Thursday, April 08, 2021

The Last Talons of Weng-Chiang Essay


“I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” 

Tony Campolo 


Behind much discussion…there hover two propositions that I think much less admissible than the new morality 

1: That if a book is literature it cannot corrupt. But there is no evidence for this, and some against it… 

2: That if a book is a great work of art it does not matter if it corrupts or not, because art matters more than behaviour. In other words art matters more than life; comment on life, the mirroring of life, matters more than life itself. This sounds very like nonsense 

C.S Lewis 





THIS ESSAY CONTAINS ONE USE OF A VERY STRONG RACIAL SLUR 



ONE

Please tick all that apply: 

▢ I am not going to read [x]

▢ I don't think you should read [x]

▢ I don't think anyone should read [x]

▢I don't think anyone should be allowed to read [x]

▢ I think that anyone who reads [x] should be killed

Where [x] =

A: Cerebus the Aardvark,

B: Charlie Hebdo Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed,

C: Monty Python's Life Of Brian,

D: the Satanic Verses,

E: the Talons of Weng Chiang


Pete Seeger sings a funny song about a bigoted American politician named Mr Bilbo. It contains the stanza:

When the king of England started pushing Yankies around
We taught him a lesson down in Boston town
A very brave negro, Crispus Attucks was the man
Was the first to fall when the fighting began.

When I first heard the song, I was very surprised that he used the word “negro”. I thought that sounded quite racist: only slightly better than that other word beginning with the same letter.

I now know that when Seeger sang the song, "negro" was the preferred term: Martin Luther King used it too. "Black" would have been regarded as rather demeaning; "coloured" as quite patronising. “Person of colour” wasn’t current. 

When Pete Seeger sang the song, he didn’t mean it to be racist; and when his first listeners heard it, they didn’t understand it to be racist. But if you sang it tomorrow, you might well be considered racist. When Peter, Paul & Mary recorded the song, they changed “negro” to “black man”. They also changed “Puerto Ricans” to “Hispanics”, and the title of the song to Mr Bigot, because no-one would have heard of Theodore G Bilbo.

It is highly unlikely that J.R.R Tolkien had heard of either the song or the politician.

We had a little book containing some American folk songs at school: Casey Jones and Johnny Appleseed and Coming Round The Mountain. Miss Griffiths told us plainly that there was nothing funny about the song in which the burly little tramp traveled a long a lonesome road looking for his liking. That, of course, made it even funnier. An elderly bespectacled spinster was talking to a class of nine year olds about bums. That no-one in a 1928 hobo jungle would have seen the joke is neither here nor there. In the end she redacted the song book with a jar of tip-ex.

The Al Jolson movie was retitled Hallelujah I'm a Tramp for the UK release.

While we are on the subject of bottoms: I saw the National Theatre's production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof the other week. I thought it was very good. So did most of the critics. But, notably, the only thing that the man in the Daily Telegraph had to say was that the production contained some nudity: a rear view of a naked man taking a shower. This was literally the only thing he could see in the production: a man's bottom dominated the text and blotted out everything else in the show. This was doubtless a puerile response to a serious piece of drama; but the producer knew very well that bums draw attention to themselves: put an arse in a play and the play becomes about arses. It doesn't follow that you should never do it and it certainly doesn't follow that you should never be allowed to do it. But you can't pretend that you don’t know what the reaction to it is likely to be.

Eric Bogle wrote a song called I Hate Wogs. Anyone can tell from 40 paces that the song is a not particularly subtle piss-take of racist attitudes. It has stanzas like:

I was queuing down the registry a picking up my dole
In front of me was a Yugoslav, in front of him a Pole
Behind me an Italian, behind him was a Turk
Those lazy migrant bastards they never bloody work!

But some people can't see beyond the title. "Wog" is a racist word, the song contains the line "I hate wogs" so the song is a racist song. Other people say "I love it that you are coming right out and saying the word Wog in order to stick it to the PC libtards, ha-ha!” So probably the song was a bad idea, even though Eric Bogle's intentions were good. Miss Griffiths would have been more concerned that he said "bastard" and "bloody'.  

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda and the Green Fields of France are two of the best and saddest songs ever written.

Yoko Ono’s Woman Is the Very Strong Racial Slur of The World was also probably a well-intentioned mistake. I think we can probably still sing De Camptown Races, Doo Dah provided we get rid of de silly phonetic spelling.

There is a very old, very lost and very black and white Doctor Who story called The Celestial Toymaker, about a baddie putting lethal twists on toys and children's games. In the first episode someone recites the eennie-meenie-mini-mo rhyme. This is about as innocent and harmless a use of the most offensive word in the English language as it is possible to imagine. There is no racial context. There is no malicious intent. The word in the poem doesn't refer to a black person, or anything else: it's just a jingle. But it’s still the most offensive word in the English language.

Now I have told you that someone once said "nigger" in Doctor Who, you have to decide what to do with that information. If you discretely remove the story from BritBox, that says something about how you regard racial slurs. If you let it go out in its original form, that says something too. You could bleep it out, which draws attention to it. You could cut the whole scene, which is the same as pretending that racism doesn’t exist. You could dub a different word over the top, which smacks of Miss Griffith’s tippex. Or you could put a disclaimer at the front: "This episode contains one use of a very strong racial slur." What you do tells us something about how you feel about race, language, and very bad 1960s Doctor Who stories.

The one thing you cannot do is nothing. Or, rather: doing nothing is still a choice.





TWO

"Reading [x] makes me feel uncomfortable."
"That's fine. Don't read it, then."
"Yes, but YOU reading [x] makes me feel uncomfortable."
"Why do your feelings of discomfort override my right to consume media?"
"Why does your right to consume media override my feelings?"

We can no longer talk about offence or offensiveness. The word “offence” has been rendered unusable by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, and other cunts.

Many years ago, I responded to the assertion that it doesn't matter whether something is offensive or not -- that claims of offence are literally without meaning and that I shouldn't give a shit which wanker my words offend -- by quoting a certain passage from a certain novel by Robert Heinlein. If nothing is offensive, I insinuated, then this passage is not offensive. If this is offensive, then offensiveness exists.

We have already established what kind of a woman you are: we are now merely haggling about the price.

This went down about as well as you’d expect. One of my friends directly accused me of being a fascist. One of them stopped reading my blog. One of them claimed that I had gone mad and hasn't spoken to me since. 

I now understand that "offend" in this context only ever meant "offend Muslims"; or just possibly “offend Muslims and Christians". Either "offence" means specifically "how a religious person feels if a holy person in their faith is defamed" or else it means "to feel bad unreasonably; to feel bad without a good cause". If a bad joke about Jesus upsets me, I have taken offence, because it is not reasonable of me to be upset by bad jokes about Jesus. If a bad joke about gang rape upsets you, you have not taken offence because being upset about rape jokes is perfectly reasonable.

Even the very lowest kind of gammon is not quite prepared to come right out and say "black people are not human" and "trans people do not exist". So instead they say "There are sinister forces which will not allow people to say that black people are not human and that trans people do not exist; it is those sinister forces that we should be worried about. Free speech uber alles! ” And then they say "People who say that they believe that black people are human and trans people exist are only doing so as a pretext to take away your right to free speech, and all your other rights."

We are not told that we are wrong to think that slavery was a bit out of order and that it would have been better if 1970s television had been a bit less racist. We are told that people who think that slavery and blackface minstrels are regrettable have a quality called "wokeness" and that the existence of this quality will shortly precipitate the fall of western civilisation.

But we do have to drop the term offence. It is, if nothing else, too subjective. You say "I was offended" and I say "I was not offended" and you say "You ought to have been offended" and I say "You ought not to have been offended" and you say “Who gets to decide” and we both say “Well, me, obviously” and so between the two of us we lick the platter clean.

We could theoretically come up with a legal definition which would infallibly divide all literature into the "decent" and the "indecent".

Tits = decent.
Cocks = indecent.
Floppy cocks = decent.
Stiff cocks = indecent.

I believe that British police used to operate a rule of thumb that said that artwork became indecent if a penis was at an angle of greater than 45 degrees: ingenious erotic artists came up with scenarios in which male models were, for some reason, upside down. And of course, anything can magically transition from "indecent" to "decent" by the judicious application of some pixels, or a bleep sound, even though we all know perfectly well what is being hidden. But our criteria of “decency” and “indecency” would come down to “what I am offended by, and what I think you ought to be offended by.” 

I forget who said that the legal definition of pornography was “whatever gives the judge an erection”. Gut feelings are not a very good guide to anything.

The only sequence in Game of Thrones which honestly made me feel uncomfortable was the Walk of Shame at the end of Season 5. I felt I was being made to watch the actress, rather than the character, being humiliated. Truthfully, it was the (presumably simulated) shit she was being pelted with that disgusted me, rather than her forced disrobing. But then I'm very immature about this stuff. Most of the nude scenes didn't make me go "hubba hubba porno" so much as "snigger snigger I've seen his BUM".  (Or, in deference to Miss Griffiths, his tramp.) But my reaction isn't a good way of judging what is artistically valid, or morally permissible, or politically useful.






THREE

"This did not offend me"
"Well it should have done."

"This did offend me but I watched it anyway"
"Well you shouldn't have done"

“Some parts of this offended me but other parts did not."
"The good parts are no excuse for the offensive parts."

"This cannot be good art because it was offensive."
"This cannot be offensive because it is good art."

"Because this is good art it does not matter whether it is offensive or not"
"Because this is offensive it doesn't matter whether or not it is good art"

And then of course someone will say “You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present.”

This is a moronic thing to say and it is very frequently said by morons.

But it may be that some of the people who say it are struggling towards the thought that texts have multiple contexts: what the Big Rock Candy Mountains meant to Harry McClintock is different from what it meant to Miss Griffiths. You can't judge art from the past exclusively by the standards of the present. I am entirely on board with the idea that the Gospel of Mark does not only mean what it meant to the sandal-wearing children to whom the disciple first narrated the story in October or November of the seventieth year of the common era. It also means what N.T Wright says that John Wesley said that Martin Luther said that Saint Paul said it meant. And a great many other things as well. Othello isn’t just what Shakespeare meant; it’s what Sir Lawrence Olivier thought that Shakespeare meant, and what F.R Leavis thought that Shakespeare meant and (especially) what Mrs Blaine who taught me O Level English thought (wrongly) that Shakespeare meant. 

Some people call this approach post-modernism. They define post-modernism as the belief that books mean anything you want them to mean; and affect to believe that this theory has been put about by Jewish communists in Frankfurt as part of a plot to destroy western civilisation. But they probably don’t read my articles, or indeed, anything else.

When I was around fourteen, some boys in my school got into one of the science labs at break time and started fooling around with expensive and possibly dangerous equipment. The physics teacher punished them by hitting them, as hard as he could, repeatedly, with a running shoe he presumably had to borrow from someone for the occasion. It is not true that times were different and that it hadn't occurred to anyone that spanking teenaged boys was a bad idea. But it is true that the Overton window was in a different place: that kind of punishment was on the radar as the kind of thing which might happen in a school. If it had happened last week the physics teacher would presumably have been escorted off the premises in a straitjacket. If you are my age, you probably think "Teachers are not allowed to slipper boys any more, and that's a damn good thing"; but if you are in you 20s, you are probably literally unable to believe that such a thing could ever have happened: that the teachers did it, and that the boys acquiesced to it. But if I were to say "Actually, he was a pretty nice teacher: I don't suppose he hit more than ten boys the whole time I was at school" you would know what I meant. The present is only one of the standards according to which you can judge the past.



FOUR

Tick all that apply: 

▢  White people ought not to watch 1970s Doctor Who stories.

▢  White people may watch 1970s Doctor Who stories but should omit Talons of Weng Chiang.

