John C. Wright's Blog, page 143

Entitled to a Good Title

I wrote that I did not intend the title THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA to be interpreted to mean that several thousand0year periods were sealed in an airtight Mayonnaise jar — I admit that, read that way, the title has less punch.

Peirce O writes:

To me it evoked a feeling of some era whose history was so terrible or incriminating to those in power that it had to be sealed away and blotted from the pages of the record books, though, come to think of it, THE MAYONNAISE MILLENIA has some nice alliteration to it. THE CONCUBINE VECTOR still seems an odd title to me, even though I have the context for it from TRILLION. The publishers need to be sure to put a big starship or other obvious sciffy element on the cover so that I can read it in public without getting funny looks.

I will talk to the art department right away!

Ah! Fortunately, I have the advanced copy of the cover art right here! I find it is exquisitely tasteful:

ANOTHER TRIUMPH OF THE ART DEPARTMENT!

NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: This is a joke. The art department at Tor Books, under the guidance of Irene Gallo, is the best in the world. I have never had anything less than a striking and well designed cover grace my humble books.

Here is the real cover. Because the name "John C. Wright" is not well recognized, I have decided to write under the pen name of "Mr Tales", with the first name "Weird."

THE REACL COVER FOR CONCUBINE VECTOR!

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

This Just In

Just now (8.00) read online that SOPA (the reason why Wikipedia went black today) is dead:

Two bills intended to help combat the online theft of intellectual property have stalled in Congress after Internet giants Google and Wikipedia protested and legislative sponsors reconsidered their support. Some Republicans, including Rep. Paul Ryan, had opposed the House's Stop Online Piracy Act, and Rep. Eric Cantor saw to it that the bill was tabled. Conservative favorite Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida withdrew his support from the Senate's companion legislation, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and other sponsors subsequently withdrew. … But the bills are nonetheless defective pieces of legislation, and conservatives are right to oppose them.

From National Review Online.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Theist Widow Cannot Regain Her Atheist Virginity

The reason why I am a Christian is partly experiential and partly supernatural.

The experiential part is that a lifelong and very tortuous process of logical reason, requiring the utmost in clear eyed intellectual courage objectivity has lead me, one after another after another, to discover inescapable secular reasons to support all the social teaching of the Church, namely, her opposition to abortion, to euthanasia, to sexual liberation, to sexual perversion, and to contraception.

I had laid out these arguments in excruciating detail in years past, hoping to provoke some interesting counter-arguments. No reader was kind or skilled or patient enough to construct any counter-arguments, or even to raise a single logically valid objection.

I live in a society so utterly without honor, that the vast majority consider it an honest reply merely to voice their disagreement with a conclusion, and not to give a reason, or have a reason to give.

The segment of that vast majority who gives no justification for their beliefs, each and every socialist, leftist, nihilist, and modern thinker replied with one and one response only, and ad hominem attack. Only men not of this faction even attempted to engage the issue of justifying his beliefs with reason rather than with emotion. The utter uniformity of this one tactic is a source of never-diminishing awe and horror and laughter to me. No matter how learned or accomplished they are in other fields, the Leftist cannot utter any other response when the topic turns to one of the ideas sacred to them. As best I can tell, the program started by Nietzsche and Marx to abolish philosophy entirely from human civilization has, for all practical purposes, succeeded.

It struck me as an inexplicable puzzle that my allies the atheists, we paragons of logic as we were, would be entirely wrong on some or all of the social issues listed above, and my hated enemies the Christians, those knavish and obscurantist foes of all progress and reason, would be, and have always been right. If, of course, the laws of morality and the laws of nature and the laws of logic have an author, which is what my hated enemies the Christians maintain, why, then, the puzzle is not inexplicable.

The supernatural part is that I saw a vision, and miracle, and had a religious enlightenment, and my life has been changed for the better, increasing both my own happiness and the lives of those around me.

That is why I became Christian.

Why do I stay a Christian?

Some atheists of my acquaintance have urged me to accept the model of the universe that says I hallucinated the vision, never experienced a miracle, did not have any enlightenment, but instead either imagined everything, or saw patterns in events where none exist.

None of them are willing to put this model to the rules either used by scientists and philosophers, as Occam's razor, nor to the normal rules of evidence a lawyer would use in a court of law, as placing the assumption of the burden of proof on the party making a claim not in evidence. Indeed, none of my atheist acquaintances so far have even proven willing to discuss the normal rules of evidence with me, much less to discover how logical demands we are to apply them in this case.

Why stay a Christian?

If I were willing to accept the theory that thirteen or so events that I take to be related by cause and effect were instead a bizarre coincidence, and to accept that a mysterious force exists in my sub-conscious mind that can, at will, start and stop heart attacks, induce visions and control their content, reveal true information about the outside world beyond the reach of my senses, or, if not, can rewrite my memories and those any nearby witnesses to make the evidence of the events match the end-result the theory commands we reach.

In other words, if I were willing to adhere to atheist theory in defiance of all evidence and logic, I could indeed write off my experiences as hallucination and coincidences and (insert other ad hoc explanations here, adding to the list as needed) — and best of all, I would lose the respect and fellowship of the honest, sane, charitable, loving and polite segment of the majority of the world, and would win the fellowship of that minority of selfish and self-righteous creatures whose good opinion I respect almost as well as I respect the opinions of pirates, whores, drunks, weasels, cowards, tyrants, toadies, and Nazi concentration camp guards. I could depart from the company of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas and other spokesmen for Christendom in order to join the company of the Marquis de Sade and Karl Marx, and other spokesmen for Postchristendom or Antichristendom, or whatever one might like to call the modern world.

