Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C. S. Lewis. Show all posts

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Bad People Versus Bad Institutions

In his latest LOCUS essay, Cory Doctorow discusses whether "all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay." Setting aside the question of whether "irreversibly terrible" is a bit exaggerated, he reasonably states that "it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people," and the internet was ruined, if it was, by bad people:

Don't Be Evil

The problem isn't that simple, however, since institutions, not individuals, created the internet. On the other hand, institutions comprise many individuals, some with honorable motives and some driven solely by the quest for profit. In short, "institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts." Can corporations as such be evil? Doctorow doesn't seem to be saying that's the case. Every institution, private or public, includes multitudes of people, with conflicting goals, some good and some bad -- both the individuals and their goals. Moreover, as he doesn't explicitly mention, some people's characters and motivations are neither all good nor all bad. Many drift along with the corporate culture from fear of the consequences of resistance or maybe just from failure to think through the full implications of what's going on. He does seem to be suggesting, however, that vast, impersonal forces can shape negative outcomes regardless of the contrary wishes of some people involved in the process. "Tech didn’t get worse because techies [workers in the field] got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the external world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments."

What solutions for this quandary could be tried, other than "burn them [the allegedly villainous "giants of the internet" such as Amazon and Google] to the ground," in my opinion a bit too drastic? Doctorow insists, "A new, good internet is possible and worth fighting for," and lists some aspects he believes must change. Potential avenues for improvement can be summarized by the need to empower the people who mean well -- the ones Doctorow describes as "people within those institutions who pine for a new, good internet, an internet that is a force for human liberation" -- over those who disregard the concerns of their customers in single-minded greed for profit.

On the wider topic of individual responsibility for the villainous acts of institutions over which one doesn't have any personal control, one might be reminded of the contemporary issue of reparations to historically oppressed groups. Of course, one can quit a job and seek a more ethical employer, but renouncing one's nationality or ethnic ancestry would be severely problematic. However, since that subject veers into "modpol" (modern politics, as strictly banned on an e-mail list I subscribe to), I'll simply point out C. S. Lewis's essay, in a different context, about repenting of other people's sins:

Dangers of National Repentance

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, September 28, 2023

In Celebration of Happy Endings

In fiction, is a sad conclusion more "realistic" than a happy one? "The belief seems to be that tragic or unhappy endings are 'real' and therefore 'worthy' while happy endings are an easy cop-out." This essay on the Word Wenches blog strongly objects to that belief:

Word Wenches: Happy Endings

The insistence that happy endings are unrealistic seems based on the undeniable fact that the real world contains lots of horror and suffering. Yes, admits this blogger, but it also contains "a lot of happy stuff," which she wants us to "celebrate. . . not push it under the carpet and call it mindless fluff." People who hold the latter position apparently believe writers and readers of such "fluff" are evading reality, hiding from the grim truths of life. As if the grimness and suffering were somehow MORE "real" than the joyful bits. Is a house in the suburbs with two cars and a jacuzzi any less "real life" than a roach-infested apartment? (During our fifty-plus years of marriage, we've lived in both as well as various environments in between.) Every work of art constructs its effects by selecting elements from the total mass of lived experience. Why shouldn't we preferentially select the good rather than the bad sometimes? Dwelling solely on the bad and labeling it "realism" reminds me of a passage in C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS: The senior demon advises the junior tempter to induce the human "patient" to consider his feelings about the impact of bombs on human flesh as a reflection of "reality" and his feelings about sunshine and happy children as mere wishful thinking.

I suspect a large part of "serious" critics' dismissal of romance arises not just from its predominantly female audience but also from its generic requirement for a "happily ever after" or at least a "happily for now." Yet if it's actually true that half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce (which I've read is a faulty claim based on a misinterpretation of the statistics), then it's also true that half of all marriages last a lifetime.

Not that the Word Wenches blogger is saying no fiction should conclude with a sad outcome. What she objects to are stories (in whatever medium) that "are needlessly miserable at the end." If the disastrous or tragic conclusion grows naturally out of the story, as an inevitable result of the characters and their situation, that can work for her. That's different from a pointlessly sad ending designed for shock value or to flaunt the author's commitment to gritty "realism" -- or "simply because the writer thinks it will make for a better, more dramatic ending." I agree. "Sad" fiction isn't necessarily depressing. The finale of a tragedy by Shakespeare feels uplifting, not depressing. Seemingly meaningless destruction of the characters and their goals, to me, IS depressing. The purpose of art is to impose structure on, or discover it in, the apparent chaos of "real life."

In one of his books on literature, C. S. Lewis approaches the issue of "realism" from the opposite angle, addressing critics and readers who think the down-to-earth content of comedy is more "realistic" than the solemn grandeur of tragedy. He points out that the zany coincidences required to make a good farce work are just as artificial and therefore "unrealistic" as the plot of a well-crafted tragedy. Every genre includes some details of mundane life and excludes others, according to its particular requirements.

So we have no reason to apologize if we love to read and write upbeat fiction.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, December 08, 2022

Commercialized Holidays

Recently I saw a Facebook post lamenting the materialistic nature of the Christmas season nowadays. The holidays focus too much on buying and receiving presents. Advertisers swamp us with messages encouraging greed. Oh, for the old-fashioned, gentle, family-centered Christmases of his youth. Well, this person appears to be around my age (mid-70s), and I remember childhood holiday preparations characterized by frenetic seasonal advertising and feverish anticipation of presents. (Of course, we were ad-bombed by less sophisticated technology, and the store displays probably went up slightly later in the year, but it was the same general kind of atmosphere.)

In A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, first broadcast in 1965, Charlie famously asks what Christmas is all about, as he despairs over the commercialization of the holiday, with even Snoopy embracing the hype.

In 1957, C. S. Lewis published an essay called "What Christmas Means to Me" (a title I'm almost certain wasn't chosen by Lewis himself, but that's beside the point). He says three things "go by the name of Christmas": First, the Christian religious festival. Second, "a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality." The third is "the commercial racket." Read this short essay in full to note how little that cultural aspect has changed, aside from the technology, since Lewis complained of it in the 1950s:

What Christmas Means to Me

A CHRISTMAS STORY (the BB gun movie), based on episodes in Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, takes place in 1940; the real-life incidents underlying it probably occurred in the 1930s. The film shows a department-store Santa in an extravagantly decorated setting, with an assembly line of children waiting to declare their wishes.

According to Stephen Nissenbaum's THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an analysis of the shift from the REAL old-fashioned Christmas of drinking, carousing, and house-to-house begging (wassailing) to the domestic, child-centered holiday we think of as a "traditional Christmas," concerns about commercialization sprang up concurrently with the cultural shift. Even before the mid-nineteenth century, merchants aggressively advertised their wares as perfect for seasonal gifting, while troubled moralists warned of Christmas becoming "laden with crass materialism" and producing a "generation of greedy, spoiled children."

