fortunately, they are now reconciled. Not singing Kumbaya, mind you, but it gives me hope that we are capable of going beyond our fears to some sort of understanding.

That brings me to this week’s assignment: I think it will be Ayn Rand…ugh!

Peace,

Gail

6/25/16, 6:52 AM

David, by the lake said...

John-- OT, I realize, but the Brexit has just hijacked everything now. I am amazed (though I oughtn't be, after having been a reader of your blog for some years now) about casually and derisively the "common man" view is dismissed by commenters on the Left. An article will mention how the vote represented a rejection of the establishment and expert opinion in favor of "instinct and experiences" of the voters, and the comment feed repeatedly equates the latter with racism or stupidity in refusing to listen to the experts. I cannot understand the total disregard for a voter's personal experience of an economy.

6/25/16, 7:15 AM

onething said...

"Do climate change skeptic books count for this assignment?"

Of course, and may I suggest Heaven and Earth.

6/25/16, 8:00 AM

James Hick said...

Another Brexit voter here.

I'm actually starting to think it would have been better for Remain to have won by a very small margin instead. If Britain had remained in the EU and business continued as normal I think it would have led to a much stronger leave vote in the end as our economy continued to slide into the post peak-oil, neo-liberal abyss. Now that we're out basically anything bad that happens can (and probably will) be attributed to our not being in the EU.

As is stands the MSM and social media already seem to be preparing the way for another referendum either to cancel this one or to rejoin a few years down the line. I notice the term "Bregret" is already being tossed about and there seems to be a myth already formulating that a lot of the people that voted to leave didn't actually think it would happen and would change their minds if they did it again.

Aside from an on-line petition for a second referendum there's also, interestingly enough, another for London to declare independence from the UK and rejoin the EU. The North of England (where I live) is increasingly being stereotyped in the same way as the South of the US as being mainly white, poor, uneducated, ignorant of the wider world and more or less flat-out racist.

I think a lot will depend on if Jeremy Corbyn survives the no-confidence vote already tabled against him for next week. If the Labour party manage to put a "Blairite" centrist back in charge then there's a fair chance the next election in 2020 will be a re-run of Thursday. That is, I suppose, depending if the EU still exists at that time...

6/25/16, 8:19 AM

James Hick said...

Also, as an aside, a good way of summing up the attitude of the "Remain" group:

http://www.thenational.scot/news/at-a-muddy-glastonbury-blur-star-damon-albarn-bemoans-the-failure-of-democracy.19238?utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_term=Autofeed#link_time=1466858530

I know pop stars tend to be arrogant but...wow. :)

6/25/16, 8:21 AM

. said...

An update from the trenches: The Brexit debate has been like a bomb going off this side of the pond and I think few people expected it to be. The level of acrimony is something I've never seen before.

The Remainers have been over generalizing about the motives of the Leavers and using guilt by association and every ad hominem known -calling them racists/fascists/UKIP supporters, xenophobes, irrationally fearful, bigots, Nigel Farage fans, Nazis - they tend to use such terms interchangeably. Black campaigners for Leave have been physically attacked by white middle class people who believe they're 'fighting fascism'.

The Leavers (on the left) have been calling Remainers neoliberal lackeys, anti-democratic, elitist snobs, traitors to the working class, 'so called socialists', bourgeouis sell outs etc. The debate has been and remains in the gutter.

Friendships are being severed all over the place because of this, families are falling out with each other. It's really unprecedented in my admittedly short, say, 15 years of involvement in politics.

Interestingly, people I know who have never had the slightest interest in politics are suddenly engaging with it on social media. The combination of Orlando and then Brexit seems to have pushed them into it. I would once have said that's a good thing but understandably they're joining an already toxic conversation and aren't improving it.

One good thing is that it might just possibly force a long overdue discussion within liberalism and the left about racism, immigration and Islam - the unmentionables. It's starting to come to the attention of the mainstream left that what was once a far left, minority position - No Borders - has become accepted as part of the definition of racism even among people who've never heard of the concept in its pure form and would be utterly opposed to it as a short term goal if they did understand it. Some more mainstream liberals/lefties are starting to notice that they don't quite know how that happened and are not sure of the wisdom of it.

The suppression of that discussion is, I think, what's behind the utter vitriol. But I fear that this is headed for violence if people can't develop the restraint to step back from the personal attacks. I'm trying to push both sides towards at least having some manners but really I think it's a lost cause. They agree with me, then half an hour later they throw another over-generalized ad hominem out there and the bitterness on the receiving end steps up another invisible notch. And these are former friends and comrades shouting fascist at each other. People are very emotional about it. Half the UK population pretty much calling the other half names. And both sides are guilty of it. The rifts won't heal quickly, if at all. I'm thinking of retirement in eastern Europe.

6/25/16, 8:48 AM

. said...

I should probably explain that many of the Remainers believed that they were protecting immigrants within the UK by voting Remain. They feared that leaving will result in minorities being deported or targeted as scapegoats for austerity or whatever. They also argued that voting Leave was opportunistic and populist rather than principled and that a Leave vote would ‘legitimize’ and strengthen the nationalists, racists and the far right (by which they mean UKIP which is certainly not a fascist party whatever it is).

‘Legitimize’ is a favourite term for some reason although it’s surprisingly hard to pin down what it really means. I suspect that the underlying idea is that the plebs will suppress their innate racism as long as their leaders make clear that it’s socially unacceptable.

JMG, I know you point out that many of the elite benefit from current immigration policies and no doubt that’s behind much of this. But I know for a fact that many activists genuinely believe that borders are racist – end of story – and many of them aren’t well paid and don’t really personally benefit from cheap migrant labour. They sincerely feel they’re fighting courageously against fascism and on the side of the persecuted.

I think it’s partly a quirk of European history, as in the Nazis, that racism is considered to be the ultimate evil and that's it's mixed up with religious bigotry. (Of course it’s also seen as far right which they actually know is inaccurate but that’s a slightly separate issue.) It also seems to be fed by American cultural imperialism funnily enough. American 'progressive' activists and academics have had quite an influence over here and typically have tended to ignore the utterly different context of racism, nationalism and fascism in Europe as compared to the US. The anti-globalization movement of the early 2000's seems to have been the seed of that incoherence.

But I find the emotional power of the word racism really extraordinary given the variety of human evil in the world. It makes me think there’s something deeper going on which I don’t quite understand.

Mallow.

6/25/16, 9:13 AM

sgage said...

@ onething:

"If I read something offensive there ought to be some redeeming value in it."

The redeeming value (or one of them) is that you examine your reactions and learn something about yourself...

6/25/16, 9:50 AM

Emmanuel Goldstein said...

Homework #2 - Book Report; Professor Wilmess Must Die by Paul Rader. Dial Press, 1969. In this book, a radical student on a California campus convinces his girlfriend to seduce a college professor. They murder him in a way that embarrasses the college.
After reading it, I could not understand why anyone would write a book like this. Professor Wilmess was not doing anything to deserve the attentions of radical students. They apparently just decide to murder him, possibly as a way to destroy the university.
Character point of view; If I was convinced that something vast and evil had to be destroyed right now, I might take drastic action like that. OTOH, old as I am, if I was that convinced I might suspect that I did not know the whole story and try to flesh out some details.
Author Point of View; Why did he write this? It is a more interesting question than the book itself. I could find no information about author "Paul Rader." There was a New York Times Book Review of the book (by Evan Hill, NYT 22 June 1969, pg BR32) behind a pay wall. The few free viewable lines indicate that the reviewer thought it was a satire, and that Rader had written other books, but I could not find any mention of them online.
The name "Paul Rader" was shared by the first 'radio preacher' Christian evangelist. He died in 1938, and among other things wrote a book on the evils of Hollywood called "Big Bug." Its possible that this could be a satire of Big Bug, but I could find no reviews of its content. The other Paul Rader was related to the first one, and is apparently a well-known figure in the Salvation Army, who served as its president from 1994 to 1999 and may still be alive. It seems unlikely that he wrote this book. At least it is not mentioned in his online biographies.
My best guess is that "Paul Rader" may be a pseudonym for someone who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, possibly a relative of the Raders or family friend, who is reacting in some way to that social environment. It would be interesting to see how a Salvation Army member would react to the book's content--But then again, I would not wish this one on anybody...

6/25/16, 10:47 AM

onething said...

The Communist Manifesto - I have a copy and read about 20 pages in. Found it quite good. Mein Kampf I read when I was about 14 because I thought I ought to, but I remember nothing, no impression. Probably was too young.

I'm balking at this assignment in a way. I will not read Ayn Rand because I finally got curious enough to do a bit of research on her and I am satisfied that she was a sociopath, and there's no point in reading something offensive just for the sake of it.

I can always turn to the Old Testament if nothing else, but I think the Left Behind book might be the ticket. However, it is a series. I hope each book stands alone more or less.

6/25/16, 10:52 AM

onething said...

"re Brexit: Would you call it a victory for the contraneoantidisestablishmentarianists?"

I believe a gold star is in order, sir!

6/25/16, 10:58 AM

Aaron Lehmer said...

Hey JMG,

Here's my latest Space Bats entry, The Golden Gate Barrage:
https://aglehmer.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/the-golden-gate-barrage-part-i

The story takes place about 50 years from now in the San Francisco Bay Area, when the Golden Gate Bridge has been eclipsed by a giant dam and lock system called "Goldilocks," designed to hold back the rising seas and provide wave energy to the region. It's the story of a young woman whose family was displaced by real estate swindlers who took advantage of floodwater fears, and whose younger brother dies from an oil refinery blast, prompting her to join the growing local resistance.

It's posted in three parts on my blog since that works better for longer stories (as I know you can appreciate). Thanks again for the opportunity!

- Aaron Lehmer-Chang, Oakland

6/25/16, 11:28 AM

Hereward said...

I'd also like to get my two-cents worth in about Brexit, and am very much looking forward to your take on the topic.

Today, I wrote an essay to a British colleague who was beside himself with grief over the Brexit vote, which I have reproduced here. If you find some of your ideas coming back to you, please take that as a compliment! Also, the 'Peak Blighty' referred to by Gill did remind me of Retrotopia. Perhaps that is equivalent to 'Peak Uncle Sam' or 'Peak American Apple Pie', or some such like. I think it would be great if you could address Gill's points from an American perspective, pay wall permitting. Please also excuse the last paragraph, which is a bit of a cop out, simply because not everyone who has been exposed to your way of thinking can handle the idea of the end of 'progress.'

--

This essay is a reaction to an article in The Times yesterday by A. A. Gill.
In it, he puts the blame for Brexit fairly and squarely at the feet of Little Englanders. The article is behind a pay wall, but to give you a taste, I have extracted one paragraph.

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

It is a nice, fun article and these "Little Englanders" he talks about certainly exist (as I am sure their equivalents exist in every country), but this is only a small part of the story. In addition, at the end of the article, the author undermines his own argument by suggesting that following a victory for leave, the UK will somehow be cut off from everything great about Europe (the Renaissance, baroque, rococo etc.) as if the whole island will be magically towed away to its new mooring off the coast of Maine. So who is the Little Englander now? He even recognises this, hence the attempt to redeem himself with the last sentence about library tickets.

To my mind, in the run-up to the referendum, the UK was roughly split into three groups: right-wing leave, right-wing remain and left-wing remain. In fact, left-wing leave also existed but the group was small enough that I can afford to ignore it in this analysis.

6/25/16, 11:36 AM

Hereward said...

continued...

RWL consisted of, among others, yes, Little Englanders and xenophobes, but this is not the whole cast. Each of those types in the RWL camp was matched by those in the LWR camp who have a mortgage or who work for an export company etc., who do not like the EU but were worried by the potential impact on their finances.