The reason why I stay a Christian is a matter of pure logic: the atheist world view does not explain the facts its attempts to explain, and so I cannot return to it. A theory that neither predicted the current facts nor explains the past facts is not a theory.

That world view is too shallow to explain anything about human nature or our role in the cosmos, or ultimate fate or the purpose of man in life, and is usually too silly.

(Yes, silly. I have more patiently explained more often to men suffering the delusion that they are meat robots without free will that if they were meat robots they could not suffer that or any other delusion, since robots by definition have no points of view, nor consciousness, nor reasoning power, than I care to remember.)

But let us not allow the presence of silly or stupid atheists of the Left to obscure the fact that atheists of the right can, unlike their fellows who are atheists for emotional reasons, give a rational account for their stance. Not all atheist accounts of the world are silly. Some are merely inadequate to explain the facts that the theory attempts to explain. Why do I not return to one of these dignified version of my old haunts?

The reason is because atheism rests on an absolute moral imperative to think and believe the truth, no matter how painful and disheartening, merely because it is true. If it so happens that we mortal exist in a universe created by nothing and no one for no purpose, and the intellectual tools given us are insufficient for determining ultimate questions  of ultimate importance, that a moral imperative to seek the truth at any cost demands our view of life consist of the admission of that limitation. To say one does not know what one does not know is what truth demands.

However, if the atheist world view cannot account for the existence of an absolute moral imperative to think and believe the truth no matte the cost and no matter the pain to oneself, then it does not rest on the imperative on which it rests. If natural reason tells us no natural reason to be naturally reasonable, why follow reason? The atheist cannot appeal to a mystical reason for the imperative, nor to a reasonable supernatural reason.

I submit that an atheist world view can account for the existence of an absolute moral imperative only if it has an associated moral code which logically flows from its premises.

That code must be based on something other than the transcendental and supernatural truths religion claim to base its values on, because atheist holds such supernaturalism to be against reason.

There are any number of atheist world views. Any world view not requiring reference to a god is atheist. But there are not an infinite number of atheist world views that can be logically consistent and yet uphold a moral code.

In order to be logically consistent with the conclusion that the answers to any or all of the ultimate questions of the meaning of man's life in the cosmos is forever beyond human reason one must either be a Stoic, or a hedonist, an idolater or a nihilist.

A Stoic says that he can endure the pain of not knowing his purpose and destiny because he must.

Moreover, a moral code based on Stoicism will serve for a military hierarchy, but one cannot erect the moral code needed for an enlightened society on such a narrow base.

A Hedonist says there is no purpose and destiny aside from those pleasures a man can devise for himself before he dies, and laughs at the notion that such pleasures will pall and fail with passing time.

Moreover, a Hedonist cannot devise a moral code which commends self sacrifice, even the minor self sacrifices needed for the maintenance of civilization. Hedonism is the vanguard of barbarism.

A man can adopt some human cause, some simplistic and simply wrong idea, such as libertarianism or communism or environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, and bring to the idols of this world those selfless impulses and spiritual hungers which otherwise would draw man's heart to the next world.

Alas, the main weakness of such idolatry is that it is local. The libertarian sees exactly one problem in life: how to exercise liberty while escaping tyranny and anarchy. The communist sees exactly one problem: how to ensure the success of the historically inevitable proletarian revolution to usher in an era where the laws of economics will be suspended. And the other simplistic answers likewise: any moral question falling outside the model of the one problem is ruled to be not a problem. For a libertarian, drug abuse and pornography are ruled to be non-issues. Theory says they cannot cause problems, or, at least, no problem where the cure of outlawing the practices are not worse than the disease. For the Marxist, theory says that there are laws of history, but no laws of cause and effect or laws of supply and demand. Scarce goods can be made abundant merely by rationing them and adopting policies that discourage their production. The theory says this will not cause a problem.

Examples could be multiplied. The problem with simplistic answers is that simplicity is not ecumenical or catholic, that is, the world view does not apply to the world, only to one's personal or factional but parochial mental landscape.

A nihilist says such questions can have no answer in this or any other universe, because life is meaningless by definition, and the only truth is that there are no truths.

Moreover, so called moral relativism is the only moral code that can float on the vacuous foundations of nihilism. It is a total eclipse of the powers of moral reasoning and moral persuasion: the ability to imagine ethics vanishes along with any motive to make or to heed ethical reasoning

Experience shows that each of these four approaches, Stoicism, Hedonism, Idolatry, Nihilism, eventually fails of its object, which is to produce a satisfactory account for life, a moral standard consistent with human dignity, and a motive to uphold civilization.

Of these, only Stoicism, the philosophy of a warrior elite, can maintain a civilization, but not above the level of the Rome of Marcus Aurelius of the China of Confucius. It cannot, if itself, maintain a non-slaveholding state.

If to maintain an enlightened and modern civilization is one's goal, these four stages of the atheist decay are washed out bridges to short to reach that destination.

So logic will not allow me to return to the ideas experience has proved inadequate and cramped to explain the wide wonder of the world, and insufficient a foundation to justify a minimal set of civilized moral standards.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Make Mine Freedom

This is from 1948, and the fact that it so presciently predicts the contours of our current political situation is evidence of the clarity and truth of basic concept.

Some concepts are so simple that they can be explained in a children's cartoon, and yet, somehow, out intellectual elites cannot comprehend them. Why is that, do you suppose?

