The politics of stupidity, reprise

1. Choose a stupid leader, someone who will bark stupid lies with enough conviction that they seem authentic (they aren't).

2. Enact stupid and destructive policy. Ignore serious, important, long term solutions for stupid immediate appearances. If the policies are also cruel, so much the better. To the stupid, this looks like toughness.

3. Bark stupid lies about your failures, the opposition, anything really. The point is not to be right; the point is to make so much stupid noise that no adequate response can cut through.

4. It's now harder and harder to maintain a lucid argument, or to identify stupidity and name it directly.
If you can get ostensibly smart people, like judges or the Hoover Institute, to cover for your stupidity, that's even better.

6. Stupidly blunder back to 1 and 2, because the only solution to the current, stupid mess will look like more stupidity.

After Christchurch, March 15, 2019

One of the comforts of mystery and detective fiction is that there is an effort to discover motive and make it knowable. Greed, jealousy, fear, revenge, desire are all intelligible to the detective's eye. But we are sometimes confronted by events in which the motive is not merely lacking, but vacant, horrific.

I write this in reference to the mass murder in Christchurch on March 15, and because I was born and lived a large part of my adult life in Christchurch, and so it is the city I still regard as home, familiar ground, before all others. The Christchurch where I grew up, the city on the plain in the shadow of the sun-browned Port Hills, with its green, fragrant parks and quiet, windblown streets and patches of Neo-gothic stonework, has been altered and scarred by inevitable change and two severe earthquakes, but these are natural events as opposed to willful slaughter.

Shaun Yeo

Faced with a crime, we seek the motive in the first instance of shock and dismay. However, I no more mean to read or reference the shooter's "manifesto" than I mean to grant him the presence of mentioning his name. It's enough to read the summaries by those familiar with acts of terrorism and hate-crimes to realize that the same tired lies and malformed justifications repeat themselves again. In any case, the slaughter of innocent persons utterly vacates even the pretence of a reason. The shooter has no just cause to defend.

So, what remains? Jordan Peterson, for one, in the context of school shootings holds that: "“They make a display of their hatred for Being by massacring the innocent. That’s what’s happening — and they write that,” but this is generalizing to the point of uselessness. Mass murderers of this sort may indeed express a hatred for Being, but the beings they murder are, by their own choice, highly specific. Indeed, as Sri Lanka shows, the hatred is always targeted, rooted in bigotry and paranoia, from whichever side. Conrad, as usual, had the better sense of it, as in the end of The Secret Agent:

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind.  He had no future.  He disdained it.  He was a force.  His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction.  He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world.  Nobody looked at him.  He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

The terrorist is not lost, nor does he lack purpose, but he measures his own worth by the ruin and destruction his fixed and futile ideas entail. He does not lack self-worth, but revels in his contempt for others. It is only that his self-aggrandizement is fixated on the power to negate other lives.

Conrad's concluding simile is apt. Terrorism is an infection. It is possible to identify the toxic ideologies that drive and support white nationalism. It's possible, as New Zealand shows, to restrict access to weapons that have no purpose in civil society, It's possible to call out the Internet trolls and the politicians, the pseudo-thinkers and the networks that lend tacit support to hate and bigotry. We can police the crime. And, in the long-term, we can plan to overcome the inequality and injustice in which hatred festers. But what we cannot do is lend a moment's credence to the supposed grievances and agendas of fanatics. Faced with this crime, the motive is void; only the pathology matters.

The Saruman trap — or Tolkien on politics

The Lord of the Rings is not overtly a political work, being more concerned, broadly, with the problem of power, but where we can say that questions of politics are also questions of power, then this recent piece on the "Saruman Trap" has particular resonance.

Saruman is, of course, the greatest of all the wizards of Middle Earth, who chooses, nevertheless, to side with Sauron, his justification being that Sauron's victory is inevitable, but with the even more insidious rationale that his wisdom, his persuasion and knowledge, can direct and control the brute strength of Mordor, guiding evil to high ends while deploring its methods.

This, as Gandalf knows, is nonsense, but it is persuasive nonsense, just as the "voice of Saruman", subtle, insinuating, lying, is a metaphor for the worst forms of political persuasion, the reasoned tones that cloak abhorrent policy.