▢  White people may watch Talons of Weng Chiang on condition they don’t enjoy it.

▢  White people may watch 1970s Doctor Who stories but ought not to write about them.

▢  White people may write about 1970s Doctor Who stories, but ought not to write about Talons of Weng Chiang.

▢  White people may write about Talons of Weng Chiang, provided they acknowledge that it is racist.

▢  White people may write about Talons of Weng Chiang provided they concentrate exclusively on its racism.

▢  White people who comment on the racism in Talons of Weng Chiang are virtue signal millennial snowflake PC SJW woke.


I got right through an O level, an A level, a Degree and a Masters in English literature writing essays that said that race wasn’t really that big a part of Shakespeare’s Othello, that he was probably an Arab rather than a negro, and certainly there was nothing racist in the text. And that if you allow Paul Robeson or Lenny Henry to play the part it follows that only fat people can play Falstaff and only native Danish speakers can play Hamlet and only murderers can play Macbeth. Private Eye sneered at Russell T Davies' decision to cast a gay actor to play a gay actor in a TV series about a gay actor because that implied that from now on he would only be able to cast actual Daleks as Daleks in Doctor Who.

And then a year or so ago I saw the National Theatre production of Othello, and there were some black guys I knew from work in the audience, and I sat there cringing, thinking, my god, this is a racist play, why have I never admitted that this is a racist play before? This is a play which only makes sense on the assumption that you can take the black man out of the jungle but you cannot take the jungle out of the black man. This is a play that says that dark-skinned people can acquire a thin veneer of civilisation but the teeniest little push will crack all that and leave them foaming at the mouth screaming about handkerchiefs. Coloured johnnies are dashed excitable, what? Not their fault, of course, but what do you expect, they come from hot countries.

It is still a fantastic play. And say awhile that in Aleppo once a most malignant and a turbaned turk beat a Venetian and traduced the state I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus; I was with the Philippine Army on the final advance on Reykjavik. It is probably a better play now I have admitted that it is a racist play because now I am engaged with what Shakespeare actually wrote, not a fantasy version dreamed up for me by Mrs Blaine.  

And yes, at this very moment, people are rushing to Twitter to say that by engaging with the actual text of Othello I have called our National Poet a racist, insulted every English man, every English woman and every English schoolboy, and if something isn’t done about me I'll be rampaging through the streets of Stratford cancelling statues. 

And others are saying that as a white person I have no business talking about Othello at all. 

I am not saying we shouldn't stage Othello. I am not even saying that white actors shouldn't be allowed to essay the role. Theatre is largely colour blind. Judy Dench can do Prospero and Stephanie Cole can do Lear so I don't see why we shouldn't hear Patrick Stewart saying all my fond love thus do I blow to heaven if he ever wants to. Although there are so many good black Shakespearean actors and so few good black Shakespearean roles that we can probably live without it. I am just saying that racism is one of things about Othello.

In the 1970s, flag days were still relatively common. On most Saturday afternoons some charitable soul would be standing on the street corner asking for loose change, and shoppers would pin a small paper badge on their coat to show their support for the cause. Lifeboatmen was a popular one; cancer research was another. We still called disabled children "spastics" and nasty children still used "spastic" as a term of abuse. Poppy Day was one flag day among many.

There followed a very subtle game of “I said you said she said I said”. Some people circulated a deliberate untruth, that They, the Political Corrects, had BANNED the sale of Muslims in case it offends Poppies. This was never true, and the Royal British Legion kept on saying that it wasn't true. But because some people thought that They wouldn’t let you wear poppies, it became more and more important for right thinking folk to wear poppies, in order to show that they weren’t caving in to the people who don’t want other people to wear poppies. The poppies got physically bigger and more absurd, and people started to wear them earlier and earlier in the year. There is a pub near me festooned with ten foot tall paintings of poppies. At least one far-right nutter named their daughter Poppy. Poppy-wearing became increasingly compulsory and increasingly a signifier of your opposition to the left-wing poppy-banning forces of political correctness gone mad. Which meant, of course, that many of us moderately liberal types, who were quite happy to pin poppies on our lapels when they just represented a few pence contributed to the care of disabled veterans, felt that we couldn't wear the now obligatory and politicised symbol. 

The same thing happened to That Statue. And I am very much afraid that the same thing is happening to some of the movies, TV shows and comic books that I used to love.




FIVE


"This thing is incredibly racist."
"Yes, but it was based on a different incredibly racist thing."
"Oh, well, that’s all right then."

"This thing is incredibly racist."
"Yes, but there are other incredibly racist things"
"Oh well, that’s all right then."

"This statue celebrates a slave trader."
"Yes, but there were other slave traders."
"Oh, well, that’s all right then."

I am old enough to remember when Mr Potato Head was an actual potato. The whole point of her was that you stuck eyes, noses and mouths into vegetables. Then someone spotted that it wasn't that great an idea to encourage children to stick pins into things you might eat afterwards. There is something mildly surreal about continuing to market a potato-themed toy with a plastic potato but the toy is still quite popular. I don't think I was particularly aware that there was more than one character: I thought you just got a selection of body parts and stuck them on the potato and created a funny face. I knew there was a Star Wars figure called Darth Tater. 

We all care very much about the symbols of our childhood. I still think occasionally about an old comic book character called Spider-Man: I doubt if anyone else remembers him.

Of course The Left affected to be very amused when The Right affected to be very cross because Mister Potato Head had been rebranded as "Potato Head". Har-har we all said how can you possibly be getting so cross about the gender of a toy vegetable. Har-har we said you can't even get your facts straight: they aren’t saying Mr Potato Head is a girl, they are just saying that Mr Potato Head and Mrs Potato Head will be two iterations of a toy simply called Potato Head.

In the 1950s, it seemed natural for Mrs Potato Head and Wee Jimmie Potato Head to be two special cases under the Mr Potato Head umbrella; because men and white people were the norm from which women and black people were an eccentric deviation. In 2021 that way of thinking seems a little bit less natural. The toy manufacturer is, in fact, taking a tiny, meaningless, not very important, almost imperceptible, baby step towards a world where gender is a very very tiny bit less important than it was before. They are, in fact, saying "The old branding was slightly sexist; the new branding is a slight improvement." And the people who grew up with the old branding, the people who grew up playing with vegetables, the people whose core identity is Mr Potato Head, the ones who saw the movie eight times in 1978 are hurt. Honestly hurt. Because that tiny change says “The thing you used to like, when you were little, maybe the last time in your whole life you felt happy, was a tiny little bit sexist” and if you admit that, you have to say “Somewhere at the core of my being in those happy little Saturday evenings with my TV set and my action figures and my plastic vegetable, at some level, there is a little bit of me that is sexist”. And so we deny and make up words like woke and SJW and PC gone mad and say that if you are going to say Potato Head rather than MISTER Potato head it logically follows that you will have to surgically neuter all males at birth and set fire to the Houses of Parliament.

And we are the same. We have allowed our identity to become tangled up with what is basically a quite disposable piece of old-fashioned kids TV. 

Some of us are able to hold both ideas in our heads: to invest Doctor Who with a level of importance that it doesn't deserve -- which nothing in the world could possibly deserve -- while recognising the absurdity of what we are doing.

Increased leisure time; new ways of accessing and consuming media; the collapse of most churches and community groups and the utter vacuity of 1970s comprehensive education means that some of us have allowed something which should only ever have been peripheral to become central to our lives.

We stopped just being people who liked particular TV shows and particular movies: we became Doctor Who fans or Star Wars fans or Gamers. So we experience a change of direction, a disappointing sequel, a negative review, or an accusation of racism as a personal attack on our very identity.

Many of us can understand that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were felt by some Muslims as personal attacks on their very identity. Some Christians were honestly and personally hurt by Jerry Springer the Opera. Some silly people are currently saying some very silly things about Union Jack but I am prepared to accept that some sensible people find disrespect for national symbols genuinely painful. Some of us would regard it merely as a nuisance if the grave of one of our relatives were vandalised: we'd pay a mason a few hundred quid to fix it and carry on. But some of us would feel the same way we would have felt if  our living father or grandfather had actually been harmed.

If somethings are sacred, then there is such a thing as desecration.

I remember being rather shocked by a 1992 BBC documentary called Resistance is Useless which for the first time said on air that Doctor Who was silly and repetitive and sexist and badly put-together. (It also coined the word "anorak" to refer to an obsessive fan.) We knew that other people -- mundanes -- sometimes said this about us, but to hear it going out over the BBC, through, as it were, official channels felt like a slap in the face. 

Every informed Christian knows that the stories of Jesus's resurrection in the Bible are contradictory and very probably symbolic rather than documentary, but it was viscerally shocking in 1984 to hear this said by a bishop. 

Jesus and Mohammed and the Union Jack are one thing: but Doctor Who is really odd place to put your identity. 






SIX

"The yellow one calls him lord."

"Yes, as I was saying, they're a mysterious lot, the Chinese. Enigmatic."

"You mean to say the celestial Chang was involved in all these Machiavellian machinations? "
"Yes, up to his epicanthic eyebrows."

"Now I've got a couple of inscrutable Chinks and a poor perisher who was chewed by a giant rat"

"That's how you might see it, Mister Ching-ching, but as far as I'm concerned all I want is a pair of smoked kippers, a cup of rosie and put me plates up for a few hours, savvy?"



You can, as a matter of fact, sometimes do a small, sensible thing without doing a big, silly thing as well. If a librarian chooses to move Huckleberry Finn from the children's section to the adult's section, it does not follow that he must also make a bonfire of every Jane Austen novel in existence. If a streaming service adds a comment to a puppet show mentioning that it sometimes makes fun of foreign people in a way we probably wouldn't do nowadays, it does not follow that every copy of Winnie the Pooh should be locked in a vault an sealed for a thousand years. It is in fact a very big step from letting The Cat’s Quizzer fall out of print and burning the Bible. It was never the case that Bristol council could only have put a contextualising sign alongside the statue of the slave trader on condition that the Greek government also raze the Acropolis to the ground.

It is much easier to focus on individual words or symbols than it is to engage in actual literary criticism. It is highly probable that some very proper Mills and Boon romances have a terrible attitude to Christian chastity; and it is equally probable that Lady Chatterly's Lover ultimately came down strongly on the side of the sanctity of marriage. Huckleberry Finn, considered as a text, might be racist, or it might not be. To find out, you would have to read it, and, even worse, think about it. Much easier to count the number of f-words and n-words and c-words and assume that the point is proved.

It is widely agreed that the sinophobic elements in Talons of Weng-Chiang were drawn from the Hammer versions of Sax Rohmer's yellow peril novels. (I am not quite sure what a 1960s version of a 1920s pulp novel was doing in a Victorian pastiche.) Similarly, it is agreed that Jar Jar Binks was based on a stereotyped West Indian fool who was rather common in 1930s movies. It isn't clear how this is a defence. One incredibly racist thing was apparently based on another incredibly racist thing. I rather liked Jar Jar Binks. 

It is widely agreed that Robert Holmes himself had no particular objection to Chinese people. It is further conceded that he did not film Talons of Weng-Chiang with the intention of stirring up anti-Chinese feeling. I am also prepared to accept that George Mitchell, maestro of the Black and White Minstrel Show, would not have particularly disliked any individual black person if he had met one. Everyone, up to an including Donald Trump has examined their own skeleton and discovered that none of the individual bones are racist. There do exist people who have a strong and overt theory that dark-skinned people are inferior to light-skinned people, but that kind of racism is relatively rare. And there are cruel people who like to make fun of people who are different from them, who think that childishly calling people "chocolate" or "fattie" or "four eyes" is a great joke.  

A text can still be racist even though the person who created the text can truthfully absolve himself of racism in those senses. 