To my shock, the site where I first came across this video (I will not provide a link) was overflowing with comments mocking our American Way, our freedoms, our free market. The hatred was overwhelming.

When did it become socially acceptable in this nation to hate this nation, to hate oneself, and to wish for the chains of a slave, but socially unacceptable to wish to live as a free man, proud of the hard won freedom our forefathers bequeathed to us?

By no coincidence, it happened in the same generation when it no longer became socially acceptable to call up on the name of Christ in public.

The cause and effect connection between the two is this: Christians regard the human person as an image and likeness of God. Even the life of a condemned man on death row is sacred, and he is not to be treated with disrespect, even if you kill him.

The modern Left, whether socialist or fascist or nihilist or progressive or all three, regards the human person as a raw material built out of inanimate molecules, born of apelike ancestors, and in the midst of a transition to a nonhuman superman of the future.

Raw materials have no dignity and no rights, nothing sacred about them. The concepts are meaningless in the modern Leftist universe. They cannot conceive of liberty, except as a by-word for sexual excess and perversion, and do not desire it, or understand why any honest man would.

Ask them to explain themselves. Their 'explanation' will consist of a condescending sneer and one or more of the word fetishes they use in lieu of thought: racist, sexist, homophobic.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Suppose you had written PHANTOM MENACE?

I am no Lawrance Kasdan. Let's get that straight from the beginning.

But I am a fan of STAR WARS, so the fact that I am an obscure midlist science fiction author should not disqualify me from answering the question all fans are allowed, nay, required to answer: if it were given you, fanboy, to have written Episode I of Star Wars, what would you have done differently?

First, no Jar-Jar. I thought he was too much like Stepin' Fetchit. The humor in the first movie was not centered in one comedy relief character: all the characters, robots and farmboys and princesses and lovable rogues alike had some good one-liners.

Second, no Midichlorians. If we must have a scene where Qui-Gon discovers the boy Anakin is bursting with secret talents, I would have Qui-Gon clutch his head and announce that he had a vision showing that this boy is all-important, whereas Yodi had a vision that the boy should be killed, and, to prevent a child murder based on nothing but pre-crime oracular evidence, Obiwan spirits the child away to the Planet of Silence, realizing that to fail to train him would be tantamount to allowing him to be spiritually corrupted by forces he cannot control.

Unwillingly at first, but then pleased at the child's growing mastery of the Force and willingness (apparently) to do good, Obiwan unwisely takes him to the Haunted Dyson Sphere surrounding the Black Sun. It is then that Anakin has a vision, and see his destiny, and, instead of fearing it, embraces it. But such is his mastery of strange powers, that he can hide his own true evil from even the mental perception of his mentors….

But this all assumes I would go with the idea of making the story about Anakin.

Bosh on that.  Do you watch FLASH GORDON prequels hoping to see a youthful Ming the Merciful, adorably cutie-pie boy prince, slowly (or suddenly) corrupting himself into a leering Space Fu Manchu? That is soap opera stuff. This should be space opera.

Nope, nope. I would have made Obiwan the main character, and made Anakin a bad egg from the get-go, having the story start with him already the trusted but treasonous apprentice of Obiwan.

There are any number of old serials where the plot concerns some group of scientists or businessmen who are being killed off one by one by some dramatic villain, never knowing nor suspecting that the villain is actually one of their number, who sits in on the meetings, makes suggestions, and knows exactly what the hero's plans are to catch him. He always sets up a trap, or sends his henchmen to avoid the trap, and there is always a Donnybrook where every piece of furniture ends up broken. In this case, all Vader has to to is take off his mask.

To ramp up the drama, I would establish, like the Black Prince Kourai in the immortal SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, that each and every time Vader uses the dark side of the force, it damages his body and soul, so that he has to keep replacing his failing organs with more and more machinery.

Vader and Palpatine, and the ENTIRE Sith order, which includes thousands of individuals from thousand of races about the galaxy, conspire for the overthrow of the Senate and the erection of an Empire, and use their mind-powers to force Senators to vote for foolish laws, to start feuds among the Patrician families, to encourage the ambitions of dangerous admirals, and spread discontent among the plebeians.

They kidnap and replace high ranking space princesses with clones, as well as admirals and judges and senators, duplicates so exact that only the Jedi can sense anything wrong with them. The clones of the Clone Wars were never soldiers fighting on the side of the Republic, who would never use such abhorrent technology: they were invaders as loathsome as the Skrull, an invasion of body snatchers.

The first act of the Senate-clones, upon achieving power, is to turn public opinion and the force of the law against the Jedi, the only people who can sense that they are clones.

When it is discover that the core of the galaxy is exploding, the panicked commoners demand that one supreme leader be placed in charge of the ineffectual and feuding Senate. The lonely voices of the Jedi, now falsely accused and hiding in scattered corners of the galaxy, calling for adherence to the constitution and the ancient traditions are shouted down.

The trusted and loved Jedi Anakin Skywalker warns the hidden Jedi council that some new enemy is hunting down the Jedi one by one — a creature called Darth Vader, who seems to have strange powers, almost like a Jedi himself (but that is impossible!) — and so he asks Yoda, the master of Obiwan, to give him the coordinates and addresses of all the safehouses where the Jedi are safely tucked away from the anger of the public …

Unbeknownst to Anakin, Palpatine has not only made clones of his enemies, but also of any lieutenants that may prove too powerful. Luke is not the son of Anakin in a normal sense, but is his clone. As the vision in the tree will later prove, Luke *is* Anakin.

