Excusing the past

Today I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?

I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa," for example, are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South.  Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering awful stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point.  (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)

I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story.  The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head.  The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time.  And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes.  Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place.  There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good, I guess.  But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration.  The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism.  There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype.  In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in.  In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default.  The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you -- as long as you know your place."

Christie herself is not a lot better.  One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written.  But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians.  Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it.  But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.

 

Even authors who you'd think would be more enlightened sometimes include stuff that is mighty sketchy.  One of my earliest favorite books was Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time.  The third book in the Murry family series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, has a neat theme -- riding through time and trying to prevent a catastrophe by altering timelines in selected places -- but the "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" trope that skims along right beneath the surface gets cringier the longer you look at it.  (Especially since the "blue-eyed Indians" have blue eyes because they have European ancestry.  Which makes them... better?  Eek.)

I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now.  Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read works of theirs that have no racist aspects at all?  More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia?  His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game.  What about worse things still?  Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place?  Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?

The allegations against Neil Gaiman -- whose work I love, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane were immensely formative in the development of my own writing style -- have made it nearly impossible for me to read his books, something I dealt with in a post earlier this year.  Is it honestly possible to separate the creator from the creation, the product from the toxic culture that produced it?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this. I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader.  I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were.  But what about reading solely for pleasure?  I loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct" -- they all too often become synonyms for "stuff I don't like" -- but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don't know the answer to that.  I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers and Christie.  I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work.  As for Gaiman and Card, well, I don't want my money supporting people with attitudes and actions I find repulsive, so I won't purchase their work.  But it's a way more complex, and less clear-cut, topic than it appears.

What do you think?  Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?

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Hero worship

Sometimes I get questioned on my decision to quote (or even mention in a non-negative light) individuals who are not good human beings.

It's a complex issue, sometimes.  When it comes to fiction, I draw the line at supporting writers who are horrible people and still stand to profit from my reading their work.  I won't read, watch, or recommend anything by Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, and Marion Zimmer Bradley for that reason; in the case of Gaiman, I've loved a lot of his writing, but what he's been credibly accused of is so deeply reprehensible that I can no longer read his work without the nausea creeping in.  (Bradley is dead, but my purchase of her work would still profit her estate, so... nope.)

The line is even blurrier when it comes to scientists, whose work is usually not so entangled with who they are as a person.  Both Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss have been accused of serious sexual misconduct; while I apply the same rule to their writing (I will no longer purchase or read anything either man writes), does it invalidate their scientific achievements?  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago I mentioned Richard Dawkins and his observation that what religion a person belongs to has more to do with geography than with choice, and I had a reader write to me to ask why I'd quoted someone like Dawkins, whose anti-trans stance I find appalling.

It's a trenchant question.  My response is that my agreeing with Dawkins about some things doesn't mean I agree with him about everything.  I maintain that he is one of the most lucid and brilliant exponents of evolutionary biology I've come across, and has incisive (and insightful) things to say about religion, but when he strays out of those fields, well... not so much.  To go from "I agree with what X said about Y" to "I agree with what X says about everything" is to engage in hero worship.

And hero worship lands you in trouble just about every time, because we humans are all flawed.  We're all odd mixtures of good and bad, moral and immoral, reasonable and unreasonable, in different kinds and measures.  Writer John Scalzi wrote a brilliant piece when the allegations against Neil Gaiman came out last fall, in which he offered a plea to his readers not to put anyone -- very much including himself -- on a pedestal.  "People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them," Scalzi wrote.  "You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner.  People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours.  Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world.  Because you’re not them.  Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups.  They will.  Always."

To take a less emotionally-charged example, consider Isaac Newton.  The Father of Modern Physics was, beyond question, a brilliant scientific mind.  Not only did he for the first time come up with an analytical model for motion -- the basis of what we now call classical mechanics -- he invented calculus, the tool now universally used to study it.  His experiments in optics were groundbreaking; he was the first person to demonstrate that white light was a combination of the entire visible spectrum.

A portrait of Newton from 1689 [Image is in the Public Domain]

But.

He was, according to his contemporaries, a prickly, priggish, humorless man, narrow-minded, combative, and deeply misogynistic.  He never forgot a wrong; his vicious (and long-lived) quarrels with Robert Hooke, Samuel Pepys, and John Locke are the stuff of legend.  He was superstitious, and often seemed more interested in arguing matters of his rather peculiar take on theology than expanding knowledge of science.  A full one-tenth of his writings have to do with alchemy.  He wrote extensively about the mystical meanings of the proportions of the Temple of Solomon.  He was obsessed with the End Times, and did in-depth analyses of the Book of Revelation (he concluded that the world wasn't going to end until at least 2060, which is a relief).

