On statues, monuments and art: Looking forward to history's judgment of us
This one's-a-gonna be a ramble. Fair warning.
Moral principles are really nothing more than logical extrapolations from empathy. If you lack empathy, you're a sociopath. If you fail to extrapolate, you're an idiot. Either way, the problem is you. Moral relativism is bullshit.
We're done now, right? No more of this moral relativism crap?
Well, what about those who are raised in an era when slavery was "accepted?''
Accepted, by whom? There were abolitionists long before the Civil War. Was it harder to be an abolitionist when raised in an era with slavery? Yes. That raises the burden on you. Tough. No excuses. Have a damned brain and a conscience and don't whine about how hard it is to think for yourself.
Moving on. Moving on to the difficulty, because you need to consider that burden, and we need to consider how we assess those who faced that burden. Looking backward, looking forward.
I'm going to propose a... "relatively"... simple rule to avoid the TR problem. Don't idolize historical figures, nor anyone. Don't make graven images to worship people as cults of personality. Humans tend to be, ya' know, human, and basically, humans suck. Some suck less than others, but basically, humans suck. Some suck more than others, but humans suck. If you pick apart any of your heroes, you'll find flaws, and those flaws may not age well. So don't idolize. Problem solved. That doesn't mean you can't recognize good deeds. Just don't idolize the people because they're just people. How hard is this?
There. Problem solved. Statues? Enough. OK, so they're art. I dig art. Don't destroy it. Put it in a museum, in context. Otherwise, you're like the Taliban, blowing up other people's religious sites. Don't blow up other peoples' art.
Is this really so hard? Don't do the cult of personality thing because people all suck anyway. You'll never wind up in the position of having to reconsider whether or not you worshipped the wrong person because you never worshipped a person in the first place. Don't destroy art. I don't get why this is difficult.
Now, where my "no moral relativism" gets muddier is where my linguistic attachment to prescriptivism runs up against the malleability of language. Prescriptivism versus descriptivism. To prescriptivists, words have set definitions. Oxford English Dictionary, and so forth. To descriptivists, words are defined by their social usage. Dictionaries be damned. They may catch up eventually, but words mean whatever people mean when they say it. I am a stuck-in-the-mud, stick-up-my-posterior prescriptivist, and I will be until the day Dear Leader sends me to the gulag to recant my rejection of "covfefe." Then again, with global warming, Siberia hit 100 degrees recently, so...
Language. Let's start with the elephant in the room. Hmmm... "elephant." Funny how we can attach it to that particular animal... The "n-word." Consider historical judgment on that word. By the standard of total rejection of the word, and condemnation of anyone who used it, we reject Mark Twain. And many have rejected him, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I love that book, and I think it is important to teach. The politics of banning Huck Finn, though, have been long-running merely because he used that word in what is probably an historically accurate way, however distressing it is to read through the modern lens. And that's kind of the point, isn't it? Huck Finn is the adult book. Tom Sawyer is the kids' book. At the time, of course, there was nothing noteworthy about Twain using that word. And that, itself, is an important pedagogic point when discussing Huck Finn, or Twain the writer.
Let's move forward in time, and art. And make it more interesting. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, the great blues musician. One of his more... challenging songs in the modern era is "Bourgeois Blues." He used the n-word. Leadbelly, of course, was black, and he used it in the context of discussing segregation, but he did use the word.
Do you wince when you hear it? Do you give him a pass because a) he recorded it in 1938, b) he was black, and c) he was addressing segregation?
You know I'm not done with "Bourgeois Blues," right? That's way too easy, after all, particularly after Huck Finn. You probably know the name, Leadbelly, if you know anything about music, but you might not know Ry Cooder. In 1976, he did a cover of "Bourgeois Blues" for his album, Chicken Skin Music, which many consider his best album. Within the world of folk-rock music snobs, Ry Cooder is very highly regarded, he is considered "a musician's musician," and lots of other stuff, so that accolade really does mean something. And yeah, he said the n-word. Ry Cooder is a white guy. White guy, sayin' the n-word. On his classic album. (I think Into The Purple Valley is a better album, but whatever.)
Of course, he was covering Leadbelly, and addressing segregation, but the politics of 1976 were rather different from the politics today. There's just no way he could get away with that today. No. Way.