RWR is the establishment and all those who, lemming-like, follow the government no matter what. Paradoxically, their antithesis was the combined groups of RWL and LWR. Yes, you read that right, 'combined' since the one thing both agreed about was that they do not like the way that they are being governed. The difference was who they thought was responsible for the poor governance: RWL blamed the EU and LWR blamed the Tories. This gets to the heart of what is happening today and that is disillusionment of the wider populace with the establishment, not just in England, but throughout the Western World.

On the one hand, this is a crisis of the establishment's own making; following the banking crisis in 2007/8 taxpayers everywhere were held to ransom by, and ultimately obliged to bail out, the fat cats as required by governments. So far so bad, but the mistake they then exacerbated was to let so few banks fail and not to jail those responsible for ripping everyone off by several trillion.

The EU/ECB made, and continues to make, the exact same errors. The whole of the EU and the eurozone countries in particular, continue to struggle economically. People are migrating through the EU, not because they want to experience life on the other side of the border, but because there are no jobs for them where they come from. Meantime, there is a veritable brain-drain on-going from the ClubMed countries to Germany, the UK and other northern countries. This is economically beneficial for the northern countries but comes at a price of worsening conditions in the south. Without a practical way to transfer wealth from north to south, this problem will only get worse. Meantime, though, the EC only comes with platitudes that things are looking up. In reality they are waiting for a miracle.

For a case study in how it should have been handled, look no further than Iceland.

Long before all of that, though, in the UK, Tony Belongs-Behind-Bars Blair deceived parliament into agreeing to attack Saddam Hussein in Iraq. According to polls at the time, the British public opposed this action by an unheard of 83%. Britain's biggest peace-time demonstration ever, totalling three million people, descended on London to persuade the government to back down. Blair ignored all, and the rest, as they say, is history. The point, though, was very clearly made to the British public: that their government was not listening to them and not acting in their best interests.

6/25/16, 11:37 AM

Hereward said...

continued...

In 2004, and in one fell swoop, the EU admitted ten relatively poor new countries to the union without so much as a 'by your leave' from even the other governments, let alone the citizens of the EU. The infamous immigration problems in the UK and other countries started from that point. Apparently nobody within the EC stopped to think about the consequences of introducing so many new and relatively poor countries in one go. The desire of the EC elite to expand the borders as quickly as possible over-rode all other considerations. This includes the latest misadventure of doing the US's and NATO's bidding of pulling the Ukraine out of Russia's orbit. Something similar could be said about the Syrian disaster which has led to the EU being flooded by refugees. This has all been wonderfully mishandled by the EC and, as a point of note, the 'new' countries have been the first to put back their borders and not accept any of these refugees.

Summarising these points, the British government has not been listening to its citizens and neither has the EC been paying attention to the concerns of the people of the EU. The establishment has lost touch with the populace. Any student of history will tell you that this is a very important marker on the way that leads inexorably to revolution.

In short, Brexit is just a signpost on the way to the beginning of the end. The elite ignore this at their peril.

Stepping back now to put this all into a much wider context we can see the underlying issue. Over the last quarter of a millennium, since the start of the Industrial Revolution (which began in England, ironically enough) life in general has been improving, with better health, better housing, longer lifespans etc., etc. It has been 'getting better' for so long now, we all believe that this is normal, that progress is an ever-upward arc. It is not. Progress i.e. 'moving forward' is a circle. We have just completed the upward part of that circle and are currently at the flatish area at the top. The future, I am afraid to have to tell you, is back down along a similar arc. What we are seeing in this vote, Trump and Sanders in the US, Marine Le Pen in France and all the others, is the start of a generalised landscape of increasing troubles throughout the West.

Is it all doom and gloom, though? In the relatively short term, it does not have to be. Careers can be followed, families raised and fortunes made, but gradually this will get more and more difficult against a backdrop of increasingly restive times.

6/25/16, 11:38 AM

Scotlyn said...

This assignment is pointing me towards the book on the theology of play written by my father... we love each other very much and have a long running argument going on since I was a teenager, where we each say things that makes the other one want to throw things...

6/25/16, 12:02 PM

goedeck said...

Trump is the object of "shadow projection"; Jung would be a field day. The annoying New Yorker is like a in-your-face demonstration of what the haters hate about their own selfishness and prodigious lifestyle. He brings up the debt, damn it, and the bubble, and the wars, and resentment abroad ; ahhh make it stop!

6/25/16, 1:54 PM

David from Normandy said...

@Alex Blaidd
Thank you for your message, I am french and I embrace it wholeheartedly.
In french we have a saying "choisir entre la peste et le choléra", choosing between plague and cholera.
It feels like every vote now belongs to that category.

6/25/16, 2:36 PM

Cherokee Organics said...

Hi JMG,

I just wanted to chuck in an outsiders observation of the BREXIT result business. I observed that in the local newspapers they provided a helpful map of the country which displayed which parts voted to stay and which voted to leave. What Blind Freddy could see from that map was that if you were in London, then clearly the majority of people wanted to stay. If you were outside of London, then the majority of people expressed their intentions to leave. What this indicates to Blind Freddy is that the benefits of staying within the EU were to be gained if you were living within the boundaries of London, whilst the costs of staying within the EU were borne by people living outside of the boundaries of London.

Now, we've often discussed over the years the sheer lack of a national vision and I believe that this referendum vote is expressing that lack of a national vision in the real world.

And also, the people who are now calling for another referendum in the wake of the result sound to my ears like school children who have lost some game chanting: Best, two of three - just to stay in the game! (That would make for a catchy good blog title too!!!) Hehe.

My gut feeling is that what they are actually saying is: I've got mine, matey! Who cares about you lot... And I believe that such thoughts are a result of the sort of social policies that we have been pursuing with such abandon over the past couple of decades.

The thing that gets me about the EU, is that if other countries sit around inflicting pain on member countries, then sooner or later your lucky numbers will turn up, it is only a matter of time.

Which reminds me that at the Green Wizards meeting yesterday someone asked me whether I believed that fuel would remain cheap into the future. It was a great discussion, and I said that yes, I believe that it will and I then walked them through one of the recent games that went on down here so as to keep fuel prices low for the consumer which has ended up with a less resilient system. They looked a bit sceptical so I didn't quite finish, but what I wanted to add was that if fuel was cheap at the pump, but there was 60% unemployment, then you can still say that fuel is cheap, but you just won't be able to pay for it. And that is how I see the future, where less people are within the circle of wealth. Well, that is the general outcome of the policies that we are pursuing and I believe that the BREXIT result speaks to that level of unhappiness in that community. But the EU is also expressing that predicament on a much bigger basis. Certainly if you were in Greece you'd be feeling it even though fuel was relatively cheap.

Cheers

Chris

6/25/16, 5:40 PM

Kevin Warner said...

OK, since the Brexit vote has been brought up. I guess that I will chip in with a few observations. To me, it all comes down to that damn essay on the reason for the rise of Donald Trump posted by JMG a few weeks ago, an essay that has been much on my mind. This essay may have been in an American context but believe me, this sort of stuff is going on everywhere. Over at http://russia-insider.com/en/british-vote-isnt-against-europe/ri15189 there is a map on how the vote went by area. As you can see, the enclaves of the remain vote were the wealthier regions of Britain, particularly London. If you had money, you voted Remain, if you did not, you voted Out. Virtually salary versus wage earners.
Now here is the thing. There is an article called "A portrait of Europe’s white working class" at https://next.ft.com/content/4139381a-f1bb-11e3-a2da-00144feabdc0 and I am willing to bet that these people would have voted for Brexit. They are real communities who know what has been done to them and why. Not for nothing did these people sing 'Ding-Dong-the witch-is-dead' at Margaret Thatcher's funeral.
Do the people in the wealthier areas have the equivalent sort of communities? Or mostly shared vested interests. Doubt that? Then consider this - if say Leeds became the financial center of Britain would these people stay in London or would they make the move to Leeds? About 10% of London are from the EU and more are from the rest of England chasing opportunities that they can. They do not care about the rest of Britain. But if you are only talking to each other, you are really only in an echo chamber.
This was in some ways, I think, a repeat of the British elections of last year when the Labour party there were nearly annihilated simply because the wealthier parts were only talking to each other and not to anyone in the rest of Britain. An article at http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/election-2015-social-democracy-is-dead.-dont-mourn/16955 has a map showing how Britain voted which is eerily like the map of how the Brexit vote went. Even here in Australia, I noted on the news before the Brexit vote that the only ordinary voters they were interviewing were from Poland or Estonia or Spain who had settled in London. I saw no interviews with people that lived in, say, England. And now those voters who voted Out are being reviled as racists (the trump card?), sewer scum, or ignorant being uneducated. Imaging that! They have been cutting back on education to people for decades and now claim that these people are uneducated!
I cannot recommend enough the video embedded in the page at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/87726.html which is an interview with Mark Blyth, a Scottish economics professor at Brown University in the US. What he had to say about the Scots rejoining the EU were jolting but at the end of the interview he states what the eventual outcome will be unless change is made. He flat out says that the Hamptons, being low-lying beaches, are not a defensible position!

6/25/16, 6:10 PM

Justin said...

Hereward, I agree with you that a lot of the general angst is a result of the end of growth. Without mass migration (from poor parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa) the charade probably could have kept going a couple more years in the UK, Scandinavia, France and Germany. However, the one issue that the media-politician-celebrity complex won't touch is that despite the horror stories they told about Brexit, a substantial part of the country voted against it.

What is even more bizzare, is that black bloc / leftist / who knows protesters are currently rioting in favor of the EU... I thought those types were against hierarchy and for self-determination?

Even though I have nothing to to do with the UK - waking up to news of Brexit on Friday felt sublime - and I wish Nigel Farage the best - it's been a long fight for him. I think that David Cameron deserves some respect for his conduct after the news as well - this Onion article sums it up:

http://www.theonion.com/article/americans-confused-system-government-which-leader--53156

I do hope for everyone's sake that the elite in the UK demonstrate the same level of dignity and honour in the face of defeat that Cameron did.

6/25/16, 6:10 PM

David, by the lake said...

John--

Quick note to let you know that my copy of The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth arrived this morning and was completed a few minutes ago. I will never see rationalism the same way again.

6/25/16, 6:19 PM

Justin said...

Oh, and here's a fantastic exchange between Nigel Farage and a radio host:

Host: "Nigel, President Obama came over on the request of Cameron, and he said if you break off you're going to go to back of the bus, almost this quasi-threat. Donald Trump is in Scotland today, he said we're going to make a deal very quickly. You've been in the Hustings for a year, and you've seen this kind of working and middle class revolt - what lessons do you think you can learn from this for America?

Nigel: "Yes. Don't threaten people repeatedly. If you do, in the end they cry wolf. They just stop believing you. We had that from our politicians and the chancellor of the exchequer - if you vote this way, you'll be poorer, there'll be war --"

Host: "You mean this project fear, this thing where the establishment was saying you'll have world war three, you'll have an economic depression all of that -- "

Nigel: "Yes, project fear, or in the end I think, when Obama came, it was virtually project threat - threatening people too much actually insults their intelligence - and the lesson from the Obama visit is even more fascinating - here's the most powerful man in the world, coming from a country that we have always had a huge, high regard for, and I saw Obama saying what he said, and a lot of people in Britain said "How dare the American president come here and tell us what to do" - and it backfired and I think we got an Obama Brexit bounce because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and how to vote.

Keep an eye on Nigel - fate likely has quite a lot in store for him.

6/25/16, 6:34 PM

Peter VE said...