So: my opening word crawl goes something like this:

THE GALAXY IS DOOMED!

BILLIONS OF STARS OF THE GALACTIC CORE HAVE EXPLODED INTO SUPERNOVAS, OBLITERATING WORLD AFTER WORLD IN FIERY DEATH!

IN THE SECRET MONASTERIES OF THEIR ORDER, JEDI MASTERS HAVE SENSED AN DARK INTELLIGENCE BEHIND THE CATASTROPHES!

PALPATINE, THE NEWLY-ELECTED 'SUPREME CHANCELLOR OF PUBLIC SAFETY,' GRANTED ABSOLUTE POWER DURING THE CRISES BY A FOOLISH AND FRIGHTENED SENATE, HAS COMMANDED THE JEDI NOT TO INVESTIGATE THIS STRANGE VISION!

DEFYING THE COMMAND, TWO JEDI, QUI-GON AND HIS APPRENTICE OBIWAN, FLY IN RADAR-INVISIBLE STEALTH BATTLECRUISER <em>PHANTOM MENACE </em>TOWARD THE ONE PLANET WHICH MAY HOLD THE ANSWER, THE DREAD AND DREADED <em>SHATTENREICH</em>, LONG DEAD THRONEWORLD OF THE EVIL SITH….

THEIR DESPERATE FLIGHT IS BEING OBSERVED BY HOSTILE EYES…

Okay. It is not great. But compare it with this:

TURMOIL HAS ENGULFED THE GALACTIC REPUBLIC. THE TAXATION OF  TRADE ROUTES TO OUTLAYING STAR SYSTEMS IS IN DISPUTE.

HOPING  TO RESOLVE THE MATTER WITH A BLOCKADE OF DEADLY BATTLESHIPS,  THE GREEDY TRADE FEDERATION HAS STOPPED ALL SHIPPING TO THE  SMALL PLANET OF NABOO.

WHILE THE CONGRESS OF THE REPUBLIC ENDLESSLY DEBATES THIS  ALARMING CHAIN OF EVENTS, THE SUPREME CHANCELLOR HAS SECRETLY  DISPATCHED TWO JEDI KNIGHTS, THE GUARDIANS OF PEACE AND  JUSTICE IN THE GALAXY, TO SETTLE THE CONFLICT….

Oy. Wake me up when a real STAR WARS movie gets made, okay?

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Eternal Verities and Elitist Myths

This question from the reader mentioned in my last post was so odd, and was based on such an odd assumption, that I wrote this reader privately and asked: where did you get the idea that science fiction presupposes no eternal verities? Are are reader of science fiction yourself, and this is your conclusion, or is this something you overheard someone else saying about the genre?

The answer:

I got the idea that science fiction presupposes no eternal verities by reading Star Wars on Trial (an excellent little book, by the way); David Brin wrote that statement, if I recall correctly.

Ah. David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover were the editors of that delightful little book, and it was one to which yours truly contributed his humble article on religion in STAR WARS.

Mr Brin's actual statement in that book is "Many campus postmodernists … find anathema the underlying assumption behind most high-quality SF: a bold assertion that there are no "eternal human verities." Things change. Change can be fascinating. And science fiction is the literature of change."

This is in the midst of a discussion where Mr Brin is trying to draw a distinction  between the way science fiction  would handle matters (such as by drawing a blood sample from Superman and learning the secret of his Kryptonian powers to share with the common man) and the respectful awe ancient poets like Homer used in dealing with the demigods and aristocratic heroes which were the subject of their epics.

Mr Brin's argument (which is too deep to pause here to examine) is that STAR WARS follows the themes and tropes of ancient epic and not the themes and tropes of high-quality science fiction.

Even if one were completely convinced by Mr Brin's argument about STAR WARS (and I urge my readers to buy the book and read it to find out!) his conclusion does not necessarily hold true for other works of science fiction, or all works.

In the context of the paragraph in which it appears, the phrase 'eternal human verities' means confirming the customs of one's own tribe and city-state as the laws of the universe derived from the gods who fathered and hero-ancestor of the current ruling class. That, at least, is the point the surrounding essay emphasizes.

In other words, I don't think in that context that phrase means a belief in any objective truth. He is using it sarcastically, putting it in quotes, and his meaning logically must be restricted to cultural mores rather than, say, scientific or mathematical or even philosophical and theological truths.

Mr Brin himself might or might not hold that all philosophical and theological truths are no more than cultural mores asserted falsely to be universal, but that is itself a philosophical stance meriting a separate argument. He is not, in the paragraph above, speaking about universal truths, but about cultural myths.

The Church, as her name implies, is universal, ecumenical, and catholic. Every effort of the saints and martyrs since the morning of the Resurrection has been bent to the subversion of the worldly powers, the world-system, the customs and the political correctness of the elites of this world.

I venture to say that Mr Brin's distaste for the comfortable little social myths people use to justify their worldly elites, powerful and mighty, from running and ruining the lives of the poor and weak and dispossessed is of course shared, nay, has no other origin in history or justification in logic, apart from the hatred of the Church for the world and its Prince and his lies.

We Christians do not like pagan myths about the grandeur of the chosen aristocrats and the contemptible nature of the poor and meek any more than do the so-called Progressives; and, further, the Progressives got the idea from us.

Indeed, even before the birth of Christ, St Mary the blessed Virgin sings this canticle:

My soul doth magnify the Lord,

and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden:

for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath done to me great things;

and holy is his name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him

from generation to generation.

He hath showed strength with his arm;

he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seats,

and exalted them of low degree.