Doctor Who sometimes included white actors with silly yellow make up pretending they couldn't say their Rs. This is a fact. I accept that you may perceive this as an attack on the ludicrously overvalued TV show and therefore an attack on you personally. You can deny it. God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith and the SJW scientists created the covid hoax to make us all wear muzzles. You can embrace it. It is okay to make fun of Asians because Asians really are funny. You can minimize it and say that it's just a bit of fun and they don't really mind. You can shift the burden of proof and say that you only think that making fun of Asians is wrong because the wokes have got to you; that old fashioned racist science fiction is the purest kind and you are prepared to stuff the Hugo ballots to prove it. Or you can process it. This thing we like has got some bad things in it.

What you can't do is ignore it. Or, rather: ignoring it is a choice as well.

Doctor Who exists in its original context -- 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Basil Brush, Jim'll Fix It, Sugar Puffs, TV Comic. But if Doctor Who does not also exist in a contemporary context then it is dead art, ephemera, as interesting as a page of advertisements in a 1952 edition of the News Chronicle. Outside of the academy, we don't care what regency ladies thought of Jane Austen, or what Tudor gentlemen thought of Shakespeare. Those texts are still alive: what matters is what they mean to a young person reading them for the first time, tomorrow. On the other hand very much the only thing which matters about Chaucer is what his works meant in the fifteenth century. Those texts exist only as dead artefacts.

Perhaps I watch Doctor Who too much in its original context. Perhaps I am too hung up on recreating those mythical Saturday tea times before Daddy got sick and before the bullying became serious. Perhaps I am too inclined to look at Talons of Weng Chiang as part of a process which had Robots of Death in front of it, Horror of Fang Rock behind it -- and not incidentally, the Lively Arts to the left of it, the Blue Peter Make Your Own Theatre leaflet to the right of it, and Jesus of Nazareth on the other side.

Talons of Weng Chiang is a component of the Who-text as well as a way into 1970s cultural history. You hardly need to watch Doctor Who to find out that the 1970s were as racist as fuck.

There are people who look at this preposterously racist artefact and say “This artefact is not racist”. There are people who say that if you look at this preposterously racist artefact and see anything apart from its racism then you are aligning yourself with the first group. 

This is an old TV show.

It contains racial stereotypes and language that may course offence, and violence. And other things. 

Meanwhile, every day on twitter mentally damaged pseudo-fans call the present show “woke” because two out of the four main characters are non-white, and the lead is non-male. 

Next week’s story is set on a lighthouse. The one after that involves a robot dog and a sentient prawn. 

A period of silence would be welcome.

Bum.












476 comments:

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Mike Taylor said...

"Similarly, it is agreed that Jar Jar Binks was based on a stereotyped West Indian fool who was rather common in 1930s movies"

Wait — is it? When did this happen?

Andrew Rilstone said...

It may not be agreed by everyone; but the thick lipped clumsy guy with the funny accent who gets scared and jumps into other characters arms like a baby is definitely the stereotype Jar Jar is playing on.

Mike Taylor said...

Heaven knows it's no part of my mission in life to defend The Phantom Menace, a film that I liked much less than you did. But I have always thought that accusations of racism aimed at Jar Jar have a very circular quality to them. Jar Jar is foolish; so someone summons up an image of a foolish and clumsy West Indian from somewhere, and says "Hey, Jar Jar resembles a foolish and clumsy West Indian". Given that his patois doesn't sound remotely like any West Indian I've ever heard, you might just as well say Jar Jar resembles a foolish and clumsy Scotsman.

Richard Worth said...

I may be a moron.
I understand the chain of logic that no-one in the late 17th century knew that enslaving black people was wrong, therefore Coslton was an honest and generous merchantman, who after two-hundred years the city fathers recognised as such, and his statue is sacrosanct, is nonsense on stilts. We make choices about what we surround ourselves with in the 21st century and what we put in museums.
I understand the chain of logic that we in 2021 use recycled paper, so King John should have written Magna Carta on recycled paper, is also nonsense on stilts. We expect that someone raised in a different era, culture or religion may have a different moral compass and different benchmarks about appropriate behaviour, We also accept that some of what we do, for example eating meat, might be judged by future generations as unethical. We also accept that people today from different cultures may have different views about putting religious figures in cartoons.
I understand that Nelson opposing William Wilberforce's plans to abolish slavery is problematic, because Wilberforce was setting a benchmark where abolishing slavery was a reasonable part of public debate. Nelson chose to take a particular side. However, Nelson said that he was worried that the French simply abolishing slavery had led directly to a race war, and there must be a better way to handle things. He may also felt that costly social reforms could wait until we had beaten Napoleon. Even if Nelson was the bloke-in-the-pub rather than a naval hero, there would still be difficult questions about plotting the right course to where we are now. The same arguments might be made about Churchill, WWII and India: writing 'was a racist' across his plinth is about as sensible as writing 'was a superhero', or 'was a baddie' (or a goodie, or a goon).
Which of these counts as 'judging the past by the standards of the present'?

Andrew Rilstone said...

Someone who says "You must not say that the sit-com "Whoops, My Neighbour is a Paki" is racist, because it would not have been considered racist in 1972 is being a moron

Someone who says "It is okay to have a statue stating that Hitler was the wisest and best son of Berlin in the center of the city, because exterminating Jews was not considered naughty in 1939" is being a moron.

What you seem to be talking about is reductionism: Nelson accepted that slavery was a great evil, but had a difference of opinion with Wilberforce about whether that particular evil could be addressed in that way at that time: to simply brand him as "slaver" and therefore bad is unhelpful. (Also: Lauding someone for being a great commander who beat the French at Trafalgar does not imply that they are a secular saint in all other ways. We can name an airport after John Lennon because he wrote great tunes, even though he was horrible to his first wife. We can lay on a wreath on Wagner's memorial without endorsing his politics. You may be able to think of other examples, possibly involving short grey furry people.)

The Churchill thing is different again. Churchill has been turned, first into a full-on secular saint, and then into an icon of a particular kind of small c conservatism, and then into a symbol of the capital-c Conservative Party. Clearly we can have a nuanced conversation about his strengths and deficits as a politician (strengths: was right about Hitler weaknesses: was wrong about colonies, women, black people, the health service etc). There are a body of people who will take the view that if you are critical of any aspect of Churchill's legacy then you are Doing Down This Country and should Go And Live There. And there are a group of people who feel that this country doesn't value them or care whether they live or die. And so they attacked Churchill's statue precisely because attacking statues would be seen as a very bad thing. I thought I talked about this in the article: things like poppies and statues get charged with meaning, by the people who want to take them down, and the people who don't want to take them down, and the people who want to take down the people who want to take down the people who want to take them down. If the Tories are serious about creating specific anti-statue-removing laws then it will become the duty of every decent human being to become an iconoclast.

Judging the past by the standards of the present means saying "Yes, nobody batted an eyelid at jokes about slitty eyed foreigners in the 1970s, but they damn well should have done."

Considering how many bottoms there were on the article, I ought to have thought to mention that we should NOT laugh at a Midsummer Night's Dream, because "bottoming" is part of the weaving process which wasn't noted as a euphemism for arse until centuries later.

Gavin Burrows said...

The question isn't whether Jar Jar Binks acts like a real black person, but whether he matches the anti-black stereotype - the wide-eyed fool who can't even speak the English good. Black people don't match that stereotype much, which is kind of the point.

Mike Taylor said...

Sorry, Gavin, I don't buy that at all. It is you, not the film-maker, who has associated Jar Jar's incompetence with being black. There are plenty of white fools who can't even speak English good. Some of them are in the cabinet. Nothing about the character invites you to associate him with a black fool rather than a white fool.

Gavin Burrows said...

Then a genuine question. You may remember some fuss about a mural some time back. It had a bunch of hook-nosed guys pulling strings that made the world run. Was it just in my mind that that's associated with anti-semitism? (NB This comment is not an invite to rake over all over again who may or may not have liked murals on social media.)

Mike Taylor said...

If I rightly remember the mural (which I might not, so much has happened since) it was depicting specific people such as Rothschild who, as a matter of fact, were Jewish. So it was unambiguously a mural of Jewish people.

Gavin Burrows said...

It featured six figures of which only two were based on actual Jewish people. The artist's defence was that this meant it could not possibly be anti-semitic. But they were all given features familiar from anti-semitic propaganda, and it used the anti-semitic trope of a secret elite (Not Like Us, nudge nudge).

Suppose, were I so minded, I repainted the mural just as it was with six clearly identified non-Jewish people in it. Would it still be anti-semitic? Yes of course it would. If it recycles anti-semitic ropes its racist. Racism doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to be able to say its thing.

Mike Taylor said...

Hang on. In your proposed repaint, would all the bankers by identifiable non-Jewish individuals? If so, then I don't see how it can be anti-semitic. Not unless you're going to say that any cartoon that features bankers is automatically antisemitic.

Gavin Burrows said...

Carefully labelled as not Jewish, depicted with the full complement of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Which would be fine right?

Andrew Rilstone said...

This is quite interesting.

When I first saw that mural I took it to be saying that rich people are exploiting poor people especially in Africa and if all the poor people go together they could stop them.

Once the storm broke I had another look and I could see that the bad rich people all looked Jewish.

And my first thought was this was an example of passive racism. When a cartoonist tries to imagine a nasty rich person he imagines them with Jewish characteristics. [If I were asked to draw a cartoon of a mathematician I would draw a bald headed old white man. And if you asked me to role-play an evil scientist I would do him with a generic Russian German foreign accent. I don’t think all mathematicians are men and I don’t think all scientists are German, but the stereotype is there. Either the cartoonist, Jeremy Corbyn or me should have noticed this.

But I’ve since found out that the image in the cartoon — of Jews playing cards or chess or monopoly on the backs of typically Black people — is a pre existing anti-Semitic motif. The guy who drew the mural either did, or should have known this, and so should Jeremy Corbyn, and so should I. But we quite possibly didn’t.

Andrew Stevens said...

I do actually believe that the true meaning of a work is authorial intent. On the other hand, this was taken too far by many literary critics who delved deeply into the author's biography in order to divine his intent. (And, of course, the author almost certainly never intended for anyone to do that.) The reaction against this kind of criticism was understandable. A lot of the reaction against was just making the perfect the enemy of the good. (I.e. "But we can't infallibly know the author's intent so we shouldn't even try to discover it!") But much of it was genuinely good points or at least arguable hypotheses ("it is not even desirable to divine the author's intent"). Given that I do take these points "on board," as it were, I suppose I am some species of "weak intentionalist." But I do believe the people who reject intentionalism entirely are in error. Without intent, there really can't be any meaning.

Andrew Stevens said...

E.g. a sunset or a spider web may be beautiful, but they have no artistic meaning.

Gavin Burrows said...

Anyone remember that Zoom call episode? A Very Important White Man was on a very important zoom call when a young child rushed in the room, and had to be escorted out by a Philipino woman. People shared the meme, often describing her as the maid. It was later found she was his wife. And everyone had been making a somewhat racist presumption.

Someone then wrote a very cross letter to, I think, the Guardian, pointing out they hadn't been racist at all, they'd just shown a tendency to picture Philipino women as maids because quite often that's a job they end up in. He was of course explaining precisely what was racist about the whole thing.

I think I prefer the term reflex racism to passive racism. People are just flexing their unconsidered prejudices, and thinking they cannot possibly be racist because they've never voted for Tommeh Robinson. In fact the vast majority of racism is reflex racism.

Much art we now have, for example folk songs, are anonymous and very unlikely to come from a single author. Does this mean we cannot classify them as art?

Andrew Rilstone said...

