THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT

 

In my essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALLSET YOU FREE, I noted one of the vital distinctions between philosophy and literature: that philosophy attempts to suss out truth from falsehood, while literature’s primary function is to promote fictions that have an ambiguous relationship to “truth,” whatever a given artist’s personal convictions may be. For instance, Dave Sim may believe explicitly in the revelations of the “Peoples of the Book,” but he’s still encoding those beliefs within the context of the fiction called CEREBUS.

Numerous philosophers have come up with metaphors for the search for truth, but in my personal opinion no one has ever topped Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave," summarized thusly:

Plato tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

It tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

The dominant interpretation of the allegory is that the chained people in the cave, able to perceive only shadows of the reality beyond the cave, symbolize human confinement to the input of their physical senses. According to the idealism of Plato (sometimes given the chimerical name of “Realism”), the World of Forms is the actual Truth Beyond the Cave, and presumably the individual who escapes the cave, and tries to convey that insight to his chained fellows, symbolizes the dilemma of the Platonic philosopher.

In addition of my deeming this the best of the “truth-seeking” metaphors, I would hazard that this may be the best known metaphor in philosophy as a whole, given that it furnishes the reader with all the basic challenges of epistemology. Further, the Cave-Allegory may be seen as consequential for the two major branches of metaphenomenal fiction: what we call “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

There have been dozens of involved histories of both “super-genres,” but I’m most concerned with the ways in which both categories developed in the late 1800s. Despite many significant precursors, the two super-genres receive their greatest codification in this period, when Jules Verne and H.G. Wells defined science fiction and William Morris defined the alternate-world fantasy. (To be sure, horror fiction undergoes a similar codification in this period, but many works in this genre make so much use of either “fantasy motifs” or “science fiction motifs” that I can’t think of horror as being entirely separable from the other two.)

Plato’s allegory in itself evokes both images of freedom and restraint; of human beings bound by their physical circumstances but nonetheless capable of obtaining some degree of freedom. Readers of this blog will be familiar with my assertion that human existence is characterized by both “affective freedom” and “cognitive restraint.” We can imagine nearly anything, despite being restrained by all the demands of physicality, winsomely styled as the “Four F’s:” food (edible matter), flax (clothing), flags (shelter) and frig (continuance of the species). As I wrote previously, the imagination may or may not lead to useful inventions that enhance the physical quality of life, but it should always be seen as instrumental to all mental formulations.

Now, fantasy and science fiction pursue distinct epistemological patterns, each in tune with the dominant matrix in which they exist. In science fictional worlds, all wonders are predicated on extensions of scientific principles, while in fantasy, they arise from the concept of magic, which may range from traditional “faerie” spellcraft to organized notions of thaumaturgy. Within all of these worlds, the main characters are generally in the position of the man freed from the chains of his fellows and propelled into a greater cosmos.

In fantasy, a common trope is to show a youth who lives in a bucolic existence, and who finds himself drawn into events of cosmic importance, often involving the combat of good and bad wizards and/or deities. Morris uses a rough variation of this trope in his four fantasy-novels, particularly in THE SUNDERINGFLOOD, though he isn’t as successful in giving his protagonist a grounding in the magical principles governing the world. Morris’s spiritual disciple Tolkien is of course famous for having hurled protagonists Bilbo and Frodo into the greater world of sorcery, walking trees and enchanted rings. The bucolic world of the Shire, from which both hobbits hail, does not as a whole wish to be tainted with all of these momentous and enigmatic presences, but its inhabitants are not really able to reject the magical cosmos in a manner comparable to the chained people in the Cave. The very idea of magic, as a force that transcends the limits of time and space, stands aligned with the concept of affective freedom.