He was not, honestly, someone most of us would care to spend much time with.

The contributions he made to physics and mathematics show signs of true genius.  At the same time, he seems to have been an ill-tempered and suspicious religious fanatic.  Why are we surprised by this, though?  As Scalzi points out forcefully, none of us are pure of heart, whatever we may accomplish, however far we rise in the public eye.

I'm not saying it's not disappointing when our heroes end up having feet of clay.  I was honestly devastated (not to mention repulsed) when I read the article that made public the allegations against Neil Gaiman.  (I won't link the article here, because it's frankly disturbing; if you're so inclined, a quick search will locate it for you.  Be forewarned, though, the whole thing is one big trigger warning.)   There will always be a measure of "Oh, no, not you too" we feel when someone we've looked up to doesn't live up to our good estimation -- or, in the case of Gaiman, falls way below it.

But like I said, humans are complex and baffling creatures sometimes.  We're all amalgams.  I try to live up to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," but like everyone, I fail way more often than I'd like.  There are parts of my past that I look back upon with deep shame, and there are a few incidents that I'd do almost anything to be able to go back and change.  And I guess that's the only answer, really; to keep in mind we're all fallible, to treat our fellow humans as well as we can, to make amends as well as we can when we do fail, and to make sure we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over.

To quote Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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Taking offense

A few days ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the following perceptive words:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin.  And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’.  That’s just treating other people with respect.” 

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it.  It’s peculiarly enlightening. 

I know what you’re thinking now.  You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Which I agree with, for the most part.  Gaiman is right that people often use "political correctness" as a catchall to cover their own asses, to excuse themselves for holding opinions that are bigoted or narrow-minded.  To me, the phrase has come to be almost as much of a red flag as when someone starts a conversation with, "I don't mean to sound racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

On the other hand, there is an undeniable tendency in our culture to equate "offensiveness" with "having our opinions challenged."  Witness, for example, the professors at the University of Northern Colorado who are being investigated for offending their students -- by presenting, and asking students to consider, opposing viewpoints.

One professor was reported for asking students to think and write about conflicting views of homosexuality in our society.  As part of the assignment, the professor had asked students to consider the following:  "GodHatesFags.com: Is this harmful?  Is this acceptable?  Is it legal?  Is this Christianity?  And gay marriage: Should it be legal?  Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?"

Note that the professor wasn't saying that homosexuality is immoral, or that the answer to any of the other questions posed above was "yes;" (s)he was asking the students to consider the claim, and creating an evidence-based argument for or against it.  The student filing the complaint didn't see it that way.

"I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated," the student wrote.  "[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics.  Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities."

Because learning how to counter fallacious arguments with facts, and answer loaded questions rationally, somehow creates an "actively hostile space."

[image courtesy of photographer Fredler Brave and the Wikimedia Commons]

The second professor's case is even more telling, as it came about because (s)he had assigned students to read the famous article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which addresses precisely the problem I'm writing about in this post.  After reading the paper, the professor asked the students to consider the questions raised by the article, specifically the issues of "trigger warnings" for minorities such as homosexuals and transgender individuals in reading controversial material.

"I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic] I was very offended and hurt by this," one student wrote in the complaint.

The university complaints office backed the student.  The professor was instructed not to interject opinions into his/her lessons -- including those of the authors who wrote the article.

So there's something to be gained by having students avoid all opinions that they disagree with?  If they think they're not going to run into those once they leave college, they're fooling themselves -- and if they haven't been pushed into thinking through how to respond to bigots and people who are simply ignorant, they're basically choosing to be intellectually disarmed adults.

Students should be forced to consider all sorts of viewpoints.  Not to change their minds, necessarily, but to allow them to think through their own beliefs.  I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "You might well leave this class at the end of the semester with your beliefs unchanged. You will not leave with your beliefs unchallenged."

Now, note that I am not in any way trying to excuse teachers (on any level) who try to use their classrooms as a field for proselytizing.  I only have the one source for the incidents at the University of Northern Colorado, and there might be more to the story than I've read.  If these professors were using their positions of authority to press their own bigoted viewpoints about gender and sexual identity on their students, they deserve censure.

But I suspect that's not what's going on, here.  We've become a polarized society, with half of us lambasting the political correctness movement and simultaneously feeling as if their right to free speech makes it acceptable to offend, and the other half afraid to voice an opinion for fear of treading on some hypersensitive individual's toes.  What's lost is the opportunity for civil discourse -- which, after all, is one of the best and most reliable pathways toward learning and understanding.