This year, in the mid-term elections, many of us may consider the Saruman trap, particularly those conservatives whose Republican Party has been captured by extremism and naked bigotry under the cloak of populism, but also, perhaps, those progressives who are berated for their lack of civility in debates with figures who have no concern themselves for civil liberties or reasoned positions.

Tolkien had first-hand experience of totalitarianism in its most dreadful forms, and Donald Trump is neither Sauron nor Hitler, which is not to diminish the grave danger his posturing, lying, self-aggrandizing incompetence and cruelty pose to American democracy. But Tolkien understood the  risks of opposing totalitarianism on its own terms, of confronting brutality with brutality, and lies with lies, or tacit acceptance that ends up as complicity. Gandalf chooses the path that is neither, knowing the dangers, but knowing also that it is better to answer a lie with a simple truth, no matter how dangerous to the truth-teller.

When Saruman makes his last, most formidable appeal from the balcony of his ruined tower, Gandalf can only laugh, and the spell is broken.

For the week in free speech

This week has furnished us with two object lessons in the debate over free speech in the US.

On the one hand, NFL athletes kneel in protest during the national anthem in protest at the deaths of black American at police hands, and the minority president himself sees fit to berate them and call for their silencing.

On the other hand, a putative "Free Speech Week" planned by alt-right agitators across the Bay from me at UC Berkeley collapses in a fog of confusion and acrimony.

Do both equally merit our concern?

The athletes follow their consciences and protest without harming or insulting anyone. Their views merit our consideration, for surely there is a case to answer for natural justice and equality when innocent black lives are lost and no one is held to account or remedy.

Now, the paid champions of right-wing "free speech" follow their speaking fees and political patrons, but their opinions amount only to their assertion of the right to their own opinions. When pressed to actually make their case, they produce only bigotry and personal abuse. The free-speech "radicals" and their supporters often offer the canard that colleges and universities have become "echo chambers", but nothing echoes more loudly, or frequently, than a bigot's opinion that he is entitled to his opinion, whereas you are not entitled to question, much less dismiss, the same. We might lend them credence or even some of our time if they had a case to make, but not otherwise. A robust diversity of opinion does not necessitate a universality of folly.

Our American Podsnap

Since Trump captured the presidency of the United States (you could not say he won by any merit of his own, and in fact Hilary Clinton has now a significant lead in the popular vote), I've been wondering if there was a literary clue to the reasons for this mess.

Well, Dickens has a word for part of it: Podsnappery.

There are, of course, many reasons for this distressing loss, many of them deplorable: resurgent white nationalism, racism, misogyny, and plain bigotry, the failure of neoliberalism on the political left and right, and these things are deeply enmeshed. But given that the US electoral system gives undue weight to votes in certain states, we must surely look to the edge cases, the margins, to detect the reasons for the swings on both sides, and here Dickens presents us with Podsnappery.

I have wondered why voters in a democracy, furnished not just with the facts and opinion of the media, but with the candidate's own words, could make a decision so fatal to the interests of the nation, not to mention the world. Some of them, poor, white, not college educated and rural, mired in the slow decay of their living standards and education, weary of false hope, were yet grasping at political straws. But a good many were neither poor nor disadvantaged, and the question is how against all good reason they could vote for a less than competent property speculator, TV star, and populist, with a taste for commercial fraud, insults, sexual assault, and unrepentant lying. The answer is: Podsnappery.

Merriam-Webster helpfully defines Podsnappery as: "an attitude toward life marked by complacency and a refusal to recognize unpleasant facts."

So Dickens describes Mr. Podsnap, the namesake of this attitude:

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness--not to add a grand convenience--in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction. 'I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss it; I don't admit it!' Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him.

Here we have, I think, the refusal to recognize Trump for what he is, a serial liar, a privileged set of failures in search of validation. In the fortress of his (and her) satisfaction, the American Podsnap can safely ignore inconvenient facts, like Trump's contempt for facts, his shady dealings, his praise for tyrants, his promotion of cronies and bigots, the advantages his schemes will confer on the already wealthy, while forcing the nation further into debt. The American Podsnap can ignore sexism and racism. The American Podsnap can ignore the harms that Trump's position on taxes and healthcare will inflict on the poor.