I just don't think it's a very interesting question. Of course it is sometimes sensible to say "Shakespeare couldn't have meant that, because that is not what the word meant in those days." Of course it is a good idea ask "What would a Tudor audience have thought about a king dividing up is kingdom" and "What would Shakespeare's audiences think constituted good behaviour between a wife and a husband in public?" But if Ctitic A says "Iago is an allegorical personification of the dark side of Othello's psyche" and Critic B say "Iago is a realistic, albeit exaggerated, picture of an ambiguous lower class soldier who has read his Machievelli" then trying to find out which interpretation Shakespeare Intended is a really pointless. Much better to see which theory is better supported by words Shakespeare wrote -- which reading best explains the difficulties in the play -- which is most interesting. If you find a signed piece of paper saying "Iago is an allegorical figure, signed Will" that doesn't make the other reading go away. Mr Tolkien who famously hated allegory except when writing Leaf By Niggle, acknowledge that there was allegory in his text that he wasn't conscious of putting in.

There are lots of jokes about pretentious critics announcing that the great white whale is really the Republic of Ireland and Poe's raven represents the gold standard -- but actual examples of critics doing that kind of thing a few and far between. (I suppose people used to find corn-gods and phallic symbols in texts even though the author didn't Intend them do, but that was not really literary criticism, so much as using poems as raw material for anthropological and Freudian analysis.)

Andrew Stevens said...

If you want Holmes and Watson to have been gay lovers, that is perfectly fine. If you think the Sherlock Holmes stories actually mean that Holmes and Watson were gay lovers, then you are mistaken.

While it may be pointless, it's not that hard to see that Critic B is correct and Critic A is overthinking it in a way Shakespeare almost certainly did not. And I agree with "much better to see which theory is better supported by words Shakespeare wrote." I just think that means "try to figure out what Shakespeare intended."

Andrew Stevens said...

Also, we are both going to agree that an author's intent is not always conscious on the part of the author. E.g. Robert Holmes's racism in Talons was subconscious racism, but one can still argue that it was intentional.

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh, I should also add that Critic A's essay may include a lot of good stuff based on Critic A's intent in writing the essay. Perhaps I could learn a lot about Critic A's psychological theorizing which might have value in itself. Critic A might in fact be producing great art of his own even. I just think he is unlikely to be giving us much insight into Othello.

Gavin Burrows said...

Rather than see intentionalists as in some kind of opposition to the po-mo school (the ones who insist you can claim ‘Talons’ is really a recipe for blueberry pie with equal validity), we should look at what they have in common.

First, intentionalism clearly doesn’t mean what its adherents say it means. If they really thought such a thing, why would they bother reading a novel? You’d go and ask the author what he meant, which would come to the same thing and be easier. It actually assumes the critic knows more about the author, or is just cut from similar cloth to them, so when we need to find that all-important intent its the critic we turn to. The author's remote authority rubs off on the critic's actual authority.

By a similar token to make ‘Talons’ into blueberry pie you’d need to create such contortions that you’d need special linguistic knowledge. ‘Blueberry’ might mean something useful to you in some random language, for example.

It ends up a little like electoralism. Both sides want to professionalise responses to works of art so they can stay in their specialist roles. Neither like the text because it’s shared property. We should resist both of them.

And I agree with "much better to see which theory is better supported by words Shakespeare wrote." I just think that means "try to figure out what Shakespeare intended.”

I’m going to guess you know what the word ‘wrote’ actually means. In which case you cannot actually think this. Further, if someone stages a Shakespeare adaptation now I’m not terribly concerned with gleaning further info about someone who died quite a while ago now, who we’re never likely to truly know much about. I’m more interested in what they’re going to do with the text.

It’s the text that’s the text. That’s clear enough.

But on the other hand… In the original draft of ‘The Daleks’, the Thals had Germanic sounding names. Which fits my notion that they’re the good Germans to the Daleks’ bad Germans of the post-war era. But was that in a version of the text, the way we’ve different versions of ‘Hamlet’? Or should we take it as something deliberately removed from the text that we have, so we should ignore it? I honestly do go back and forwards over something like that.

Andrew Rilstone said...

If closely studying the text is the same as figuring out the author's intentions, and if the author's intentions can sometimes be unconscious, then I don't think there is much difference between the two positions.

You get people who say "Since Paul McCartney had not studied music theory and didn't understand what pandiatonic clusters are, the music critic was incorrect to find them in Eleanor Rigby." I think we can all agree that that is silly?

The "was Holmes gay" thing is a slightly different kind of question. It's about treating fictional characters as if they were real. Holmes doesn't really exist: in way it is meaningless to say "did he and Watson sleep together off stage". Off stage doesn't exist. On the other hand, scouring the text for evidence -- Holmes never married, and says that Watson acted selfishly when he "deserted him" to get married. But only a few months after his marriage, Watson is back in the bachelor pad. They go to saunas together, and it's the only time when Holmes opens up to his friend. Everyone knows they called each other "my dear". Now we are talking about the text. I think "would those things have been taken as signifiers for being homosexual at the time Doyle was writing, or would they have been read differently" is a good question. Did Doyle sit in his room intending really really hard for them to be straight, not so much.

That kind of criticism is not very much respected in Eng Lit departments, or wasn't when I was a student. ("How many children had Lady Mabeth" was proverbially a Silly Question.) But it's a fact about Doyle's presentation that the stories invite you ask those sorts of questions. It would make much less sense to speculate about (say) The Redcrosse Knight's "off stage" existence.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Medieval Morality plays definitely personified psychological states -- so the idea that Iago is an allegorical figure representing Doubt (and that Falstaff is an allegorical figure representing Drunkenness -- who the Prince sends away before he sobers up) is by no means impossible. It would be a bit old fashioned if Shakespeare will still doing it, but he could very well have been influenced by that kind of writing. The medievals thought that the Bible, and by extension, everything else had five levels of allegorical meaning and one dullards paid much attention to the literal sense.

postodave said...

A few years ago I read the first three Fu Manchu novels. I had read some of the later ones as a teenager. When I read them I was both aware that they were racist, (and you can't miss it. There's a lot of references to the danger the white race is in and so on) and yet also not too troubled by the racism, though I was a bit troubled by it not troubling me. In the end I think I realised that the type of racism being depicted is so far removed from the racism encountered today that I could accept it as a literary trope, a way of identifying the goodies and the baddies, and not a reflection of current attitudes. When we read the books we have to side with 'the white race' in something like the way we have to side with the police or the FBI in some kinds of crime novels. We can still have a more ambivalent relationship to those bodies in real life. And since I don't even think anything remotely like 'the white race' even exists I felt distanced enough to read them as adventure stories.

As a father I read the Dr Dolittle stories to my daughter. I chose to read the originals which have the same kind of unintentional racism in them. I decided it was best to read the original versions and discuss the racism as we read. I think that worked.

Andrew Stevens said...

If they really thought such a thing, why would they bother reading a novel? You’d go and ask the author what he meant, which would come to the same thing and be easier.

I'm not sure if I should take this seriously? It's certainly not easier for the author and people really enjoy talking to authors about their books. But it's certainly not easier. In fact, it's much harder.

It actually assumes the critic knows more about the author, or is just cut from similar cloth to them, so when we need to find that all-important intent its the critic we turn to.


No? In fact, if I want to know what the author meant, I wouldn't go to a critic first. On the contrary, I take what J.R.R. Tolkien said about his works far more seriously than I take Andrew Rilstone's (and I take Andrew Rilstone pretty seriously about Tolkien!).

I’m going to guess you know what the word ‘wrote’ actually means. In which case you cannot actually think this.

I do know what the word 'wrote' means and I do actually think that.

Further, if someone stages a Shakespeare adaptation now I’m not terribly concerned with gleaning further info about someone who died quite a while ago now, who we’re never likely to truly know much about. I’m more interested in what they’re going to do with the text.

Now, I don't really disagree with this. On the other hand, if I were staging a Shakespeare adaptation, I would in fact do quite a lot of research first on how it was staged in Shakespeare's time. I wouldn't slavishly adhere to that research, of course. I would adapt it for the modern age, but I would be trying to reveal Shakespeare, not me.

Andrew Stevens said...

Just to explicate, when I am reading a comment by Gavin Burrows, I am genuinely trying to discover what Gavin Burrows intended to communicate. Even though he 'wrote' the comment.

Andrew Stevens said...

(I am not trying to argue that Richard III set in Nazi Germany is wrong. If somebody wants to stage that, I don't have any objections. But honestly I'd rather watch West Side Story. Go all the way and make it your own.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Medieval Morality plays definitely personified psychological states -- so the idea that Iago is an allegorical figure representing Doubt (and that Falstaff is an allegorical figure representing Drunkenness -- who the Prince sends away before he sobers up) is by no means impossible. It would be a bit old fashioned if Shakespeare will still doing it, but he could very well have been influenced by that kind of writing. The medievals thought that the Bible, and by extension, everything else had five levels of allegorical meaning and one dullards paid much attention to the literal sense.

That actually might be an interesting essay. I'd be willing to read it, though I'm going to be a bit skeptical and the critic would have to provide some convincing biographical details about Shakespeare to convince me. Or possibly the critic could even convince me from just the text itself, but I've read the text and this interpretation seems fanciful to me at first blush.

Andrew Stevens said...

Sorry to keep posting comments. As I have said before, I am a discursive personality.

Why do I read Andrew Rilstone on Tolkien or Lewis? I'm not sure he knows the actual texts better than I do. He probably does, but I'm betting it's not a blowout. Do I read him because Mr. Rilstone brings his personal experiences to bear on the texts? Partially, but not really. Mr. Rilstone's just some guy. I read Mr. Rilstone because he has read all of the Christopher Tolkien texts. I have not. He has read all of the letters of C.S. Lewis. I have not. He is almost certainly better versed on the biographies of the writers and I am certain this gives him insight into their writings which I do not possess. And reading Mr. Rilstone is a whole lot more fun than doing all that work myself.

If I'm reading a critic of Arthur Conan Doyle's, I am doing so because I presume he has expertise about Victorian England, at the very least, which I do not possess. He can help me contextualize the work and maybe even actually explain whether "those things [would] have been taken as signifiers for being homosexual at the time Doyle was writing, or would they have been read differently."

Anonymous said...

I find your position very surprising. Thinking about it, it's maybe because when I read about a text I'm much more interested in hearing about how it is understood by or affects or is used by its audience than hearing about what you call its true meaning, what the author intended. It actually slightly baffles me that anyone would be more interested in what Shakespeare thought about Othello than in all the things the text of Othello has done to people. Like, why?!

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think we are talking about to many different things at once -- theatrical interpretation of Shakespeare; academic criticism; "readings"; cultural changes: and each case we're eliding the "is" and the "ought".

e.g Is THIS gender-reverse production of Taming of the Shrew interesting? (Might be, might not be, I'd have to see it.) Did Shakespeare sit in his little room "intending" Katherine to be a man and Petruchio to be a woman. (Almost definitely not.) OUGHT a director do a production which goes against the playwright's presumed intention. (DUNNO: but thats a moral question not a critical one.) Does a 21st century woman in fact read Taming of the Shrew and think "Yes, it sure is funny that a strong independent woman is being humiliated, and quite right too." (Probably not.) Is it possible for her to read the play and say "This is a very funny play, and Petruchio is an idiot and completely in the wrong?" (Yes.) Should she feel that? (None of your business.) Does that understanding of the play magically vanish in the presence of a piece of paper that says "Petruchio was doing what any sensible man would have done, and Kate was a bitch. I intended you to read the play like that." (Of course not.) Would an academic paper saying "Actually, there was more feminism in Shakespeares time than you might think, and the play by no means comes out on the side of misogyny" be interesting. (Maybe.) Would an theoretical paper entitles "Phllocentric Intertextualities: Queering Christopher Sly" be interesting. (Maybe.) Were there specific restoration, Victorian and early 20th centuyry ways of reading the play? (Yes.) Were those reading all the same as what Shakespeare Intended. (Probably not.) Did they think they were. (Probably.) If you could demonstrate that Shakespeare wrote the play in a fit of bad temper after a row with Anne about replacing the curtains in his cottage, would that be quite interesting? (Up to a point.) Would it reduce the play for ever afterwards to a mere document about the relationship between a long dead couple. (Some people think that it would, but I suspect they are mostly people who don't really like plays.)