Do we now look back at Ry Cooder's 1976 album, Chicken Skin Music, and say, he was out of line, racist, and needs to issue an apology, perform acts of contrition, and that the album needs to be stricken from the record, so to speak? Let's be blunt about the fact that there is a contingent that will say, yes. He certainly couldn't record that today.
Let's note, of course, the "I Have A Dream" speech. You know he said, "negro," right? I'll type that one, with quotation marks around it, unlike "the n-word," which I will only type as, "the n-word," but I won't say or type it in any other way. Why not? Standards change. The descriptivists win, to some degree. It's not that that etymological associate of "the n-word" which appeared in King's speech is precisely a racial slur, but it's close enough, and outdated enough that cultural norms have moved to either "black," or, "African-American." Anyone who says that other word now just sounds a little too much like they want to say the n-word, and are trying to get as close as they think they can.
Words change. (I lose.) This means something as far as how we assess things like bigotry. And in that context, now go back and think about Ry Cooder. From the perspective of 1976. I said I wasn't a moral relativist, but language is, unfortunately, context-dependent. I fight against this, but I'm fighting a losing battle, and I know it. How do you assess him?
This isn't the same thing as assessing segregation itself. This is assessing the decision to cover a Leadbelly song, yet it sounds different today, in 2020. This is where you lose the plot, if you aren't careful.
So let's take a more elaborate detour through literature. Instead of Twain's time-traveling adventure, let's get into something that's even more wibbly, wobbly and timey-wimey. If you didn't get the Sad King Billy thing, here's where I get into it.
The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons. My general recommendation is that you read the first two-- Hyperion, and The Fall of Hyperion-- and skip the second two, but whatever. Even trying to summarize what's going on in these books would be daunting, so I'm just going to jump to the narrow slice relevant to this post. Some spoilers ahead, but minimal.
Father Paul Dure. (The blog editor doesn't want to put the accent over that "e." Whatever.) Dure was a catholic priest of the non-molest-y variety. Instead, his crime was the high crime of data falsification. He was a jesuit scholar in the distant future when christianity has shrunk to the status of minor cult. He decided to falsify data about the appearance of Jesus on some other planet somewhere to try to revive interest in the catholic church. He got caught, and exiled. Specifically, exiled to the planet, Hyperion. Hyperion is where weird stuff happens, for a variety of reasons, and watch me minimize spoilers. Hyperion had been settled earlier by Sad King Billy, whose droopy, rather unattractive face had been carved into a mountain. Billy, though, was awesome, and he basically wanted the planet to be a haven for artists. It just didn't work out that way.
Anywho, Dure heads off to Hyperion and decides he wants to be a real scholar, and he goes off into the Hyperion outback looking for a small tribe-- the Bikura. Anthropology.
When he finds the Bikura, he discovers what is happening, although it takes a long time for everything to be revealed fully. They are the survivors of a crash, but there is a cave nearby with small, parasitic things that look like crosses-- cruciforms. Once one gets stuck on your chest, care to guess what happens when you die? It brings you back.
Kind of.
Every time it does, it brings you back... a little less. You get less intelligent every time, and you lose more and more of yourself. You become just a mindless husk.
Why? What's going on? I don't need to spoil that if you haven't read the books, but that's the short version.
Anyway, the first Hyperion book was published in 1989. It swept awards. Great, great book.
You know what word Dure used to describe the Bikura? "Retarded." Not in the sense of attack, but in the sense of, "the Bikura appear to me, in a clinical way, to be developmentally disabled."
Right now, in 2020, I'm not supposed to type the word, "retarded." There are some who would say that I'm not even supposed to type it when quoting. I'm supposed to reference it as, "the r-word," and treat it as, "the n-word," as though it is the same thing. Of course, this process is somewhat different, and described as "the euphemism treadmill," if you consult the work of Stephen Pinker. However, 1989 just wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't that long before Pinker's book on the topic.
So we shift to looking forward. Simmons, after all, was writing a science fiction series about... the future!
And just a scant few years later, he'd be called a psychopathic, bigoted monster for typing what was, at the time, the clinical word in a novel that swept the awards. I'm probably going to assign Hyperion in a class soon, and I'm going to have to do this thing where I tell students, yeah, words changed. Chill. Otherwise, they're going to lose their fecal matter. And really, you could stand to lose that anyway, right?
But this forward-looking thing is tricky. If I just handed out copies of Hyperion to my students, much less put up a video of Ry Cooder-- a white dude-- covering Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues," in the current era of wokeness and virtue-signaling through linguistic purity, they'd be burning books, and I'm really not about that.