Many have sought change in the American political system, but many of those in positions of privilege who nevertheless choose Trump are content to invoke change for it's own sake, with no thought of the consequences to the world, or others. The issues are swept behind them, so many exaggerations, mean words and tweets, the inconvenience of human rights, inequality and globalization, climate change, mere unpleasantries.

Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, 'Not English!' when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away.

It remains to be seen what else may be swept away in the wake of a Trump administration -- and what may be recovered afterwards. The last thing to do now is lose faith in democracy or the virtues of the republic. But what Dickens returned to, from Bleak House to Our Mutual Friend, is that society is not singular, and that the Podsnaps cannot isolate themselves in their small worlds from injustice or folly. Perhaps now we need the novelist's satire to pierce their complacency, before that reckoning is due.

Mystery and stupidity

This is an odd topic for a longish post, but as the end of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts draws near, as an ambiguous detective hunts down the conclusion of an intricate and ambivalent case, I've had cause to consider the nature of stupidity, as a theme of the novel and in society.

By stupidity, I don't mean simple, individual foolishness, but consistent, willed idiocy in grave matters of public life, from the spectacular boorishness of a New Zealand talk-radio host attacking a respected writer for disloyalty to – of all things – the government; to the exceptional callousness of the Australian Prime Minister, who refuses to prevent the further brutalisation of children held in detention and instead moves to change the subject; to rewriting the charter of a respected university to diminish truth and enquiry, to – most dangerous of all – admitting the reality of global climate change while not recognising the human cause.

In many of these cases, from the cruelty of Mr Abbott to putting humanity and the planet at risk, there is an element of harm, as cruelty and stupidity go hand in hand, even as there is also a violent disrespect for persons and their good sense in the other instances. Of course, folly, bigotry, self-interest, and deceit are nothing new – unsurprising, in fact – but what is worrying is that this stupidity has become naked and shameless, that there is no attempt to reason or persuade, only a bald assertion that should be as embarrassing to the speaker as it is irritating to the audience. Was there not a time when political leaders, rightly or wrongly, would at least attempt to persuade us of their case, on whatever grounds?

How is this related to mystery? Because I think that in a good mystery there is a satisfaction in the discovery that truth can be found, that the detective, whether a private individual or an official, can use reason and observation and imagination to track down the real facts of the matter. In this way, the mystery narrative schools us or engages us in a certain kind of thinking. By the same token, the dark forces the detective might confront, malice and crime, are aligned with stupidity as well as the fog of circumstance. Hence, in A Hangman for Ghosts, in the harsh environment of the Australian penal colony or on the doorstep of the empire, my reluctant investigator, an outsider even in exile, must confront official stupidity as well as the complexity of the crime, because this kind of stupidity is about preserving the order of the system rather than justice.

Which brings me back, from another direction, to my first point. Just as propaganda in a totalitarian society is not about reality but bullying and demeaning the subject, official stupidity is not about the facts or even reasons, but about muddying the waters, creating confusion in the hopes that confusion seeds doubt, not to sway the majority by argument but to target the wavering few by obfuscation. As such, stupidity is the great red herring, the concealer, the distraction from who is guilty.

Eleanor Catton was subjected to a stupid personal attack because she demurred, mildly, to act as a cheerleader for a New Zealand government she thought at odds with her values. The response to her in some media shows that on the contrary, her writer's role as critic, conscience, and doubter is even more vital.

What would Dickens do?

Dickens was a great popular writer, but he was also, in a way rarely seen today, a political writer, and his social criticism should not be buried in the convenient backwater of Victoriana.

Dickens was a social conservative with the imagination of a radical. That is, while he accepted implicitly the middle-class assumptions of the Victorian patriarchy — hard work, the nuclear family, sensible commercial ambition — his sympathies were with the weak, the exploited, the strange and the fanciful, the dispossessed and struggling. And he was far too aware of the power and richness of language to be impressed by pettifoggery, hypocrisy, complacency and indifference, which he attacked at every turn with greater and greater sophistication.