In short, every era's nostalgic imagination relegates the traditional, unspoiled Christmas of bygone years to their parents' or grandparents' day, or maybe the generation before that. More accurately, that ideal holiday never existed in the first place.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, November 17, 2022

The Purpose of Horror

What is horror fiction (whether in print or on film) good for? My parents certainly took a dim view of my fervent interest in the genre, beginning at the age of twelve with my first reading of DRACULA. A familiar physiological or biochemical hypothesis proposes that reading or viewing horror serves the same purpose as riding a roller coaster. We enjoy the adrenaline rush of danger without having to expose ourselves to any real risk. Personally, I would never get on a roller coaster except at gunpoint, to save someone else's life, or to earn a lavish amount of money. I'm terrified of anything that feels like falling and don't like any kind of physical "thrill" experience. Yet I do enjoy the vicarious fears of the horror genre. Maybe real-life thrill rides or extreme sports feel too much like actual danger for my tolerance level, whereas artistic terror feels controllable.

H. P. Lovecraft famously asserts, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown." Therefore, horror is a legitimate subject for art, even though he believes its appeal is restricted to a niche audience. We might link Lovecraft's thesis to the physiological model, in that the feared unknown becomes manageable when confined within the boundaries of a story.

In DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King suggests that all horror fiction has roots in our fear of death. Embodying the threat of death in the form of a monster entails the hope that it can be defeated. I think it's in 'SALEM'S LOT that a child character says, "Death is when the monsters get you."

In an interview in the October 2022 LOCUS, author Sarah Gailey maintains that "horror is designed to put the reader in touch with an experience of the body, where that experience is one that they typically would not wish to have." Our culture separates body and mind from each other, while, Gailey says, "Horror serves to remind us that those things aren’t separate. The ‘I’ who I am is absolutely connected to the physical experience of my body and the danger that body could face in the world, and horror does an incredible job of reminding readers that we live in bodies, we live in the world, and we are creatures."

This comment reminds me of C. S. Lewis's remark that the truth of our nature as a union of both the spiritual and the physical could be deduced from the existence of dirty jokes and ghost stories. Bawdy humor implies that our having fleshly bodies is somehow funny, shameful, or incongruous. No other species of animal seems to find it funny just to be the kind of creature it is. Supernatural horror highlights the sense that separation of body and soul, which should form a single, unified entity, is deeply unnatural. Hence we get the extremes of zombies (soulless yet animated bodies) and ghosts (disembodied spirits).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Is Time Travel Impossible?

A character in C. S. Lewis's posthumously published novel fragment THE DARK TOWER asserts it is. (Granted, one faction within Lewis scholarship maintains THE DARK TOWER wasn't actually written by him, but I don't find that claim convincing. Anyway, the issue doesn't affect the point of the story.) He argues that physical travel to the past or future can't be done for a basic, irrefutable reason: A corporeal trip into a different time necessarily carries all the atoms in one's own body into that other time. But in the past, all those particles existed in other entities in the physical world, whether inanimate objects, living creatures, liquids, gasses, whatever. In the future, those same particles will again be distributed through the environment. The only way you could materialize in a different moment would be if duplicates of each of your atoms, molecules, etc. existed in the same place at the same time. According to the laws of physics as we know them, that's impossible. Therefore, physical time travel is forever, irrevocably ruled out, unless we invoke magic rather than science.

That story is the only place where I've encountered this argument, which strikes me as highly convincing. On this hypothesis, other temporal "locations" could be only viewed, never visited. Accordingly, Lewis's character has invented a device for viewing other times, although it turns out the true situation is more complicated than he believed.

While I've come across other stories of observing rather than traveling to some non-present time, I don't remember any that offer a theoretical grounding for the impossibility of temporal travel in the flesh. It's not unusual in time-travel fiction, however, for a traveler to be unable to exist in the same location more than once in the same moment. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTNING, a traveler can't visit a place/time where he already is/was. He's automatically shunted away from that point. In Connie Willis's series about time-traveling historians from a near-future Oxford University, the same prohibition applies, but it's not clear whether the simultaneous existence of two of the same person is outright impossible or would produce a catastrophic result if it accidentally happened. In such works as the Harry Potter series, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," on the other hand, any number of you can be in the same point in space/time at once.

To me, the former rule seems more plausible, because it makes the issue of the same material object being in two places at once less obvious, although I've enjoyed lots of fiction in the second category. One possible way to get around the problem raised in Lewis's DARK TOWER: Instead of a corporeal leap into a different time, travelers might project their consciousness and build temporary bodies in the other time by "borrowing" stray particles from the surrounding air, water, and earth. When the traveler released the borrowed matter to return to his or her point of origin, the particles would dissipate harmlessly into the environment. Another method of bypassing the problem shows up in the new QUANTUM LEAP series: The leaper's consciousness occupies the body of a person in the past, presumably suppressing the host's personality in a sort of temporary, benign possession. (The time-shift operated differently in the original series, while this version does leave unanswered the question of where the leaper's body is while his immaterial consciousness travels to multiple past eras.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Age Ranges for Fiction

Editor Laura Simeon writes about determining whether a children's or YA book is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for a certain age:

What Makes a Book Age-Appropriate?

Current "battles over so-called 'inappropriate' content in kids’ and teen books" can lead to situations where "school librarians nationwide report that some administrators are incorrectly treating these age recommendations as prescriptive and using them to craft policies that override the expertise of library professionals and limit students’ access to books." But determining which readers certain books are suitable for isn't that straightforward.

Do age guidelines for reading materials refer to vocabulary and sentence complexity or to content? The two criteria don't necessarily align. Simeon points out that a child with advanced literacy skills might be able to read a particular novel's text fluently but not be developmentally ready for the themes it includes or the way it deals with them. Her essay offers several examples of 2022 books that cover potentially sensitive topics (e.g., divorce, mental illness) in ways suitable for middle-school and YA readers, respectively. Conversely, I could mention numerous classic novels with stories fully accessible to preteen readers but with vocabulary and style that could prove challenging for some contemporary twelve-year-olds—for instance, THE SECRET GARDEN, especially the Yorkshire dialect passages.

Simeon lists issues that trouble people who want to restrict students' access to the "wrong" or "inappropriate" books, among them the fear that kids might "lose a romanticized notion of childhood innocence." It is to laugh. The only people who believe in the "innocence" of childhood are adults who've forgotten large portions of their own childhoods. When James Barrie calls children "innocent" in PETER PAN, he couples that adjective with "heartless." It has often baffled me when would-be censors object to having child readers exposed in fiction to phenomena they're almost certainly aware of in reality. "Books can be upsetting and confusing," Simeon acknowledges, "but so can real life. Unlike real life, readers can skim, skip, take breaks, and walk away."