@Jasmine: you wrote “Not all Remainers are rich sociopathic neoliberals who invade other countries and cause hundreds and thousands of deaths, but most rich sociopathic neoliberals will vote Remain tomorrow”. I paraphrased it slightly (changed tenses) as my battle cry against the masses of acquaintances who decried the vote for Brexit. It worked well: several people changed their attitude to neutral after salvos back and forth. One of the great pleasures of TAR is the quality of writing by the commenters, and so I want to thank you for helping me.
I've started Mein Kampf. So far he's gotten to complaining about how strict his father was, and how he wanted to be an artist, and could have been an artist if his father had just let him study art. Perhaps we can blame the Holocaust on Hitler pere? I suspect the swing of Germany to nationalism was in the cards, but it could well have been the inward fascism of Spain, or the puffed up Imperialism of Italy.

6/25/16, 8:43 PM

LewisLucanBooks said...

@ Emmanuel Goldstein - I don't know how old you are, where you live or what you remember about the 1960s. But if you Google "1960s Campus Unrest" and read a couple of entries, you'll get a feel for the tenor of the times and how books like the one you mentioned could get published.

As I remember, Dial Press catered to the college and university crowd, with books such as this. Most college and university bookstores carried a full line of the Dial Press. Lew

PS: Not a Dial book, but "The Strawberry Statement" by James S. Kunen is a pretty good snapshot of the same era ... from one point of view.

6/25/16, 8:48 PM

W. B. Jorgenson said...

Hi all, here is my contribution to the spacebats challenge:

http://allthenamesicanthinkofaretaken.blogspot.ca/2016/06/a-heros-tale.html

I hope (some of) you like it!

I also have to say that for the homework assigned I'm going to reread the God Delusion again, given the radical change of my view point since the last time I read it, a few years ago, when I was very much an atheist. I did use it for a religion paper, but I didn't read it, I just used my knowledge of the book to get to the parts I need.

On the Brexit issue, I have the disadvantage of being a white male, so whenever I even try to say "it's not all racism," I'm accused of being another bigot. Given there's no response that will convince people I'm not, I'm sitting this one out. It's still really weird though, that even "it's not all racism" is so controversial. Surely there can be other reasons to dislike the EU than racism, but apparently not. That fact on its own gives me pause.

It's also funny that I called it, nearly everyone I mentioned it to said that it would never happen, and yet so many people still dismiss my predictions as crazy and irrelevant.

6/25/16, 10:03 PM

I Janas said...

Gah - what a nice assignement.
At first I thought it should be a Lovecraft book for me: as a teenager I started to read a Lovecraft book and then encountered a Horror that left only stones where it oozed eating up all live underneath it.
That really shocked me and I couldn´t read further, also staying way away from Lovecraft until now.
But I think it should rather be a Rosenberg or indeed Mein Kampf.

Sigh, and thank you for challenging challenges.

6/26/16, 5:36 AM

Chris Travers said...

A lot to think about in this post. Thanks. This is a high quality blog and very provocative as always.

This equal and opposite reaction strikes me something Phillip Blond said at one point, that globalization was driving deglobalization. I cannot help but think that the whole global political shift going on (from Liberalism/Neoliberalism as the center to nationalist communitarianism). Brexit, Trump, Sanders, Dansk Folkepartie, Syriza, etc are all a part of this.

What does this mean for the entirely uncompromising position of the current left on all culture war issues? Will we see a stark reversal in abortion jurisprudence and policy? Is it not a better thing for communities to come together and solve joint problems rather than trying to force shiny abstractions on everyone? It seems to me that the culture wars themselves will do little other than make everyone on both sides victims if you are right.

Regarding the last assignment, I revisited Beowulf, which was interesting in part because the epic is told from a Christian perspective and I noticed a lot of things that I had missed before. I am really not sure what to read this time since I am very, very difficult to offend. Maybe I will read a hymnal ;-)

6/26/16, 6:18 AM

Lynnet said...

For assignment #1, I read Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. Short, and such fun, so I continued with Master of Ballantrae, then Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Treasure Island. That man could spin a tale! I just couldn't put any of them down. Many of them were based 100 years before his time, in 1750s Scotland. Social differences I noticed were a tendency to unthinkingly honor class distinctions of the time. And women were under the thumb of their fathers, then their husbands. Few women in the stories actually, and none with any autonomy.

For assignment #2, either Ayn Rand or the Secret. I think the latter will provoke a strong desire for book-throwing!

6/26/16, 6:41 AM

Owen said...

Re: Brexit

Ugh, politics is so depressing. To get a teeny bit cynical, looking at the map of the UK and to see where voting for what, you can see who doesn't like who, more than whether or not they think the EU has good policies. It's like looking at a map of gang turfs.

London voted for remain, so that means all the country bumpkins who don't like Londoners voted leave. Most of Britain wants to leave, so naturally all of Scotland votes remain, just because they're sore over losing their independence. And Northern Ireland? Euros to sausage rolls, that the leave parts of N Ireland are all, all protestant. So guess what? All the catholics vote remain.

But it does indicate that Globalization(tm) isn't benefiting everyone equally, and those that were never cut into the deals made have finally figured this out and are pissed off enough to find common cause. Why they couldn't have figured this out sooner, escapes me. Why does it take so long for people to figure these things out?

I guess I'm guilty of this whole duality thing too - Brexit to me, is pissing off the right sort of people, and yeah, I'll be honest - that's enough for me to be in favor of it, even though I don't really have a stake in the governance of the UK.

6/26/16, 6:55 AM

Owen said...

A few more comments, re: Brexit

Right and Left issues seem to be becoming more and more quaint by the day, part of a past that isn't quite relevant anymore.

The new duality that seems to be taking its place is Nationalism vs. Globalism.

One more thing. To call someone a Globalist is becoming almost like calling someone a racist, it's becoming a badge of shame and something that someone wants to hide from the public.

Fun times. Welcome to the 21st century.

6/26/16, 7:01 AM

Owen said...

re: Trump

I think all you would get from a Trump presidency is what you got from substantially from Reagan - gridlock.

The right wingers like to remember his presidency with rose colored glasses and the left likes to revile him as the devil, but what I remember most about Reagan is how he was ALWAYS whining about how he couldn't get anything done because of that dratted Congress.

I think you would see him isolated at the top and kept out of the loop while the bureaucracy was remote piloted by the Deep State.

6/26/16, 7:04 AM

Matt said...

Like luna, I cannot agree with Grebulocities that Brexit shows a failing of propaganda. I see it more as the undermining of authority, of trusting in experts and 'your betters'. The Leave campaign was at least as 'propagandist' as Remain, and with the support of the main agenda-setters in the UK, the tabloid press.

I was a reluctant Remainer. In other circumstances I can imagine having voted to leave, but I couldn't stomach the campaign's pandering to, or even whipping up of, hostility to immigrants. I was also troubled - as I am still - by the seeming promises being made around immigration and increased spending that Leave's leaders would have no appetite or power to deliver. Already it's "we never said there would be *less* immigration", "it was a mistake to promise to spend extra money on the NHS", "there's no rush to start the exit negotiations" etc.

The tragedy is that the campaign was won on the pain of the wage class, who have got the dirty end of the stick for the last generation or more, but every indication is they will continue to the get the worst of any bad effects that come from leaving (or from staying, for that matter!). The destruction of the British labour movement - promoted heartily by all of the high profile Leave spokespeople - makes it seem almost inevitable that it will pan out this way.

I expect the next couple of years to be consumed by lots of effort being poured into negotiations and separation whilst Farage chips away with an escalating anti-immigrant agenda. And any conversation about resource depletion, the malfunctioning economy and climate change will be pushed even further into the background.

My two penn'orth. Looking forward to your post JMG.

Matt

6/26/16, 8:28 AM

Allexis Weetman said...

Couplo off topic data points, fema are planning for a ten year food shortage beginning 2020:

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/fema-contractor-predicts-social-unrest-caused-by-395-food-price-spikes

Trams are coming back:

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/sweden-is-testing-an-electric-road-for-trucks

6/26/16, 9:32 AM

Phil Harris said...

JMG & all
British Brexit referndum.
This man gets it for the 'natives' on the reservations, and so apparently does the American he quotes.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/brexit-vote-poor-elite

Ian Jack is only a few years younger than me, and his experience certainly squares with mine over the last 35 years. But please note the very significant difference in outcome between Scotland and England & Wales. And with a different twist, note the result in Northern Ireland where the Catholic Irish who are British subjects there, are complaining like mad about the 'English' result.

I feel though that both 'sides' - if the distinction is real- of the rather sinister elites we have here in England (including the plutocrats who backed Brexit's 'leave EU' propaganda) have ploys still in plenty. Cameron probably was not the worst of them. I am pretty sure that further sections of the population will be sacrificed as needed and/or set one against another. BAU? Well ... every challenge is an opportunity, eh?

best
Phil H

6/26/16, 10:18 AM

Varun Bhaskar said...

Archdruid,

Climate change denial It's not going to fill me with smugness as much as burning rage.

Regards,

Varun

6/26/16, 11:04 AM

Unknown said...

Re: Brexit and some themes of this blog (relocalization by choice or force, for one):
"Hell Is Other Britons"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/hell-is-other-britons.html
Familiar as this opinion is, I was still kind of startled by this.
Jonathan.

6/26/16, 11:05 AM

bedroom-magick said...

I also look forward to you analysis. I suspect you may cover this but i'm not sure my fellow brits were very 'clever' in voting for this. Its becoming apparent that many did so on entirely false or over simplified claims. Still the result is as it is - and may stand a chance of helping the crumbling european infrastructure collapse early and void the rush???

6/26/16, 1:50 PM

alex carter said...

Here's something that might help a few of us fulfill our homework assignment:

http://www.tradworker.org

I found these people when I was looking for news on today's dust-up between some neo-Nazis and anti-fascists in Sacramento.

I actually agree with quite a bit of what they say; they're pretty close to the "NPI" (Nationalist, Protectionist, Isolationist) party I dream of, but there are things with which I vehemently differ. In my dream party, gay is OK, and so's a woman's right to choose, although, health care and adoption services might be so good that, as Margaret Sanger originally said, abortion would be safe, legal, and rare.

In short, this party looks an awful lot like a confluence between JMG's theoretical party with young adults doing public service wearing green shirts and black slacks, and what the mass of the American public is in favor of. And their web page is better done than that of many more "respectable" groups. That's what's kind of scary - typically right-wing groups' sits have been laughable. Not this one. And, hilariously, is that a pitchfork in the center of their symbol?

6/26/16, 2:04 PM

alex carter said...

https://www.starship.xyz/for-businesses/

Another bit of humor for the "singularity" crowd .... this is better than some teenagers/young adults on bikes how?

Again I've got to say: If we're in a Depression, where are the bikes and the mopeds? The 1970s saw a ton of mopeds on the roads, motorcycles with an emphasis on small ones like 250's and 125's, and a lot of bicycles.

Is is perhaps that people older than I am, who grew up fixing their own flat tires, oiling their own chains, doing their own work on relatively simple machines since they were little kids (hey at least by age 5 or so we'd been taught by a bigger kid how to put playing cards in the spokes, fastened with a clothes pin, to make our tricycles mae a "motor" sound) react to energy-drouth by "regressing" to simpler, easier-to-maintain, more efficient machines, while people raised by Nintendo tend to clamor for robots?

6/26/16, 2:09 PM

Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...

Coordinated Universal Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20160626T220346Z

(1) I have now received from London "further and better particulars", as Britland lawyers possibly say, for that pro-Brexit flier to which I referred in ADR blog postings timestamped by my workstation 20160625T021606Z and 20160625T030543Z (or,in the less satisfactory formalism imposed by the ADR server, "6/24/16, 7:44 PM" and "6/24/16, 8:11 PM"). I now learn that the flier is printed on two sides, of which I had seen only one when when I previously posted.

Although the other side does not undo the "desinformatsiya" inflicted by the tendentious map which I previously analyzed, it does do something to meet my previous complaint regarding incomplete discussion.

I quote enough from this now-inspected PDF side to show the arguments deployed, using boldface here on JMG's ADR:

Over a quarter of a million people migrate to the UK from the EU every year.