I predict several response to this telling me which of my hypothetical readings of the Taming of the Shrew are good and which are bad; but the point "these questions are all good questions and not reducible to 'What did Shakespeare mean?' will still stand

Gavin Burrows said...

And what would going to JRR Tolkien involve? I’m guessing he no longer has a listed phone number. Going to Tolkien wouldn’t involve going to Tolkien, it would involve going to a biography or perhaps an interview. And even with an interview someone else determines the questions, and (normally) edits the replies down. There’s nothing wrong with doing either thing. But to assert the primacy of these things over the text is to go to gatekeepers, under the guise of going to the author. We don’t have the author. What we have is the text.

Another problem with the biographical fallacy is that it too readily confuses the impetus for a work with its meaning. People seem to do this the most with songs. Clinton Heylin discovered there’d been someone who’d go through Greenwich Village clutching an oversize tambourine, and concluded with some relish that’s where Dylan had got it from. But the only things this tell us about the song are prosaic, nothing to do with what makes the song the song. Were we to discover Shakespeare had had a row with his Missis, I don’t doubt people would do the same for him.

Not so long ago on this blog, on one of the Cerebus posts, someone misinterpreted what I was saying. I re-read what I’d written, thought I could have made a better job of making my point clearer, and fessed up. When it’s a mailing comment you can’t really claim you were going for creative ambiguity like in ‘Hamlet’. Like should really be compared with like.

When you read a comment on the internet marked ‘Anonymous’ that goes on to make perfect sense, that has the makings of an unusual day.

Andrew Stevens said...

I am pretty much in perfect agreement with Andrew Rilstone's comment above. But then I have already acknowledged that I am a "weak intentionalist."

Going to Tolkien wouldn’t involve going to Tolkien, it would involve going to a biography or perhaps an interview.

Sure. Now. But if I were reading a modern author and I genuinely was confused by a passage and what the author meant, I might find a critic and ask him what he thinks or simply ask my family or friends. That may or may not be helpful. But it's actually easier to just go on Twitter and directly ask the author and, if I had that opportunity, that is actually what I would do (and have done).

The problem with ignoring intent entirely is that things that aren't intentional have no meaning at all. We don't argue about what the meaning of a spider web is because we know it doesn't have one.

Another problem with the biographical fallacy is that it too readily confuses the impetus for a work with its meaning.

Sure, people can make that mistake. (Though, of course, I don't agree that the so-called "intentional fallacy" is a fallacy.)

When it’s a mailing comment you can’t really claim you were going for creative ambiguity like in ‘Hamlet’.

I agree that the author's intent may very well (and frequently does!) include deliberate ambiguity. Many times the author will be explicit about that. (By the way, modern authors are usually too cagey to allow themselves to be pinned down on a work's meaning. They want to appeal to the broadest possible audience and don't want to alienate those people who might not like their intent.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Hell, sometimes the author just outright lies about her intent anyway. E.g. "gay Dumbledore." (I don't deny Rowling may have had that in mind during Book 7, but certainly not in Book 1.) I suppose this too must be taken into account.

Andrew Stevens said...

I find your position very surprising. Thinking about it, it's maybe because when I read about a text I'm much more interested in hearing about how it is understood by or affects or is used by its audience than hearing about what you call its true meaning, what the author intended. It actually slightly baffles me that anyone would be more interested in what Shakespeare thought about Othello than in all the things the text of Othello has done to people. Like, why?!

A very fair question, Anonymous! Because I think Othello is a great play because of Shakespeare, not because it has been anointed as such by his audience. I have, in fact, been accused of being an "elitist" (a charge which I only half-heartedly dispute) many, many, many times.

Andrew Stevens said...

For what it's worth, I think Mr. Rilstone and Mr. Burrows really are weak intentionalists just like me and this is why we actually aren't in much disagreement. E.g. we seem to agree that an interpretation of 'Talons' as a recipe for blueberry pie is simply wrong.

Andrew Stevens said...

Of course, my elitism doesn't mean I am completely uninterested in the opinions of "common people." Mr. Rilstone is a greater critic than I am, Mr. Burrows is a greater artist than I am. I am quite interested in their opinions, even when I disagree.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Has anyone ever said that Talons of Weng Chiang is a recipe for blueberry pie? Or anything analogous?

I suppose conspiracy minded rock fans think that I Am The Walrus is an account of Paul McCartney's fatal motorcycle accident and Puff the Magic Dragon is about marijuana but is this the kind of thing which any actual critic has ever done?

It's a problem, because very moderate ideas about two people understanding the same text in legitimately differently ways too easily morph into "cultural modernists and post marxists say that anything means anything you like". Which no-one ever has.

Gavin Burrows said...

”But it's actually easier to just go on Twitter and directly ask the author and, if I had that opportunity, that is actually what I would do”

If this is the case, I’m still absolutely unclear why you would bother with the text in the first place. If it’s just a means to an end, and you can use a quicker means to the same end. You also seem fairly certain they won’t just reply “I don’t know”, which seems to me a strong possibility.

”The problem with ignoring intent entirely is that things that aren't intentional have no meaning at all. We don't argue about what the meaning of a spider web is because we know it doesn't have one.”

You know the story of Robert the Bruce? If it’s invented some anonymous writer thought a spider spinning a web could be a useful metaphor. But if it’s true, Robert the Bruce saw a real spider - and then applied the same metaphor. It doesn’t really matter. Because this is what a reader does, inscribe meaning on the text. There is no absolute distinction between a writer and a reader, unless it’s the mechanical action of writing something out. Nothing has any meaning at all until such a time as its given one.

Let’s take another notorious ‘Who’ story, Gatiss’ ‘Unquiet Dead’. When told of the anti-immigrant reading, he was somewhat aghast and said that if he’d noticed that himself he’d have changed it. He didn’t say “I am the writer and as such forbid this interpretation”. He knew full well that would have no meaningful effect, that’s just not how it works. Even if he said it on Twitter.

It could be he’s unconsciously anti-immigrant, so the whole thing’s one big slip of the tongue. But there’s no way for us to know that, and it wouldn’t make much difference to the rest of us if we did.

However, there’s a more interesting way of looking at it. Suppose we stop looking at writers as solitary enlightened geniuses, with bold notions springing fully formed from their Olympian brows, and start looking at them as lightning conductors of the zeitgeist. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is prevalent in Britain, you can probably pick it up easier than the coronavirus. Why wouldn’t it worm its way into a writer’s work?

And that’s a notion of how art works which was not particularly contested for most of history. The sole genius is just another thing Romanticism lumbered us with.

Gavin Burrows said...

I think Post-Modernism does insist all meaning is essentially made up, so anything I say will have as much validity as yours. They went so far as to say the Gulf War didn’t happen, because “the Gulf War” is just a way of looking at things.

Being somewhat cynical, I suspect that this is because the serious work critiquing author primacy had already been done, so they needed something to upstage it if they weren’t going to languish un-noticed.

People then confuse them with their forebearers. I have lost count of the times someone on the internet has told me Post-Modernism is the same thing as Marxism. But it may be more times than I’ve been told anti-fascism is fascism.

But the problem with this is not the one you might think. You don’t get random people cropping up on the internet saying “okay then, ‘Face Of Evil’ is rhubarb crumble, you can’t prove me wrong, har har.” You get people saying “a very clever critic said this about the meaning of texts, and he used lots of fancy terms.” It’s building up your authority under the guise of demolishing authority.

Andrew Rilstone said...
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Andrew Rilstone said...

If the writer is around, then "What did you mean by?" is a perfectly interesting question. e.g People asked Frank Oz if he'd envisaged Fred and Ernie as a gay couple, and he said truthfully that he hadn't. That's interesting. If he had said he had, that would also have been interesting. But whatever he had said doesn't make the contrary reading go away. (Writers can sometimes be very unperceptive about their own work. Ask George Lucas.)

If there really was a late night tambourine player in Greenwich Village, that does alter my understanding of Mr Tambourine Man, a little. I never quite bought the idea that "tambourines" was a slang term for LSD tabs. (I'd be inclined to say that that story, right or wrong is now one of the many texts which that song lyric refers to.) But it doesn't create a singular Meaning.

If I had interviewed Tolkien, I might have said: did you envisage the wings of the balrog as literal or metaphorical? And his answer would have been extremely interesting and would have affected how I read the story afterwards. But it would still remain a fact that the description of the balrog's wings is ambiguous. I might say "It's a flaw; he didn't say what he meant" or "It's a strength: he wanted to leave the appearance of the creature partly to the reader's imagination." (But Mr Tolkien, did you INTEND to leave it to the readers imagination, or were you trying to be as specific as you possibly could be?)

"What did the Balrog look like?" is a more sensible question than "What did the Jabberwocky look like?" because Tolkien is writing feigned history, where Carrol is writing surrealism. The stupidest question of all would be "What colour were Hamlet's eyes?".

What does the song mean?
It means I never have to work again.

What are your songs about?
Some of them are about three minutes, some of them are about four minutes, and there is one on the new album which is about twelve minutes.

postodave said...

Okay, let's take that 12 minute song. It was something Andrew said a while back when he compared that song to American Pie that set me googling. American Pie looks like if you knew what all the symbols refer to you could crack the meaning along the lines of The Jester is this, the King is that and so on. Don McLean always refused to explain it in that way, probably wisely. Desolation Row never looked like that to me, but what I found on digging is that there are a lot of very specific references in the first verse. Dylan's father had seen a hanging, a lynching in fact, and they did sell postcards of it. There was a circus involved and a commissioner who was blind in the sense of refusing to see what was going on. But you can't carry on like that through all the verses, the meaning pretty soon comes detached from that kind of one on one explanation of symbols.

But sometimes there are songs that seem cryptic which can be understood once the author or someone else tips you off. Judi Sill's 'Jesus was a Cross Maker'seems quite obscure until you know that she had been reading Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation in which Jesus as a carpenter makes crosses for the Romans. When she introduces the song live she says that this helped her see that even her ex was not beyond redemption. Listen to the song knowing that and the words make sense.

postodave said...

And in case anyone wants to hear this is Judee explaining the song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InST5docSkM

Mike Taylor said...

Gavin wrote: "If this is the case, I’m still absolutely unclear why you would bother with the text in the first place. If it’s just a means to an end, and you can use a quicker means to the same end. You also seem fairly certain they won’t just reply “I don’t know”, which seems to me a strong possibility."

I am fascinated by the song — really a sound collage — Hell Mary by Chroma Key, which is mostly a distorted narration over a soundscape. (I think you'd really like it, Gavin, BTW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv0BV86aVKg ). I managed to track down Kevin Moore, who created it, on Facebook, and asked him:

Hi, Kevin. I am haunted by "Hell Mary", the last song on the first Chroma Key album. Is the vocal a sample? Where is it from?

He replied:

Good question - I forgot where I got the text, but just I entered it into a speech-to-text program

I have a horrible feeling this is pretty much what Shakespeare would say if asked about most of his plays.

Andrew Stevens said...

However, there’s a more interesting way of looking at it. Suppose we stop looking at writers as solitary enlightened geniuses, with bold notions springing fully formed from their Olympian brows, and start looking at them as lightning conductors of the zeitgeist. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is prevalent in Britain, you can probably pick it up easier than the coronavirus. Why wouldn’t it worm its way into a writer’s work?

And that’s a notion of how art works which was not particularly contested for most of history. The sole genius is just another thing Romanticism lumbered us with.