Anyway, age range recommendations for books, like genre categories, are marketing tools. Their chief purpose is to help booksellers and librarians decide where to shelve things. C. S. Lewis says somewhere that any book worth reading at age eight (aside from "books of information") is equally worth reading at any age. I first encountered many of my favorite children's and YA authors in adulthood. I have a vague memory of reading a couple of the Narnia novels in elementary school, but I tracked down the entire series only in my twenties. I've reread them over and over since then. I'd never heard of the Winnie the Pooh stories until my high-school Latin teacher read us a chapter every Friday (while we passed around WINNIE ILLE PU).

My own policy about children and books, based on my own prodigious quantity of "inappropriate" reading from about age eight on, has always been that their reading shouldn't be censored. If they stumble upon a literary work and find it interesting, let them tackle it. If they come across passages "over their heads," they'll be either bored or repelled and will simply skim or skip. As for the few books I owned that I flatly didn't want my underage offspring to read, I kept them securely stowed where the kids didn't know they existed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Writing to the Future

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column, on writing nonfiction pieces that will still be relevant by the time they're published:

Six Weeks Is a Long Time

The time lag that may undercut the applicability of a written work, according to him, seems to be getting shorter. Circumstances can always truly change overnight or in an instant, of course. Consider the difference between September 10, 2001, and September 11 of that year. Yet it may seem odd to define an essay meant to be read a month and a half after it's written as "futuristic thinking." The near future, however, is still the future. As C. S. Lewis's senior demon says in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, all human beings constantly travel into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.

I once read a story about a time-viewing machine that allows the user to look into the future. The culture-transformative feature of this device is that it has no lower limit on how short a time span it can look ahead. And apparently (if I remember correctly) one can view events in other places, not just where one happens to be personally located. Suppose you peer ten seconds into the future? You're effectively spying on people's actions in the present, in real time. (On second thought, it may have been a past-viewing device. Same principle applies.)

Doctorow wrote this month's article in the midst of a new, highly contagious COVID variant and the imminent invasion of Ukraine, addressing us "in the distant, six-week future" from his moment in the past when "the odds of nuclear Armageddon [seemed] higher than they’ve been for decades." He greets his future audience thus: "I bear glad tidings. Only six weeks ago, you, me and most everyone else we knew couldn’t imagine getting through these next six weeks. If you’re reading these words, you did the unimaginable. Six weeks and six weeks and six weeks, we eat the elephant of the unimaginable one bite at a time."

We're familiar with the question of what message we'd like to send to our past selves. There's a country song about writing a letter to "me at seventeen." But what message might you want to send to your future self? Unlike speaking to one's past self, this we can actually do. Are there important events or thoughts you might want to write down as reminders in case you've forgotten them a month, a year, or decades from now? What would you like to record as an important reminder for the citizens of your city, your country, or the world next month, next year, a decade from now, or generations later? People often do the latter with physical "time capsules." Would the things you choose to highlight turn out to be important to those future audiences or not?

Isaac Asimov wrote at least one essay predicting future technological and social advances, and surely he wasn't the only SF author to do that. Some of his predictions have come true; many haven't. An essay like that could be considered a message to future generations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 24, 2022

Verbicide

The final chapter of C. S. Lewis's STUDIES IN WORDS shifts from the narrowly focused topics of the rest of the book (each chapter delving into the history of a particular term and its relatives) to a general overview of what he calls "verbicide," the degradation of the meanings of words. Not that he expects words to stay frozen in their original denotations. As he says somewhere else, expecting a changeless language is like asking for a motionless river. What he objects to are changes that empty words of meaning. Most words now used as insults or compliments began as descriptive, neutral terms. "Cad" is short for a reference to boys or young men, surviving in the golf term "caddie." "Villain" originally meant a peasant and eventually became derogatory when it grew to emphasize the alleged boorish, thug-like traits of the typical peasant. (That's almost certainly how Richard III uses it in Shakespeare's play; he plans to act like an uncouth brute, not a mustache-twirling incarnation of evil.) Now it just means a very bad person. "Gentleman" denoted a man of a particular social class before it gained the connotation of someone who displays the fine manners and honor expected of that class. By now it has lost all connection with class status and simply means a polite man or, even more vaguely, a man the speaker approves of. To call someone a good Christian, in Lewis's day, had come to signify a favorable opinion of the subject's behavior rather than a statement that the person belonged to a certain religion and believed, at least theoretically, in its doctrines. Lewis deplored the trend of turning previously useful words, which at least implied specific grounds for praise or condemnation, into yet more all-purpose synonyms for "good" and "bad." "Awful," which originally meant "awe-inspiring," evolved to mean "very bad." "Fantastic," which implied wildly imaginative or incredible, came to mean "very good." I shudder to think how Lewis would react if he visited our era and discovered "awesome" has morphed into a substitute for "very nice."

Speaking of "very," it has changed from meaning "truly" to a general intensifier that writers are advised to avoid. Mark Twain famously suggested that we replace every "very" with "damn." The editor would delete all the "damns," to the great improvement of our writing. (Not that this trick would work nowadays, when few editors would blink at that once-unprintable word.) As for "damn" itself, it has little more content than a snarl. To echo Lewis again, someone who trips over the furniture and exclaims, "Damn that chair!" doesn't really expect it to be endowed with a soul and condemned to eternal torment. "Literally" has become, for many casual speakers, another content-free intensifier even in statements the diametric opposite of literal.

Then there's the phenomenon of euphemism creep. Valiant attempts to replace taboo or insulting words with less offensive equivalents sooner or later result in the euphemism taking on the stigma of the word it replaces, so a new alternative has to be invented. "Retarded" originated as a euphemism implying a little slow rather than feebleminded. During my teen years, "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron" had already served as insults in popular speech for a long time, but high-school lessons on mental health taught us they still had sober scientific meanings in reference to precisely defined IQ ranges. In my youth, "colored" and "Negro" were the polite words for Black people; now they're considered at best old-fashioned, at worst offensively patronizing (except in the names of organizations such as the NAACP). Long before I was born, "toilet" shifted from a personal hygiene ritual to the room where it was often performed, then to a particular plumbing fixture in that room. As a result, in my teens I found the older use of "toilet" in Victorian novels puzzling, and at that age we were apt to snicker at the label "toilet water" for a type of perfume.

Writers can't stop language from changing, not that we'd want to. Nor can we hope to stem the flood of verbicide. What we can do is try to avoid the latter in our own prose. Aside from dialogue, where current slang such as "awesome" for "very nice" may fit the character, we can take care to use words in their proper context with precise meanings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Survival Through Storytelling

Recently I came across an ad for a book subtitled something like, "How to survive hard times by telling stories." I can't find it again, so I don't know the title, author, or specific subject matter. (Google and Amazon didn't help because the terms are so general.) Not knowing leaves me free to speculate about what that phrase means. To me, it suggests that we cope with difficult experiences by shaping them into narratives that discover purpose in the seeming randomness of the ups and downs of our lives.