He hath filled the hungry with good things;

and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Please notice that the first thing Mary thinks to sing as the praise of the Lord who has granted her this miraculous birth and signal favor to be the mother of the Messiah, is to exalt over the promised downfall of the proud and mighty and rich, and to glory in the elevation of the low and hungry.

A more stark opposition to the type of ancient epic that traces the lineage of Romulus to Aeneas to the goddess Venus cannot be imagined.

Now, it is true that modern elitists want to run and ruin the lives of the poor and lowly in the name of social justice, or eugenic progress, or radical egalitarianism, or the triumph of the proletarian class, whereas ancient elitists wanted to run and ruin the lives of the poor in the name of the cosmic order of the universe, or the caste system ordained by the gods.

This does not mean that the modern elitists are not elitists.

No, the modern elitists are Christian heretics, that is, persons who accept (knowingly or unknowingly) the Christian moral landscape, along with its fixtures and mental furniture and assumptions, and then reject one logically necessary part or another of the Christian message, creating an illogical, or at least arbitrary, jury-rig.

Socialism is another such jury-rig, the one now the most popular and persuasive. Related philosophical pathologies include the environmental movement, radical feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and various other attempts to take one aspect of Christian teaching or another and make that usurp the whole of it.

Because it is a jury rig, such heresies and half-truths hid gaping logical lacunae, and so the main effort of the partisans of a heresy is not the orderly enunciation of the reasonable arguments and evidences supporting their position: it is the hysterical effort to draw attention away from the gaping flaws in their ideas.

If there is more than one tactic for doing this, I have never seen it in action. The only tactic I have ever seen in action is the ad hominem attack, combined with a strawman argument.

Philosophically, the defender of the logically indefensible position must demote the normal things used to judge philosophical merit: logic and reason are denounced as being worthless, or biased, or the mere 'ideological superstructure' of hidden 'class-interests.'

Freud and Darwin are dragooned into support of this flimsy ad hominem, since Freud can be used as an argument from authority to state that one's opponents have invalid motives of which they themselves are not aware. Darwin can be used as an authority to state that, in the same way new species arise from old with no fixed forms, new ideas and new power of logic, Aryan Logic or Proletarian Logic, arise through a process akin to natural selection. One's opponents occupy a lower plane of such alleged mental evolution, using categories and axioms which higher thinkers have superseded, but of which one's opponents are themselves once again unaware.

In both cases, and in many more cases than this, the modern defender of unreason can merely level accusations that cannot be answered, because the accusation is that you yourself are unaware of your own flawed motives and flawed thinking process. Accusing an overworked and underpaid Jewess of 'White Privilege' is a similar unanswerable accusation, because no matter how bad her life is, one can claim she has received some benefit from the conspiracy of a hidden and general social atmosphere of which she is unaware.

In the case under discussion, the modern socialist heretic takes up the Christian concern for the poor, and, with no sense of shame, abandons the Christian metaphysical and philosophical principles which make concern for the poor reasonable.

The Hindu world view proposes a caste system; Confucius proposes submission to a set of filial and governmental obligations which will feed the poor but rob them of liberty; Buddha denounces love of wealth as an alluring trap leading to suffering, but does not enjoin charity as a duty (In Buddhism almsgiving is the respect given by the laity to the Buddhist monk).

Only if we are all brothers have I any fraternal duty of care toward the poor; only if we are all equally sons of Our Father in heaven can we be brothers in other than a metaphorical sense.

Nor can we be brothers if we are all descendant from competing and mutually exclusive tribes of prehuman apish ancestors, for then we are in a competition from which there is no escape nor quarter; for then my unwillingness to do my best to crust the genetically inferior or sickly or weak or idiotic races of man beneath my shiny jackboot, and my reluctance to impregnate as many healthy and intelligent brood-mares as possible, not only betrays my bloodline, but indeed the entire course of human progress toward the superhuman evolutionary future!  If we are all descendant from competing and mutually exclusive tribes of prehuman apish ancestors, peace and brother-love is not only impractical, it is race treason!

Now, many a modern will try some makeshift to combine the Christian idea of charity and brother-love with the materialist idea that the cosmos is an empty machine, and we no more than machines made of meat inside it, and with the Darwinian idea that the only way to improve those machines is by the trial and error of brutal total warfare to extinction. It cannot be done. The ideas cannot be reconciled.

As I said above, the only thing that can be done is to halt any inquiry into the gaping logical holes of the makeshift by denouncing the human capacity to think logically.

Or take some other modern heresy, like feminism. Outside the Church, outside of the cultural assumptions created by the philosophical and theological axioms of the Christian worldview, on what grounds does equality between the sexes make sense? Sexual equality cannot be justified on the grounds of Confucian or Buddhist or Hindu thought, nor does the grinding emptiness of Darwinism or Marxism offer any better foundation. Indeed, Mr John Norman of Gor fame (or notoriety) has made a cottage industry of the argument that, from a purely mechanistic world view of Darwinian natural selection, not only is female equality not desirable, female liberty is not. He does not argue that wives should submit to their husbands; he argues that slavegirls should submit to their rapists. We can leave aside, with perhaps a queasy wince, this particular sexual perversion with no more than the observation that history records happy and healthy wives even in marriages where she agrees to love and honor and obey her lord and husband; but history records no happy rape victims who prefer being concubine to being wives.

