Two Tribes: further thoughts

I am a slow learner, no doubt, but it was something of a revelation when it was brought home to me that the stories about the knights of the Round Table I enjoyed as a child were actually written for real knights, who were not necessarily very nice people at all. (One of the sources of the Grail story, for instance, is dedicated to a leading figure in two notorious bloodbaths: the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople, and the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars in the south of France.) It struck me then that most fiction is actually written to flatter its readers by making people they can identify with into the heroes of the story.

When it comes to Brexit it would have been an easy matter for me, as a ‘remain’ voter who writes science fiction, to do something of that kind. I could, for instance, have written a future dystopia, in which a ghastly caricature of the ‘leave’ camp is in charge, and noble, liberal, internationalist types are fighting a brave war of resistance. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would have welcomed it.

But I don’t think it’s my job to exaggerate the ugliness of rival tribes, and big up the heroism of my own. If you want a simple ‘goodies versus baddies’ view of events, you can find it on social media, where whole armies of people are busy night and day proving how utterly and irredeemably bad those others are, and how very good they are. I’m sure it serves some useful social purpose or other, but it really isn’t my thing.

I don’t deny that there are bad people out there. Trump, for instance, is clearly a very damaged and dangerous human being, Johnson a shallow and vain one. And some of the nastiest and most mean-spirited aspects of British culture were certainly evident on the ‘leave’ side. But an exclusive focus on the shortcomings of others does tend to blind us to our own, and what I noticed in aftermath of the 2016 referendum was that, on the ‘remain’ side too, some pretty ugly things were crawling out of the shadows .

I say ‘ugly’, I say ‘nasty’, but the truth is that human beings are human, whatever tribe they belong to, and my objective, as in my other books –America City is probably the closest- was to write a story that looked at this particular time, not through the lens of ‘them and us’ but simply as human beings responding to their particular circumstances, as humans beings do.