We human beings are storytelling creatures. We share jokes, urban legends, and episodes from the daily news. If we're enthusiastic about a book or movie, we often can't wait to rave about it to fellow fans. Think of a small child trying to recite the plot of a film, each sentence starting with "and then. . . ." Everybody enjoys telling others about experiences they've lived through, good or bad, although some people do it more skillfully than others. Every family has tales passed down from parents, older siblings, and other relatives. Memories get polished into anecdotes retold and embellished over the decades and generations. Two of the world's major religions, Judaism and Christianity, have their roots in stories (the Exodus from Egypt and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, respectively).

As C. S. Lewis mentions somewhere, we can find "escape" in literature by reading even the most depressing or tragic work of fiction, because it provides a temporary distraction from our own mundane troubles. Moreover, stories impose order on the untidy incidents of everyday life, in which no sequence of events has a definite beginning or end. Narrative makes sense of the world. As writers are often warned, the argument "but it really happened" can't justify a farfetched scene in a novel. Reality doesn't have to be believable or logical; fiction does.

I'm reminded of my favorite Terry Pratchett passage, this often quoted dialogue between Death and his granddaughter in HOGFATHER:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

Off topic, RE Halloween: Vampire fans might enjoy my duology TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS, starring a vampire-human hybrid psychiatrist:

Twilight's Changelings

Another good introduction to my vampire series is the stand-alone romance EMBRACING DARKNESS:

Embracing Darkness

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 08, 2021

Educating the Passions

Over the July 4th weekend, columnist David Brooks wrote about the importance of storytelling:

America Has a Great Story to Tell

Skipping past the explicitly political content, I was particularly impressed by the discussion of "propositional" (intellectual) knowledge versus "emotional and moral knowledge." Brooks quotes 18th-century philosopher David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” My first reaction, as many readers' might be, was, "Huh?" But Brooks goes on to explain:

"Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions. It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows. This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories." I would add, by the way, that poems and songs perform the same function. Think of "America the Beautiful" or "This Land Is Your Land," to name only two examples.

The importance of educating the passions (i.e., emotions) forms one of the core messages of C. S. Lewis's THE ABOLITION OF MAN (1943). He adopts from Plato the metaphor of the human personality being composed of three parts, the head (reason), the chest (spirit, in the sense of emotions), and the abdomen (basic appetites). Reason should rule the whole person, including appetites and desires; however, it does so, not directly, but through the "chest." One of the chapters in THE ABOLITION OF MAN, in fact, is titled "Men Without Chests." The "proper" attitudes alluded to by Brooks develop not through intellectual study, important as that is, but by osmosis, so to speak, permeating a child's world-view before he or she has any idea what's happening. And that happens through implicit assumptions that may never be explicitly stated. For instance, in Lewis's book he analyzes passages from a pair of English textbooks for pupils at British elementary schools (as we'd call them). Both of them convey the underlying, taken-for-granted idea that there are no such things as objective values. The authors of the texts may not have even consciously realized that's what they were doing. Lewis covers similar ground in his PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST, where he refutes the disdain of one of his contemporaries for "stock responses." The attitudes and emotions dismissed by some critics as "stock responses," Lewis maintains, are not innate and automatic. They have to be deliberately shaped through years of growth. Good preconceptions as well as bad have "got to be carefully taught" (to quote the song from SOUTH PACIFIC).

As writers, we should be heartened to recognize the vital importance of stories in that process.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Xmas Musings

I've just read a recent book about Dorothy Sayers, SUBVERSIVE, by Crystal Downing. One theme to which the author frequently alludes is the concept of living by an exchange model, an expectation of behaving certain ways to get equivalent value in return. For instance, Downing emphasizes that Sayers cautioned against the mind-set that doing good deeds guarantees one will "go to Heaven" or even enjoy prosperity in life. At the current season, this idea reminded me of Christmas gifts, naturally. We often speak of "exchanging presents" or having a gift exchange at an office party. Ideally, we'd give presents that reflect our awareness of what the recipient really wants, without any consideration of what we might receive from that person. In practice, our gift-giving is often constrained not only by what we can afford but by the anticipated size and monetary value of the present we expect the recipient to give us. If we spend a lot more in giving than the other person spends on us, we might feel miffed at the discrepancy or embarrassed at having put the other person in an awkward spot. Conversely, not spending enough on a gift may distress us because we fear the recipient will think we're stingy, or we might even feel guilty about not giving what we "should."

This subject reminds me of two short essays C. S. Lewis wrote about Christmas as celebrated in Britain in his time. You can read them here:

What Christmas Means to Me

Xmas and Christmas

In "What Christmas Means to Me" (a sappy title I seriously doubt Lewis chose himself), he distinguishes three things called "Christmas": The first is the religious festival. The second, a secular holiday devoted to merrymaking, "has complex historical connections with the first" and, in mid-twentieth-century England as in our contemporary culture, is joyfully celebrated by millions of people who don't practice Christianity in any other way. The third phenomenon, which Lewis says "is unfortunately everyone's business," he calls "the commercial racket." Note that this article was first published in 1957! Here's where the topic of gift exchange comes in. He laments the modern pressure to give presents or at least send cards to everybody we know, a custom he maintains "has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers." Not only is this obligation exhausting and a hindrance to the "ordinary and necessary shopping" we still can't avoid, "Most of it is involuntary." While I think "most" is an exaggeration, Lewis amusingly summarizes the hapless shopper's plight thus: "The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own."

"Xmas and Christmas," a witty piece of satire, bears the subtitle "A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." It purports to be the classical historian's report of strange winter customs in the fogbound island nation of Niatirb. The writer describes the sending of "Exmas-cards" bearing pictures that seem to have no discernible connection to the festival supposedly being celebrated, such as birds on prickly tree branches. There's a funny description of the citizens' reactions to receiving cards or gifts from anyone they haven't already gifted: "They beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain. . . ." Herodotus concludes that Exmas and "Crissmas" can't possibly be the same holiday, because surely millions of people wouldn't undergo those ordeals in honor of a God they don't believe in.

This essay's description of the illustrations on "Exmas-cards," including "men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs," highlights the way our images of a "traditional Christmas" often owe more to art, literature, and the media than to firsthand experience. Those idyllic snow scenes, for instance, and the songs about sleigh rides. If anyone in the modern U.S. goes on a sleigh ride around the holidays, it's most likely a staged event, not a spontaneous family outing. As for songs such as "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "White Christmas" (rescued from banality only by its seldom-sung prologue, which frames the singer as a Los Angeles resident nostalgic for the northeast winters of his childhood), a considerable percentage of the American population sees white Christmases only in the movies. In the popular imagination, though, December is supposed to conform to the standard described by TV Tropes in this entry:

Dreaming of a White Christmas

As the page explains, "Unless a work of fiction takes place in a tropical or arid setting, or in the Southern Hemisphere, it will always snow in winter. . . . The snow will be there to look 'pretty'. It does not melt or turn slushy, nor is it ever coated with dirt or litter. It is never accompanied by freezing winds or icy rains." While our family lived in San Diego at some points during my husband's Navy career, we could tell when it was winter (aside from chilly nights and increased rain) because the distant hills turned green rather than brown. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I seldom experienced snow in December as a child. We got it mainly in January. My late stepmother, a native of the coastal region of North Carolina, loved snow and always hoped for a white Christmas. Considering her birthplace, I doubt she ever saw snow at Christmas during her entire early life. Yet the ideal derived from fiction, movies, and songs shaped her vision of how the winter holidays were "supposed" to look.

