Cultural Processes and the Pulp Revolution

Recently, the Russian Orthodox Church's Patriarch Kirill spoke out in support of the Pulp Revolution, the Superversive Movement, and the various stripes of Puppies.  Not in so many words, but his heart is with us. 

Naturally, in their interview, Russia Today didn't explicitly ask the Patriarch what he thought of Appendix N and the recent push to reinvigorate a dying sf/f culture by a return to stories featuring healthy relationships, clear lines of good and evil, and heroes that take active measures to suppress the latter.  Instead, they asked him about recent legislation pushing the normalization of same-sex relationships, and in an off-hand moment he used literature as a common touchstone for understanding the difference between good and evil:

"I’m deeply wary of it. What’s happening in the Western countries is that, for the first time in human history, legislation is at odds with the moral nature of human beings. What’s good and evil? Sin and righteousness? These could be defined in both religious terms and non-religious terms. If you take a good character from English, American, or Russian fiction, you will see that all of them possess the same qualities. Why? We have different cultures and different political systems, but for all of us good is good, and evil is evil, and everyone understands who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. So how do we distinguish? With our heart, with our moral nature. This moral nature, created by God, served as a foundation for the legislation which is designed. Laws defined moral values in legal terms, telling us what’s good and what’s bad. We know that stealing is bad and helping people is good, and laws define what stealing is and what the suitable punishment for it is.

Now, for the first time in human history, the law allows something that doesn’t correspond to our moral nature. The law contradicts it."

As Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture.

The enemies of truth and beauty have long understood this, and they've long understood that subverting the culture was a necessary first step towards subverting the law.  By pushing fiction away from universal truths about good and evil and towards antiseptic intellectualism unmoored from a moral center, they've managed to shift the culture towards one that accepts and encourages their stilted world view.  There's a feedback system built into their plan whereby they infect the culture with their grim worldview which then demands more reinforcement that hopelessness is the natural order.

The new-wave writers and editors explicitly told readers to stop worrying about all that good and evil stuff.  They told readers to evolve beyond simple superstition and accept that the world is painted in various shades of gray - that the wisdom cultivated over generations and handed down to us should be overturned if you're really smart and you just kinda figured some stuff out.  Which left the barn door open for, "I just kinda figured it out when I was in college," writers like Iain Banks and China Mieville to escape from the hog pen and into the kitchen to slurp up all the jelly.

Patriarch Kirill.  Hero.  Revolutionary.  Puppy.

And yet, as the Patriarch points out, we distinguish good and evil with our heart and our moral nature.  I'd argue that our brains play a role, but the greater point is that even after you give your brain over to writers like Banks and Meiville, the good man's heart and soul reject what they have to offer.  It takes an act of will to silence or ignore the feeling of disgust or dismay that those two (and others like them) inspire in readers.  The bleak and hopeless worldview of the new wave authors is a heavy and draining one, and all the brainpower in the world cannot solve that problem.  Give up, these authors say.  You are surrounded by evil and nothing you do can really make much difference in the grand scheme of things.  Just abandon hope, live for today, and let your betters care for you and yours.

Contrast that with the feeling of hope and inspiration that John C. Wright's works inspire.  Even when things look their worst, hope remains.  It feeds the soul what it needs to forge ahead in this fallen world.  It pushes a worldview that inspires active resistance to darkness and evil.  Wright, and writers like him, bring the message that you are surrounded by evil, but everything you do to fight it makes a difference.  Fight today that you might live tomorrow, and care for you and yours.

That's the message you get from the 'regress harder' crowd, and it appeals to the sensibilities of all men of good faith.  That message is a direct threat to the new-wave writers and those who subscribe to the larger cultural narrative.  That message resonates with the hearts and souls of those looking for hope, and active measures are taken to silence that message because it is so much stronger and appealing.  That message has to be contained because every time the message of life grows, it does so at the expense of the death eaters.

At the societal level, a culture welcoming messages of truth and beauty also rejects the grim nihilism and empty intellectualism of the 'no real bad guys' crowd.  The former teaches an understanding that good and evil are real things in the world.  The former provides an ability to distinguish between good and evil.  The former encourages everyone to fight evil - even if it's just the dragons appearing on the ballot or in the office or in one's own heart.

Producers of nihilistic tales of raw intellectualism unfettered by the presence of a moral heart and soul know that literature exalting the ability to recognize and fight evil are a dagger pointed straight at their blackened, shriveled hearts.  They are all battle cries that serve to inspire men of good will to reject the seductive message of evil peddled by men of ill will.  The forces of darkness hate and fear the Pulp Revolution, the Superversive Movement, and the various stripes of Puppies, because we represent a direct threat to their existence.  They cannot but alternately mock and ignore us because deep down in their hearts they know their empty promises will yield but bitter fruit.  They know their days are numbered.  They that we are coming for them. 

Writing Circle Jerks

Most people in most writing circles are jerks.  Allow me to demonstrate:

 

This crossed my Twitter transom, and it took a Herculean effort and some serious teeth gritting to let it slide on down out of the bottom of my feed without a direct response.  So much of it makes no sense to me, and yet I said nothing.  The limitations of communicating through the twit box saved me from shooting off my mouth at the time.  The many and varied problems inherent in this graph won't fit into a few 140 character telegrams.  Twitter just wasn't the right place.

 

Blogger, now...that is the right place!

 

One look at that chart tells you everything you need to know about the sad state of literature today.  Three quarters of that pie consists of raw emoting about writing.  Maybe a quarter of the pie actually relates to writing.