Notice I'm not even bothering to address any high-profile cases of people acting in oh-so-out-of-date ways. This is my little corner of the world, where people are actually trying. I don't want to deal with the parts of the world where people don't try. They scare me. I'm exhausted, OK? I can't deal anymore. This is what I can do.
And in this context, how do you avoid future judgment, should that be your goal?
A few years ago, I presented a paper at the MPSA-- "Expressive Voting and Legislative Gridlock: The Changing Meaning of a 'No' Vote." One of these days, I'll figure out what to do with it, but right now, it's sitting around in a papersupprepository. The short version: ideology changes, and within the Republican Party, this presented a particular danger because the definition of "conservatism" had been changing rapidly for so long. It had been moving rightward so consistently and so rapidly that if any Member of Congress wanted to avoid the "RINO" label ("Republican In Name Only"), the safest course of action was to vote "no" on everything, justifying those votes by saying that no bill is ever conservative enough. That way, as the definition of "conservative" continued to move rightward, there would never be any way to nail you down and say you weren't conservative enough. Leave no room to the right of you, ever. The implication of that: gridlock.
It was an observation, with some incompleteness in the model, which is why the paper is still unpublished, and languishing in a conference repository.
Anyway, one of the observations I keep making here is that the Democratic Party has been doing its best to demolish claims of asymmetric polarization by moving as rapidly as possible to the left, and nowhere is this more clear than in the realm of identity politics.
And here, there is a general approach on the left to avoid history's judgment. Leave no room to the left. Otherwise, you run the risk, not that you will lose now, but that someone will look back on you in the future, and say that you were the historical analog to the segregationists rather than the civil rights advocates.
That, of course, is not a principled analysis of policy, and it is ultimately doomed to fail when it comes to diction because language will change. Y'all could always side with the prescriptivists, but we're in a Sisyphean struggle. Whatever words you use will no longer be considered acceptable in 20 or 30 years. Whether or not you have to apologize for them... that'll be interesting, won't it? In order to assign Hyperion, I'm gonna have to do a song and dance, and my voice sucks and I can't dance.
And if one rejects moral relativism, then looking to the historical judgment of the future is poor guidance even if you could imagine it.
But suppose you have some ideas about the historical judgment of the future. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Tell that to the people of Hungary. Brazil. Poland. Russia. And of course, you know I've been commenting on the collapse of democracy here. That arc of history line? It's an interesting and poorly tested claim. We have seen the collapse of slavery as we knew it, even though there is still human trafficking. There has been positive movement on a range of civil rights issues, although as long as African-Americans are at this kind of risk of being murdered by cops... we've got a ways to go. There's suffrage, the expansion of LGBTQ rights, and for those making the King argument, as long as you focus your data set on modern western civilization in the last couple hundred years, sure, but that's a little anthropic for me, by which I mean the anthropic fallacy, and yes, it's a fallacy. This is why we use Hickman models in econometrics, people. Selection effects.
And right now, there's a lot of backward movement. Why do you assume that things move one way? Remember the lesson of Fukuyama, as in, don't step in it the way Fukuyama did. There are plenty of places around the world where the arc of history ain't bendin' anywhere near justice, and a bunch of places, like here, where the collapse of democracy creates a lot of opportunity for it to loop right back around.
And suppose it does. When Sad AG Billy was being interviewed about the full extent to which he is corrupting the justice system in this country and how he will be viewed, his answer was, "history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who is writing the history."
Why are you so sure Barr isn't winning? That he isn't going to be writing the history and judging you? That Bolsonaro and Orban and Duterte and Putin and all of the rest who seek to abolish democracy and all progress aren't winning and bending the arc of history?
I don't know which way the long arc of history bends. They really are doing a Foundation series, I guess, and it'll almost certainly suck. And I think it's a mug's game trying to figure out how someone in the future will judge you, particularly when you don't know who they are.
I can judge FDR for his internment of Japanese-Americans while still welcoming the hatred of anyone who uses standards with which I disagree to judge me. That is the point of beginning with first principles and eschewing moral relativism.
One of the processes that has accelerated lately amid the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement is the removal of monuments to a variety of historical figures. I am prompted, in particular, by the removal of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the Museum of Natural History in New York. Roosevelt also happens to have his face on Mount Rushmore. No word yet on any plans for Mount Rushmore.
