Virtue and virtue-signaling in science fiction & fantasy, Part VI: Coda on N.K. Jemisin

The Isabel Fall fiasco has challenged my basic principles regarding the separation of art from artist, and as I wrap up the "Virtue and virtue-signaling" series, Nora Jemisin gives me yet another reason to think.  Here is where I think I stand right now.  The basic problem with how Jemisin and the other "social justice warriors" behave in situations like the Isabel Fall mess is the problem of vigilantism.  It only works in the comics.  In real life, it hurts the innocent.

So, to recap.  Isabel Fall is a transgender woman who wrote a story about the transgender experience.  She did so by adopting a trope used by the anti-transgender rights movement on the internet about "attack helicopters."  The story was called, "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter."  While the story was a sincere attempt to grapple with the process of transitioning, the SJWs didn't bother to read it.  They just saw the title, and attacked.  Fall was traumatized by the process, asked that the story be retracted, and had to out herself before she was ready in order to defend herself against the SJW onslaught.

One of the SJWs who piled on without reading the story was someone I often say is my favorite author, NK Jemisin.  Neither Jemisin nor any of the other people leading the charge against Fall really owned up to what they did, nor made amends.  Of course not.  Honor doesn't really exist in very many corners of this world.

My principle is that art must be separated from artist.  How many of the great artists in history have been horrible people?  It is neither practical nor advisable to interrogate the politics nor personal virtue of an artist as a precondition for appreciating his or her art.

And yet, Jemisin challenges this principle for me because her art is political, and her offense is not just political, but an act of political hypocrisy.  And I really hate hypocrisy.

Some of the other authors I have praised in my science fiction posts here include Neal Stephenson, Jacqueline Carey, Charles Stross, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor...  If someone told me that Neal Stephenson is a belligerent drunk, would it matter to me?  If I found out that he got into a drunk driving accident, would that affect how I read his books?  If I found out that he got into a drunk driving accident, had his license taken away, then got behind the wheel again, and killed a kid in another drunk driving accident, would that affect the way I read his books?

Here's the thing.  That would make him a way worse person than N.K. Jemisin and her SJW hypocrisy.  Jemisin is mean, she is a bully, she is a hypocrite, and she attacks before reading.  Totally unacceptable.  The Isabel Fall incident gives me new insight into her.  And I didn't like what I saw.  But my alternate universe version of Neal Stephenson would be a way worse person.  Yet, bizarro-Stephenson's alcoholism and refusal to give up the keys would not live a life that would affect my willingness to read his books, nor how I would read his books.  He'd just be the scum of the earth, who happens to be a genius writer.  And I love a good book.

Jemisin, though, doesn't just write books.  She writes about social issues.  In fact, one of the more fun characters in The Broken Earth trilogy was Tonkee, who is transgender.  Jemisin handled the character in an interesting way.  No big hullaballoo about the inclusion of a transgender character.  She's just there.  Jemisin even commented about that in several contexts, that that's the way you do it.  She's also really interesting, such that her being transgender is the most boring thing about her.  Why?  Because Jemisin is all about diversity, and writing about it well.  Not just, hey, here's a transgender character, 'cuz.  She writes about social issues, and she handles them, dare I say, better than Octavia Butler?  Can... can I say that?

So, yeah.  It isn't just that Jemisin is an "SJW."  Her books are about social justice issues.  And they're good.  So, when she, personally, fails in a dramatic and disturbing way, that's a little different from my bizarro-drunken Stephenson hypothetical.  I think.

And yet, I kind of want to cut her some slack.  Despite the fact that hypocrisy is one of my deadly sins, and as you can tell, the Isabel Fall thing really pissed me off.

Is this because I'm just a Jemisin fanboy?

Analogy time.  Comic books.  Jemisin has been working on those too!  (Hi.  Fanboy here.)

In 1954, the Comics Code Authority created a set of rules for comic books.  The background here is a complicated story, and I'm not getting into it here.  However, the rules themselves are basically what you would expect given 1954.  For my purposes today, I'm going to point you to the aspects of the Code that were authoritarian, as in, the Eric Cartman rule.  You will respect my authoritAH!

Here's the thing about superheroes.  They're vigilantes.  But, according to the Comics Code, they had to work hand-in-hand with the cops, who were always the good guys, and anyone the vigilantes targeted were always the bad guys.

Yeah, funny, that.

Eventually, the Comics Code goes away, and on the opposite side of the spectrum, you get stuff like Watchmen, and even some of the darker incarnations of Batman.  Comics get dark and intellectually diverse.  What kind of person puts on a costume and goes around looking for criminals to beat down?  People who enjoy violence.  Sure, they may, to varying degrees, want something else, but you kind of have to be bloodthirsty to do the vigilante thing.  That bloodlust can go all the way up to Rorschach or The Comedian on one end, with some versions of Batman creeping towards that line and trying to impose a no-killing rule to keep the bloodlust in check.

But you don't go vigilante unless you enjoy the violence itself.

Can a character go around like that without hurting the innocent?  In the comics, that depends on the writers.  The Comics Code Authority prevented writers from ever letting that happen.  But, those days are gone.  There is a wide world of comics and comic-related material out there in which vigilantes do kill either the innocent, or those who just don't deserve to die for what they did.

And in the real world, we can't have vigilantes running around, deciding on their own, whom to kill or maim.  Do I have to explain why?

