Bad faith readers (in lieu of the next Virtue and virtue-signaling post)
Sorry, folks. I have been working on the next post in the Virtue-signaling in science fiction series, but it just isn't going to get done today. The post is running long, and I have real work. Classes start tomorrow. Behold, a ramble in its stead.
I have some thoughts on bad faith reading, and the problems that bad faith readers create for those of us trying in good faith to have rigorous intellectual discussion.
This morning's post was intended to be a critique of Seth Dickinson's second Baru Cormorant novel, The Monster Baru Cormorant. The short version is that while Dickinson's first book was a very sharp examination of political, social and economic issues in a fantasy setting that avoided so many of the tropes and pitfalls of virtue-signaling, his second book in the series failed in nearly every way that the first book succeeded. However, as I found myself writing my critiques, I found myself trying to soften them as I understood the position from which he wrote, and from which I began the Virtue and virtue-signaling series.
Quick reminder of what I mean by virtue-signaling in literature. Yes, I occasionally read stuff other than science fiction and fantasy, but I'm, like, a grown-up, 'n stuff now, so I get to read whatever I want. So there. Anyway, virtue-signaling is writing is such a way that a primary goal is to demonstrate the author's own personal political, social or economic virtue to an audience that either requires such demonstrations, or gives extra credence to authors who make such demonstrations. J.K. Rowling's recent dust-up demonstrated that there can be a backlash against authors who fail to signal their virtue. However, despite the fact that all literature is symbolic, not all political writing is virtue-signaling, and in Part II, I pointed to Nnedi Okorafor's Binti as a prominent recent example of a novella that rose above the tropes of virtue-signaling. My intent today was to show that Seth Dickinson's second Baru Cormorant novel didn't do what Nnedi Okorafor did: rise above.
Why not? Bigger picture: bad faith readers. A bad faith reader is someone who reads a piece of work, be it a novel, text, piece of scholarship... anything, not with the goal of trying to understand and analyze it with an open mind, nor even with the goal of taking an oppositional stance for the sake of intellectual debate, but with the goal finding a way to impugn the character of the writer. Bad faith readers exist, they are a blight on the intellectual world, they undercut serious intellectuals' ability to accomplish anything, and they force true thinkers to write in such a way as either to avoid topics, statements or arguments, or to couch them in ways that hide intent to the point that it may as well be avoidance. And the bad faith reader will find a way to impugn a writer's character anyway, because that's what a bad faith reader does.
In Venn diagram terms, think of it this way. Consider call-out culture. Some proportion of it is good faith, regardless of whatever other critiques can be made of it, and some proportion of it is bad faith. How much of it is bad faith is open to debate. Good faith practice means making an honest reading and only making an accusation if the content warrants it. Bad faith practice means looking for an opening to make an accusation because there are social points to be gained, and indeed, virtue to be signaled, by making the accusation. So, just find any excuse, regardless of how flimsy.
Bad faith reading, of course, can occur for reasons other than kids on twitter looking for ways to show how holier-than-thou they are. Scholars do it. Politicians do it. Literary critics do it to justify their existence. The legal profession is built on the premise that everyone is entitled to representation, but if we accept the premise that one side is at least more in the right than the other, then one lawyer is probably arguing at least colloquially in bad faith, even if there is a separate legal definition for negotiating in bad faith.
There could even be someone hate-reading this obscure, little blog, scouring my every sentence in the hope of finding something to... whatever.
Anyway, bad faith reading has a Venn diagram overlap with call-out culture. There is bad faith reading unrelated to call-out culture. This can be an issue for novelists, but a less commercially treacherous one. Readers might think they see plot holes or inconsistencies if they squint at the text in certain ways. Whatever. And as I said, there are elements of call-out culture that happen in good faith. It's the overlap of bad faith reading and call-out culture that creates the real problem.
Recall my discussion of Jacqueline Carey's Starless. I thought it was, overall, a good book which happened to have some fascinating ideas about sex and gender, which is exactly what science fiction and fantasy are well-suited to examine. See: Le Guin, Ursula. However, I noted several times that a bad faith reader might look for ways to call Carey a trans-phobe, or something like that. What made the book so interesting was the nuance, but writing like that meant taking risks because it created openings for bad faith readers. Hypothetically, some bad faith reader could have come along and said that Vironesh was a TERF, and that through Vironesh, Carey was advocating TERF-ism. Burn the heathen! Would that have been a fair reading of Carey? No, but it can happen these days. That's the Venn diagram overlap between bad faith reading and call-out culture, and since there are few issues more sensitive right now than transgender issues, Carey wrote a really risky novel, if you examine it closely.