Merry Christmas, white or green, to all who celebrate it!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 17, 2020

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS essay discusses empathy versus selfishness and why being the "bad guy" is actually taking the easy way out:

It's Easy Being the Bad Guy

It's not uncommon to think villains are more fun to read and write, while heroes are boring. Hurley recalls her childhood reading diet of "feel-good fantasy novels," the kind of "noble tales" in which the good and people can be counted on to fulfill our expectations of their good or evil choices, and we know in advance "who would prevail and who would fail." In childhood, she "found this predictability boring and formulaic after the first three or four novels." Later she realized fiction of straightforward good and evil offers a welcome, valid respite from the "messy and complicated" real world where "good people coming out on top is far less common than we’d like." By adulthood, most of us have learned that's how the world works. It's understandable to want a fictional world that operates differently. In addition to fantasy, Hurley mentions detective stories, pervaded by the theme that truth will come to light and justice will prevail. As she puts it, "This is why we tell so many stories about the good folks winning, to balance out some of the everyday horror we encounter in a world that is fundamentally unfair."

In her early years, Hurley "believed goodness was the default state." Later in life, after decades lived according to an allegedly realistic philosophy of self-interest, she discovered that doing the right thing, rather than the easy "default" path, is a difficult choice that must be consciously taken. She notes that "we must actively choose goodness every day" and affirms, "Goodness. . . is not a state, but an act, one we must perform again and again." A provocative article well worth reading in its entirety.

In real-life terms, C. S. Lewis maintains that the notorious criminals, tyrants, and other villains of history have a monotonous sameness, while the saints are gloriously unique. Nevertheless, I feel there's some truth in the idea that it's often easier to write a convincing, interesting villain than a believable hero. Lewis himself creates interesting good characters, such as Lucy in the Narnia series and Dr. Ransom in the space trilogy (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, etc.). Madeleine L'Engle does an especially fine job with her engaging young heroes, e.g., Meg and her brother Charles Wallace in A WRINKLE AND TIME and its sequels. The dual protagonists of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series also rank high in that category. Two of my other favorite good characters are Dorothy Sayers's mystery-solving duo of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Terry Pratchett also does this sort of thing brilliantly, as with formidable witch Granny Weatherwax and police chief Vimes.

The assumption that heroes can't interest audiences without fundamental flaws and deep-seated self-doubt has led to distortions such as the portrayal of Aragorn in the LORD OF THE RINGS movies and the jarringly out-of-character behavior of Peter in the large-screen adaptation of PRINCE CASPIAN. This assumption is a fairly modern development, though, not an eternal verity in the creation of mythic, legendary, and fictional good guys.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Risk Assessment and Fear

So schools, bars, restaurants, theaters, concert venues, casinos, etc. in Maryland have been ordered to close, and gatherings of more than fifty people are forbidden. Both of the cons I was scheduled to attend this spring have been canceled, sadly but inevitably. While of course we'll obey the official edicts and exercise prudence in daily life, I can't help thinking some reactions are overkill. The panic-buying, for instance, aspects of which baffle me. Bottled water stripped from store shelves, when there's no threat to the drinking water supply? We have electricity, running water, heat, and cable and aren't at risk of losing them. Major retailers reassure us that there's no long-term shortage, only a distribution problem that will clear up rapidly if people stop panic-buying. If everybody would just buy what they require for a week or two at a time, the stores could keep up, and we'd all be able to get what we need.

It's a familiar truism of human psychology that we overestimate rare dangers and underestimate common ones. The extraordinary threats draw attention BECAUSE they're rare. Here are two short pieces on that tendency:

Jared Diamond on Common Risks

Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Horrific Events

As is often pointed out, we're far more likely to get into a car accident driving to the airport than to die in a plane crash. We're more at risk of injury or death in traffic on the way to the big-box store than of exposure to the coronavirus (in this region, at least). The population of Maryland is about six million. Our county has a population of 573,000. As of Monday, there are 37 confirmed cases in Maryland, only two in this county. Since members of our family haven't traveled abroad lately or come into contact with anyone who has, our individual risk of crossing paths with the virus is near zero. Yet the daily deluge of breaking news still makes me anxious (mainly, on a personal level, about being unable to restock the items we need for daily living), and to stop brooding over it takes real effort.

Psychologist Steven Pinker has a section on phobias in his HOW THE MIND WORKS. He notes that almost all phobias (irrationally exaggerated fears) fall into a few categories, derived from things that threatened our prehistoric ancestors. Hence our common fears of spiders and snakes, even though most species encountered in urban areas of North America are harmless to humans. "Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us." Instead of spiders and snakes, we should be afraid of "guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs." While we may exercise sensible caution about such things, most of us aren't terrified of them (although driving-phobic people do exist, and transportation assistance is available for those who can't force themselves to drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland). For every freeway-phobic person, large numbers suffer from fear of flying, despite the greater safety of the latter mode of travel.

In C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, senior devil Screwtape reminds his nephew Wormwood that "precautions have a tendency to increase fear." When standard precautions become routine, however, "this effect disappears." (Think how blase we've become about airport security lines. I remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and non-flying companions could accompany departing travelers right up to the gate.) Screwtape advises Wormwood to keep the "patient" obsessing over all sorts of extra things he can do "which seem to make him a little safer" and can be developed into "a series of imaginary life-lines" in response to imagined potential developments. (Accumulating a hoard of bottled water even though there's no threat to the public supply?) Earlier in the book, Screwtape points out that "real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible."

One of my favorite Lewis quotes comes from an essay he wrote in answer to the question, "How are we to live under the threat of the atomic bomb?" It's a longish passage, but I think it's worth reproducing here:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. 'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

As a last resort, we could reread Daniel Defoe's A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, Stephen King's THE STAND, or Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK and remind ourselves our current plight isn't nearly so bad as that, nor is it likely to become so.

In case you have time to watch a video of about six minutes, here's a calming message from a layman of our church—with a Maine Coon. Cats make everything better:

Jeff Conover

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Social Media in the Raging 20s

In her latest LOCUS post, Kameron Hurley writes about tension and anxiety in the era of instantaneous communication and miscommunication:

Into the Raging 20s We Ride

She discusses misinformation, the pitfalls of following news bites in real time, the anxiety caused by exposure to floods of "unfettered" and unfiltered content, and feelings of helplessness when overwhelmed by what appear to be irresistible, impersonal forces. The essay begins with this generalization: "I’ve found that the insidious problem for me in scrolling through social media is that it feels like action. Ironically, it also creates – in me – a profound feeling of being out of control over events in the wider world, while generating a huge amount of anxiety and worry."