It would, of course, be silly to say that Shakespeare wasn't a part of his "zeitgeist" and received ideas from it. Of course he did. I doubt anybody disputes this. But it is reality which lumbers us with the idea of "genius."

I had a coworker who once said to me, "I have heard Shakespeare was overrated." I responded, "Well, 'overrated' is a relative term. However, if Shakespeare had written just one of 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' 'Othello,' or 'Macbeth,' his reputation would be more assured than Christopher Marlowe's. He wrote them all and several other great plays besides."

If Mr. Burrows's theory was correct and any person was as good as any other, this would not happen.

Andrew Stevens said...

But then, speaking of Marxism, I am reminded of the debate between the "Great Man" theory of history and the "social forces" theory of history. Tolstoy seemed to believe that, absent Napoleon, the French would all have picked up and invaded Russia anyway. He took the "social forces" theory so seriously that he believed it was basically impossible for a single man to have had an effect. This seems ludicrous to me. Of course, "social forces" is not meaningless and they do indeed have an effect. The U.S. probably gets into World War 2 on the side of the Allies no matter who was President, though FDR was helpful (to those of us who are glad the U.S. did get into the War). But the idea that history runs pretty much the same way absent Julius Caesar just seems silly to me.

I can also say pretty much the same about the genetics/environment debate. The science is very clear that both matter. If, for example, you're dealing with an extreme intellectual outlier like Einstein, I think it's nearly inevitable that you'll find that he had very large advantages in both genetics and environment. (Though sometimes the "advantages" one finds in environment are not obviously so at first blush. E.g. "privilege" is very often a hindrance, not a help.)

If this is the case, I’m still absolutely unclear why you would bother with the text in the first place.

Because the question of who to ask what would never occur to me without the text? Honestly, this one still seems to have an easy answer to me.

You also seem fairly certain they won’t just reply “I don’t know”, which seems to me a strong possibility.

Always a possibility. I wouldn't be surprised if a writer said, "Huh. I didn't even remember I wrote that."

Andrew Stevens said...

If this is the case, I’m still absolutely unclear why you would bother with the text in the first place.

It should also, I think, go without saying that in a work of art like Othello, meaning is probably not even the most important thing about it and certainly not the only thing about it. After all, I can appreciate the beauty and the quality of construction of a spiderweb without thinking it has any meaning at all.

SK said...

Interesting as this discussion of meaning is, and much as I would like to weigh in by pointing to Paul Grice, can I ask another question going back to the original article?

What is racism?

Is it the belief that those you perceive as a different race to yourself are somehow lesser (less human? Less intelligent? Less worth caring about?) than those you perceive to be the same race as yourself?

Is it an animus towards those you perceive to a different race to yourself, whether or not you think they are lesser or greater?

Is it anything which results in differential outcomes for different types of people, so that you can have 'racism' even if nobody involved thinks any less or any differently of anybody because of the race they perceive them to be?

Is it something else?

Because I do think a lot of these 'that's racist!' 'No it's not!' 'yes it is!' argy-bargies, especially on the inter-net, come down at root to people using sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly different definitions of the words 'racist' and 'racism'. And that therefore if one is going to talk about it one ought first to set out one's definition clearly, so that the rest of the article can be understood by substituting that definition anywhere the word 'racism' or 'racist' is used.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I am not sure that texts, in that sense, have "meanings". Even very didactic ones: would there be any point in saying "The meaning of Animal Farm is that communism is bad"? I think that what we are talking about is "interpretation" - how you read particular passages, characters or motifs. And there is no one right interpretation, athough there maybe several wrong ones.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think I kind of tackled that, but yes, calling the back kid a nasty name; happening for some reason not to have any black people working for your company; and having a theory that black people are genetically suited to doing what white people tell them are not necessarily the same thing. It was specifically said in Doctor Who Monthly that Weng Chiang could not be racist (and the people who thought it was were snowflakes) because Robert Holmes did not personally dislike asian people.

I think that using terms like chink, ching-chong and (in that sense) yellow Is highly likely to be hurtful to Asian people; and if you chose to use them, you are saying "the feelings of Asian people are not very important", which may imply a (possibly unconscious) assumption that white people matter more than Asian people; and the routine use of hurtful expressions contributes to different outcomes.

I would be very prepared to argue that Terror of the Autons is more seriously racist than Talons of Weng Chiang because it simply doesn't have any black or Asian people in it. "But that means everything is racist". Yes, yes it does.

I probably tend to the view that Talons of Weng Chiang is "making fun of Chinese people in a very nasty way" rather than "promoting an anti-Chinese ideology". But since I'm not the one being made fun of, I need to be a bit careful of that. I was surprised to read earlier this week that A Princess of Mars was still regarded as a majorly problematic book. My first reaction was to say "Oh, come on, it mentions in passing that the hero is a Virginian soldier, and therefore a slave-owner (who was nice to his slaves and liked by them) but that's a really small part of the text". My second reaction was to say "Suppose your ancestor was one of those slaves?" My third was to say "Suppose that a really cool 1950s German language space opera had mentioned in passing that the noble hero had had a previous career as a really excellent Gestapo agent: would you regard that as so unproblematic?"

Ditto Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show.
]

Andrew Stevens said...

"But that means everything is racist". Yes, yes it does.

Yes, given the standard definition of racism (which I agree with - I just want a stronger word to use to describe Nazis), I completely agree with this. This is why I am largely indifferent to arguments about the racism of any given work. Can Tolkien be read as noble Europeans fighting against the forces of darkness coming out of Asia and Africa? Of course he can. Does this mean that Tolkien was at least subconsciously racist? Sure. Can you say that about virtually everyone? Yes. Can an author try to write the most inclusive intersectional text ever and still be accused of racism? Yes.

As for the stronger word for hateful racists, even that wouldn't matter much. We used to have such a word for sexism. Am I a sexist? Sure. Am I a misogynist? Absolutely not. Would a lot of people nowadays be happy to describe me as misogynist even though I obviously am not? Yes.

SK said...

Yep, yep, yep, all good points.

But, I note that you still haven't explained what you mean by 'racist' or 'racism'. What you've done is given a list of things which you think could be called racist, or racism, along with the reasons why you think they could be called that. And they're good examples and perfectly sensible reasons.

However, unless you intend all questions of 'is this racist?' to be settled by a kind of common-law precedent system, where we try to work out whether they are sufficiently close to something we have previously agree to be racist, then simply enumerating examples won't do as a definition. Especially if what we are trying to do is classify edge conditions, and the examples are all of unambiguous, central exampls of the thing being classified.

What we need for that is a definition of, well, ideally what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be racist, or an instance of racism? for example is it necessary that there be some animus towards people on the grounds of their perceived race (presumably that's the Doctor Who Monthly) argument) or is that merely a sufficient but not necessary condition? Or is the existence of actual animus neither necessary nor sufficient? Are differential outcomes a necessary part of racism, or can someone be racist if they hate people they perceive to be of another race, even if they have no way to affect outcomes so their hate is entirely ineffectual? Are differential outcomes sufficient to identify racism even if nobody involved thinks that any type of person matters more than any other type of person?

Otherwise we risk getting into the same position with regards 'racism' as you identify with pornography in the article, where the only definition is 'I know it when I see it'. As you rightly wrote, 'gut feelings are not a very good guide to anything'.

SK said...

given the standard definition of racism

Out of interest could you specify what you mean by 'the standard definition'? I think there are several competing definitions out there and each of them has advocates who would say it was the 'standard' one so it would be helpful to know to which one you are referring here.

SK said...

(Or perhaps there's no single necessary or sufficient condition but instead there's a selection of different criteria where each one adds up and once the total is over a certain threshold then that's racist, perhaps with a gradual grey area between 'not at all racist' and 'definitely racist'; or something else; but the point is to get principles by which we can judge whether something is racist rather than just examples or leaving it all up to 'gut feelings'.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Good question. When I say "standard definition," I am in fact talking about a rather old-fashioned definition. I would say it means "the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities and that it is at least sometimes appropriate to use that as a basis for treating them differently." In this sense, I am a racist. In this sense, I think virtually everyone is a racist. I am, for example, much more tolerant of conspiracy theories from African-Americans than I am for the same conspiracy theories from European-Americans. There are very good reasons, historically speaking, why African-Americans are more susceptible to conspiracy theories. They were conspired against for at least 350 years of American history! If they believe a majority (or more) of white Americans are still out to get them, I understand. They are even right about that in some senses. (In the sense that everyone wants their children to at least not move down the ladder of socio-economic hierarchy, for example.) I am also much more tolerant and open-minded about policies which treat African-Americans different and better than white Americans in a way I would not be for most other groups.

I once took pretty seriously the idea that black people might be, on average, better than white people. (Look up Sun People/Ice People, which argues that black people evolved to be more cooperative and white people to be more ruthless and competitive.) The evidence I considered in favor of this was based on a false belief that serial killers were much more common among white people than among black people. (The history of slavery never impressed me since I have always been reasonably sure that if Africa had had the technological advantage, it would not have been very much kinder to Europe than Europe was to Africa.) I now believe that the races are all pretty roughly the same, morally speaking.

For the record, my sexism consists of believing that women are, on average, better than men.

Andrew Stevens said...

By the way, I take the origin of nearly all these racial differences to be cultural and have no need of the hypothesis that any of them are genetic (though some of them might be). I.e. I also believe that the English possess different characteristics, abilities, or qualities from Americans and the Belgians possess still others.

Andrew Stevens said...

(Also, I take the origin of the differences between men and women to be both cultural and biological. I think it would be very difficult to create a society where men are, on average, better than women due to how much of it I believe is actually biological in origin.)

SK said...

When I say "standard definition," I am in fact talking about a rather old-fashioned definition. I would say it means "the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities and that it is at least sometimes appropriate to use that as a basis for treating them differently."

Right, that is definitely a usable definition of racism and I think you're right that there are very many people who would consider it the 'standard' one (though perhaps there were more who would have considered it that in the past than there are today).

I am going to carefully make no comment on whether I think it's a good definition or whether I agree with you, but it is certainly a definition.

I take the origin of nearly all these racial differences to be cultural and have no need of the hypothesis that any of them are genetic

The reason I am always careful, as I was above, to specify that racism is about treating people differently based on their perceived race is that, genetically, 'race' is a meaningless concept.

Andrew Stevens said...

It's not a completely meaningless concept. I am 1/64 black and 63/64 European, almost all of that from the English peoples. Some people in the South in the early 20th century would say that makes me "black" (the so-called "one drop" rule). This is, of course, ridiculous. In fact, I am very "white." Which is to say that the large majority of my ancestors evolved pale skin in order to absorb more Vitamin D from the sun in climates where sunlight was, at least part of the year, much rarer. That is a real thing. So are the frequency of genes in black populations which lead to increased resistance to malaria, but also lead to much more incidences of sickle cell anemia.

Andrew Stevens said...

Sigh. I meant, of course, to say "many more." I am getting very old and unwell.

SK said...

It's not a completely meaningless concept

It is completely meaningless. Genetic variation between what have historically been 'races' is far smaller than genetic variation with them. The cosmetic differences which are what people have traditionally used to classify people into 'races' are, from a genetic point of view, insignificant. The really significant genetic differences are invisible and do not correlate with the cosmetic differences.

So are the frequency of genes in black populations which lead to increased resistance to malaria, but also lead to much more incidences of sickle cell anemia.

This is a good case in point. You write 'black populations'. There's no such thing as 'black populations'.

There are indeed genes which lead to increased resistance to malaria, but also lead to much more incidences of sickle cell anemia, and these are indeed found more often in some populations who also have genes for higher levels of melanin in their skin.

But there are far more populations who also have the genes for higher levels of melanin in their skin, but who do not have any higher incidence of the genes which lead to increased resistance to malaria and a higher incidence of sickle cell disease.