The EU is expanding to include: Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey.

The European Union has changed enormously since the UK joined the 'Common Market' in 1973.

EU law overrules UK law.

The EU costs us over 350 million pounds a week.

You don't have to be a member of the EU to trade with it.

While we're in the EU, the UK isn't allowed to negotiate our own trade deals.

There are risks in voting either way.

Each of these bullet points is printed with a bit of amplification, which in the interests of brevity rather than of censorship I here omit. The amplifications do not probe deeply. Anyone wishing to see them should e-mail me privately, at which point I can e-mail in response the entire PDF.

I do not, in herewith posting these "further and better particulars", mean to imply that I accept the bullet points or their amplifications. I remain pro-Remain. And I continue writing in a timid and low-key way as an Estonian national, not as a British national.

(2) In reading and reading on this UK crisis today, I have come across a blogger, David Allen Green, with the general depth and clarity of JMG, but with a special background in law. I shall have to continue following Mr Green in future: http://jackofkent.com/. Mr Green has a pleasingly skeptical stance regarding both Brussels and Westminster. He is a former legal correspondent of the New Statesman, and the winner of a UK 2013 national award as "mainstream media blogger". Outside journalism, Mr Green was instructing appeal solicitor in the "Twitter Joke Trial" case (Chambers v Director of Public Prosecutions 2012; a conviction for injudicious Twitter reference to airport terrorism was overturned on appeal, in what seems a victory for free speech, for which Mr Green can take some credit).

One likes the sound of this - "Ah yes, time to get a cuppa and read some blogs, time to drink more loose-leaf 'English Breakfast' and read Greer and Green; yes, time for tea with G&G."

Tom

http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com

Toomas(dot)Karmo(at)gmail(dot)com

in Estonian diaspora, approx 20 km north of downtown Toronto in Canada

6/26/16, 3:06 PM

Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...

Coordinated Universal Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20160626T225603Z

Full regional implications of Brexit vote are accurately highlighted, in whole or in reasonable part, by at least two ADR commenters, namely Owen ("6/26/16, 6:55 AM") and Phil Harris ("6/26/16, 10:18 AM"). Thank you for this.

Appropriately detailed stats, with maps, are at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028.

To reiterate, reinforce, and amplify Owen and Phil Harris, I remark herewith that following three key regional points emerge from this BBC coverage:

(1) Within London, East End voted "Leave", contrary to the rest of London (thereby perhaps confirming suggestion of various ADR commenters that the poorer voters have tended to be more kindly disposed to "Leave": East End has, at least historically, been poor).

(2) All Scotland districts voted "Remain" (a development which is this weekend triggering calls for what is being called "IndyRef2", the argument being that Scotland now faces prospect of being taken out of EU against its will).

(3) Northern Ireland voted "Remain" overall, with some districts voting "Leave" (a development which is this weekend triggering some questioning on NI role in UK, with some asking whether there might now a referendum on the question of detaching NI from UK and instead attaching it instead to Eire, thereby reuniting Ireland; I would suggest here that ultimate NI reaction to 2016-06-23 referendum is liable to depend in part on ultimate Scottish reaction to 2016-06-23 referendum).

Sincerely,

Tom

http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com

6/26/16, 4:14 PM

Mon Seul Desir said...

Peter VE

If you are reading Mein Kampf, I would advise you to check up Heinrich Class, If I were Kaiser, published in 1912. Class was the president of the PanGerman League and the program he laid out prefigures that of the Nazis, at the time Hitler was an aspiring Viennese artist with little political ambitions.

It was men like Class and his followers, men of wealth and power who gave hitler and the Nazis their program and greased their way to power because they felt this would advance their goals. They [ the Pangermanists ] all of them members of the upper middle class elites, had already drawn up their project for a new german century at a time Hitler was a complete unknown.

Hitler was simply a convenient alibi for these elitists, to hide their responsibility

6/26/16, 5:09 PM

Bob Brown said...

JMG - Please find a short story called "The Permie" for your consideration for the space bat wings compilation at:

https://investingwithnature.com/blog/

It is an view of the next ~25 years in a small town. Thanks for giving me a deadline to get the blog started. It is still bare bones but needed that kick in the butt to finally start it.

Thanks,

Bob Brown ([email protected])

6/26/16, 7:15 PM

PatriciaT said...

I just saw something about 'Regrexit' setting in. Hmmm. I also wonder about a backlash from Brussels to Brexit.

RE: Reading Assignments:
1) Found a book for assignment number two. The opening statement in 'The Adventure of Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado' by Hammond and Goad (UNM Press, 1938), sets the tone, which galls to no end: "The men of this story came from far-away Spain four hundred years ago, when ONLY Indians lived in the great stretch of country we call the United States and Canada." ('ONLY' capitalized for emphasis). This book is history in story form, geared toward children and youth.
2) For assignment number one, finished reading Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’. As with David, by the lake (6/23/16, 5:59 AM) who read Wilkie Collins ‘The Moonstone’ and noted, “…how significantly personal the inter-class relationships were and how the loyalty was reciprocal -- not just retainer to master/mistress/family, but the reverse as well…”, I found similar respectful attitudes true with the narrator and his servant in the book I read. This rather surprised me, but I’m not sure why. I also got the idea that while Verne described ‘Progress’ as inevitable, there seemed to be an almost subversive undercurrent of Nature being the ultimate winner (implied in almost incidental statements about the forces of nature, as well as various narrow escapes).

6/26/16, 7:23 PM

patriciaormsby said...

Gracious! Sorry to be so late to class! Another thought-provoking essay. I'll tell my Japanese husband he can thank Hitler for our marriage. And the Mormon Church too.

The LDS seem to have carried forward the Victorian attitude to sex, with the clumsy "garments" they all have to wear once they are married. Among the children, the most popular role-playing game was something called "Nasty," which I'll leave to your imagination, and I won't tell on who did it (hint: every last one of them). The upshot of my odd upbringing was the subconscious perception that Causacian bodies were filthy and disgusting, while those of the Japanese were clean, and it may actually have been true to some extent. The Mormons hide it, while the Buddhist Japanese scrub it down good and air it out.

I did not manage yet to do your last assignment. I have Don Quixote in Spanish somewhere and will eventually relocate it. I also have "Bagvad Gita" in Indonesian, but in looking it over, it appears to be a modern novel based on the classic, so I went shopping for literature in Indonesia again. I've read quite a bunch of children's books with the hope of translating them into simplified English for my students, to make plenty of easy reading available to them. The problem is that many of them have such violent endings (not Grimm, thank goodness, but grimace-worthy), that they offend my students' sensibilities. Japan is really quite an isolated culture.

It became clear in Indonesia that I needed to choose a modern-lifestyle sort of novel. (Hard to have a conversation when all you know are animal names, active verbs and a handful of emotional expressions.) So I bought something that translates as "Love Ended Yesterday." I do expect to be thoroughly offended by the antics of a modern bimbo phonehead, so it appears I am prepared to take on your next assignment while I try again to locate Don Quixote.

6/26/16, 7:56 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Jasmine, that was certainly my read on it.

Averagejoe, it'll be interesting to see how all this works out. My post on Brexit is finished in draft and will be up Wednesday.

Twinruler, thank you. It's mostly just that I've spent so little time taking in current popular culture, and reading dusty old tomes instead, that I never quite noticed that there was a box in the first place!

Travis, I suppose if human beings eat too many cephalopods, Cthulhu might get offended by that... ;-)

Phil H., so noted. You're certainly right that further explosions could follow!

Maria, it's a heck of a book! Glad you liked it.

Don, Coulter really does look like she eats small children raw.

Phil K., hurrah for irresponsibility, then!

Quos Ego, er, why should they have any more trouble importing food than any other country not part of the EU? They're not exiling themselves to another planet -- just cutting the connection to a failed political experiment.

Cherokee, okay, now I definitely have to find the older version. That does sound a lot more fun.

Alex, understood. Like most political decisions in the real world, it was a tangled mess, but my take is that Leave was and is the better option.

Latefall, oh, granted. Politics generally is a mess these days, full of loudly shouted thoughtstoppers and not much else.

Patricia M., "getting off scot free" used to mean something a little different...;-)

Alex, fair enough. I'd have thought that Boris Johnson's no worse than Cameron, but that's a view from the far side of the pond.

Luna, understood. It was a difficult decision all around, I know.

Donalfagan, that's what used bookstores and public libraries are for -- letting you read books when you don't want a penny to go to the author. ;-)

Justin, I'm not at all sure what you're suggesting -- I may just be being dense.

John, Britain's getting decently skilled at backing away from empires without civil war. It's a useful achievement, and I hope other nations copy it.

Rumighoul, the post is finished in draft. I hope you find it interesting!

Dammerung, I'll consider it.

6/26/16, 10:52 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Dirk, "on through the fog" isn't a bad description of where we are just now.

Aunteater, Limbaugh wrote children's books? Oh man. He can't write coherently for adults, and writing for children is much harder. I bet they're epically bad.

Ursachi, the geography of the vote is among its more fascinating details. I'm not at all surprised that Scotland voted Remain; it would be a sad day if the Scots ever got so daft as to trust the English, and having the EU to yank Westminster's chain at intervals has got to be some source of security.

Sylvia, if by Native Tongue you mean the science fiction novel, it's by Suzette Haden Elgin. Readers who have trouble with feminism might also want to take their pick of the SF novels of Joanna Russ, which I've read and can't stand (not the feminism, the bad writing).

Avalterra, thank you!

Pygmycory, exactly -- and the disconnect between your kind of monotheism and Homer's kind of polytheism is pretty wide. That's the kind of reflection I was hoping to spark.

Glenn, well, there you are!

Zach, I don't do much visual media, but I'll keep it in mind.

Owen, I don't underestimate them at all. It's just that there's only so many hours in a day, and I like to spend as many of them as possible not looking into a glass screen.

RPC, that's a good point.

BoysMom, most people find the Communist Manifesto fairly mild, so you may be disappointed. Have you considered something nastily antireligious? Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand both have some fling-across-the-room-worthy things along those lines.

David, exactly. The alternative to the nastiness is actually talking about why so many of the working poor have cause to want out of the EU, and that would entail frank talk about who's gained and who's lost from the last three decades or so of neoliberal economics -- and nobody in the affluent classes wants to do that.

Violet, hah! That's a good one. If it's any encouragement, the bad logic and bad prose are worth reading all by themselves.

Myriad, okay, that's worth a gold star with honorary laurels to rest on -- both for "contraneoantidisestablishmentarianists" and for the list of other state-secession acronyms. But you left out two, from my former neck of the woods; Washington State's would, of course, be a Washout, and the state immediately south? Ore-Gone.

Juhana, I'm sad to say that I do remember the Spice Girls. As for the rest, though, as I've noted before, it's more complex than that: in the decline and fall of a civilization, existing ethnic groups get fed into a blender, and new ethnicities form out of the near-random groupings that result. Sitting at that campfire with you are a couple of Innsmouth fish-people, a shoggoth, a night-gaunt, two Tcho-Tchos from the plateau of Leng, and a tentacled horror from R'lyeh. Despite the differences that divide you, you all want to survive, and so you work out ways to function cooperatively -- something that people (and presumably nonpeople as well) have been doing in the aftermath of decline and fall since the first civilizations toppled over.

Whomever, delighted to hear it. Yes, the Puerto Rico situation promises to be, shall we say, colorful.

6/26/16, 11:17 PM

luna said...

JMG - I read Alex Baidd's point this way. The polititians mentioned aren't necesarily any better or worse than Cameron. The problem is this - with Scotland gone (as seems likely), with their fifty-plus left-of-centre MPs, a Tory majority in England and Wales is very difficult to overturn.

Added to that, one thing that keeps the Tory government in check is the EU. For all it's faults, it does provide some citizens protection by way of regulations on the environment, food safety and workers rights. Many Tories and UKIP-ers would love to get rid of these.

So with Scotland gone and the EU gone, we have perpetual (and fiercely neo-liberal) Tory government, and none of the checks and balances provided by the EU. It feels bleak.

I hope that all of this will eventually cause people to wake up, that would be good to see. Though given the biased and manipulative media here, it's not guaranteed...

6/27/16, 2:04 AM

. said...

Justin,

Those leftists oppose the EU also oddly enough. But they think the referendum itself was racist because it was led by ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’ and stirred up British nationalism and ‘legitimized hatred of immigrants and xenophobia’. They don’t believe that nation states are or can be any more democratic than the EU structures. Plus they see it as turning back the clock which is of course blasphemy. So they’re rioting against the Nazis basically, in their minds.

They’re opposed to hierarchies within the working class also. In practice, that means they oppose the idea that workers in one country should have more ‘rights’ than those in others. This makes it extremely difficult for them to deny any workers from poorer and more oppressive regions the right to live somewhere freer and wealthier. It's a long standing thread of internationalism within socialism.

As far as self-determination goes, they don’t recognize the legitimacy of nation states so they don’t support national self determination. If you could organize a global plebiscite open only to workers (as opposed to capitalists) on borders and immigration, they’d accept the results of that as legitimate, probably. In the meantime, they’ll support what they believe to be the objective interests of the entire global working class. Conflicts of interest within that class are, basically, all the fault of capitalism and imperialism anyway so they’ll just skirt over those. Anyone calling attention to those conflicts will be presumed to have suspect motives and denounced as a sower of division.

Their solution to the problems that they largely pretend don’t exist is that workers, migrant and non-migrant, must all join unions to prevent exploitation and must organize at European level to counter the neoliberalism of the EU. In other words, the solution to a problem causing present suffering is for the victims to create a world that doesn’t yet exist and never has. And of course the victims must overlook any inconvenient divisions within the working class in order to do that.

Anyone expressing doubts about the immediate chances of European workers managing to organize across what are at ground level massive language and cultural barriers, with nothing resembling the funds available to international finance, is considered to be defeatist. I couldn’t even begin to explain to you how deep the level of insanity goes in that world.

The mainstream left distances itself from the fringes while in practice being very heavily influenced by them. Ask them to produce a non-racist immigration policy, a non-Islamophobic response to IS activities within Europe and a non-racist explanation of the events of New Year’s Eve in Germany and you’ll see the utter incoherence. It’s ironic that those they, at best, intend to educate, are in reality better Marxists and better intersectionalists than they are.

Mallow.

6/27/16, 2:32 AM

luna said...

PS. What I mean to say is Johnson, Gove, IDS, Farage etc truly will be in charge! Until the people wake up, and the opposition gets it act together, there is no third option (yet). Yes, it is kind of interesting to watch what unfolds.

6/27/16, 3:05 AM

Alex Blaidd said...

Thought you might this piece interesting, poignant but in no way surprising. In case you haven't seen it as you're considering Brexit at the moment. It was with immense sadness though not shock that I read this piece as it's entirely my own experience too of other parts of the country not mentioned in this piece.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum

6/27/16, 4:42 AM

Twinruler334 said...

It is most interesting that both Creationism and Evolution have been implemented to rationalize the Racist beliefs of White Europeans, and Whites generally. And, though Hitler himself was a Creationist, most Eugenicists, including Francis Galton himself, were Evolutionists. Indeed, racism transcends the Creationist-Evolutionist divide!

6/27/16, 5:10 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

@JMG - yes, I know about the original meaning of scot-free, but could not resist the pun. I have other bad habits, like filking. It comes along with the s/f culture. Ironically, my current reading is Josephine Tey's SINGING SANDS, in which a secondary character is a Scottish separatist of the sort to give the entire breed a very bad name. A caricature of a posturing, whining loser-turned-crank.

Before that my chosen book was Georgette Heyer's DUPLICATE DEATH. Both novels are set in the immediate postwar period and both authors are very culturally conservative. Alas, the "offensive" part was simply not there for me, only a feeling of polite disagreement "but I see your point." Have to reach further afield, I guess.

But - midcentury popular fiction by culturally conservative authors is still a good corrective for the mindlessly PC thinking of our decade, which it's easy for a lifelong liberal to fall into.

6/27/16, 6:14 AM

RPC said...

Regarding Brexit, I think it's possible Remain and Cameron have won. By not delivering the request to leave to the EU the next morning and by stating that he'll resign "by autumn," he leaves the UK with months to reconsider AND leaves his successor to deliver the request - probable political suicide to whoever that is. We may yet see Parliament begging him to stay, at which he'll say the price is not delivering the separation request.

6/27/16, 6:56 AM

234567 said...

@ JMG RE Louisiana Law

Oh yes - that political greased football went nowhere fast. And Louisiana has been reluctant to deal with anything involving genetics and law since then.

The real truth is nobody picks their parents.

The other truth is that a little beer or wine makes many things attractive on a Friday night that don't seem quite so alluring Sunday morning. But by then the cow is out of the barn. There are untold billions of humans created each weekend...LOL

I just find anything involving race to be hilarious or ridiculous - having lived in places like Colombia, Argentina and Tehran - race is a very rickety bridge to base any grand assumptions on. I doubt most alive today even know the heritage claimed by their great-grandparents. There is nothing one can do about heritage anyway, other than endure it and, eventually, embrace it.

6/27/16, 7:15 AM

heather said...

Just wanted to pipe in that I'm with the class. I read Orwell's "War of the Worlds" for the last assignment. It was interesting to reflect on the author's portrayal of people in panic. Gentlemen were regarded as having the obligation to offer their help to the (poor, helpless) ladies and children, and their religious and political leaders, even in the midst of turmoil. Women were for the most part regarded as a useless drag, with one spirited lady as a counterexample. The novel overall felt surprisingly modern (though it did just sneak in behind the 1900 deadline with a publication date of 1897).

I am pondering my choice for this week's assignment. There are a lot of things I don't want to read, but they mostly fit into the "ugh, shrug, life's too short, re-shelve!" category rather than the "fling across the room" category. I gather we are not looking just for bad writing, which is a frequent cause of my rejections, but rather a conflict with the author's viewpoint. So we are to identify where the author's going, acknowledge that we don't want to go there, and read on anyways to try to understand how that viewpoint could make sense in some way? I may just default to "Mein Kampf" because I should have read it in its entirety long ago. Then again, I might feast myself on some prosperity gospel literature- that concept really does turn my stomach. Gosh, can't wait.

Re. Brexit- when I first heard about the shocked and disbelieving reactions of those watching their country radically change around them, I too wondered if someday we in the U.S. would be encountering similar feelings watching our union dissolve. That evening I saw on our local news a young man from the Yes! California campaign, which wants our state to peacefully secede from the U.S., explicitly holding up the Brexit process as a model for proceeding. The tone of the newscast was amused tolerance- "Aren't we a great country? Even these nuts can have their say." I just wonder if one day the tone of both the message and the reaction to it will be markedly different.

--Heather in CA

6/27/16, 7:26 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

OT, but - seen on Freecycle today.

"OFFER: Craft Books. Have no need to have books when there is a pinterest app on my phone. for children."

Re: Puns as commentary. A link to a pro-Brexit blog post was posted to the Stirling fans list. The blog post contained a parenthetical comment about "13 revolting colonies." I answered the Stirling post with that quote and the quip "Annoying sometimes, yes, but surely not revolting!" Which led to a string of "peasants are revolting" puns that segued into revolting-revolving and ended with "Are they revolving deosil or widdershins?" To which I answered (ending that thread) "Widdershins, of course. It [the Brexit vote] was a banishing ritual, after all."

OK - I'll shut up, now. But that's what s/f folks are like.

6/27/16, 9:50 AM

MawKernewek said...

The raw results of the UK EU referendum can be found at https://github.com/robfarr/UK-EU-Referendum/blob/master/data.csv and I have produced maps of my own: http://skrifennow.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/mapping-result-of-eu-referendum.html.

I didn't think the Vote Leave campaign had any vision of Britain I could share, though this was true for most of the official Remain campaign as well. It was some of the Remain adverts that made me closest to being tempted to vote Leave, because of the way they trotted out the various neoliberal capitalist institutions and footballers as 'experts'.

I think a lot of people voted Leave because Remain was very much the establishment choice (not withstanding many of the tabloid newspapers backing Leave) and they wanted to give them a shock. In some ways, it may be better for the UK to have an economic and political shock now, rather than a nastier one further down the road. Not that we will avoid that anyway.

6/27/16, 11:04 AM

Mean Mr Mustard said...

JMG,

The £350M p/w was called out as a brazen lie before the vote. Apparently our net contribution was less than half that. The promises to divert the funds to healthcare immediately evaporated, post-vote, along with promises to curb immigration levels, half of those being of non-EC origin anyway.

We now have sudden domestic political fracturing, and likely the fallout will impact elsewhere in Europe.

I'm reminded of several of your observations over the years. Carrying capacity. Stairstep catabolic collapse. The broad sweep of history punctuated by dramatic crises such as the French Revolution and Waterloo - two events in one lifetime. Disconnected elites. And Fred Halliot offering easy solutions to the gullible. That strategy certainly seems to have worked here, and the same simple solutions - with no detailed planning beyond the initial goal, anymore than there was for post-liberation Bagdhad - are also now on offer to exclude outgroups in the US.

But we already have tempting offers emerging - 'Missold Brexit?? According to our files, you may be entitled to pursue a compensation claim from any smooth talking charlatans who offered you £350M a week'... There are job opportunities emerging too. Bricklayers are needed to rebuild Hadrian's Wall.

Perhaps the urgent need of the Bank Of England to magic up £250Bn to support our banks and currency implies downstream economies, and the RAF and Fleet Air Arm will be spared the indignity of operating the F-35.

Caveat Emptor!

Mustard

6/27/16, 11:17 AM

Justin said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-breitling-energy-fraud-idUSKCN0ZD0BL?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social

JMG, thought you may be interested. Submitted without comment...

6/27/16, 11:18 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

Brexit in 286 AD (actually premature.)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/06/27/britains-first-brexit-286-d/86422358/

I was vaguely aware of this, but had to read the entire article to be reminded of it. The story is that Britain's East Coast had a major pirate problem, and Rome was sucking up Britain's taxes and not returning enough to keep Britain's navy going, probably due to politics inside the Roman government. (For whom Britain was a low priority). So essentially, the admiral mutinied and turned privateer, with his navy keeping the loot from the pirate ships in their own budget. Whether or not he declared himself Imperator, or his troops did (which was what happened with Arthur, if you accept him as a real Roman/British leader) is a moot point. He was in a nasty Catch-22 and did the only thing he could, if you ask me.

Allectus' victory was a palace coup by the head bean-counter, probably political in nature (a purely local power-play)and probably inevitable. Because, as I said, the entire thing was premature, though there would be other British generals and admirals (to use modern terminology) who did the same thing, and later made it stick. But also, pretty soon the pirates were being invited in and promised land if they'd defend the coast against other pirates.

I do consider this worth thinking about in our own time, for those inclined to go by historic parallels. Or as the battle cry in TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING was, "No more unfunded mandates!"

6/27/16, 12:06 PM

SLClaire said...

I was in northwest Illinois this past weekend after the Brexit vote was announced. The campground where we visited friends is populated primarily by low-end white salary class folks who have just enough money to have a parked RV in a crowded park as their summer house. Their reaction to Brexit was horror -- at the US stock market dropping 600 points as a result. Apparently they check the value of their 401ks and suchlike nearly every day. Once I heard that the DJ had been at 18,000 and did the math (it's only a 3 fracking percent drop!) I pointed that out and reminded them about the 1987 drop of a far higher percentage. It shut them up pretty fast.

Here in Missouri the better name for a similar vote would be on the Remain side: Missouremains.

For my first assignment I read The Scarlet Letter and am very glad I made that choice. Since Hawthorne was a 19th century man writing about happenings more than 100 years before his time, it had the extra interesting effect of seeing the farther past through the eyes of the past and then through my own eyes.

Much as I hate the prospect, reading Ann Coulter will have to be my assignment this time. I can't even look at the covers of her books without wanting to do something very mean. Since I'm checking the book out of the library I'll have to not follow through on impulses to throw the book across the room, but I'm certain I'll feel them.

6/27/16, 12:34 PM

Urban Harvester said...

After mulling the assignment over, I'm considering reading one of C. S. Lewis' apologetics books. My admiration of him as a Neoplatonist and for his anti-Religion of Progress stance has been growing. However, there were still parts of the space trilogy which I found offensive, and troubling. As there are also parts I've had difficulty reading to my 5 year old in the Chronicles of Narnia. I've heard that his apologetics were his worst writings - I certainly was nearly put off of him because of how he is read over the pulpit by the Top Mormon Brass. Do you agree that that is the case? I'd like to confront my discomfort with him head on just as I've encountered his Neoplatonism in "the Discarded Image". Could you recommend a "worst specimen"?

6/27/16, 1:19 PM

Mean Mr Mustard said...

JMG,

Looks like your politics has become as unhinged as ours in the UK, and for similar reasons.

"But here’s the thing: the neocon love affair with Clinton started well before Trump was even in the discussion of Republican candidates, let alone the party’s likely nominee".

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/hillary-clinton-necono-republican-endorsements-donald-trump-policy-issues

6/27/16, 2:42 PM

onething said...

Talk about peak resources! Here is an article about sand:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/opinion/the-worlds-disappearing-sand.html?_r=0

As to the book assignments, I think I may have inadvertently fulfilled the new assignment. After reading Sense and Sensibility, of which my main impression is that the "real" people are upper class and that they have servants who are like wallpaper or furniture, I had A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court laying around, and it turns out to be a quick read of little more than an hour.

How disappointed I am in Mark Twain for this, surely his most horrible book! Words like trite, pompous, and even silly come to mind. The protagonist, whom one feels to be Mark Twain in fantasy, is a smug and modern progressive, who dismisses magic and makes a fool of Merlin who is a useless windbag and fraud. The stupidity of the entire society is greatly exaggerated but our hero is able to make telegraph, fleets of bicycles, and large amounts of electricity with switches. Enough electricity to win a kind of civil war with layers of electric fence. All this is done more or less in secret, and then presto - at the flip of a switch all the electric current a whole town could want. Where does that electricity come from? Apparently, it is sort of magic. You just have to know how to set up all the wires and switches.

6/27/16, 3:17 PM

Unknown said...

Outdiana. Tennessegress. Missescapi. Wisconsout. Or, Withdrawnsin?
Sheepishly,
Jonathan.

6/27/16, 3:20 PM

Justin said...

JMG, I was making a tinfoil-y joke about freemasonry and its association with Scotland.

Mallow, thanks for the explanation. I understand rhetorically that the Marxists/whatever want equality including cross-border equality and an abolition of borders to create the global workers paradise. I respect the notion, but its never ended well and so often the foot soldiers of such a movement are just tools that let one group of elites gain power at the expense of everyone else...

6/27/16, 3:22 PM

Justin said...

Totally off-topic, but you might find this interesting, JMG:

http://www.wnd.com/2016/06/explosive-new-twist-in-idaho-sex-assault-case/

This is the kind of thing that ends with people hanging from lampposts if it goes on too long...

6/27/16, 3:23 PM

Twinruler334 said...

I am looking forward to your next post. You have some very interesting ways to think outside the box, Mr. Greer. I really admire you for that.

6/27/16, 3:30 PM

Ing said...

Thank you .Mallow and JMG. My partner is English, has never supported Britain joining the EU, and is quite happy with the vote to leave. His reasons are complex and I am gobsmacked to read in the mainstream media the simple evil that is being attributed to him and anyone else who would support leaving. So many issues have been conflated that it's nearly impossible elsewhere to have reasonable conversations. I've opted out of all news and most conversation about it for the time being until I can find a news source that just gives me the facts and history without the opinion and agenda, much less the righteous vitriol. I very much appreciate reading all of the comments here in general and in particular about Britain's exit, it's always a sad week when I cannot keep up with them!

6/27/16, 4:05 PM

alex carter said...

More on why Brexit is destined to happen: '

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum

6/27/16, 4:43 PM

alex carter said...

234567 - Race is not hilarious to most of us. Race is a deadly-serious thing. It determines where you can live, what kind of job you can get, whether you can go to college, whether you get promoted at what jobs you *can* get, the size - or presence at all - of your raises, etc.

It's very serious business. Obviously you've never been a white person of modest means growing up and living in Hawaii, and it's not a non-issue in California either. Hell it's not a non-issue in a fairly conservative state like Colorado, where I knew a family who all worked their butts off to send *one* kid to college, and that kid had to get straight-A's to afford to go at all since that was the standard for whites. If he were black, he'd only have to get C's to get the same aid package.

This is why people always talk about race in the US. It's like farmers always discussing the weather; it's for a reason.

6/27/16, 4:47 PM

rube cretin said...

@Caryn,
I concur that Cormac McCarthy is one of our finest writers. Blood Meridian is one of my favorite books. Read it several times. However, if one wants to get the full McCarthy I recommend his play The Sunset Limited. It was made into a movie a few years ago staring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. I believe It is the outstanding movie of the past decade. JMG give this guy a chance. Imagine Hemingway without punctuation!

6/27/16, 5:37 PM

Ing said...

Oops, I shouldn't just attribute the reducing of motivations to simple evil just to main stream media, it's also been on blogging sites and the commenters on both. As often happens, the comments section on some of those sites are the worst.

6/27/16, 6:22 PM

Grebulocities said...

Re: ethnicity, one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet was on the notorious white supremacist site Stormfront.org, which I check occasionally so as to understand what truly racist people are thinking and whether it matches up with claims about racism by the mainstream media.

Being big on genetics and the purity of their bloodline, many of them thought it would be a great idea to get genetically tested by one of the testing companies (e.g. 23andme) and prove they were totally white, along with finding out which European countries their ancestors hailed from. Needless to say, after the results came back, there was a proliferation of threads with titles like "Genetic tests are scams". All in all, about half of them got results that were rather different from what they expected. ;)

As for me, though, I actually am boring. Nearly all my known ancestors are assorted British Isles riffraff, starting with some Puritans and moving on to include Welsh people, Cornish people, Scottish people, Scots-Irish, real Irish, English laborer types, and so on, along with a few Dutch and French people and a Croat who slipped in there somehow. 23andme lists my ancestry as 97.2% Northwestern European, 2.0% Southern European (inc. Balkan), 0.7% unspecified European, <0.1% Native American, <0.1% unknown. That's about as pure as it gets. I'm just happy that someone 11 or 12 generations ago (mid-1700s) apparently managed to insert a tiny trace of something different into the mix, but then again it would have been just as likely to be war rape (maybe the French and Indian War, maybe one of the smaller ones) as a consensual affair.

6/27/16, 6:24 PM

alex carter said...

Aaaaaaaand in Hawaii, where I grew up and lived as a young adult, they want to register all gun owners on an FBI file. Now, whites, a minority there, are disproportionately gun owners there. Even as dirt-poor as we were, we had a little .22 rifle for a while, and that made us "armed and crazy" to a few neighbors who'd have happily attacked us otherwise. (It also helped that we always had a few dogs, who'd have given their lives to defend us.)

When I see things like this pass, I see it in a different - more realistic - lens than those who've not "been in the trenches".

6/27/16, 6:25 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Timothy, if I wasn't already more than halfway through Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World, I might ask you for the title and author! That's certainly a kind of book I tend to find in need of flinging...

Gabriela, thank you -- and yes, progress definitely has a point of diminishing returns! More on this as we proceed.

Space Seeder, that kind of thing is all over the place. If you belong to a minority religious tradition in today's America, you can pretty much count on seeing lots of misinformation being tossed about by self-proclaimed experts who never bother to talk to anybody who actually follows the faith in question. Just one of life's little entertainments...

Submarine, it's been pointed out that Obama's speech in Britain more or less ordering the British people to shut up and stay in the EU does seem to have been the inflection point at which the Leave vote started to take the lead!

Hereward, and I can well imagine that in the Netherlands, the whole country would tend toward a single tier. Different locations mean different conditions!

Lewis, replace "butthurt" with "downtrodden" and you've got one of the major themes of 19th century British radicalism. Funny to see that brought up again! As for Game of Drones, I've been told that you can get the same experience by watching the Lord of the Rings movies, pausing them every fifteen minutes to take in thirty seconds of cheap softcore pornography -- and somehow that just doesn't seem like an interesting pastime to me.

Leo, yes, I heard -- another glorious onward step in the march of progress, or something. Gah.

Unknown Eagle, of course! "Here's a problem, and we're going to solve it by doing even more of what's causing it. What could go wrong?"

Onething, all I'm saying is that each of us understands other people through our understandings of ourselves -- what else do we have to go on? When you try to understand why the neoconservatives behave the way they do, you create a mental model of what's inside their heads, and the only raw material you have to go on is what's inside your head, illuminated to one degree or another by listening to other people talk and reading what they write.

Atilio, good! And if you let go of the fantasy of perpetual progress, all of a sudden what you've learned from Anna Karenina can be applied much more usefully to here and now.

Alex, no question, it's instructive to watch raw class bigotry being so loudly paraded by the losing side.

Unknown SamChevre, thanks for the assistance. Certainly Julian Simon's book has always made me want to look up figures on the length of his nose!

6/27/16, 6:32 PM

John Michael Greer said...

Kevin, yes, I saw that stat -- but then California is a very difficult place to survive just now, by all accounts, unless you're able to parasitize off the current tech-stock bubble. It'll be interesting, in the sense of the apocryphal curse, to watch how that unwinds.

Toomas, by all means dissent! I expressed my own opinion, which (since I'm not a British subject) is pretty much irrelevant anyway; others have expressed theirs. I certainly agree that Brexit is the beginning of a rough road, but staying in the EU would, I argue, have been an even rougher one.

Caryn, I'm not going to make it a hard and fast rule, but the general idea is to find something written from a point of view you find hard to imagine any human being actually holding -- and then try to understand why the author holds it. As for your fellow expats -- well, of course; how many people from Brixton end up in Hong Kong?

Alex, I can't stand him either, so unless you can find something better, yes, it's probably perfect. As far as xenophobia et al., I trust you're not assuming -- like so many people -- that xenophobia is the only reason someone could possibly object to mass immigration to an overcrowded island that can't provide adequate jobs, housing, and social services to the people who already live there...

Tripp, indeed he did. Now he'll be remembered for something other than that affair with a dead pig.

Peacegarden, I notice that Ayn Rand seems to be well ahead in the "I Can't Stand This" sweepstakes, with Mein Kampf, The Secret, and Richard Dawkins her only real competition. What can I say? This blog apparently attracts a sensible crowd... ;-)

David, vicious class prejudice on the part of the affluent against the poor is an immense social fact in today's America, but it's also unmentionable. Thus the use of dog-whistle language such as "racism" to mean "back to your hovels, peasants!"

James, I know quite a few people in Britain who would be delighted if London could somehow be removed from their country, but continental drift is so slow! ;-)

.Mallow, I wonder whether the loading on the word "racism" on your side of the pond comes from the same sources it does here -- on the one hand, a very Jungian projection of the shadow onto the Evil Other (in this case, "racists"), and on the other, the use of talk about racism as a way to avoid talking about the pervasive and often vicious class prejudices that affluent liberals direct toward the working classes of their own countries.

Emmanuel, interesting. Remember that there's a certain subset of readers who read for shock value -- they take in a lot of true crime books these days, but before that became a fad, books like the one you read were fairly common.

Onething, au contraire, the whole point of this homework is to read something offensive because it's offensive. If you get something else out of it you may miss the point of the exercise.

Aaron, got it. You're in the contest.

6/27/16, 7:23 PM

Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...

Coordinated Universal Time (= UTC = EST+5 = EDT+4): 20160628T021412Z

I have now posted to http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com the entire set of bullet points from that pro-Brexit flier, delivered to the residence of a friend in a double-digit area of London NW, with my commentary on each of its successive points. I have also posted the flier map, with its unexpected treatment of Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Portugal, and Eire.

As I argue also at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com, Burke provides food for thought on Brexit, in a couple of different ways.

Thanks, MawKernewek and others, for further commentary on regional distribution of results.

MawKernewek, since you are professionally skilled in cartography, might it be possible for you to make some maps at some stage illustrating sea-rise scenarios? Ideally, you would show your best estimates for sea levels in each of the years 2100, 2200, 2300, and 2400 (or something similar), with some discussion of the (inevitably huge) uncertainties, and with maps indicating what at each stage gets left in various jurisdictions - very notably, what gets left in England. Many us would be anxious to proceed beyond vague generalities, such as the banal "East Anglia is doomed" and the banal "Dartmoor is safe." What some of us would really love, though it might be too much to ask of you, would be a comprehensive discussion, comprising some tens of maps, and covering if not all continents, then at any rate Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals" (in that helpful old phrase of M.S.Gorbachev). Also of special interest would be a detailed map of London, giving some idea of (for instance) what might remain safe in the years when the first tidal surges are starting to wash over Threadneedle Street. (How, I am wondering, do you, as a professional, see London dying? Perhaps the ideas of Victorian eco-novelist Richard Jefferies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jefferies are prescient?)

Sincerely,

Tom

6/27/16, 7:36 PM

Yellow Submarine said...

Looks like Brexit might just be the beginning.

Marine Le Pen, who is probably the single most popular politician in France these days, is calling for a referendum and what she calls a Frexit. Geert Wilders, who is the head of the Dutch Freedom Party, is calling for a Nexit and promises that if he becomes prime minister of the Netherlands, one of his top priorities will be to organize a referendum on whether to declare independence from the EU. Finally, Finnish nationalists are calling for a Fixit.

There are a lot of people throughout Europe who are sick and tired of the EU and want out. George Soros said just the other day he believes the EU is coming apart at the seams and that Brexit is probably a harbinger of things to come in the near future.

6/27/16, 8:01 PM

Emmanuel Goldstein said...

Little Black Sambo is a Gutenburg Project book, available to read here;
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17824?msg=welcome_stranger

@PygmyCory-- It may alleviate your suffering while reading one of the "Left Behind" books to look for the numerous hidden ...jokes? puns? in the text. For example, the global cellphone company, "Cellular Solar," was most often referred to as "Cel Sol," pronounced "Sell Soul." If you take the letters of the name "Viv Ivins" (the nursemaid of the Antichrist) and read them as Roman Numerals, you get "VI VI VI ns" which is an ignorant way to encode "666," the number of the beast. NS could mean 'not saved...' Don't point these out to anyone who took the series seriously--They will not thank you...:-)

6/27/16, 8:32 PM

Myriad said...

I'm very impressed by Ore-gone's efficiency. Only a hyphen and one letter added!

Of course, Now Mexico has it even easier. :D

6/27/16, 9:17 PM

Scotlyn said...

...a datapoint, I guess. A neighbour's 9-yr-old daughter told me yesterday the boys in hef class are insulting each other with an epithet that she is sure they don't understand the meaning of... (some things never change)...

Oh, the epithet being hurled by 9-yr-old boys in the playground? "Racist".

6/28/16, 12:15 AM

Mean Mr Mustard said...

Lose iana, Miss issippi...?

6/28/16, 2:51 AM

onething said...

"Onething, au contraire, the whole point of this homework is to read something offensive because it's offensive. If you get something else out of it you may miss the point of the exercise."

I see what you're saying, I really do, but then I have all my life been willing to really listen to the other side. What I won't listen to is someone like Ayn Rand who has a basic brain dysfunction that makes her not a whole human being emotionally give discourse on society. Having said that, I do realize that if one dismisses all the opposition as sociopaths who are by definition not worth listening to, then one is back in the original boat. And she was smart and no doubt made a good point or two, as did Descartes, who tortured dogs to prove a point about which he was not only wrong, but obviously wrong. An error of that magnitude would be like letting someone who is colorblind design the street lights.

That most people who disagree are viable human beings I agree with.

6/28/16, 4:41 AM

Tripp said...

If you'll indulge me, I wanted to get a link to my blog post about Brexit up before my ultimate influence posts on the subject! Can't wait...

http://smallbatchgarden.blogspot.com/2016/06/show-me-to-brexit-please.html

From my post:
"It also strikes me that this vote wasn't so much a vote against the globalists' politics, but against their religion. That's why it's so...offensive to them."

6/28/16, 6:55 AM

Jon from Virginia said...

I'm surprise with everyone reading "mein kampf" that no one brought up the 1916 bestseller "The Passing of the Great Race" by Madison Grant. Sometimes shame starts at home.

6/28/16, 8:21 AM

SumErgoSum said...

Dear Mr Greer, I look forward to your post about the Brexit, and what it says about the possible futures ahead.

I voted to leave, as did several I have spoken to in my locality, and the issues raised where far more complex, and from a wider range of political viewpoints than the current blame game on the behalf of both can seem to understand, or seemly avoid addressing.

Of course emotions are high right now, and everyone is suddenly a politician. It is too easy for both sides to try to re-frame the narrative to their agenda, and cherry pick quotes and statistics.

I would like to quote from a speech an MP made that addresses some of the additional reasons the vote went the way it did.

(http://www.yvettecooper.com/yvette_s_speech_to_the_centre_for_european_reform)

"The cities voted in. Industrial towns voted out. Digital growth areas like the M4 corridor or the University towns voted in. The Tory shires and the Labour coalfields voted out. Scotland voted in. England and Wales voted out. The young voted in. Older votes chose out. Graduates in. Working class communities out.

Those who saw globalisation as an opportunity voted in

Those who felt globalisation was a threat and didn’t trust “the system” to make it better voted out

The woman on Thursday who told me she was voting out because “well they all deserve a kick”

The man on Friday who told me how pleased he was that Britain was finally standing up for itself again.

Communities who didn’t believe the Remain campaigns arguments about risk because they didn’t feel they had much more to lose.

People who said they didn’t believe “experts”, because too often experts have let them down

Places that that people too often feel no longer have a purpose. Because the jobs have gone to the cities and shops to out of town malls

A Tory Prime Minister could not persuade them. Because a Tory government has let them down.

But Labour had nothing to say that could convince them either.

They weren’t convinced by staying in Europe because they couldn’t see how they benefited

And yes, lots of people were really worried about immigration."

As one of those who has felt disfranchised, ignored, unrepresented, and staved of funds and attention that has been lavished on establishment pet projects,and the rich; a Europe that has ignored our needs and concentrated power for their own ends; and a media that panders to such; We had little to lose.

For good or ill, we spoke. Some of us may have racist views. Some may have been swayed by negative viewpoints and lies (not all of which came from the leave side I might add) But the political climate that has been building for many years due to neglect was always going to spill over sometime, and the opportunity for politicians to learn and do something about it is there. If they can.

6/28/16, 8:35 AM

Twinruler334 said...

I once read Lothrop Stoddard's book: "Racial Realities in Europe", as well as Madison Grant's "The Passing of The Great Race." I was morbidly curious as to what were in Politically Incorrect books.

6/28/16, 8:53 AM

Renaissance Man said...

You are right. For the sake of my psyche, having combed through several dozen speeches by all the putative candidates who started out in 2015 (and commentary on those speeches) and the sake of the throbbing in my head, you're right, I'll read something else that isn't going to leave me banging my head on the keyboard.
The disconnects between what they say, what their opponents and detractors say they said, what their supporters believe they said, what they believe as solutions only address the proximate cause of the increasingly evident problems plaguing the U.S. and what I understand is the ultimate cause (i.e. pretty much what you blog on) leaves me feeling a little like one of Lovecraft's poor characters who is about to lose their grip.
It's dizzying.
I am filled with dread at the realization that this disconnect applies not only to the candidates, but to the vast majority of active voters (i.e. the ones who shift themselves off the couch to go pull a lever). Just as Lovecraft's hapless characters find their world utterly disrupted by the discovery that all is not as it seems, I suspect that the collective psyche of the western powers has been increasingly battered of late and I really wish I not alive and in the middle of it to see it snap. The ugly racist overtones evident in the Brexit vote, the rise of nationalist parties in Europe, Trump in the U.S. are indicative of the strain, as people who never understood the true source of their wealth in the first place look for some proximate cause to assign blame as their wealth fades. And there are lots of proximate causes, all evinced in all those speeches I've been reading.
At least I can say I've looked at the actual source, and not just something filtered through someone else's viewpoint.
Time to go build the work-shed, continue training horses, and slowly getting my house even more energy-efficient than it is.

6/28/16, 10:24 AM

Jasmine said...

Dear Mr Greer

I’m afraid that Brexit has rather taken over the comments sections. Here are a few more insights from this side of the pond before you make the final draft for your next blog post.

If anyone does not understand why so many working class people voted for brexit, then watch this you tube clip of this working class black man shoot down a remain supporting white middle class liberal. The look of cognitive dissonance on the liberals face is is something to behold, I’m an surprised his brain didn’t blow up. As his opponent is black he can’t just dismiss him as a racist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gHLfMXb0Yg

I live in Newham in the East End of London, which is one of the most diverse boroughs in the country where white people are a minority. I know a number of black and Asian people who have voted for brexit, so this is not just a white racist thing, as it has been portrayed by parts of the media

I myself am a middle class liberal andI know several white middle class liberals who voted for Brexit like me, because they can see that the EU has screwed up. Saying this I can understand why a lot of people voted remain. There is an aura of idealism surrounding the EU and to be fair it does have an better record on things like Human rights and environmental protection than our tory government. The greatest claim made for the EU is that it has helped to keep the peace. Given the history of the first half of the last century, it is something that has given me real pause for thought. Ten years ago I would have voted to stay in the EU and I would probably have done the same five years ago. The thing that has changed my mind, is seeing the way that the Euro has led to vast swathes of poverty and unemployment in southern Europe. Seeing whole Nations being thrown to the dogs and the rise of far right parties have convinced me that the EU has become a threat to peace in Europe and that we need to get the hell out and get our democracy back.

The Euro has become a wealth pump for Germany and enabled that country to sell its exports to the rest of Europe at a much cheaper rate than it would have done if it had the Deutsche mark. If Greece had its own currency, then it would have devalued after 2008 making its exports cheaper and German imports more expensive and encouraged a tourist boom in that country. The huge transfer of wealth to Germany has made it the power centre of Europe and left it reluctant to make any reforms that might sort this mess out. This situation is unsustainable and it is going to end up in ruin. I can only thank god our leaders had the wisdom not to adopt the Euro and it is is time to leave the sinking ship. If I thought that the EU was reforming the Euro and on the way to becoming more democratic, I would vote to stay in. Sadly that it not the case. The EU has become a prime example of abstract principles overriding reality. It was a noble dream, but it did not work.

6/28/16, 12:21 PM

Jasmine said...

I know a number of white middle class liberals who are very critical of what has happened int he EU, but have voted to remain because the Tories would be worse. They are right, the tories would be worse. However I prefer to be ruled by those I can kick out at an election, then unelected bureaucrats I can do nothing about. Please also note that the politicians on both sides of this debate are vile. Farage is a racist and Boris Johnson has been genetically engineered by monsanto from Bertie Wooster, Satan and Machiavelli. The politicians on the remain side like Cameron and Blair are the muslim murderers and brown people bombers who have devastated Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. The politicians on both sides have lied like hell. My decision to vote out is based on the principles and the situation we find ourselves in. Compared to that the politician are here today and gone tomorrow people who have had little influence on my decision

When it comes to Scotland, this country is a democracy and if the people of Scotland choose to become independent, then we must respect their wishes. At least that way we do not end up fighting. The only question i would have is about the SNP policy of achieving independence from the UK and then joining the EU and probably being forced to adopt the Euro. That just does not sound like independence to me. It sounds like a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

6/28/16, 12:22 PM

Robert C. Guy said...

Speaking of reprehensive, I review the headlines of such bastions of modern economic thought as Bloomberg just to try and stay aware of how far removed my perception of the shape of things is from the perception of the variously moneyed interests.
Unfortunately I don't think it will count for the homework it does often contain smatterings of material that might, if they were in book-form. Still, I wanted to share something not quite on topic for this week's essay (I understand if this comment is kept out of the conversation thread, but I wanted to try and send along the article nonetheless)

Of such ideas so clearly articulated here on the fringe, a curious echo from right in the mass of it all:
"[California's] high-speed rail project is a classic example of how concentrated benefits and diffused costs shape public policy, even when the general public has a direct say."

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-28/california-hits-the-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-fiasco

6/28/16, 12:25 PM

LewisLucanBooks said...

Dear JMG - Re: True Crime books. Back when I worked for one of the large book chains, I was a bit of a rouge :-). Here's a typical conversation. That I had many times. And, oh, by the way, I always knew what the customer was driving at.

Customer: I'm looking for a book.
Me: Well, you're in a bookstore. That's a good start.
Customer: Where's your nonfiction section?
Me: Cookbooks? Cookbooks are nonfiction. Biographies? They're nonfiction, too. How about home repair? Lots of good nonfiction there.
Customer: No, no, no. You know ... NONFICTION.
Me: (Finally offering a little bit of mercy.) Maybe ... true crime?
Customer: Yes, yes, that's it.

Funny. Back then, every two years or so, I'd read a bit of it, myself. Usually know off two or three in a row. And, I'd usually ask myself "Why am I reading this stuff." After a lot of thought, I realized that it wasn't so much for the shock value. It was more a case of "There but for the grace of ... who or whatever ... go I." I think that really came home to me when I discovered that a local serial killer had worked right on the other side of the wall, from me, during the same time period that he was going about his merry business. That does give one pause. Lew

6/28/16, 12:37 PM

G E Canterbury said...

Looks like this post did not go through on my original attempt. For the first assignment, I read Thackeray's Vanity Fair. (Had been in the middle of Nostromo, but turned out that was published a bit this side of 1900.) I never had read anything by Thackeray before, and had had some vague preconception of the book as a dull daunting classic, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it very readable - playful, sarcastic, and narrated with plentiful breaches of the fourth wall. One difference from the modern perspective I almost missed in passing: the casual use of a simile, phrased something like "she held it as the reader has seen a mother holding her dead child to her breast". Today I would not expect that image to be deployed with such an assumption of the readers' shared everyday experience, given the lower infant mortality and the institutionalization of medicine (separating death from daily life) in most Western societies.

The novel follows our antiheroine Becky Sharp (a fitting name) as she ruthlessly ascends the English class structure through various deceptions and malfeasance; characters rise and fall, but that structure itself is very solid and explicitly defined by fine gradations of class, wealth, career,and family background. Neither the narrator nor the characters make any bones about discussing exactly how much income one can expect from their situation, and whether that will permit an acceptable marriage match. In my modern experience, these considerations indeed continue to exist, but in a rather more nebulous and less openly discussed form. I suspect the late 20th century resource bounty allowed many a greater sense of fluidity and freedom in personal life choices (thus, follow your dreams, and even if they fail you can probably regroup and find a way to make do more or less okay). In the future, probably not so much. Naive optimism has a pretty short half-life in Thackeray's world before being ruthlessly smacked down; when Becky and her husband are cut off from family support they do mostly maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, but only by employing heroic levels of fraud, extortion, and exploitation of their more vulnerable associates.

- Grant

6/28/16, 1:21 PM

Lunchista said...

Re-posting my contribution to the "Space bats prohibited" challenge, in case it got missed the first time :)

http://spaceandspaceability.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/space-bats-prohibited.html

Enjoy!

6/28/16, 4:12 PM

donalfagan said...

Someone probably posted this, but I think Mark Blyth states the reason for the Brexit vote well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK0jeJ8wxg

6/28/16, 4:52 PM

Doug Manners said...

Here's a different perspective on Brexit.

As several people have mentioned, it was EU regulations that held off attacks on the environment by the British government. The EU was able to devise and uphold those regulations precisely because it was unelected. The Great British Public does not care about the environment, any more than the Great American Public does.

Farage, Johnson, Gove & the rest of the Brexit movement are thus the modern equivalent of Reagan and Thatcher in using populist support to suppress the influence of environmental concerns over government policy.

To put it another way, the environment is an elitist concern. And sometimes the elites really are right and the populace is wrong even about matters that concern the populace. So while revolution may be justified from one point of view, there may be other points of view from which the revolutionaries damage their own interests at a fundamental level.

6/28/16, 11:34 PM

patriciaormsby said...

Commenters are coming up with such great ideas for reprehensible literature here! I realize I am much more likely to sympathize with the protagonist of the harmless little fluff novel I've chosen mostly as a lesson in modern Indonesian, and moreover I'll probably get a vicarious kick out of life in a medium I am physically unable to tolerate. Here in Japan, though, I probably will not find books that are reprehensible enough, even in Japanese, because the Japanese do not like to offend. Not wanting to order a book via the shaky international shipping system, I will seek out reprehensible on-line material, of which there is probably more than enough to constitute a book, given that among the views of the power elite there are those I consider an existential threat. (I think nearly everyone faces such a threat from the elite in one way or another.)

@Onething, a look at the world through the eyes of a moral Daltonist would be enlightening, especially since you know what is wrong with Ayn Rand. On the other hand, there is a whole world of reprehensible literature out there by unidentified sociopaths, and you might have fun picking out their moral blindspots.

6/29/16, 12:09 AM

patriciaormsby said...

I just took Kim Arnsten's advice and had a look at Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts by Leigh Phillips over on Amazon's website. They won't let me read the whole thing of course, but I do get a sampling, and My Goodness! What a steaming pile! She says she is coming from a leftist, environmentalist point of view, but regarding the latter, how in the heck could she misunderstand it as completely as she has! A basic lack of physics education? She's a "science writer"? God help science! In her first chapter, she manages to deride JMG along with just about anyone else prominent in our camp, implying indirectly that they are responsible for deaths of scientists in Mexico at the hands of a radical group she could not directly interview.

I noticed my response to this was to give her the benefit of the doubt at first, and then start skimming to see if there is any place where she sheds light on how she reached her conclusions, with which she starts her diatribe. My general response was the gag reflex.

If she were a decent writer, she could present an argument I could stay with, suspending my doubts at some points to try to follow the whole idea and learn what I can. The whole purpose of the book must have been simply a feel-good book for folks who still want to go forward with "progress" despite its increasingly visible flaws, who must be feeling a lot like Custer at Little Bighorn these days.

I also noticed at Amazon's site that those who had ordered her book also chose lots of good antidotes to it, like "Facing the Anthrocene" and others tkaing on the "crisis of capitalism".

So it is a real black hole of a book, but I will read through until, gratefully, I am stopped by Amazon who says I've had enough.

My late Aunt Helen recommended Sarah Palin's book as another real steamer.

6/29/16, 1:22 AM

Twinruler334 said...

The very term "Master Race" came from Madison Grant.

6/29/16, 2:23 AM

Alexandra said...

I can barely hear myself think for all my liberal, salary-class friends' shocked wailing and hand-wringing over Brexit. Mind you, these are almost all Americans who have never lived in the UK or EU, and have no idea what they are talking about except what they read in the media: that all supporters of Brexit are racists and xenophobes who are too stupid to even understand what they voted for. I'm not really even sure why they have their knickers in such a twist about something they never cared about enough to learn the first thing about it...I guess even they sense that the UK's internal divisions are a prequel to what we may see in the US. Or maybe it's just because it got a mention by John Oliver.

Well, I actually lived in the EU (Spain) for several years in the '90s. That was before Spain had joined the Euro currency zone, but even back then people were complaining about EU policies. One example: I lived in the most rural and poorest region of Spain and a lot of the complaints had to do with EU agricultural policies--mainly that the decisions about what to subsidize were made by people with no knowledge of the local environment and growing conditions. At roughly the same period I heard of similar complaints coming from the Scottish highlands where they were being told to grow crops instead of livestock. The EU bureaucrats apparently couldn't grasp that there's a reason why certain crops or livestock are traditional in certain areas (i.e., because they work). The subsidies weren't enough to cover the costs and farmers were having to sell their land for a pittance. Oh well, more real estate for the rich to invest in, right? Hooray for progress.

Sadly, the Spanish government made the decision to join the Euro zone, and you can all see what a boon that was for their economy. All their fears from the '90s came true, and worse.

So from my point of view, the faultlines in the EU were obvious 25 years ago, and it was a foregone conclusion that it would collapse--the only questions were how long it would take, who would leave first, and how nasty it would get. If the UK can really manage to extricate itself, it may avoid being crushed under the rubble. I am glad to see other nations considering referenda of their own now. The real point of national sovereignty isn't xenophobia--it's that decisions that impact a nation should be taken by those who (a) actually know that nation, and (b) are themselves impacted by the outcome.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that those who wanted to Remain in the EU are now calling for a do-over (what's next, best two out of three?): if you're not willing to abide by the votes of your fellow citizens, then you obviously don't believe in democracy anyway.

6/29/16, 9:01 AM

Bob Patterson said...

Noted - The utter insanity of Mr. Farage, leader of the LEAVE movement, insulting the EU Parliament in the most boorish way possible, knowing that these same people could slap a 30% tariff on British trade at any time after BREXIT.

6/29/16, 9:28 AM

Patricia Mathews said...

This book should offend everyone - and yet, from the description, is long overdue.

http://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/white-trash?utm_source=powellsbooks.news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbnews_20160629&utm_content=Essay

6/29/16, 10:38 AM

Owen said...

>read something offensive because it's offensive

How about writing something offensive because it's offensive? And funny. I know I shouldn't laugh, but I do.

https://storify.com/weev/a-small-experiment-in

6/29/16, 11:10 AM

Unknown said...

(Deborah Bender)

Alabandon, Iaway, Rhode Off, Wisconsout, Idahexit, Michigone, Delete.

6/29/16, 11:51 AM

BoysMom said...

Good grief, Justin. I live very near there, as Westerners count distance, and we've had a total black-out of that, I didn't even know it had happened. Compared to an equally nearby high school case where the perps were white teen boys and the victim a black teen boy, which made front page news in such excruciating detail that I had to hide the paper from my kids!
I knew our local paper wasn't good for much, but this is going too far. We've got multiple missing teens in the region right now, if any links between them and this situation surface I think things have the potential to get very ugly very fast. Lampposts might be the least of the perps and their protectors' worries.

6/29/16, 2:56 PM

Andy said...

I can't belive I read this, and completely missed it ;) Obviously I wasn't alone. I had no understanding of what you were saying, and it may as well have been a different language. Yet now it is so obvious to me. I'm curious if you can talk about it so openly and get an equally blank response, or is it reading that causes us to glaze over? I have always been impressed by your reasoning and knowledge, but I'm in awe of your patientce.

7/11/16, 12:40 AM