There really are people out there who scour an author's words, looking for ways to misconstrue them and accuse the author of horrible things.
So I found myself writing my critiques of Seth Dickinson, and thinking about my perspective relative to his. Dickinson is a novelist. And bluntly, a relatively new one. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was his first published novel, and while it got serious buzz, he's still not exactly the biggest thing out there. You're reading a political science professor's blog, so there is a high likelihood that you don't know Jacqueline Carey, but trust me when I say that she is a big name within the science fiction and fantasy world. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Kushiel books, which are her big claim to fame. Just... no. Basically everything else she does is golden, in my opinion, but she's a big name and has been for a while. Only among us weirdo nerds, though. That established reputation gives her some leeway, though.
Rowling? Household name. More freedom.
Me? I'm a tenured professor. I'm both nobody, and protected by academic freedom, written into my contract. In principle, I'm supposed to be able to comment on politics 'n stuff* in a way that I deem appropriate as a professor of political science without fear of retribution from my employer-- Case Western Reserve University-- because that's the point. In tenure veritas! I'm also writing primarily for myself, though, as a mental exercise/outlet. I write scholarly works intended to sit on scholarly book shelves, collecting dust because that's what we Piled-higher-and-Deeper-s do, but this blog is just me messin' around on weekend mornings. It's not monetized, and I neither gain nor lose anything based on readership or readers' opinions. Straight-up: I write because I need to write. I love the written word. If you have any artistic outlets yourself, you get that.
Dickinson? He is in a different position. He, too, loves the written word, and he writes because he needs to write, but his professional situation is not the same as mine, and some self-reflection requires me to recognize that. He does not have the position to allow him to say that he just writes for himself and damn the audience that doesn't see the genius of his work. If he is worried, then, that insufficient signaling of virtue will result in a poor reception of his work? He must signal virtue. That's not entirely on him, then.
It's on the bad faith readers.
Bad faith readers are parasites, and my general advice to them is that they should examine their life choices. One need not live a parasitic existence. Not that they'd take advice from me. The whole point of a bad faith reader, of course, is... bad faith.
*Everything is political! Especially art!
I have some thoughts on bad faith reading, and the problems that bad faith readers create for those of us trying in good faith to have rigorous intellectual discussion.
This morning's post was intended to be a critique of Seth Dickinson's second Baru Cormorant novel, The Monster Baru Cormorant. The short version is that while Dickinson's first book was a very sharp examination of political, social and economic issues in a fantasy setting that avoided so many of the tropes and pitfalls of virtue-signaling, his second book in the series failed in nearly every way that the first book succeeded. However, as I found myself writing my critiques, I found myself trying to soften them as I understood the position from which he wrote, and from which I began the Virtue and virtue-signaling series.
Quick reminder of what I mean by virtue-signaling in literature. Yes, I occasionally read stuff other than science fiction and fantasy, but I'm, like, a grown-up, 'n stuff now, so I get to read whatever I want. So there. Anyway, virtue-signaling is writing is such a way that a primary goal is to demonstrate the author's own personal political, social or economic virtue to an audience that either requires such demonstrations, or gives extra credence to authors who make such demonstrations. J.K. Rowling's recent dust-up demonstrated that there can be a backlash against authors who fail to signal their virtue. However, despite the fact that all literature is symbolic, not all political writing is virtue-signaling, and in Part II, I pointed to Nnedi Okorafor's Binti as a prominent recent example of a novella that rose above the tropes of virtue-signaling. My intent today was to show that Seth Dickinson's second Baru Cormorant novel didn't do what Nnedi Okorafor did: rise above.
Why not? Bigger picture: bad faith readers. A bad faith reader is someone who reads a piece of work, be it a novel, text, piece of scholarship... anything, not with the goal of trying to understand and analyze it with an open mind, nor even with the goal of taking an oppositional stance for the sake of intellectual debate, but with the goal finding a way to impugn the character of the writer. Bad faith readers exist, they are a blight on the intellectual world, they undercut serious intellectuals' ability to accomplish anything, and they force true thinkers to write in such a way as either to avoid topics, statements or arguments, or to couch them in ways that hide intent to the point that it may as well be avoidance. And the bad faith reader will find a way to impugn a writer's character anyway, because that's what a bad faith reader does.