If you were to pick, at random, two people from the UK with the exact same shade of skin colour, and, at random, two people with very different skin colours, the two with the same skin colour are no more likely to share a higher percentage of their genetic code than the two with different skin colours.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Yes. If you take a concept -- courage, cheese, the colour purple -- and keep asking "yes, but what do you been by..." you eventually run out of answers, and have to admit that you don't know what you mean by courage, cheese, or the colour purple. Although you still know brave things cheesy thing and purple things when you see them. This is, quite literally, all in Plato.

By all means drop the word "racism" from the vocabulary altogether: the lady who phoned up LBC was a white nationalist (she thought you couldn't be black and British); the person who assumed the Philippine mum was the nanny was prejudiced or guilty of negative stereotyping (she assumed that everyone of that ethnicity had a low status job); the people who want to celebrate slavery and the empire are white supremicists (they think it is natural that white people should be in charge of black people). Talons of Weng Chiang is "making fun of Chinese people in a nasty way."

I think we talked about this under Science Fiction, above. I am quite within my rights to tell a high school English Class that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy (a story with a sad ending) and quite within my rights to tell my PhD students that Romeo and Juliet is not a tragedy (not driven by fate, no sense of harmatia or catharsis). "Yes but what actually IS tragedy..." only remains interesting for so long.

Or we can talk about features in common and family resemblances if you like. Apparently Wittigenstien was the creator of the monster and not the monster itself.

Andrew Stevens said...

SK, you seem to be saying that it is largely meaningless, but are then being forced to concede that it is not entirely meaningless.

Genetic variation between what have historically been 'races' is far smaller than genetic variation with them.

Nobody who has studied the science would deny this. (Well, probably not nobody. You can virtually always find people who will deny any proposition, no matter what it is.)

If you were to pick, at random, two people from the UK with the exact same shade of skin colour, and, at random, two people with very different skin colours, the two with the same skin colour are no more likely to share a higher percentage of their genetic code than the two with different skin colours.

This is almost certainly untrue. Though most people don't share a lot of DNA in common with each other, even if they are of the same race. But "no more likely" is a very strong statement and almost certainly a false one. Do you have a link to a study showing this?

Andrew Stevens said...

(I should probably have said, "a lot of significant, expressed DNA in common." Otherwise, someone will point out that we share 98% of our DNA with chimps and about 60% with bananas.)

SK said...

Yes yes yes in the end it's all language games, all signifiers are arbitrary, etc etc etc.

But.

You will accept, presumably, that it is possible for people to be talking at cross purposes? That sometimes, when people are arguing over whether something is X or not X, the issue in question might — just might — not be a disagreement about the thing, but about the definition of X?

Assuming you agree that that can happen, the best way I can think of to work out whether a given disagreement is an instance of it is for anyone who is — say — writing an article about the disagreement, to be clear up-front about what the definition of X is that they are using?

I am quite within my rights to tell a high school English Class that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy (a story with a sad ending) and quite within my rights to tell my PhD students that Romeo and Juliet is not a tragedy (not driven by fate, no sense of harmatia or catharsis).

Of course you are. But presumably you would be consistent about what you mean by 'tragedy' when talking to your PhD students, and when talking to your 'high school English class' (going American, are we?) , even if you used a different definition for each? That is, you would agree that it is bad form to chop-and-change definitions of an important concept within the same argument? I mean most people agree that's bad form, there's even a name for it, which is 'equivocation'.

I'm not asking for you to give The One True Universal Definition Of Racism For All Time And All Audiences. That would obviously be unreasonable. But you've written a long essay on whether a given thing is racist. I think it's reasonable to ask what the definition of racism that you are using in this essay is. I mean, you have clearly put a lot of thought into the easy, so you must have thought about what you meant by 'racist' and have a coherent definition that doesn't rely on the 'gut feelings' that, indeed, you write are 'not a very good guide to anything'.

That way someone who disagrees with you can work out more easily whether they disagree with you about the thing, or whether they agree with you about the thing but just disagree with you about the definition you are using for 'racist'.

Or we can talk about features in common and family resemblances if you like

We could, but I'm not sure it would help with the key thing here, which is working out if people have a real substantive difference on the question of whether something is racist, or whether they are just talking at cross-purposes because they disagree about the definition of 'racist'.

Saying 'but — aha — all definitions are arbitrary!' might be all very clever, but it doesn't really contribute meaningfully to the cause of clarifying where exactly the disagreements lie.

After all, say we were arguing about whether something was or was not cheese. You insisted it was, I insisted it wasn't. You could go on about how meaningless the concept of cheese is. Or you could just spell out the definition of cheese you were using, and I could spell out the one I'm using, and we could discover the actual disagreement isn't about the thing, but that I was insisting that only unpasteurised cheese could properly be called cheese.

Then we could move on to you trying to convince me that my definition is stupid. but until we set out what we actually mean by 'cheese' we're not going to discover what we are actually arguing about, and we will just go around in circles.

Andrew Stevens said...

But, as I have already said, I take the origin of most racial differences we observe to be cultural rather than genetic. Charles Murray gets into trouble because he believes A) that other races have significantly higher IQs on average than black people (an observed fact) and B) that he doesn't find it likely that 100% of the difference is explained by culture.

The mistake that Mr. Murray is making is that 200% of the difference could be explained by culture. It is well within the realm of possibility that black people are genetically smarter (as measured by IQ tests) than other races. I take Mr. Murray's failure to reason properly here to be intellectual rather than moral in origin. (Mr. Murray is abundantly clear that he does not consider "smarter" to equal "better.")

Andrew Stevens said...

(Note that "explained by culture" can most certainly include "explained by racism against them by other races.")

SK said...

SK, you seem to be saying that it is largely meaningless, but are then being forced to concede that it is not entirely meaningless.

Um no. If genetic variation within what have been perceived as 'races' is greater than genetic variation within them — if two people from the same 'race' are no more likely to be genetically similar than two people from different 'races' — then the concept of 'race' is, genetically, entirely meaningless.

The idea that someone from, say, Ghana, is the same 'race' as someone from, say, Zimbabwe, just because they have the same skin colour, when genetically they are probably more different than either one of them is from a light-skinned European, is obvious nonsense.

See for example: https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269

This is almost certainly untrue. Though most people don't share a lot of DNA in common with each other, even if they are of the same race. But "no more likely" is a very strong statement and almost certainly a false one. Do you have a link to a study showing this?

It's pretty much the definition of there being greater genetic variation within 'races' than between them, when you agreed that nobody would deny.

Andrew Rilstone said...

SK - I have agreed with you that I have no definition of racism, that it is not a helpful word, and that I am happy to describe Talons of Weng Chiang as "a story which makes fun of Chinese people in rather a horrible way". I am not sure how much further you want me to go.

Gavin Burrows said...

”But it is reality which lumbers us with the idea of “genius.”

Were that the case, the concept of artistic genius would be transhistoric. But we know it isn’t.

” If Mr. Burrows's theory was correct and any person was as good as any other”

I’m not sure I find this false binary a convincing way of looking at things. All the caveats appear to apply only to one side. Genius expression may turn out to be unconscious, but unless you think ‘Talons’ is really blueberry pie you must actually be on my side. There are more things on heaven and earth, as Elizabethan society once said.

For example, this statement doesn’t relate to what I’m saying. For one thing, someone could be a better lightning conductor than another. David Bowie certainly was, to name one.

”speaking of Marxism’

I’m not sure we were. And Tolstoy wasn’t a Marxist in any case. True, it was me who mentioned the Gulf War. But my point there was that the Po Mo insistence that it should be seen as a text, rather than an actual historical event.

My argument is - the text may start with the artist but doesn’t stop there. And encountering the reader(s) enlarges the text. So, much like children, texts need to be begat. But like children they’re not entirely defined by that act of creation. I’m arguing for folk culture over high culture. Or more accurately that in practice it’s always folk culture, but that folk culture has barriers and toll-booths imposed upon it, by a combination of high culture and the market mechanism. People mistake them for the culture. In fact it’s the other way round, they need a culture which doesn’t need them.

Gavin Burrows said...

Because I love clicking on traffic lights, I’m back.

”The history of slavery never impressed me since I have always been reasonably sure that if Africa had had the technological advantage, it would not have been very much kinder to Europe than Europe was to Africa.”

”I take the origin of nearly all these racial differences to be cultural and have no need of the hypothesis that any of them are genetic”

These statements seem to contradict somewhat. And the problem’s with the first one.

It seems true enough that the slave trade was driven by opportunity, and motivation followed. In other words the concept of racist hierarchies, the stuff you told yourself to make it all seem okay, didn’t lead to people enslaving others, it was more the other way round. It was a necessary contingent of the slave trade, but not a cause.

But the way round it happened is the way round it happened, and that makes a material difference. Particularly so once you concede race is nothing but a cultural construct.

As the question, why are there so many more white supremacists than black? There are some black supremacists, true, but clearly nowhere near as many. And that’s because we still live in a society that confers advantages on white people. The white supremacist parses these as unique qualities of whiteness. Black supremacists don’t have that, they always need to run against the grain of the society they’re in.

”"But that means everything is racist". Yes, yes it does.”

Yes. Everything in this racist society is, to some degree or other, racist. Arguing otherwise is like saying you could live in a swamp and not get wet. It’s vital, in fact, we get there and realise this. But, just to make the point, you can be racist and still be anti-racist. The same way you could be an alcoholic but want to quit.

Andrew Stevens said...

It's pretty much the definition of there being greater genetic variation within 'races' than between them, when you agreed that nobody would deny.

Not at all! They are quite different statements. One is true and the other is false. (To be fair though, analyzing data and such is what I do for a living. I can understand why a layman might make the error you have.)

Were that the case, the concept of artistic genius would be transhistoric. But we know it isn’t.

I certainly think it is. The idea of genius, full stop, certainly is. (See the preferential preservation of the works of Aristotle and Cicero.) I suppose I could not prove that people in the Middle Ages regarded Aristophanes as an artistic genius, but I'm pretty sure they did.

I’m not sure I find this false binary a convincing way of looking at things.

I have read both yours and Mr. Rilstone's essays. You certainly act as if you're very interested in the intent of the artist. As I believe you should be. (Freely granting that the artist may have subconscious intentions, that the artist may have been deliberately ambiguous and never decided what something means even in his own mind, and that the artist may literally have meant nothing at all, just like a spider.)

I’m not sure we were. And Tolstoy wasn’t a Marxist in any case.

I agree, but hostility to the Great Man theory of history was certainly something he and Marx had in common.

I’m arguing for folk culture over high culture. Or more accurately that in practice it’s always folk culture, but that folk culture has barriers and toll-booths imposed upon it, by a combination of high culture and the market mechanism. People mistake them for the culture. In fact it’s the other way round, they need a culture which doesn’t need them.

Yes, I do agree that we have different emphases.

Andrew Stevens said...

These statements seem to contradict somewhat. And the problem’s with the first one.

No, I don't agree. But that's because I believe in a common human nature, which all the races have in common and I know you don't agree with me on that. Of course, history is contingent. It is certainly possible that Africans would have been much kinder to Europeans (for whatever reason) than Europeans were to Africans. Perhaps the enslavement would have been gentler (to be fair, I do think this not unlikely - race-based chattel slavery was much worse than other slaveries had been); I suppose it's even possible that Africans would not have enslaved the Europeans at all (this I do not find at all likely though).

Andrew Rilstone said...

I am interested in how a work is produced. My understanding to the Beatles expanded when I walked from 251 Menlove Ave to Strawberry Fields.

I do not think that you can use the idea of the author to exclude particular ways of reading texts.

I sometimes use "Stan Lee said" or "Saint Mark" said as a convenient shorthand for "I find this on the page".