Many of the removals that have taken place should be obvious and are long overdue. Monuments to traitors who attempted to secede in order to keep in bondage a race of people... monuments that were erected not even in the aftermath of that war, but generations later to spit in the faces of burgeoning civil rights efforts... this took how long... why?
Oh. Right.
And of course, I am reminded of the poem by Elie Wiesel, "Never Shall I Forget." We don't build monuments to atrocity nor to its perpetrators in order to remember it, and tearing down monuments to atrocity is not an attempt to forget it. To "erase" history. We study history through documents, and art, and by fighting revisionist history which seeks to glorify traitors and slavers who deserve no monuments. We are not "erasing" history. We study and learn from it while seeking to not glorify its worst evils. Elie Wiesel understood how to remember history, and anyone who requires statues to slavers and traitors isn't trying to "remember," nor fighting an effort to "erase" history.
Flash forward to that cuddly, old Teddy Bear. That oh-so-manly-man, who praised "The Strenuous Life," and went off to war because war was manly. The kind of guy who was a sickly child, but unlike one who might seek multiple deferments for a "bone spur," the kind of guy who toughened up to be the toughest tough guy around. Basically, he was Yosemite Sam. Mustache and all. My mental image of Teddy Roosevelt is of him getting outsmarted by varmints.
Teddy was also really, really racist. In a racist-off between TR and Trump on a level playing field of unconstrained public opinion, I'd be guzzling Pepto Bismol the way your typical sportsball fan guzzles cheap beer.
So this brings us to the often-asked question of the slippery slope. Where do we stop, when it comes to removing monuments?
Removing monuments glorifying traitorous slavers kind of seems like a no-brainer, no? OK, done. Finally. Once we start, where do we stop? Teddy demonstrates that it does, indeed, continue. He isn't as clear a case. Racist? Absolutely. Really, really, really racist. A traitor, though? No. A slave-trader? No. He did plenty of bad things, but not that one. Do I look to him for moral guidance? No, but as I'll address later, I think part of the solution is to stop trying to lionize historical figures anyway. But, on that good-to-evil spectrum from [hypothetical moral perfection]-to-Hitler, TR's mathematical distance to Hitler is greater than, say, Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee.
Given that TR was really, really racist, how bad is it to have a statue of him? Or... his face carved on a mountain? (At least Sad King Billy was a cool guy. I'll get to the source material there, which you probably don't know.)
Or let's make this harder. How about Franklin Roosevelt? Shall we talk about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII? That dude's on a coin. (Remember coins? Remember, like, paying for stuff with physical money?) And no, replacing him with Reagan doesn't help with the racism thing. Be serious.
Removing monuments glorifying traitorous slavers kind of seems like a no-brainer, no? OK, done. Finally. Once we start, where do we stop? Teddy demonstrates that it does, indeed, continue. He isn't as clear a case. Racist? Absolutely. Really, really, really racist. A traitor, though? No. A slave-trader? No. He did plenty of bad things, but not that one. Do I look to him for moral guidance? No, but as I'll address later, I think part of the solution is to stop trying to lionize historical figures anyway. But, on that good-to-evil spectrum from [hypothetical moral perfection]-to-Hitler, TR's mathematical distance to Hitler is greater than, say, Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee.
Given that TR was really, really racist, how bad is it to have a statue of him? Or... his face carved on a mountain? (At least Sad King Billy was a cool guy. I'll get to the source material there, which you probably don't know.)
Or let's make this harder. How about Franklin Roosevelt? Shall we talk about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII? That dude's on a coin. (Remember coins? Remember, like, paying for stuff with physical money?) And no, replacing him with Reagan doesn't help with the racism thing. Be serious.
And that's kind of my point. Once we move to TR, we start asking about hard lines when it's a spectrum. Was TR a horribly racist, vile person? Yup. Did he also do some decent stuff? Yes. Most people are shades of grey, and products of their time.
And this is where we are in the whole "monument" thing. We are having a discussion about historical figures, and how to assess past figures, when norms were different, when people thought differently, when we look back through modern eyes. And as we look forward, perhaps wondering how we may be judged.
Products of our time. In a sense, we are all products of our times, right? And so often, this is the defense offered for slavers, ironically by those who claim to oppose moral relativism. It is, in fact, moral relativism in its most noxious form, and unless the person offering the defense truly is a moral relativist, it's a dodge.