My point here is not to investigate the fever swamp of the imaginings of someone like John Norman. My point is that no argument from the shabby worldview of political correctness can dislodge the conclusions of even so bizarre and openly evil a conclusion as that of the Gorean. John Norman is in fact merely using the modern notion of Freudian Darwinism to erect a cultural myth for his (I hope) pretend culture that has the same character and purpose as the myths Mr Brin denounces so passionately: it is a myth told to justify the oppression of the weak, in this case, the weaker sex.

The general argument Mr Brin makes is that STAR WARS is suspect, because it cleaves too closely to the antique social myths of epics, which are abundant with lost heirs of kings or sons of gods raised by wolves or shepherds, and whose main point of such social myths is to keeping the underlings in their place by telling them their low estate is part of the cosmic order of being, Karma, Maat, Me, or Fate.

Along a similar vein, I would argue that the modern social myths of the so-called social progressives also keep the underlings in their places by defining them as victims of an innately evil system of oppression, economic as well as psychological, and encouraging both their victim status, and their dependency, and encouraging the elitists to regard themselves, absurdly, as heroes saving the poor, rather than their main foe.

I am sure Comrade Stalin on his death bed thought he had helped the poor by organizing and commanding the Ukrainian famines, and orchestrating the worldwide falsehoods of the mass media to cover it up. I am sure Margie Sanger, founder of Planed Parenthood, to her dying day was proud of her work in the field of eugenics, and convincing Blacks and others she considered lesser races to kill their offspring in the womb, thus lowering their numbers and making room for Aryans of the superior bloodline, I am sure she justified in terms of her compassion for the world, and for the little man, including the defectives by products of miscegenation and race-inferiority she wanted to wipe out.

Mr Brin would perhaps (I hesitate to speak for him) define science fiction, since it deals with technological change and weirdness as its main theme, as loyal to social change, both warning of social devolution into dystopia, and urging social progress to higher levels of enlightenment, both scientific and social and economic.

Whether one agrees with a narrow definition of science fiction tying the theme of science fiction to social progress, or whether one prefers a wider definition of science fiction that would include more outliers, either way I submit that it is hard, nay, it is impossible to imagine either the modern science or the modern adventure romance springing out of any other worldview or cultural assumptions or moral atmosphere than that produced by Christendom, either of an orthodox or heterodox variety.

The non-European and non-Christian nations who have produced a modern crop of science fiction writers, by no coincidence, are the ones that most aggressively and rapidly Westernized: Japan and India.

The scientific adventure romance or lost race novels could not be written for or appeal to a Hottentot, much less a society oppressed by Confucian notions of absolute rule or a society sunk in the passive oriental slumber of Buddhist despair.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Movie Star!

Well, I finally got around to seeing the film in which (name dropping alert) Neil Gaiman and Joe Haldeman and David Brin and Corey Vidal* and I appear.

It is called The People Versus George Lucas—and it is directed Alexandre O. Phillippe, who interviewed me  at 67th Worldcon, Anticipation, held in Montreal, 2009.

It is a documentary about the fanhate (a word coined just for this) for George Lucas, who so deeply impressed himself on our childhood imaginations.

I appear for exactly one line of dialog 1 hour, 2 minutes, 27 seconds into the documentary.

Here I am!

During the one-line clip, I am talking about my favorite topic,

MIDI-CHLORIANS

See? I *am* a science fiction author! It says so right there on the screen!

Now for the shocker: I do not look ridiculous on film, at least not to me. My voice does not sound high and stupid like it sounds in real life. I actually look dignified, and my voice is manly and deep.

Sure, this sounds like vanity, but I assure you most solemnly that every other photo I have ever seen of myself, and every other sound of my voice in tape, has annoyed me to no end. I tell people that I am a member of the Dakota tribal religion that forbids taking pictures because cameras steal one's soul, merely so I can escape from the necessity of seeing one more ghastly unflattering photo of myself.

But, something this time was different. I look … normal. My voice sounds … normal.

Alexandre O Phillipe obviously meddled with me using special effects! Now I am beautiful! Now I feel pretty, Oh, so pretty!

Oops. Wait. Sorry, I was looking at a clip of Jar Jar Binks in Episode II casting the deciding vote to elevate Chancellor Palpatine to Emperor. I thought that was me. It is a common mistake.

(Just kidding. My trip to Montreal with the beautiful and talented Mrs Wright was a long-delayed honeymoon for the misses and me, and so perhaps to myself I look less cross than my normal wont.)

——————————————————–

* Footnote:  What do you mean, you do not know who Corey Vidal is?

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Isaac Asmiov and the Insanity of Materialism

Part of an ongoing conversation.  Sandy Peterson writes:

"I don't see a problem with Mr. Andreasson's theory about something derailing our minds. Even if we are not simply Turing machines, our brains are physical, and when deranged it has a definite effect on us….Thank God we are not completely rational beings ourselves though."

My comment: Mr Peterson, Please reflect.

Suppose, as some here have said, that the human being, body and soul, is merely a physical system and nothing more. It has no properties that cannot be defined, described and reduced to the physical properties.

But if that were so, there would be no such thing as insanity, or sanity.

Sanity and insanity are difficult to define, but all definitions broadly agree that when your thoughts and memories, perceptions and words line up with and represent and reflect the things, including physical things, that they alledgely reflect or represent, then you are sane, and the more tenuous the relation, or the more skewed, the more insane.

If you see things that are not there, remember things that did not happen, or you think you are a glass of water when you are a Massachusetts landowner, and so on, then this is insanity.

We also call it insanity when a subjective non-physical thing, like a thought or emotion or conception, does not line up with another (more objective) non-physical thing, like a rule, which it allegedly reflects or represents.