We tend to think if we Like or Share a post on a vital topic, we've done something about it. We often forget to dig deeper for reliable information or to seek out something concrete we can do in the real world. Hurley recommends rekindling the joy of creation, as well as becoming more intentional and selective about the online sources we expose ourselves to. She points out, "Our always-on culture has been driven by organizations that seek to get an increasing share of a finite resource: our attention. The more attention I give their services and algorithms, the less attention I have for the things that matter to me." The "luxury of deep focus" is an important resource of which social media can deprive us; Hurley writes about the need to rediscover that focus.

I was surprised at her remark that she's trying to spend more time on books. When and why did her book-reading decrease, I wonder? I can't imagine not reading a portion of a book-length work every day (in practice, two or three, since I always have several books going at one time, each for a different reading slot in my schedule). Unlike many people, including Hurley, I don't get ensnared by Facebook for long sessions. Some days, if time runs out, I barely glance at it or don't open it at all. When I do scan my feed, I devote only twenty minutes or so to it. Since I've friended or followed so many people, the content is effectively infinite, so there's no point in trying to consume all of it. The organizations and individuals I'm really interested in, I see regularly near the top of the page. My personal infinite black holes in terms of online reading are Quora and TV Tropes, where I have to make a conscious effort not to get sucked in except during free time I've specifically allotted to recreational surfing.

Hurley's comments about the illusion of taking action remind me of some lines from C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. (Like Shakespeare, Lewis offers an apt quote for almost any situation.) With regard to steering the victim's "wandering attention" away from what he ought to be spending his time on, senior demon Screwtape advises his pupil, "You no longer need a good book, which he really likes" to distract the "patient"; "a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about." Later, Screwtape says, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." Screwtape would probably get a lot of mileage from the temptation to chase an endless chain of web links down multiple rabbit holes. In a different work (I can't remember which), Lewis points out that our brains weren't designed to cope with infinite demands on our sympathy in the form of a torrent of news about crises and disasters in distant places that we have no power to affect. I wonder what Lewis would say about social media and the 24-hour news cycle. His reaction would definitely not be favorable; in his lifetime, he avoided reading newspapers on the grounds that the content was often distorted or downright false.

Hurley's essay concludes with a declaration that's easy to applaud but often hard to practice: "Our attention, like our lives, is finite. Choose wisely."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Worlds with Depth

The Fall/Winter issue of MYTHLORE includes an article by Katherine Sas on creating the "impression of depth" in a work of fiction (specifically, in this case, in the backstory of the Marauders in the Harry Potter series), a term coined by Tolkien in his classic essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." One of my favorite themes in fiction is the overshadowing of the present by the deep past. That's one reason I find Stephen King's IT enthralling, a feature that the new movie tries to present a bit better than the old miniseries, but still not adequately. So I'm glad to have an official name for this theme. Sas herself paraphrases this effect as "a sense of antiquity and historical reality."

The essence of the "impression of depth" consists of a feeling that the author "knows more than he [or she] is telling." Tolkien refers to the creation of "an illusion of surveying a past...that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity." He mentions the crafting of this effect in BEOWULF by "allusions to old tales." In his own work, Tolkien uses invented languages, frame narratives, references to ancient tales and lost texts, and "hypertextual layering" (i.e., metafictional features that draw attention to the text as an artifact). Such techniques produce the illusion of a world that has existed for a vast expanse of time before the present action and contains places, peoples, and events glimpsed at the edges of the main story.

Within a more limited physical setting, King's IT creates an illusion of deep time by the gradual revelation of how the monster originally introduced as merely a supernatural killer clown has haunted Derry since the town's founding—revealed by Mike's research into the generational cycle of the entity's periodic return and hibernation—and, eons before human settlement, came through interstellar space from an alien dimension. Likewise, the TV series SUPERNATURAL begins on a small-scale, personal level and expands to encompass an entire cosmology. At the beginning of the series, all we know about the background of Sam and Dean Winchester is that their father is a "Hunter" (of demons and other monsters) and that their mother died in a horrific supernatural attack when Sam was a baby. The brothers themselves know little more. We, and they, soon learn that their father made a deal with a demon. Eventually it's revealed that Sam and Dean were destined from infancy, not to save the world, but to serve as "vessels" for divine and diabolical entities. As they strive to assert their free will against this destiny, they uncover secrets of their family's past and the worldwide organization of Hunters (along with its research auxiliary branch, the Men of Letters), they clash (and sometimes ally) with demons, angels, pagan deities, and Death incarnate, and, incidentally, they do save the world and visit Hell and Purgatory several times. They learn the real nature and purposes of Heaven, Hell, and God Himself. The hypertextual (metafictional) aspect of the series is highlighted in episodes such as a visit to an alternate universe where the brothers are characters in a TV show and their discovery that a comic-book artist who turns out to be a prophet (as they believe until he's revealed as the very incarnation of God) has published a series that chronicles their adventures.

Tolkien's colleague and close friend C. S. Lewis reflects on the literary impression of depth in two articles reprinted in his collection SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism" and "The Anthropological Approach." In both pieces, he concludes that the ideas of hidden, half-forgotten, multi-layered dimensions in place or time and disguised remnants preserved from the ancient past are alluring in themselves. We're fascinated by the suggestion of "the far-borne echo, the last surviving trace, the tantalizing glimpse, the veiled presence, of something else. And the something else is always located in a remote region, 'dim-discovered,' hard of access." We're thrilled to enter "a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history" than expected. Many readers (although admittedly not all) enjoy the idea "that they have surprised a long-kept secret, that there are depths below the surface." Tolkien's exposition of this effect, as well as the creation of it by him and other authors who use similar strategies, offers valuable hints to writers who want to produce that kind of impression.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Writing in Times of Anxiety

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column tackles the problem of writing through anxiety. The essay focuses mainly on public crises and disasters but mentions its application to personal troubles as well:

Writing Through the News Cycle

She quotes a common reaction: “It’s 2019. Who doesn’t have anxiety?” She also highlights what she sees as the difference between today's news-inspired worries and those of people in the 1950s and '60s faced with possible nuclear war: Nuclear holocaust was a hypothetical threat; such crises as wars in the Middle East and global climate change are already happening. "That makes optimism and hope a lot more difficult to cling to, and anxiety ratchets up the more one stays glued to the news." (A good reason, by the way, to resist the temptation to click on every Internet headline or obsessively pore over social media streams, a remedy Hurley herself alludes to.) She compares chronic anxiety to a "faulty fire alarm" (I'd say "smoke alarm," which is what she seems to be talking about), which keeps going off despite the absence of fire. Subjected to constant alerts, one suffers fear and anxiety even though, objectively, there's nothing more wrong at this moment than there was a minute, an hour, or a day ago.