So moral relativism. I'm just going to go ahead and reject the concept of moral relativism. I'm fine saying that child molestation, and things like that are morally wrong, period, for all time, in all places, ever, and if you don't get that, there's something wrong with you, not me. I don't care who you are, where you were raised, when, or by whom, there's something wrong with you, and here's why.
And this is where we are in the whole "monument" thing. We are having a discussion about historical figures, and how to assess past figures, when norms were different, when people thought differently, when we look back through modern eyes. And as we look forward, perhaps wondering how we may be judged.
Products of our time. In a sense, we are all products of our times, right? And so often, this is the defense offered for slavers, ironically by those who claim to oppose moral relativism. It is, in fact, moral relativism in its most noxious form, and unless the person offering the defense truly is a moral relativist, it's a dodge.
So moral relativism. I'm just going to go ahead and reject the concept of moral relativism. I'm fine saying that child molestation, and things like that are morally wrong, period, for all time, in all places, ever, and if you don't get that, there's something wrong with you, not me. I don't care who you are, where you were raised, when, or by whom, there's something wrong with you, and here's why.
Moral principles are really nothing more than logical extrapolations from empathy. If you lack empathy, you're a sociopath. If you fail to extrapolate, you're an idiot. Either way, the problem is you. Moral relativism is bullshit.
We're done now, right? No more of this moral relativism crap?
Well, what about those who are raised in an era when slavery was "accepted?''
Accepted, by whom? There were abolitionists long before the Civil War. Was it harder to be an abolitionist when raised in an era with slavery? Yes. That raises the burden on you. Tough. No excuses. Have a damned brain and a conscience and don't whine about how hard it is to think for yourself.
Moving on. Moving on to the difficulty, because you need to consider that burden, and we need to consider how we assess those who faced that burden. Looking backward, looking forward.
I'm going to propose a... "relatively"... simple rule to avoid the TR problem. Don't idolize historical figures, nor anyone. Don't make graven images to worship people as cults of personality. Humans tend to be, ya' know, human, and basically, humans suck. Some suck less than others, but basically, humans suck. Some suck more than others, but humans suck. If you pick apart any of your heroes, you'll find flaws, and those flaws may not age well. So don't idolize. Problem solved. That doesn't mean you can't recognize good deeds. Just don't idolize the people because they're just people. How hard is this?
There. Problem solved. Statues? Enough. OK, so they're art. I dig art. Don't destroy it. Put it in a museum, in context. Otherwise, you're like the Taliban, blowing up other people's religious sites. Don't blow up other peoples' art.
Is this really so hard? Don't do the cult of personality thing because people all suck anyway. You'll never wind up in the position of having to reconsider whether or not you worshipped the wrong person because you never worshipped a person in the first place. Don't destroy art. I don't get why this is difficult.
Now, where my "no moral relativism" gets muddier is where my linguistic attachment to prescriptivism runs up against the malleability of language. Prescriptivism versus descriptivism. To prescriptivists, words have set definitions. Oxford English Dictionary, and so forth. To descriptivists, words are defined by their social usage. Dictionaries be damned. They may catch up eventually, but words mean whatever people mean when they say it. I am a stuck-in-the-mud, stick-up-my-posterior prescriptivist, and I will be until the day Dear Leader sends me to the gulag to recant my rejection of "covfefe." Then again, with global warming, Siberia hit 100 degrees recently, so...
Language. Let's start with the elephant in the room. Hmmm... "elephant." Funny how we can attach it to that particular animal... The "n-word." Consider historical judgment on that word. By the standard of total rejection of the word, and condemnation of anyone who used it, we reject Mark Twain. And many have rejected him, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I love that book, and I think it is important to teach. The politics of banning Huck Finn, though, have been long-running merely because he used that word in what is probably an historically accurate way, however distressing it is to read through the modern lens. And that's kind of the point, isn't it? Huck Finn is the adult book. Tom Sawyer is the kids' book. At the time, of course, there was nothing noteworthy about Twain using that word. And that, itself, is an important pedagogic point when discussing Huck Finn, or Twain the writer.
Let's move forward in time, and art. And make it more interesting. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, the great blues musician. One of his more... challenging songs in the modern era is "Bourgeois Blues." He used the n-word. Leadbelly, of course, was black, and he used it in the context of discussing segregation, but he did use the word.
Do you wince when you hear it? Do you give him a pass because a) he recorded it in 1938, b) he was black, and c) he was addressing segregation?