Again, objective and subjective are hard to define, but in this case we can call objective those things no man can change by an effort of will and do not depend on our point of view (we cannot make twice two equal five, nor make beauty ugly, make property theft, nor, despite our best efforts, make vice virtue) Subjective are those things which depend on our point of view and for which we are responsible, whether we lack the current strength of will to change them or not: whether or no we assent to the truth, what we seek or seek to avoid, the impulse to deliberate actions.  The truly self consistent materialist would, of course, define this as a null set. To them, all things are objective, nothing subjective.

A man unable to see the moral order we call a sociopath. A man unable to respect that pure abstraction we call law against theft, and abstraction that protect a non-physical property of objects we call ownership, we call a kleptomaniac. A man unable to align his fear of open spaces with his reason (and both fear and reason are non-physical) was call agoraphobic. And so on.

Judging a man insane or sane is not like taking his temperature. We are using a non-physical faculty, our reason, to assess the nature and condition BUT NOT TO MEASURE ANY PHYSICAL PROPERTY OF his non-physical faculty, his reason.

We can measure his blood alcohol level, and we can detect other neurological disorders: but we cannot put a needle in a man's brain and tell whether or not the sight of the stars would drive him mad, nor measure how many foot-pounds or inches or ergs or seconds of insanity the sight would bring. Insanity is not measured in foot-pounds.

Sanity and madness are judgments we make in our minds concerning how well or ill the minds of another man lines up with real things, both moral rules, and mathematical and philosophical ideas, and physical things.

If it were so human being, body and soul, is merely a physical system and nothing more, then there would be no such thing as madness nor sanity nor any other non-physical judgment of the non-physical state of the relation between mind and reality.

So, not to belabor the point, the Isaac Asimov story is not about the planet Lagash passing through the tail of a comet and having whole continents breath in a vapor that turns out to have an hallucinatory affect on their nervous systems.

It is about men making and awe inspiring scientific discovery about the nature of the universe and their place in it, and reacting, not with the sense of wonder at the intricacy and beauty of creation that normal scientists feel, but with civilization-destroying fear and panic.

The reason why Lovecraft, and other philosophical materialists, have such a low opinion of the human race is because materialism pictures man as an irrational animal, the helpless by product of the environment, or as a meat robot.

Their low opinion is, of course, false to facts, because their metaphysical theory is self contradictory and, if you will forgive the expression, insane.

They also have a low opinion of reason and the power of reason, even those who, like Asimov, pay lip service to it.

I assume someone with a very low opinion of reason taught you to bless God for making man unreasonable, or that you are using the word in some ironic or sarcastic way, to mean that men should do those things which the small-souled skeptics regard as irrational, such as be virtue, or to commit acts of self sacrifice out of love.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

VOTE!

Nope, not in the GOP caucuses. I mean the important vote!

http://www.gemmellaward.com/page/the-legend-award

The David Gemmel Legend Award for Fantasy has an entry for PROSPERO REGAINED by the lovely and talented L Jagi Lamplighter, who is the secret crimefighting identity of Mrs. Wright.

So vote early! Vote often! Have your dead friends vote, too!

VOTE FOR LAMPLIGHTER OR PERISH IN THE DARKNESS!!

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Vanvogtian Vision vs Campbellian Cosmic Mechanics

Here is an excellent essay on the early work of A.E. van Vogt: Man Beyond Man by Alexai Panshin.

I urge those readers who are fans of A.E. van Vogt to read it. Those readers who are not van Vogt fans, I urge you to become so at your earliest convenience.

Mr Panshin discusses Van Vogt's early short stories and novels, from 'Vault of the Beast' to 'The Black Destroyer' to SLAN to 'Resserection' to the Weapon Shops of Isher short stories, 'Asylum' and 'Proxy Intelligence.'  These include some of the very best of van Vogt's work, and personal favorites of mine.

Mr Panshin emphasizes a holistic and moralistic idea guiding van Vogt's writing which he contrasts (favorably) with the more mechanistic idea guiding John W Campbell's editorial work. The Campbellian reductionist materialist idea envisions the universe as a massive but unliving mechanism, a Sampo set to grind out prosperity and power to whomever should first discover the rulebook for its operation. The Vanvogtian vision  is that the universe, including man, is a living and organic and mutually interdependent system, one where altruism and far-sighted cooperativeness form the key to understanding.

I wish I had read this essay before I sat down to write NULL-A CONTINUUM.

Reading it now, I note the several places where NULL-A CONTINUUM had, not by the author's intent yet not by accident, fallen neatly into the pattern established for a Van Vogtian theme.

 

Van Vogt 'The Black Destroyer' marks the onset of the Golden Age of SF

 

This thematic parallel between a sequel and its originals should not come as a surprise. The Vanvogtian theme of an organic unity of the universe cannot be avoided by an epigone (like myself) who accurate copies his master's model.

In my case, the explicit driver of the plot in NULL-A CONTINUUM was that the self-aware universe, including man, was and had to be self-aware at an ultimate level, that is, to be Null-A trained: the goal was that the insane universe had to be evolved or trained to sanity, and to embrace absolute altruism, even to the point of the self-sacrifice of the continuum for the sake of the greater good. With that plot driver, I could not have avoided engaging the Vanvogtian master-theme of cosmic unity correctly.