Do you want to imagine what privatised education and charter-schools can devolve into? Reread Nicholas Nickelby. Do you think that corporate interests in collusion with state power always supports innovation? Then read Little Dorrit and take the Circumlocation Office as a warning. Do you think that rationalist economics based on metrics can conjure up human happiness? Check your copy of Hard Times again. Do you dream that the revolution and the apotheosis of state power will be the path to universal freedom? Read A Tale of Two Cities.

So, what would Dickens do in response to the plainly inequitable, the profoundly Scrooge-ish and strangely regressive budget recently produced by the Australian Federal Government under Tony Abbott? Dickens was instrumental in projecting the idea in the English public that the Australian colony could be a nation of opportunity rather than a place of incarceration and punishment. Whatever his reaction, the sheer hypocrisy and political malfeasance of claiming equal sacrifice while rewarding the wealthy and attacking the weakest would surely have attracted his most ferocious attention.

Digital humanities and programming's first rule

There is an interesting and critical piece here on the role and hype of digital humanities in the humanities.

While I've said elsewhere that interactive fiction and the digital publishing hold great promise for writers as well as scholars, I think overblown representations of the inevitability and scope of new technologies should be considered with the utmost caution.

I recall the simple proposition I learned from programming BASIC in high school: Garbage In, Garbage Out (or ask a silly question, get a silly answer). The digital archive and the digital medium can't substitute for clear, informed thinking and the accumulation of humanist scholarship. Machine logic can only show you the same data in different forms. Literature is a matter for memory, imagination and the human experience; the understanding is in the particulars that data-analysis can only abstract.

The humanities "crisis" - a perspective

This piece in The New York Times on 'The Real Humanities Crisis' lays out the case pretty clearly. As a writer and a scholar in the humanities (first English Literature, now Creative Writing) this concerns me closely.

As the article notes, and I've mentioned before, talented writer, musicians and artists cannot make a practical living by their craft, and must pursue secondary, less fulfilling jobs as though they were careers. Even so, these Arts graduates earn less over time. And in universities (as at the University of Canterbury, as reported here), the corporatist pressure to profit and commercialise means that the Arts are steadily dismissed, devalued and defunded.

There are many reasons for this decline, and the causes differ in different contexts. But at all levels, managerial and corporatist thinking, an emphasis on economic rationales and benefits, have pushed humanities to the periphery.

I also believe that the humanities sometimes failed to push back, and the discipline compromised itself at many points. In English Literature, the rush towards theory, particularly deconstruction, which began (tardily) in the late eighties in New Zealand, opened the door to willed obtuseness of language and impenetrable thinking, rejecting imagination, memory and experience in favour of abstraction and the mechanical moves of deconstructive reading. The discourse of theory presented itself temptingly as a technology, a paradigm and a technical language, which in the fervour of post-modernism and post-humanism distanced criticism from writing and human creativity. This is not to reject theory, because it was necessary and useful to set aside preconceptions and to reconsider language and meaning in the literary text, but to say that literary theory and the denial of meaning and authorial agency it implied to many people led the study of literature into its own backwater. Literary theory, embedded in its own technical jargon, could not mount an effective defence against the ideology of the management technocracy.

Is there a way out? For starters, the skills that the humanities prefer — critical thinking, writing, knowledge of the genealogies and trends of human culture — are required universally, and urgently. I've argued elsewhere that we are drowning in 'word junk', that fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thinking, particularly in management culture, which has certainly brought us few real rewards outside of the constant process of rising inequalities and aimless restructuring. Having worked in the corporate sector for many years, I can say that there are no skills here that a degree in commerce or business management would have provided that cannot be acquired with ease in the course of the job, or by the simple application of order and good sense, whereas skills in research, thinking and design, as well as clear communications, are all grounded in my university studies. But there is a danger in pursuing this too far and packaging graduate skills as if they were a commodity. Selling education for its commercial utility alone lends too much credence to the notion of learning as a product that has led the humanities to this pass.