You know I'm not done with "Bourgeois Blues," right? That's way too easy, after all, particularly after Huck Finn. You probably know the name, Leadbelly, if you know anything about music, but you might not know Ry Cooder. In 1976, he did a cover of "Bourgeois Blues" for his album, Chicken Skin Music, which many consider his best album. Within the world of folk-rock music snobs, Ry Cooder is very highly regarded, he is considered "a musician's musician," and lots of other stuff, so that accolade really does mean something. And yeah, he said the n-word. Ry Cooder is a white guy. White guy, sayin' the n-word. On his classic album. (I think Into The Purple Valley is a better album, but whatever.)
Of course, he was covering Leadbelly, and addressing segregation, but the politics of 1976 were rather different from the politics today. There's just no way he could get away with that today. No. Way.
Do we now look back at Ry Cooder's 1976 album, Chicken Skin Music, and say, he was out of line, racist, and needs to issue an apology, perform acts of contrition, and that the album needs to be stricken from the record, so to speak? Let's be blunt about the fact that there is a contingent that will say, yes. He certainly couldn't record that today.
Let's note, of course, the "I Have A Dream" speech. You know he said, "negro," right? I'll type that one, with quotation marks around it, unlike "the n-word," which I will only type as, "the n-word," but I won't say or type it in any other way. Why not? Standards change. The descriptivists win, to some degree. It's not that that etymological associate of "the n-word" which appeared in King's speech is precisely a racial slur, but it's close enough, and outdated enough that cultural norms have moved to either "black," or, "African-American." Anyone who says that other word now just sounds a little too much like they want to say the n-word, and are trying to get as close as they think they can.
Words change. (I lose.) This means something as far as how we assess things like bigotry. And in that context, now go back and think about Ry Cooder. From the perspective of 1976. I said I wasn't a moral relativist, but language is, unfortunately, context-dependent. I fight against this, but I'm fighting a losing battle, and I know it. How do you assess him?
This isn't the same thing as assessing segregation itself. This is assessing the decision to cover a Leadbelly song, yet it sounds different today, in 2020. This is where you lose the plot, if you aren't careful.
So let's take a more elaborate detour through literature. Instead of Twain's time-traveling adventure, let's get into something that's even more wibbly, wobbly and timey-wimey. If you didn't get the Sad King Billy thing, here's where I get into it.
The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons. My general recommendation is that you read the first two-- Hyperion, and The Fall of Hyperion-- and skip the second two, but whatever. Even trying to summarize what's going on in these books would be daunting, so I'm just going to jump to the narrow slice relevant to this post. Some spoilers ahead, but minimal.
Father Paul Dure. (The blog editor doesn't want to put the accent over that "e." Whatever.) Dure was a catholic priest of the non-molest-y variety. Instead, his crime was the high crime of data falsification. He was a jesuit scholar in the distant future when christianity has shrunk to the status of minor cult. He decided to falsify data about the appearance of Jesus on some other planet somewhere to try to revive interest in the catholic church. He got caught, and exiled. Specifically, exiled to the planet, Hyperion. Hyperion is where weird stuff happens, for a variety of reasons, and watch me minimize spoilers. Hyperion had been settled earlier by Sad King Billy, whose droopy, rather unattractive face had been carved into a mountain. Billy, though, was awesome, and he basically wanted the planet to be a haven for artists. It just didn't work out that way.
Anywho, Dure heads off to Hyperion and decides he wants to be a real scholar, and he goes off into the Hyperion outback looking for a small tribe-- the Bikura. Anthropology.
When he finds the Bikura, he discovers what is happening, although it takes a long time for everything to be revealed fully. They are the survivors of a crash, but there is a cave nearby with small, parasitic things that look like crosses-- cruciforms. Once one gets stuck on your chest, care to guess what happens when you die? It brings you back.
Kind of.
Every time it does, it brings you back... a little less. You get less intelligent every time, and you lose more and more of yourself. You become just a mindless husk.
Why? What's going on? I don't need to spoil that if you haven't read the books, but that's the short version.
Anyway, the first Hyperion book was published in 1989. It swept awards. Great, great book.
You know what word Dure used to describe the Bikura? "Retarded." Not in the sense of attack, but in the sense of, "the Bikura appear to me, in a clinical way, to be developmentally disabled."