Contrast this with Damon Knight's deservedly obscure BEYOND THE BARRIER. Mr Knight was something of an antagonist to Van Vogt, dismissing his work as deamlike and illogical, and BARRIER was Mr Knight's attempt to do a Vanvogtian pastiche. But by failing to copy the central theme that Mr Panshin identifies, Mr Knight's yarn fails. All the trappings of a Vanvogtian plot are present (amnesiacs, time paradox, aliens in disguise) but the end result is dismal.

Contrast this again with THE PARADOX MEN aka FLIGHT INTO YESTERDAY by Charles L Harness, the best Vanvogtian book never written by van Vogt: I suggest that hints of the theme of the unity of the universe are present there, particular in the time paradox that forms the title of the book.

FLIGHT INTO YESTERDAY -- The Most Vanvogtian Yarn Never Penned by Van Vogt

Consider the famous plot reversals typical of van Vogt, where what seems to be an implacable foe (such as Keir Gray, the world dictator in SLAN) turns out to be a leader or even a mentor, or where two enemy forces (such as the Weapon Shops and the Imperial House of Isher) turn out to be necessary mutual components of a ying-and-yang wheel. Mr Panshin argues that these reverses are not mere "twists" or sleights of hand, but a deliberate theme by Van Vogt to show the reader (or, better, to have the reader experience) that sudden expansion of awareness by which a selfish and isolated individual learns he is part of a greater universe, so that the farthest star is touching his heart, and the smallest gesture of kindness or cruelty reflects and affects a cosmic war of enlightenment versus ignorance.

The climaxes of Van Vogt tales are rarely if ever fight scenes. Instead, they are scenes of revelation, even apotheosis, where the perspective on all that has gone before undergoes a paradigm shift.

These revelations, oddly enough, are of precisely the opposite character as similar revelation scenes in HP Lovecraft, or even in a tale like 'Nightfall' by Isaac Asimov, where the inhuman immensity of the universe drives man mad: the protagonist sees what can only be called a human immensity.

Mr Panshin also emphasizes in Man Beyond Man a theme mentioned in his essay on Robert Heinlein (The Death of Science Fiction A Dream): Van Vogt, of all the Campbellian stable of writers, comes closest to portraying the step beyond human evolution, and not as the cold-hearted big-headed hyper-rationality of the Martians of H.G .Wells, or the reptilian amorality of the superman of Nietzsche.

What an awesome challenge it was for van Vogt to attempt to imagine the likes of a fully integrated Great Galactic!  As a gauge of how difficult it could be in 1941 to conceive of an encounter with a radically transcendent being, we might remember Slayton Ford returning a broken man from his interview with the gods of the Jockaira in Heinlein's Methuselah's Children,or the brief, unrecallable glimpse of a High One in Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," which demoralizes Bob Wilson/Diktor, turns his hair gray overnight, and leaves him feeling like a bewildered collie who can't fathom how it is that dog food manages to get into cans.

    But it wasn't just a less traumatic meeting with radical superiority that van Vogt was proposing to imagine.  What van Vogt aimed to show was nothing less than a normal Earthman — or something like one — being transmuted and melded and assumed into the highest state of awareness and responsibility that the writer was capable of conceiving.

This awareness of the organic interconnection of the cosmos is not a knowledge needed to conquer the universe (one organ in an organism does not conquer the others but cooperates with it) but it is the knowledge, in the vision of van Vogt, to open the gates to the future.

To act without that knowledge is fatal. In NULL-A CONTINUUM, the attempt by Gilbert Gosseyn in the final chapter to overcome the exo-multiversal enemy Ydd by destroying it creates the cosmic disaster he had been trying to avoid–the organic unity of the cosmos is a theme in the book, but not one consciously imposed by the author.

The self-destruction of the main villain in NULL-A CONTINUUM was based consciously  on the themes from THE VIOLENT MALE van Vogt's one mainstream novel and his most obscure work: the parallels to the self-destruction of the Courl and the Ixtl in VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE and the more grotesque self-destruction of the Kibmadine in THE SILKIE was not intentional, but, of course, followed the same pattern, the same logic of theme.

And likewise, the ending of NULL-A CONTINUUM was based closely (actually, word-for-word) on the ending of 'Asylum.' This was not merely based on a lazy writer's wish to copy the original, but also because the theme logic allowed for no other ending.

By them logic I mean this: If you are writing a story about the interconnectedness of all things, you cannot have the ending be anything other than a revelation of that interconnection–ergo the arch foe called "X" as well as the benevolent father-figure Lavoisier, as well as the golden giants from the remote future and the primal "Ptath" from the remote past, have to be part of the same oneness.

One reviewer was taken aback that I introduced a "warped" version of the Null-A training into the universe, and erected Loyalty Machines in the place of Games Machines. But like the Prof Kenrube's hyperspace machine in "Secret Unattainable" a Vanvogtian machine which is part of the cosmic organism affects and is affected by the mind of those who use it, especially where this is a psychological teaching machine. The parallel with Kenrube's machine was unintentional but not mere accident. The same philosophical concept was at work in both tales: in a Vanvogtian universe a mechanism tied to the very fabric of reality must correct itself in the direction of sanity, that is, of congruence with reality.

Despite that I had not read this essay before writing my book, nonetheless, the spirit of Van Vogt guided my theme even if I did not fully or consciously recognize it. (Or the muse, or my subconscious, or the innate logic of the plot, or my love for his works, or whatever one wishes to label it.) And for that I am grateful.

What I think is odd is how much I enjoy writing in other's men's worlds more than in my own. While this may be because I am more suited to fanfic than the true creativity; but on the other hand, this may be because all human beings, except those afflicted with narcissistic disorder, take more joy in the others' works than in one's own.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.