In contrast, the epistemology of the Cave has a more ambivalent function in science fiction. For all the differences between Verne and Wells, they have in common the fact that many of their scientific seekers—the ones who part company with the world of ordinary reality—meet catastrophic fates, explicit with respect to Captain Nemo, implicit with respect to the Time Traveler. Thus, science fiction can be somewhat aligned with the concept of cognitive restraint, and not only because the forces of science—even those of made-up, “impossible” science—are supposed to cohere with the limits of time and space.

At the same time, science fiction shows a greater emphasis upon following the destiny of the society than that of the individual. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks are bound by the chains of a chimerical evolution much as are Plato’s cavepeople, and they are doomed never to escape, existing to illustrate to the protagonist the futility of life. Yet many of Wells’ disciples altered the Platonic paradigm in order to promote a triumphalism of science. It would probably be difficult to find a science fiction author who advocated “truth” in a Platonic World of Forms, but there are hundreds who see capital-S “Science” as such a truth. Science fiction is riddled with protagonists who live in some constricted society, whose people know nothing of scientific principles, but who break free and bring the Good News of Science to convert disbelievers. Such cosmic conversions underlie the enduring appeal of a series like Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy, where the advocates of a logical means of “reading history” are proven to have superior insight over all competitors.

Not a few advocates of science fiction have shown themselves to be hostile to the representations of fantasy, confounding the fictional premises of fantasy-stories with resentment of real-world religion and/or superstition. In so doing, they validate only those products of the imagination which seem to champion real-world science—even though, in point of fact, constructs like Niven’s “Ringworld” and Blish’s “Cities in Space” are not likelier to come into being than elves and orcs. It’s a shame that science fiction enthusiasts have made this conflation, for the activity of trying to fit the human imagination into a box is not only fatuous, but futile beyond anyone’s attempt to—imagine.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 1

To preface this essay, I'll quote myself once more on the topic of negative and positive equity:

'In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away"... In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.'

In Part 2 of January's essay-series EMANICIPATION VS. FREEDOM,  I commented on the opening chapters of Alex Nevala-Lee's ASTOUNDING. I commented upon the promising nature of a book on the "neglected topic" of the effect of John W. Campbell's editorial reign at ASTOUNDING SCI-FI, but I also found fault with the author's need to "virtue signal" on what Campbell should or should not have done in his heyday with respect to racial matters.

As I've now finished the book, my early anticipations of the work's quality as a cultural biography of the men profiled was fully justified. Further, though I do not retract anything I wrote about Nevala-Lee's opening remarks, I should note that he does not "virtue signal" throughout the text, which would certainly have damaged the credibility of the work. Only in the last chapter (not counting an epilogue) does Nevala-Lee substantially return to the topic of "race in modern America" that he raised in the first sections.

In my remarks, I made this statement:

Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but he certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

In that last chapter-- titled "Twilight" after one of Campbell's most famous short stories, and referencing the editor's declining years and death-- Nevala-Lee does indeed demonstrate that John W. Campbell was more than a casual racist. To be sure, I had heard the accusation once or twice from other sources, though I personally would not have been able to weigh in with any informed opinion. I had read a fair number of Campbell's reactionary editorials from the last decade of his life, when ASTOUNDING had been remolded into ANALOG. Said editorials usually stayed away from the topic of race, though I do remember one essay in which Campbell inveighed against the "burn baby burn" politics of Stokely Carmichael and gave his approval to the accomodationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr. And Nevala-Lee does not reference Campbell's editorials either, finding more than circumstantial evidence both in Campbell's letters and in anecdotes from people who knew the editor. There is, for instance, more than enough evidence to state that Campbell nurtured an animus against the Negro race, and that even some of his favorable judgments-- as when he told Jewish writer William Tenn that he Campbell considers the Jews "homo superior"-- were also couched in racist diatribes. In my earlier essay I scoffed at Nevala-Lee for suggesting that Campbell could have made any difference to American racial politics in the 1940s with his little SF-magazine, and I still scoff at that. However, I also argued:

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy

And, mirable dictu, one anecdote attests to Campbell's having resisted the currents of the new cultural paradigm, in that he reportedly refused to publish Samuel R. Delany's NOVA because it had a non-white protagonist.