In Hard Times, Dickens was well aware of the dangers of this rigidly utilitarian way of thinking. The people need education, no doubt, but human beings also need to dream, to imagine and to be entertained. We still need to escape the dominant perspective, the market, the office, the ideology, the industrial complex that confines thought and creativity. Over the years, new ideas have emerged to 'save' the humanities: data-mining and digital humanities, Darwinist criticism, neurocriticism, but all of these offer another technology, another narrow approach. What will rescue the humanities is the practice of the humanities: writing and reading and an opening of critical perspectives. Theory can formalise and encourage insight into literature, but only more reading, more writing, more stories and more human experience will bring us back to literature. The humanities, after all, represent the study of human creativity, the one field that can always surprise and escape us. The humanist goal is to aspire to our fullest potential, our fullest awareness of ourselves. There can be no humanism if we cannot consider, articulate and study what it means to be human. We need universities, artists, Arts and Arts graduates to do that.

A comment about the Potterverse and fantasy

A critical note about the Harry Potter series. An unused fragment of my creative writing dissertation, which is not wholly fair, or reasoned, but represents my disquiet with this otherwise admirable series:

In the world of Harry Potter, magic has become procedural, teachable and formulaic (though we rarely, if ever, glimpse the history of those formulae). Hence, magic becomes a mechanical task, a technology, and is represented as heavily bureaucratised. The only character who defies the bureaucracy, who acts as if magic has personal, transformative power, is the antagonist Voldemort, the leader of a cabal of racists in a fascist coup. Rowling’s work is so committed to the coherency of her world and magic that she discounts or smothers magic’s transgressiveness, its dangerous potential.

Reading and sympathy

If there's a question as to why we should read for pleasure (or with pleasure, for that matter), rather than just for information, this little snippet might help us understand that reading can truly broaden our empathy, or what writers would have once called our sympathies:

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

Now, I don't believe that we need science to save literature (or literary studies), or even to make the moral argument for us, but this is an intriguing bit of evidence. It shows that as we might expect, reading is reading: it exercises our perceptions and our sympathies, requires and enhances skill, and connects us with the world and the characters we read about.

I take issue with the distinction between literary and popular fiction, since of course, Dickens was once one of the most popular novelists of his era, but I wonder if what the study might suggest is that other genres could enhance additional sympathies than just our 'theory of mind'. Can science fiction make us more philosophical or analytical? Can fantasy make us more imaginative? And could mystery make us more observant, more cued to perception and environmental subtleties?

Orwell, clarity, language and power

There is an odd strain of 'anti-Orwellianism' starting to appear, as evidenced in this essay in the New Statesman, in which the author argues that Orwell's famous correlation between insincerity and long words is no longer true, that indeed,"When politicians or corporate front men have to bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity."

I have some sympathy with the view that:

There is a new puritanism about the way we use words, as though someone with a broad vocabulary or the ability to sustain a complex sentence is innately untrustworthy. Out with mandarin obfuscation and donnish paradoxes, in with lists and bullet points. But one method of avoiding awkward truths has been replaced by another.

And I tend to agree that literary language is sometimes needlessly austere, as is the mantra to show and not tell.

But, having been confronted with a fair share of official bullet points and managerial language, I would say that bullet points can be perfectly deceptive in their plainness, and that the language of policy remains one of vagueness, distortion and opacity, where acronyms, keywords and catch-phrases (plain though they may be) conceal intention as surely as Latinate phrases.

Although Orwell favoured clear, plain language, I'm sure he was under no illusion that short words and blunt sentences in and of themselves could not be used to conceal political intentions. Long words, circumlocutions, were in Orwell's time the marker of political deception. Now talking points, market-speak and bullet-points have the same function. My only reservation is that the later also corrupt and diminish thought, making the liar duller rather than devious -- but then this is what newspeak was for.

Word Junk

Management is a useful technique, but it belongs properly to the domain of logistics: to coordinating resources and activities. When management is elevated to an ideology (managerialism, if you will) it inevitably corrodes the distinction (which it little understands) between planning and strategy. It moves to lead what it should simply coordinate. Hence, managerial reports are stuffed with high-sounding and empty aspirational terms, vague assertions and incoherent popular terms. Thought is pushed to the edges. What is left is word junk.

A perfect example of this confusion is here, a 'strategic blueprint' (itself an oxymoron) for e-learning at The University of Queensland. Everyone knows a half-dozen other examples.

Tufte noted of 'chart junk' in PowerPoint that it 'weakens spatial reasoning as it does verbal reasoning'. Word junk weakens thought as it corrupts critical reasoning.