 

Here's my own pie chart:

 

Granted, my life as it relates to writing includes a massive chunk of time spent doing things for other people in exchange for pictures of dead presidents.  That's life, and it's fine.  It won't last forever.  The point is that writing is an enjoyable experience for me, and when the chance comes along to do it, I grab it.  Contrast that to a 'writer' who actively looks for reasons NOT to write.  Do you really think the material they produce will be worthwhile?  If they couldn't be motivated to write it, why would I be motivated to read it?

 

Notice that the other half of my chart consists of time spent actually doing something.  If I'm not writing, I'm reading about it, or writing about it.  That last one is a bit ironic, so let me explain.

 

There's writing and then there's writing.  Typing these words into Blogger is writing, technically.  It's writing in the same sense that writing a letter or email or a technical report at the office is writing, but it isn't writing in the sense of producing a work for sale on the open market.  That doesn't mean that it isn't writing of value.  Quite the contrary.  This post serves as a warm up for me - as soon as I'm done with this post, I'll go back to walking my mendicant priest through the clues that lead him to the final confrontation with a hell-spawned dragon.  Everything I write - from the quickest email to the longest internet rant - has value and makes me a better writer.  It's all time well spent.  It goes in the 'win' column even if it isn't generating words for sale on Amazon.

 

Before we move on to why most writing circles are full of jerks, let's get a little bit meta.  That last paragraph I wrote?  That's a reminder to everyone that you're getting better all the time.  That's a reminder that writing is a skill that you practice even when you aren't pushing characters through a plot.  That's a reminder that so much of what you do with your 'not writing' time is making you a better writer.  These are all subtle words of encouragement to writers that everything is going to be okay.  That they shouldn't stress out so much.  That they can do this.  It's positive reinforcement for them to continue doing what they are doing.

 

Notice the active verbs there that have more to do with action than emoting?  That's on purpose.

 

Compare my advice to that of the jerks shuffling the first pie around the internet:

 

Notice the small size of that yellow slice?  Writers love to laugh about how much they suck or about how much they hate writing.   You can never fully escape it.  As much as I actively avoid most writer's haunts on the internet, that damn thing still pushed into my feed.  It's small size is my way of telling the reader to stop listening to that kind of loser talk.  That's my way of telling the reader to stop worrying about what other writers feel and get back to what you should be DOING.

 

Notice there isn't a red slice?  I don't spend time worrying about it.  More to the point, I don't spend time telling people that I worry about it.  At best it isn't true - it's just a po' faced attempt to fish a compliment out of the reader.  At worst, it's an attempt to invoke feelings of inadequacy among other writers.  Either way, it's a pretty lousy thing to say to a writer.

 

Of course, a writer should be concerned about the quality of his work.  If you're honest, and if you want to get any better.  The day a writer thinks he is a good enough writer is the day he stops trying to get better is the day he starts the long, slow slide towards writing like John Scalzi.  But that's besides the point - the real point is that time spent emoting about the quality of your writing is not time spent doing something about the quality of your writing.

 

You see what I keep coming back to?  It's the contrast we've seen before between feeling and doing. 

 

Those in writing circles whose advice focuses on feeling rather than writing are doing their audience a grave dis-service.  They are jerks.

 

Don't be a feeler.  Be a doer.

 

Don't feel.  Write.

Quick Hits: Woke Kids

This is going to sound like one of those fake "my woke eight year old asked me," things that has littered the twit box of late.  It's really not.  I take full credit for raising my daughter right.  My twelve year old daughter has my genes and she has my memes.

This weekend the older kids asked to watch the latest Star Trek horse whipping.  The twelve-year old is wise beyond my years, because she learned her lesson after the last two movies.  We asked her why she didn't want to see the latest movie, and my hand to god, she said, "It's just going to be about a hundred year old guy with a bomb trying to blow up the Federation, and then there'll be a fistfight over the bomb at the end."

A single tear of pride is rolling down my cheek as I type this.

Now look, my kids know to watch for the signs.  They know all about The Narrative, and we all point and laugh every time a movie makes a point to pause and linger in a long steady shot expressly designed to show everybody how current year the movie really is.  They ask questions about the antagonist's motivations.  They will be effective soldiers for the next generation's fight in the war on noticing things.



Take that, flyover country!

They pointed out to me that two out of the three vengeance thirsting Big Bad Guys seeking in this franchise are soldiers.  They had no answers for why that would be the case, so Dad filled them in, Jeffro like, on what their brain noticed, even if they did not.  As with most messaging designed around empty promises, stating out loud the sales pitch in plain bold terms makes the pitch sound ridiculous:

• If you wear Axe body spray dozens of supermodels will follow in your wake.
• Your cats will love you more if you feed them food from a can.
• Soldiers are very bad, dangerous things who do very bad things, and you can't have peace while they are around.

They notice these things, even if they don't have the words to explain them.  Better yet, they have the confidence to identify when something doesn't pass the smell test, and ask questions about it.  Why is that so hollow?  Why don't I care about the people on the space station?  Why does this fight feel so fake?  Why is the central node for the entire ventilation system a glass box in 'the sky'?  Why do the spaceships fly under rivers to dock in the middle of the space globe?

In some cases the answer is as simple as, "Because it makes it more dramatic.  Because it looks better.  Because we have three teams of people to keep track of, and this lets the director show us where they all are in relation to each other."  These are the easy ones.  The relationship questions that are the hard ones to answer.  You have to really break down all the ways that films like this fail on the relationship front, and then figure out better ways to present what the film-makers were trying to show.  Teaching kids how adult relationships work is hard enough as it is, doing it while trying to shore up the foundations of a film like Beyond is playing the "Dad Game" on  B Mode.

You know what I'm talking about.

I should have listened to the 12 year old.