Say What?

This is a quote from Michael Chabon, which one of my facebook colleagues posted. My colleague thought this was beautiful. I thought it was pretentious crap.

"The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

"There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

"Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

"Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models 'works of art.'"

The world is not broken. It's a fine planet, full of strange and wonderful and profoundly interesting things. It sits in a good planetary system, a good galaxy, a universe that looks beautiful to me.

There are things I am not entirely crazy about, such as mortality. But if we didn't have mortality, we wouldn't have evolution. Instead, we'd have a planet covered with single-celled organisms, if that. Think of missing out on dinosaurs, trilobites, corals, elephants, social insects, birds...

What bugs me is not the planet or the universe, it's human behavior, which can change. For that matter, I think mortality is fixable, though not -- I am afraid -- in my lifetime.

By saying that the world is broken, Chabon is letting humans off the hook. (Notice that he is mixing entropy, which is physics, and mortality, which is biology, in with human behavior. Entropy may be inevitable. Human meanness is not.) And he is buying into the Book of Genesis, and the idea that we are stuck with a fallen world, because our ancestors did something bad a long time ago. No. We are apes who have evolved, and we are still learning to be a new kind of being.

I tend to blame class society and the rich and powerful, more than I blame our primate nature. We are a species dependent on culture, and culture is highly changeable, which suggests we can change. We can -- in theory -- build a new and just society within the shell of the old. It's not impossible the way reversing entropy is impossible. Never confuse the difficult with the impossible; and never confuse the universe with the USA.

This reminds me a bit of Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap." Sturgon was talking about fiction, and he is probably right. But I wouldn't call 90% of stars crap, or 90% of birds crap. And I am not sure that 90% of human products are crap, except in a society driven by profit. Is 90% of folk art crap? How about 90% of folk tales?

Unlike Chabon, Sturgeon was not pretentious; and he was smart enough -- and a good enough science fiction writer -- to not make Chabon's mistake of confusing people with existence. And, like many science fiction writers, he probably had enough sense to realize that much about human society is contingent. The way we are now is not the way we must always be.

This is why I write science fiction and fantasy. I do not like writing so elegant that it enables us to think badly.

P.S. I also think Chabon's Bedouin metaphor is an example of what Edward Said called "Orientalism" -- a prejudiced, ignorant stereotype about the people of North Africa and the Middle East. The Bedouin were not losers herding goats among the ruins. Their culture developed to survive in an environment no longer conducive to settled life. The "giant" cultures that preceded them had failed, due to climate change, unsustainable agriculture and war. The Bedouin managed to keep going, because they had adapted to arid and damaged land. Their culture is now changing again. (I just read the Wikipedia entry on Bedouins.)