One cognitive trick I try to remember to use on myself, by the way, is becoming mindful of the fact that very seldom is this present moment unbearably terrible. (It can be, of course—if one is in acute danger or severe pain, for example—but more often than not, it isn't.) Much of our unhappiness springs from brooding over unpleasant, scary, or outright horrible things that might happen in the future.

In response to the challenge of writing "through the tough times in life, personal as well as national, and, increasingly, global," Hurley says, "I’ve found that focusing on a better future, and putting that into my work, has helped me deal with the news cycle and the rampant anxiety." My own reaction as a writer to public disasters and personal troubles is pretty much the opposite. I don't feel capable of creating fiction with the weight needed to confront such crises. The problems of my characters seem to trivialize by contrast the real-world distress around us. Instead, I've turned to composing lighter pieces, stories featuring hints of humor and protagonists with believable but not dire problems (such as my recent novella "Yokai Magic," a contemporary light paranormal romance inspired by Japanese folklore) rather than backstories that abound in horrors and tragedies. Also, on a personal level, working on a story that I can hope will entertain readers as well as myself not only helps to distract me from whatever I'm worrying about but can cheer me with a sense of having accomplished something.

Some critics might label taking refuge from real-world problems in fiction, whether weighty or light, "escapism." Tolkien dealt with this charge many decades ago, asserting that such critics confuse "the escape of the prisoner" with the "flight of the deserter"? If we find ourselves in "prison," why should we be blamed for trying to get out? Hurley herself makes it clear that "this doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to the horror." A fictional vision doesn't have to equate to "the flight of the deserter"; rather, according to her, "We are what we immerse ourselves in. We are the stories we tell ourselves."

Coincidentally, this week the local Annapolis newspaper, the CAPITAL, published a column by psychologist Scott Smith headlined, "How to stay happy in a world filled with sad events." He discusses how to deal with the modern condition of being "inundated with tragedy." He makes the very cogent point, "Our human brain is not really built to process this ongoing flow of tragic and negative events. We live with a brain that is tooled for a much slower pace...." Like Hurley's column, Smith's emphasizes the emotional and physiological stress caused by being constantly bombarded with negative images in the 24-hour news cycle. He mentions, in addition, "Our brain is also not very good at placing tragedy in context or calculating probability." When we hear about high-profile, terrifying, but extremely rare disasters, our brains are wired to react to these remote (for the vast majority of us) contingencies as if they were "imminent threats." Smith lists several suggestions of ways to reorient our thinking and appreciate the good things in our own lives, remedies that collectively boil down to "focusing on the positive and limiting our exposure to negative events that are out of our control." He would doubtless agree with Hurley that we, as writers, should resist allowing stress to drain our energies and instead cultivate the positive benefits of exercising our creativity.

I've probably quoted C. S. Lewis's refreshing perspective on global problems here before, but it's too relevant not to include now. This passage comes from his essay on living in an atomic age—demonstrating that news-related stress is far from a recent phenomenon:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Learning from Fake News

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores what "fake news," conspiracy theories, and hoaxes can reveal about our culture:

Fake News Is an Oracle

He begins by discussing the mistaken idea that science fiction predicts the future. Instead, SF "can serve as a warning or an inspiration, influencing the actions that people take and thus the future that they choose." A second function of SF, where the analogy with fake news comes in, is to expose "our societal fears and aspirations for the future" somewhat the way a Ouija board planchette reveals the fears and desires of the users by responding to unconscious movements of their hands. As Doctorow points out, even the most innovative spec-fic creators must choose their material from an existing array of tropes that resonate with their audience. Authors write "stories about the futures they fear and rel­ish." The fiction that gets published, achieves bestseller status, and captures the imaginations of readers reflects hopes and fears dominant in the current popular culture: "The warning in the tale is a warning that resonates with our current anxieties; the tale’s inspiration thrums with our own aspirations for the future."

Similarly, a hoax, conspiracy theory, or false or deceptive news item that gets believed by enough people to make it socially significant "tells you an awful lot about the world we live in and how our fellow humans perceive that world." As an example, Doctorow analyzes the anti-vaccine movement and why its position on the alleged dangers of vaccination seems plausible to so many people. Asking what makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories and false beliefs, he speculates, "I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exer­cises can’t be trusted." While the first step in fighting fake news is "replacing untrue statements with true ones," a deeper solution that addresses the roots of the problem is also needed.

Speaking of true and false beliefs, and harking back to the topic of my post of the week before last, I was boggled by a widely quoted comment from a certain junior congresscritter: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." Say WHAT? As one article about this remark is quick to point out, using precise language and accurate facts isn't mutually exclusive with being morally right. Ideally, we should aspire to do both:

CNN

The article summarizes the attitude behind the Congresswoman's remark this way, noting that it's not exclusive to her: "My specific fact may be wrong, but the broader point I was making still holds. The problem with that thinking is that it says that the underlying facts don't matter as long as the bigger-picture argument still coheres." This attitude is said (correctly, in my opinion) to lead to a moral "slippery slope."

I would go further, though. I'd call having the correct facts one of the essential preconditions to being morally right. How can we make moral judgments if we aren't certain of the objective materials we're working with? If a speaker's statements about concrete, verifiable facts can't be trusted, should we trust that speaker's version of truth on more complex, abstract matters?

As writers, we in particular should place a high value on accuracy of language. Referring again to C. S. Lewis (as I frequently tend to do), his book THE ABOLITION OF MAN, first published way back in 1947, begins with an analysis of a couple of secondary-school English textbooks sent to him for review. From certain passages in those texts implying that all value is subjective, Lewis expands the discussion to wider philosophical issues and constructs a detailed argument in defense of the real existence of objective values, "the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason. . . or out of harmony with reason." And how can we recognize which values are "true" or "false" in this higher sense without verifiable knowledge of "the kind of thing the universe is"?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 04, 2019

Spontaneity Is Overrated

Happy Independence Day to our American readers!

I sometimes involuntarily overhear snippets of podcasts by Ben Shapiro, a lawyer, columnist, and author on the political right. He impresses me as relatively rational and less inclined to sarcasm and name-calling than many partisan podcasters. Don't worry, this isn't a political post; my emphasis will be linguistic and philosophical. I was dismayed by one of his recent comments because it seems like a symptom of a much larger problem. After the Democratic presidential hopefuls' debates, I was surprised to hear Shapiro, a staunch champion of classical and Enlightenment values, flippantly dismiss a particular candidate's "food fight" zinger as blatantly "rehearsed."

So a remark carefully prepared in advance is somehow suspect and prima facie inferior to one blurted out on the spur of the moment? An impulsive comment is automatically assumed to be a more reliable indication of the speaker's true feelings or beliefs than one that she thought over and shaped to express her opinions in a coherent, articulate style? I'm reminded, tangentially, of a past presidential candidate who was challenged on the subject of criminal justice and asked what punishment he'd want for someone who'd raped his wife. The aspiring candidate fell out of public favor partly because he gave a rational, ethical response to that hypothetical scenario instead of an emotional one.