In Venn diagram terms, think of it this way. Consider call-out culture. Some proportion of it is good faith, regardless of whatever other critiques can be made of it, and some proportion of it is bad faith. How much of it is bad faith is open to debate. Good faith practice means making an honest reading and only making an accusation if the content warrants it. Bad faith practice means looking for an opening to make an accusation because there are social points to be gained, and indeed, virtue to be signaled, by making the accusation. So, just find any excuse, regardless of how flimsy.
Bad faith reading, of course, can occur for reasons other than kids on twitter looking for ways to show how holier-than-thou they are. Scholars do it. Politicians do it. Literary critics do it to justify their existence. The legal profession is built on the premise that everyone is entitled to representation, but if we accept the premise that one side is at least more in the right than the other, then one lawyer is probably arguing at least colloquially in bad faith, even if there is a separate legal definition for negotiating in bad faith.
There could even be someone hate-reading this obscure, little blog, scouring my every sentence in the hope of finding something to... whatever.
Anyway, bad faith reading has a Venn diagram overlap with call-out culture. There is bad faith reading unrelated to call-out culture. This can be an issue for novelists, but a less commercially treacherous one. Readers might think they see plot holes or inconsistencies if they squint at the text in certain ways. Whatever. And as I said, there are elements of call-out culture that happen in good faith. It's the overlap of bad faith reading and call-out culture that creates the real problem.
Recall my discussion of Jacqueline Carey's Starless. I thought it was, overall, a good book which happened to have some fascinating ideas about sex and gender, which is exactly what science fiction and fantasy are well-suited to examine. See: Le Guin, Ursula. However, I noted several times that a bad faith reader might look for ways to call Carey a trans-phobe, or something like that. What made the book so interesting was the nuance, but writing like that meant taking risks because it created openings for bad faith readers. Hypothetically, some bad faith reader could have come along and said that Vironesh was a TERF, and that through Vironesh, Carey was advocating TERF-ism. Burn the heathen! Would that have been a fair reading of Carey? No, but it can happen these days. That's the Venn diagram overlap between bad faith reading and call-out culture, and since there are few issues more sensitive right now than transgender issues, Carey wrote a really risky novel, if you examine it closely.
There really are people out there who scour an author's words, looking for ways to misconstrue them and accuse the author of horrible things.
So I found myself writing my critiques of Seth Dickinson, and thinking about my perspective relative to his. Dickinson is a novelist. And bluntly, a relatively new one. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was his first published novel, and while it got serious buzz, he's still not exactly the biggest thing out there. You're reading a political science professor's blog, so there is a high likelihood that you don't know Jacqueline Carey, but trust me when I say that she is a big name within the science fiction and fantasy world. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Kushiel books, which are her big claim to fame. Just... no. Basically everything else she does is golden, in my opinion, but she's a big name and has been for a while. Only among us weirdo nerds, though. That established reputation gives her some leeway, though.
Rowling? Household name. More freedom.
Me? I'm a tenured professor. I'm both nobody, and protected by academic freedom, written into my contract. In principle, I'm supposed to be able to comment on politics 'n stuff* in a way that I deem appropriate as a professor of political science without fear of retribution from my employer-- Case Western Reserve University-- because that's the point. In tenure veritas! I'm also writing primarily for myself, though, as a mental exercise/outlet. I write scholarly works intended to sit on scholarly book shelves, collecting dust because that's what we Piled-higher-and-Deeper-s do, but this blog is just me messin' around on weekend mornings. It's not monetized, and I neither gain nor lose anything based on readership or readers' opinions. Straight-up: I write because I need to write. I love the written word. If you have any artistic outlets yourself, you get that.
Dickinson? He is in a different position. He, too, loves the written word, and he writes because he needs to write, but his professional situation is not the same as mine, and some self-reflection requires me to recognize that. He does not have the position to allow him to say that he just writes for himself and damn the audience that doesn't see the genius of his work. If he is worried, then, that insufficient signaling of virtue will result in a poor reception of his work? He must signal virtue. That's not entirely on him, then.
It's on the bad faith readers.
Bad faith readers are parasites, and my general advice to them is that they should examine their life choices. One need not live a parasitic existence. Not that they'd take advice from me. The whole point of a bad faith reader, of course, is... bad faith.
*Everything is political! Especially art!
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