Right now, in 2020, I'm not supposed to type the word, "retarded." There are some who would say that I'm not even supposed to type it when quoting. I'm supposed to reference it as, "the r-word," and treat it as, "the n-word," as though it is the same thing. Of course, this process is somewhat different, and described as "the euphemism treadmill," if you consult the work of Stephen Pinker. However, 1989 just wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't that long before Pinker's book on the topic.
So we shift to looking forward. Simmons, after all, was writing a science fiction series about... the future!
And just a scant few years later, he'd be called a psychopathic, bigoted monster for typing what was, at the time, the clinical word in a novel that swept the awards. I'm probably going to assign Hyperion in a class soon, and I'm going to have to do this thing where I tell students, yeah, words changed. Chill. Otherwise, they're going to lose their fecal matter. And really, you could stand to lose that anyway, right?
But this forward-looking thing is tricky. If I just handed out copies of Hyperion to my students, much less put up a video of Ry Cooder-- a white dude-- covering Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues," in the current era of wokeness and virtue-signaling through linguistic purity, they'd be burning books, and I'm really not about that.
Notice I'm not even bothering to address any high-profile cases of people acting in oh-so-out-of-date ways. This is my little corner of the world, where people are actually trying. I don't want to deal with the parts of the world where people don't try. They scare me. I'm exhausted, OK? I can't deal anymore. This is what I can do.
And in this context, how do you avoid future judgment, should that be your goal?
A few years ago, I presented a paper at the MPSA-- "Expressive Voting and Legislative Gridlock: The Changing Meaning of a 'No' Vote." One of these days, I'll figure out what to do with it, but right now, it's sitting around in a paper
It was an observation, with some incompleteness in the model, which is why the paper is still unpublished, and languishing in a conference repository.
Anyway, one of the observations I keep making here is that the Democratic Party has been doing its best to demolish claims of asymmetric polarization by moving as rapidly as possible to the left, and nowhere is this more clear than in the realm of identity politics.
And here, there is a general approach on the left to avoid history's judgment. Leave no room to the left. Otherwise, you run the risk, not that you will lose now, but that someone will look back on you in the future, and say that you were the historical analog to the segregationists rather than the civil rights advocates.
That, of course, is not a principled analysis of policy, and it is ultimately doomed to fail when it comes to diction because language will change. Y'all could always side with the prescriptivists, but we're in a Sisyphean struggle. Whatever words you use will no longer be considered acceptable in 20 or 30 years. Whether or not you have to apologize for them... that'll be interesting, won't it? In order to assign Hyperion, I'm gonna have to do a song and dance, and my voice sucks and I can't dance.
And if one rejects moral relativism, then looking to the historical judgment of the future is poor guidance even if you could imagine it.
But suppose you have some ideas about the historical judgment of the future. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Tell that to the people of Hungary. Brazil. Poland. Russia. And of course, you know I've been commenting on the collapse of democracy here. That arc of history line? It's an interesting and poorly tested claim. We have seen the collapse of slavery as we knew it, even though there is still human trafficking. There has been positive movement on a range of civil rights issues, although as long as African-Americans are at this kind of risk of being murdered by cops... we've got a ways to go. There's suffrage, the expansion of LGBTQ rights, and for those making the King argument, as long as you focus your data set on modern western civilization in the last couple hundred years, sure, but that's a little anthropic for me, by which I mean the anthropic fallacy, and yes, it's a fallacy. This is why we use Hickman models in econometrics, people. Selection effects.
And right now, there's a lot of backward movement. Why do you assume that things move one way? Remember the lesson of Fukuyama, as in, don't step in it the way Fukuyama did. There are plenty of places around the world where the arc of history ain't bendin' anywhere near justice, and a bunch of places, like here, where the collapse of democracy creates a lot of opportunity for it to loop right back around.
And suppose it does. When Sad AG Billy was being interviewed about the full extent to which he is corrupting the justice system in this country and how he will be viewed, his answer was, "history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who is writing the history."
Why are you so sure Barr isn't winning? That he isn't going to be writing the history and judging you? That Bolsonaro and Orban and Duterte and Putin and all of the rest who seek to abolish democracy and all progress aren't winning and bending the arc of history?
I don't know which way the long arc of history bends. They really are doing a Foundation series, I guess, and it'll almost certainly suck. And I think it's a mug's game trying to figure out how someone in the future will judge you, particularly when you don't know who they are.
I can judge FDR for his internment of Japanese-Americans while still welcoming the hatred of anyone who uses standards with which I disagree to judge me. That is the point of beginning with first principles and eschewing moral relativism.
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