This faith in the value of spontaneity is relatively modern and would have sounded absurd before the Romantic era. C. S. Lewis addresses the subject in a chapter of his book A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST, where he defends Milton's style and tackles the charge of "stock responses" in traditional poetry. Lewis frames the issue so well that I'll quote him at length rather than trying to paraphrase:

"By a Stock Response Dr. I. A. Richards [a distinguished literary critic contemporary with Lewis] means a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for ‘the direct free play of experience.’ In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance—all solid virtue and stable pleasure—depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or ‘direct free play’) of mere immediate experience…."

He observes that our culture has suffered "a loss of the old conviction (once shared by Hindoo, Platonist, Stoic, Christian, and ‘humanist’ alike) that simple ‘experience,’ so far from being something venerable, is in itself mere raw material, to be mastered, shaped, and worked up by the will…."

The modern tendency to mistake any well-crafted statement of opinion or emotion for insincerity, Lewis attributes to "confusion (arising from the fact that both are voluntary) between the organization of a response and the pretence of a response."

The old saying "in vino veritas" (truth in wine) expresses the same kind of attitude. It's taken for granted that the character, manners, and opinions a person displays when alcohol has destroyed his inhibitions are more authentic signs of his "real" self than the reflective, carefully considered speech and behavior of his sober periods. Why do we tend to assume that an individual's lower nature shows what he's "really like" and his higher nature doesn't?

The prioritizing of emotion and spontaneity over reason probably springs from the philosophical shift generated by the Romantic movement in the early 19th century. I suspect the current prevalence of the idea that reduced inhibitions reveal a person's "real" self comes (at least in part) from the popular influence of Freud's theories of the unconscious and the id.

This issue, by the way, contributes to my preference for e-mail over oral conversations—whether by phone or face-to-face—on serious subjects. When I talk off the top of my head, half the things I say come out awkwardly phrased and easily misunderstood, or I impulsively blurt out remarks I regret later (sometimes only seconds later). With e-mail or an old-fashioned letter, I can think over what I want to say and deliberately craft sentences to express it accurately and clearly. This kind of forethought doesn't mean my remarks are insincere, but just the opposite.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 02, 2019

Copyright Conundrum

One of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis, published many books of essays over the long span of his career. A few of the early volumes have been allowed to go out of print. Aside from fabulously overpriced used copies, they can be found only in libraries—and not many of those. The copies I was able to read came through inter-library loan from the one library in Maryland that accumulates and retains a huge collection of older books that most public libraries tend to cull (for lack of space, I know, but the practice still pains me to contemplate). Many of the essays in those volumes have been included in more recent collections released by the Lewis estate, but not all. I made photocopies of the otherwise unavailable items I wanted to keep and reread, for my own private use.

Thinking about those "lost" Lewis books recently, I've been contemplating a hypothetical ethical question about out-of-print works. Consider a deceased author whose writings are old enough that some have lapsed out of copyright, even though most are still under copyright and being published by his estate. (I don't know whether any early Lewis works are in fact old enough to be in the public domain; he just happens to be the author who started me thinking about this situation.) Suppose those out-of-print, public domain works are hard to find and impossible to buy at any reasonable price. Suppose a devoted reader scanned those books, articles, or stories and made them available online for free. (Not that I plan to do any such thing; it would be way too much work!) Obviously it would be wrong, even if technically legal, for an individual fan to charge money for them. A reputable publisher might offer such works for sale with editorial material for added value, but I would hope such a publisher would notify the estate of its intention as a courtesy, at least, even if not required to under law.

Now, it seems clear that scanning and distributing such works would be legal, because in this hypothetical example they're in the public domain. My imagined reader doesn't make any changes in the text and certainly doesn't claim the writings as his or her own. This person's sole motive is to make "lost" works available to other fans. Would this activity be ethically permissible? I believe it would. Not only is it legal, the author's estate has effectively abandoned the books. Having not reprinted them since their release in the 1920s or before (which would have to be the publication date for the material to be in the public domain), it clearly has no intention of ever doing so. The hypothetical scanner and distributor would be performing a service for other fans who want to read those "abandoned" writings.

This seems to me at least as ethically okay as publishing books such as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, which add extra material to the largely unchanged text of a classic novel while making no claim to ownership of the original work. Any thoughts on my hypothetical scenario?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Inspired by a True Story

I recently watched the movie THE GREEN BOOK, about a famous black concert pianist in the early 1960s who hires an Italian-American as a driver and general assistant for a tour of the Midwest and the South. The film bears the caption "Inspired by a True Story." This label seems to serve as notice to the audience that the script may portray events and people differently from the way they existed in reality, as well as including invented episodes. For example, reading about the movie and its factual background reveals that the pianist had multiple brothers and was on good terms with them, while his film counterpart claims to have no family except one brother, from whom he's estranged. People who knew the real-life musician describe him as less uptight than the character shown in the movie. As for particular incidents shown on the concert tour, I didn't come across any information about which actually happened (if any) and which were invented.

Most movies "inspired by" real-life happenings seem to alter the facts to one degree or another. I'm thinking mostly of stories about people within recent memory, with friends, relatives, and colleagues who are still alive, rather than historical figures of the distant past. Some members of the Von Trapp family were famously upset by the inaccurate portrayal of their father as rigid and cold in the early part of SOUND OF MUSIC. Moreover, in escaping from Nazi-occupied Austria, the family didn't flee over the mountains by night; they openly boarded a train, left the country, and didn't return. SCHINDLER'S LIST, understandably, concludes with the end of the war, then skips to the present-day view of "Schindler's Jews" and their descendants visiting Schindler's grave. It doesn't mention the breakup of his marriage or his failed postwar business ventures. SHADOWLANDS, about C. S. Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham and her death of cancer, had two feature film adaptations "based on a true story." In the second, better-known movie (starring Anthony Hopkins), one of Joy's two sons is deleted. I consider this omission rather serious. On the other hand, changing the first meeting between Lewis and Joy to have Lewis's brother present (he wasn't) seems justified for dramatic effect. I found it mildly annoying that Lewis is shown driving a car (he tried to learn to drive at one point, and everybody involved quickly agreed that the attempt should be abandoned) and having no idea how to comport himself at a country inn (something he had ample experience with), but those departures from fact don't mar the story. It's a much more serious distortion to portray Lewis as an ivory-tower academic with no prior experience of either suffering or women. His mother died of cancer in his childhood, he was wounded in World War I, and he and his brother shared a busy household for several decades with the family of a woman Lewis had "adopted" as his foster mother.

What's your opinion of movies allegedly based on real people's lives that take broad liberties with the facts? In my opinion, minor omissions or unimportant deviations from actual events can be acceptable for dramatic purposes, but larger changes are problematic. I just tend to laugh or groan at blatant errors in films set in distant historical periods. With events that happened within living memory, though, I hope for stricter attention to accuracy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt