The perils of political commentary through literature (...and I criticize my favorite author)
The term, "fanboy," has some interesting baggage associated with it, but one would not be completely out of place attaching it to me when it comes to Nora Jemisin. I discussed her just last week in my Sunday post, and I talk about her all the time to anyone who will listen. That does not, of course, mean that one should read everything she writes uncritically, and as I continue to spend my Sunday posts addressing the use of science fiction to think about the modern world, her latest gives us a dramatic example of why pedestals are meant to be knocked down, sacred cows are delicious, and iconoclasm is a wonderful, if (definitionally) destructive hobby. Hey, look! There's my icon! What shall I do next? You know the etymology of "-clasm," right? Hulk smash. Hulk take graven images commandment very seriously.
I don't think Jemisin thought everything through, and this is where political argumentation through literary analogy can go to weird and uncomfortable places when you pick the ideas apart.
Have you ever encountered the argument that Idiocracy, while funny and vaguely cathartic, is borderline eugenicist? "Emergency Skin" is Idiocracy, in reverse, and by the same token, almost implicitly eugenicist. What's more problematic, though, is that Jemisin goes hard at racism and even directly attacks eugenics. Mike Judge could brush aside the eugenicist undertones of Idiocracy and tell the audience to interpret the movie however they choose, but Jemisin was writing directly about eugenics. Umm... problem!
Yeah, so I've been telling you that it's a good idea to read science fiction and think about politics through science fiction. Don't do it uncritically, even with the best of authors, which Jemisin is. So let's get into this. Sorry, Nora...
Anyway, depending on your Amazon purchase history, you might have gotten an ad last week about a collection of short stories (Forward) by some famous authors, including Andy "The Book Is Better Than The Movie" Weir, and N.K. Jemisin. As a Jemisin fanboy-- a known fact to Mr. Bezos, which is in no way creepy-- I got the ad, and needed to read whatever N.K. Jemisin wrote. Fanboy. Fanboy, though, is not the same thing as cult follower.
N.K. Jemisin's latest short story is called, "Emergency Skin." Synopsis: Climate change and other problems continue to deteriorate, and as space travel technology improves, some rich, self-important, racist, misogynistic "Founders" (get it?) leave the planet because they decide it's easier to try to colonize another planet than save this one. They expect Earth to become uninhabitable, and for humanity to die off completely here, but they need some samples, so they send a soldier back to collect those samples. The soldier finds that Earth is not only inhabited, but that the ecosystem has recovered, and Earth has turned into a pretty cool place.
Why? Jemisin's story was about a paradox. The "Founders" left because they saw deterioration, but they themselves were the reason nothing could get better. Once they left, stuff got cool again. They were the problem. They were their own problem. (Or, rather, they were everyone's problem, but in addition to being everyone's problem, the interesting paradox is that from an earthbound perspective, they were their own problem until they were no longer earthbound.) Cute, right?
Read it, pick it apart for yourself, but here's this...
I don't think Jemisin thought everything through, and this is where political argumentation through literary analogy can go to weird and uncomfortable places when you pick the ideas apart.
Have you ever encountered the argument that Idiocracy, while funny and vaguely cathartic, is borderline eugenicist? "Emergency Skin" is Idiocracy, in reverse, and by the same token, almost implicitly eugenicist. What's more problematic, though, is that Jemisin goes hard at racism and even directly attacks eugenics. Mike Judge could brush aside the eugenicist undertones of Idiocracy and tell the audience to interpret the movie however they choose, but Jemisin was writing directly about eugenics. Umm... problem!
Yeah, so I've been telling you that it's a good idea to read science fiction and think about politics through science fiction. Don't do it uncritically, even with the best of authors, which Jemisin is. So let's get into this. Sorry, Nora...
Here's what actually happens in the story. Earth deteriorates. The "Founders" leave. Since the "Founders" are the ones stopping anything from getting better on Earth by being selfish and short-sighted (in addition to being every kind of bigoted jerk imaginable), their decision to leave is what permits everything to start getting better here.
OK, so let's say that happens during the first generation upon the Founders leaving. (Actually, there were multiple waves, since a bunch of groups of people left, but whatever) Should we expect the basic goodness of the remaining people to continue for a second generation? A third? A fourth? However many generations it takes for the story to continue, and technology and progress to develop to get to the point where the story takes place? We see a picture of a basically utopian society. How does it get there?
The Founders, and other sets of bad people, left, in multiple waves.
Who remained? The people who, by default, weren't the bad people. The only way that carries forth into the time the story takes place is if we accept a premise that is almost eugenicist in itself. Instead of the bad people being removed from the gene pool through forced sterilization in some 20th Century eugenics movement, Jemisin has the bad people save the Earth through a sort of non-suicidal Darwin Award. They take themselves out of Earth's gene pool by leaving Earth. And once they're out of Earth's gene pool, sure, the Founders turn the planet they colonize into a dystopian hell because it was founded by people who suck, but Earth winds up fine because even generations into the future, whatever evil they removed from the planet doesn't re-materialize.
Think about that non-rematerialization. Jemisin's commentary is essentially that what holds everything back is a combination of greed, short-sightedness, racism, misogyny, and so on. Fine. So what is the origin of those things? If you let the greedy, short-sighted, racist misogynists leave, and those philosophical leanings don't come back, ever, that's practically an endorsement of the premise that greed, short-sightedness etc. are inheritable, and hey, if they want to eugenicize themselves out of Earth's gene pool, we'd be fine with that!
But in a story that poses itself as a condemnation of eugenics...
Does anyone see anything weird going on here?
And there is a big debate on the heritability of political attitudes! Beginning with Alford, Hibbing & Funk's 2005 article in the American Political Science Review, "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?," we political scientists have been having a serious debate about the extent to which stuff like this really is inherited.
Several years ago, I had an MA student studying for his comps, and while sitting in my office talking about this debate, I posed the following question, just to mess with his head. (I do this, 'cuz a professor has to entertain himself somehow...). What if we found a "racism" gene? What kinds of policies would you support regarding it? I love messing with peoples' heads. Put their opposition to eugenics against their opposition to racism, and watch them twist themselves into knots! Who needs tv when you have developing minds to warp?
The thing is, unintentionally, Jemisin actually wrote this into her story. The problem, though, is that "Emergency Skin" tries to have it both ways. Condemn eugenics, while implicitly portraying a world that got better through the accidental application of eugenic principles, where instead of the normal targets of eugenics, the ones removed from Earth's gene pool are the rich, white, misogynistic, self-important dot-dot-dots. At its core, though, that's still eugenics.
Now, there's another idea that sometimes floats to the surface when Jemisin is writing utopian rather than hellscape literature. The opening short story in her compilation, How Long 'Til Black Future Month? presents a parallel universe which is utopian, but in which there are occasional communications from something like our universe, with the danger being that the spread of ideas like hate would endanger the society, creating some weird undertones, and there's a kind of a police state thing to stop the spread of bad ideas. The thing about that particular utopia, though, is that it is preserved by preventing ideas from spreading from our universe. (You know, like thoughtcrime. Gee...)
So, what about the preservation of Jemisin's "Emergency Skin" utopia by simply having the bad ideas leave with the Founders? Here's the problem with that. In "The Ones Who Stay And Fight," ideas from our universe never get out into Um-Helat. In "Emergency Skin," they do. Soldiers from the Founders' planet, and other exod... (plural of "exodus") show up back on Earth on a regular basis, talking about the bad ideas they took with them all the time. The ideas are regularly re-introduced. They just don't take hold. There are no thought police to keep those ideas from spreading, as in "The Ones Who Stay And Fight" (or the Dreamblood Duology). They just get laughed at.
Why? Because in "Emergency Skin," it wasn't just that "the ones who stayed and fought" to turn Earth into a utopia were good people. It was their kids, and their children's children, and so on. To the point that even when their descendants heard morally bad ideas, they rejected them.
That's really hard to explain, sans eugenics. And since we can put this in contrast with Jemisin's other writings, like "The Ones Who Stay And Fight," and the Dreamblood Duology, Jemisin's latest looks both self-contradictory and like a borderline acceptance of some eugenics principles.
Um, Nora? Can we, like, maybe, talk?
But of course, the flip side of the eugenics in "Emergency Skin" is the thought police element in the Dreamblood Duology, or "The Ones Who Stay And Fight." In the Dreamblood Duology, the worshippers of Hananja believe in peace. And anyone who is unpeaceful, even in general personality, basically gets Freddie Krugered, but in a peaceful way. 'Cuz... peace. (Essun, from The Broken Earth trilogy, would be so dead!)