So, it would appear, from everything I've summarized about Nevala-Lee's disclosures, that the balance of his complaints against Campbell should constitute "positive equity." And for the most part, this holds true. Except---

See Part 2.

EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 2

At the end of Part 1 I said:

In Part 2 I'll address some of the ways current popular fiction devotes itself to universal recognition /equity without showing any insight as to the "quality" of said emancipatory representations.

I decided to put off the examples I had in mind at the time in favor of a quick look at an example of what I've called "negative equity" not in popular fiction, but in a non-fictional work about popular fiction.

I've just started reading Alec Nevala-Lee's 2018 book ASTOUNDING, which purports to chart the historical development of American science fiction through the medium of the magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION. The book's subtitle specifies that Nevala-Lee concentrates on the intersections of three major figures of science fiction-- writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and ASTOUNDING editor John W. Campbell Jr.-- and one figure of cultish notoriety, L. Ron Hubbard. Having finished only the prologue and first chapter, I have no doubt that he's put a huge amount of research into the lives of these four intersecting figures, and as of this reading, it seems like this is going to be a very good read into a very neglected topic.

In the prologue, however, Nevala-Lee feels the need to "virtue signal," by attacking early science fiction for being too WASPy:

Campbell's writers and their characters were almost exclusively white, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre's diversity. At best, this was a huge missed opportunity. ASTOUNDING, which questioned so many other orthodoxies and systems of power, rarely looked at racial inequality, and its lack of historically underrepresented voices severely constrained the stories that it could tell.

This is, in a word, garbage. I might qualify it as well-intentioned garbage, but it's still garbage.

That all or most of Campbell's writers were white is a half-truth. Some writers, like Isaac Asimov, were descendants of European Jews, so they did look "white," though by virtue of their descent they were not necessarily deemed "white" by the time's more conservative standards. One can certainly argue that even Jewish writers still created characters who were dominantly WASPs, which may be an overstatement, though not by much.

But Nevala-Lee's attempt to place blame bears no relation to any truth, save that of ideologues who mouth truisms like, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." To such ideologues, it's always easy to tell someone else to sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of social justice. If John W. Campbell bears "part of the blame," then it's a blame shared by not only popular culture of the thirties and forties but also the majority of so-called "high culture." During these two decades, and most of the next two as well, there was essentially no mass market for non-white characters. If one wants to indict as racist the whole of American culture for the first half of the 20th century, one can certainly do so. But John W. Campbell's share of blame for that cultural racism is so  infinitesimally small that it's hardly worth mentioning-- unless one wishes to show off one's own virtuousness.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy. But in the 1930s and 1940s, no one could have fought against the current of white privilege without drowning-- certainly not the editor of a science-fiction magazine, back in the days when the genre was deemed little more than "Buck Rogers stuff." It's really not a "missed opportunity" if the opportunity wasn't there at all.

Particularly egregious is the cant about "historically underrepresented voices." Nobody in the 1930s or 1940s would have even understood what that meant, for those were the days of the diametrically opposed cultural concept of "the melting pot." Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but Campbell certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

Nevala-Lee's prologue also sings some sad songs about the marginalization of female voices. There may be a little more evidence for women being kept out of science-fiction's "boys' clubs," though even then, most of the evidence comes from women of Caucasian heritage who managed to write professionally under ambivalent cognomens like Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore. I've seen no evidence to suggest that persons of color, of either gender, had that much interest in breaking into the science-fiction magazines. Often it takes a cultural revolution before any marginalized outgroup starts thinking seriously about crashing the gates of the favored ingroup.

I also object to the politicized thinking that asserts, even indirectly, that a given genre's worth can be measured in terms of how many "underrepresented voices" it champions. But I'd need a whole nother essay to do justice to that topic.