Instead, we have a legal system.  That legal system is deeply flawed, in oh so many ways.  The flaws in the legal system are not the grist for a post, nor a series of posts, but a series of books.  Those books have been written, and are being written.  Yet, at least there is a system.  The purpose of the system is to balance two types of errors.  Punishing the innocent and acquitting the guilty.  The legal system is based on the premise that the worse error is punishing the innocent, so we have biased the system in the direction of acquitting the guilty.

Vigilantism works the other way.  And there is no corrective process for vigilantism gone wrong.

SJWs are vigilantes.  Jemisin is a vigilante.  And they have the potential to hurt.  Just ask Isabel Fall.

Whatever you think of the forces they oppose, they act as vigilantes because the first amendment protects freedom of speech, so the police won't shut down the speech that the SJWs want removed from society.  Vigilantes in the real world make the error of, not "convicting," but punishing the innocent.  It is inevitable because they don't have a process.  That's why everything went wrong with Isabel Fall.  No process.  Instead, a bunch of vigilantes who are in it as much for the attack as the "social justice" attacked because that's their lifeblood.  And an innocent person suffered, because that's the reality of vigilantism.  This isn't a 1955 Batman comic.  This is reality.

And to make matters worse, from my perspective, if you are reading this, you know that I am a free speech absolutist.  I oppose both governmental and private attempts to shut down speech because I hold to the principle of free speech as the most central tenet of intellectual debate.  Hi.  Professor, here.  With tenure.  ACADEMIC FREEDOM!!!  In tenure veritas!  The ACLU was 100% right to defend the neo-nazis' right to march in Skokie, IL, and as principles go, speech wins.  So, if you have a group of people whose goal is to shut down speech, and they hurt someone innocent in the process (Isabel Fall), as far as I'm concerned, that shows the totality of wrongness.

In other words, Jemisin was wrong, not just in telling Fall to shut up, but in the concept of organizing people to tell writers to stop writing.

Of course, I'm a writer!  I'm also a professional political thinker.  I don't like this stuff.

So here's the character analogy question for Jemisin.  Who is she?  The Comedian?  Rorschach?  Frank Miller's Batman?  (The Green Lantern?)

Squirrel Girl?

I don't feel like getting into more obscure comics here, but for the sake of defending Jemisin, I think she has an objective beyond the attack itself.  That puts her pretty far from The Comedian.  I have encountered some SJWs whom I would compare to The Comedian in the vigilante framework, but Jemisin does appear, to me, to care, in which case, she's not Eddie Blake.

But, she's also not a 1955 Batman.  And if you aren't operating within the Comics Code, innocents will get hurt.

TV sucks, of course, but once upon a time, there was a great show, with a great spin-off.  Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, followed by Angel.  I am the weirdo Whedon fan who actually thinks Angel was the superior show, and I'll get into part of why.

The best character?  Faith.  I'll die on that hill.

In Season 2, there was a one-off episode in which Buffy's mother starts dating a guy who turns out to be a psycho robot.  Buffy "kills" him, and is traumatized when she thinks she accidentally killed a human.  Buffy=awesome hero.  This concept leads to what happens in Season 3-- the introduction of Faith.

Backstory.  Buffy had briefly died in Season 1's finale, which activated another slayer (Kendra), who was then killed by Drusilla, which then activated Faith as a new slayer.  Faith was a wild child.  She shows up in Sunnydale and parties hard.  On a reckless charge through town, Faith accidentally stakes a human, thinking he's a vampire.  Oops.  She doesn't react the same way Buffy does.  This leads to a downward spiral for Faith.  She turns villainous, and eventually has a very hard road to redemption.  She has one of the best story arcs I have ever seen.  Her decent into villainy happens on Buffy, and she shows up again on Angel for a redemption arc because that's Angel-- the vampire trying to redeem himself, back when vampires were actually evil.*

(Does anyone remember a terrible show called Forever Knight?  Just me?)

Anyway, moving on.  Faith wasn't a sociopath.  She was a damaged person who did a bad thing, by accident, while out trying to protect the world.  Recklessly, because she's Faith.  She also got off on the violence.  Then, Wesley and the Watchers' Council pushed her in the wrong direction, and made everything worse.  What people do when they find that they have done the wrong thing is always interesting to me.  Most people don't have any real honor.  And, vigilantism is intrinsically dangerous, even when combined with a Batman-esque intent to fight for justice, or something.

What do you do when you do wrong?

I expected more from Jemisin, but so much of SJW culture exists for the attack.  The attack is used to signal virtue within SJW circles, which creates dangerous feedback loops.  Jemisin is a goddess to these people.  She could steer people in a better direction.  She didn't.  That bothers me.  Yet, I do think that her motives were as mixed as the vigilante who both enjoys the attack and directs those impulses towards a goal of justice in some sense.  Does that absolve her?  No, but it does affect how I interpret her actions.

And the basic point is that the bar is really high before I stop reading her books.  That bar has not been cleared.  I'm going to keep reading her books.  What she did bothered me, but the entire concept of trying to shout down and shut down speech bothers me.

So I'll leave you with this.  The next time someone tells you that So-And-So said something horribly offensive, (a) read or listen for yourself, (b) think about what kind of rules for speech you want society to have, and that you want imposed upon you-- call it the John Rawls rule, AKA, the veil of ignorance, (c) remember that if you don't want to read/listen/watch, you don't have to, and (d) if you're going to enter a debate, be prepared.

*Everybody knows there's no such thing as vampires.  {Get it?  No?  Fine.  I'm being really obscure today.  Charles Stross.}