Now, one way to deal with all of this is not to worry about what Jemisin thought, and just take your own interpretation. In that case, any potential contradiction is just grist for thought! It is important, though, not to get swept up to the point of missing the nuances, though, which is tempting when one is ideologically predisposed towards a central message. And when the author pulls off some cool tricks, as Jemisin always does. This is messy stuff, though. It usually is, which is why, as much as I'm telling you to think about literature, and science fiction in particular, do so carefully.
Nora K. Jemisin-- the accidental eugenicist. (Sorry, I had to do that reference.)
And sorry, Nora. I'm still looking forward to your next book.
Two Sundays in a row of Jemisin, and I'll move on for next week. Variety. I need some variety in what I write. It'll be different. Hopefully, though, you're enjoying some different semi-scholarly commentary. If so, please help build back up the readership base.
Several years ago, I had an MA student studying for his comps, and while sitting in my office talking about this debate, I posed the following question, just to mess with his head. (I do this, 'cuz a professor has to entertain himself somehow...). What if we found a "racism" gene? What kinds of policies would you support regarding it? I love messing with peoples' heads. Put their opposition to eugenics against their opposition to racism, and watch them twist themselves into knots! Who needs tv when you have developing minds to warp?
The thing is, unintentionally, Jemisin actually wrote this into her story. The problem, though, is that "Emergency Skin" tries to have it both ways. Condemn eugenics, while implicitly portraying a world that got better through the accidental application of eugenic principles, where instead of the normal targets of eugenics, the ones removed from Earth's gene pool are the rich, white, misogynistic, self-important dot-dot-dots. At its core, though, that's still eugenics.
Now, there's another idea that sometimes floats to the surface when Jemisin is writing utopian rather than hellscape literature. The opening short story in her compilation, How Long 'Til Black Future Month? presents a parallel universe which is utopian, but in which there are occasional communications from something like our universe, with the danger being that the spread of ideas like hate would endanger the society, creating some weird undertones, and there's a kind of a police state thing to stop the spread of bad ideas. The thing about that particular utopia, though, is that it is preserved by preventing ideas from spreading from our universe. (You know, like thoughtcrime. Gee...)
So, what about the preservation of Jemisin's "Emergency Skin" utopia by simply having the bad ideas leave with the Founders? Here's the problem with that. In "The Ones Who Stay And Fight," ideas from our universe never get out into Um-Helat. In "Emergency Skin," they do. Soldiers from the Founders' planet, and other exod... (plural of "exodus") show up back on Earth on a regular basis, talking about the bad ideas they took with them all the time. The ideas are regularly re-introduced. They just don't take hold. There are no thought police to keep those ideas from spreading, as in "The Ones Who Stay And Fight" (or the Dreamblood Duology). They just get laughed at.
Why? Because in "Emergency Skin," it wasn't just that "the ones who stayed and fought" to turn Earth into a utopia were good people. It was their kids, and their children's children, and so on. To the point that even when their descendants heard morally bad ideas, they rejected them.
That's really hard to explain, sans eugenics. And since we can put this in contrast with Jemisin's other writings, like "The Ones Who Stay And Fight," and the Dreamblood Duology, Jemisin's latest looks both self-contradictory and like a borderline acceptance of some eugenics principles.
Um, Nora? Can we, like, maybe, talk?
But of course, the flip side of the eugenics in "Emergency Skin" is the thought police element in the Dreamblood Duology, or "The Ones Who Stay And Fight." In the Dreamblood Duology, the worshippers of Hananja believe in peace. And anyone who is unpeaceful, even in general personality, basically gets Freddie Krugered, but in a peaceful way. 'Cuz... peace. (Essun, from The Broken Earth trilogy, would be so dead!)
Now, one way to deal with all of this is not to worry about what Jemisin thought, and just take your own interpretation. In that case, any potential contradiction is just grist for thought! It is important, though, not to get swept up to the point of missing the nuances, though, which is tempting when one is ideologically predisposed towards a central message. And when the author pulls off some cool tricks, as Jemisin always does. This is messy stuff, though. It usually is, which is why, as much as I'm telling you to think about literature, and science fiction in particular, do so carefully.
Nora K. Jemisin-- the accidental eugenicist. (Sorry, I had to do that reference.)
And sorry, Nora. I'm still looking forward to your next book.
Two Sundays in a row of Jemisin, and I'll move on for next week. Variety. I need some variety in what I write. It'll be different. Hopefully, though, you're enjoying some different semi-scholarly commentary. If so, please help build back up the readership base.
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