The options are not "Either the author has 100% veto on all reading and interpretation of his text" or "You are not allowed to mention authors at all."

Gavin Burrows said...

It’s generally agreed that the concepts of the artistic genius, and that art is inherently about self-expression starts with Romanticism. This notion then seeped backwards in time so it got applied to, say, Shakespeare. In fact especially Shakespeare as they tended to be fans of his. And now he's many people's go-to example.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(literature))

What Andrew says about the options. I don’t have an inherent opposition to questions of artistic intent, or of biography. Much of the time you probably make the artist a character in your own mental drama, until Shakespeare is scarcely less a character to you than Hamlet. But that’s fine. My point is that in general there’s too much emphasis on this, that there’s other things we should look at that matter just as much. How much emphasis is actually appropriate, that will wary from artist to artist, or work to work.

I very often read on the internet someone explaining what Marx said, and what is wrong with it. I used to think it a good idea to try and correct them. Finally I gave up and switched, so now I only speak up when someone gets Marx right. I get a lot more time off that way. I’m staying quiet now, in fact.

With your second comment, sorry but I’m not sure you’ve picked me up right. My point wasn’t to deny that Africa could have sent slave ships, had things been the other way up, which it looks like you’re replying to.

Yay, more traffic light ticking!

Andrew Stevens said...

It’s generally agreed that the concepts of the artistic genius, and that art is inherently about self-expression starts with Romanticism. This notion then seeped backwards in time so it got applied to, say, Shakespeare. In fact especially Shakespeare as they tended to be fans of his. And now he's many people's go-to example.

Ah, thank you! Now I understand. The slipperiness of the word "genius." I am only using it in the sense of superior skill and ability (whether that is innate or, as in the very large majority of it, developed). E.g. from the Wikipedia article, "the belief in a special trait that makes the artist above the run of humanity, and more particularly the view that skill is inferior to imagination, has been in decline." I am perfectly fine with the decline of that belief. I certainly do not share the belief that artists are above the run of humanity nor that skill is inferior to imagination (though I would rank imagination as among the skills or abilities artists can have). So, you see, another point where we actually agree.

Andrew Stevens said...

I tend to use the word "genius" in a very old-fashioned way, simply meaning someone who is in an extremely small segment of the population for some intellectual skill or ability. So, for example, I believe a man can be a genius even if he spent his entire life trying to solve a problem which turned out to be insoluble or, at least, which he was never able to solve (e.g. curing cancer). I realize that other people use the word "genius" to mean things which I don't even believe in (e.g. "above the run of humanity") or who equate "genius" with accomplishments rather than ability. (E.g. if the exact same man had actually cured cancer, they would acknowledge he was a genius.)

Andrew Stevens said...

I do not think that you can use the idea of the author to exclude particular ways of reading texts.

We are still in disagreement then, I suppose. I will give a contrast here. I believe it is ludicrously implausible that Conan Doyle was coding Holmes and Watson as gay. Thus, I believe that interpretation is ruled out. On the other hand, was Shirley Jackson coding the character of Theodora in The Haunting of Hill House as gay? Quite possibly! Neither theory is explicitly confirmed in the texts, but the evidence for one is extremely weak (especially when one adds information about the author) and the evidence for the other (including what we know about the author) is quite strong.

Andrew Stevens said...

If we are not trying to decide what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was trying to do, then I don't even know what it would even mean to ask the question, "Were Holmes and Watson gay?" They obviously did not have homosexual relations with each other within the body of the texts, after all.

Andrew Rilstone said...

you are commenting on the story

you are commenting on things which happen in the stories

look you are saying they hang out in saunas prefer each others company to women and call each other my dear

you are talking about the text

the response to point out other things they do in the story and to talk about the text better than me

I don't think holmes was gay but I totally think spider-man was jewish

Andrew Rilstone said...

https://open.spotify.com/track/7FQqpytcwjFJgvYooQTOmR?si=dfa3ce6610964c9f

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh, you mean why I think Holmes and Watson aren't gay? Because Holmes is pretty explicitly asexual. (Watson is quite explicitly heterosexual, though that doesn't rule out homosexual activity with Holmes.)

"It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer."

"I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix."

I suppose it is possible that Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg just may have created a Jewish character but then named him Peter Parker to hide the fact.

Andrew Stevens said...

On another site once, somebody told me that he knew for a fact that Conan Doyle had admitted that Watson and Holmes were gay and Conan Doyle was making some anti-homosexual point about decadence or some such. Apparently, he had been informed of this by his English teacher.

This was wrong on so many levels that I did not even know how to begin.

Andrew Rilstone said...

There you are you see. Now we are talking about the texts, which we have in front of us, and not Conan Doyle's intention, which we don't. Much more interesting.

If we could find a piece of paper saying "Watson and Holmes were gay, signed Doyle" it would still be a very silly way of reading the text.

I think, that like Frodo and Sam, they are probably best seen as "homosocial": a kind of relationship that was more common in the days of the army and boys boarding schools and men's clubs than today. It is not insignificant that Watson specifically says of Holmes what Plato said of Socrates ("I shall ever consider him the best and wisest man I ever met".) We all know what a Platonic relationship is.

The question doesn't change if it becomes about Lee and Kirby rather than Conan Doyle. Whether they "would have" created a Jewish character called Parker, or whether they "intended him" to be Jewish isn't interesting. The question is "How is portrayed in the text itself" and "Does a reading in which he is Jewish make more or less sense than a reading in which he is Episcopalian."

SK said...

SK - I have agreed with you that I have no definition of racism, that it is not a helpful word, and that I am happy to describe Talons of Weng Chiang as "a story which makes fun of Chinese people in rather a horrible way". I am not sure how much further you want me to go.

Sorry, I misread you, I thought you were defending your use of the word 'racism'. You weren't. My apologies.

Mike Taylor said...

Late to this party, but commenting here purely in my capacity as a mathematician:

SK writes "If genetic variation within what have been perceived as 'races' is greater than genetic variation within them — if two people from the same 'race' are no more likely to be genetically similar than two people from different 'races' — then the concept of 'race' is, genetically, entirely meaningless."

This is incorrect. Proof by example: posit two populations, one of which determines strength by rolling 3d6 at birth, the other of which rolls 3d6+1. Variation within the second population is much greater than the average difference between the populations, but it's still unambiguously the case the second population is stronger. So a difference between the populations would be real, despite the large overlap.

Mike Taylor said...

Gavin writes: "Yes. Everything in this racist society is, to some degree or other, racist. Arguing otherwise is like saying you could live in a swamp and not get wet."

You're not wrong. But you're also not right in a way that is useful. I am reminded of this:

Dash: But our powers make us special!
Elastigirl: Everyone is special, Dash.
Dash: Which is another way of saying that no one is.

If we agree that everything is racist, what word are we going to use when we want to highlight racism?

Andrew Rilstone said...

"Very racist" :)

Andrew Stevens said...

We are in agreement on Holmes and Watson and Frodo and Sam. Indeed, I think it is interesting that there was such a large rise in "gay readings" of both texts and it tells us something of the change in the culture. People both A) stopped believing in chastity and B) stopped believing that two males could be close friends without any sexual attraction. Doyle and Tolkien, of course, came from different cultures than we have today.

Whether they "would have" created a Jewish character called Parker, or whether they "intended him" to be Jewish isn't interesting.

On the contrary, I think it is very interesting. And obviously that Lee and Kirby both changed their names to be less obviously Jewish is an enormous point in favor of your reading. (And I don't even know what evidence you might have from the texts themselves.)

Andrew Stevens said...

There is nothing in the text of Homer that would cause anyone to think Achilles and Patroclus were lovers. But this became an enormously popular interpretation during the Greek Enlightenment.

Andrew Stevens said...

This is incorrect. Proof by example: posit two populations, one of which determines strength by rolling 3d6 at birth, the other of which rolls 3d6+1. Variation within the second population is much greater than the average difference between the populations, but it's still unambiguously the case the second population is stronger. So a difference between the populations would be real, despite the large overlap.

Thank you, yes. It would be extremely surprising (in fact, utterly implausible in my opinion) if people with similar skin colors showed no greater genetic similarity than people of very different skin colors. Just the greater possibility of relatedness would ensure that would not happen. Nevertheless, the genetic variation of anything at all (except perhaps melanin) would be much larger within each population than the genetic variation between populations and this is a very robust finding.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Words like schnook and nebbish applied to him.

Shy, neurotic, angsty, ("why's all this shit happen to me?")

Believes he can and should pay for his past sins in this life.

Has over-attentive mother figures who thinks the sun rises and sets for him and feeds him chicken soup.

Frivolously claims that he provides entertainment for weddings and bar mitzfahs

Grew up in Forest Hills.

Outsider, other children at his school prejudiced against him.

Has sense of being chosen by a higher power; chosen-status tends to bring unhappiness on him.

Clashes with WASP Johnny Storm (who frivolously quotes protestant hymns)

Quotes from the book of Ruth but never from the Christian Bible.

Three of the four creators who claim to have originated character were Jewish.

One of the creators frequently compares him with Wodoy Allan

No references to churches, Christian rites of passage or Christian-style prayers. (Compare
Daredevil and Batman, radio Superman, for example.)

Repartee consciously imitates, and sometimes directly quotes, Groucho Marx.

Derided and lied about in the media.

Born at end of World War II. (16 in 1962.) Both parents dead and never spoken of.

Gavin Burrows said...

”I tend to use the word "genius" in a very old-fashioned way, simply meaning someone who is in an extremely small segment of the population for some intellectual skill or ability.”

Then a genuine question, cannot there be a genius reader?

Clearly the internet commentator who replies to a post on ‘Pyramids of Mars’ to say “the Doctor’ll have to be played by a man now we’ve got our country back, RU triggered libtards, freeze peach Tommeh” is just sticking their oar in.

But what about the active reader? The one who engages with the text and spots things in it others don’t? Is Andrew a genius for having read and commented on Ditko’s Spider-Man?

Or, to stretch the point further, could I be called a genius? Because I’ve read Ditko’s Spider-man too, you know. At which point something has clearly gone wrong. But as the process seems robust enough it must be the initial premise that’s wrong.

”There you are you see. Now we are talking about the texts, which we have in front of us, and not Conan Doyle's intention, which we don't. Much more interesting.“

You know the feeling when you had a toothache but it goes? And your mind had been focused on that tiny part of your mouth which caused so much pain? And how for a short while it carries on being as focused, so the lack of pain feels positively blissful? I feel like that right now.

I think Spider-Man is Jewish and the Thing is black.

Gavin Burrows said...

Racist
XL Racist
XXL Racist

Mike you may come to wish you hand’t asked me this. I will try to be as brief as I can. But I won't be very good at that.

First let’s pretend there’s only anti-black racism. Particularly egregious when the OP was about anti-Chinese racism, but it keeps things simpler.

White people (like me) can tend to view racism as specific, intentional acts of malevolence. Name-calling, threats, assault and so on. This has the advantage of confining racism to a group of nasty people called “racists”. And as most people tend to view themselves as not nasty but nice, this means they cannot be racist. “‘Talons’ cannot be racist unless Holmes intended it to” comes from here.

But ask black people and they tend to give a different answer. They’ll talk about the time they didn’t get a job they were well-qualified for, that flat which strangely turned out to be let rather suddenly, the security guard who followed them round the store even though they weren’t behaving any differently to anyone else.

White people will often talk blithely about institutional racism without really getting it. They tend to believe it refers to an institution with lots of racists in it, so the problem with the cops becomes “bad apples” and so on. But it’s what it says on the lid - the institution itself is racist. This is the failing in the thinking there should be more black cops. Places where they’ve managed to do that, ask them off duty and the black cops still talk like black people, about how racism concerns them and so on. But on duty they'll behave just like other cops. Because at that point they’re part of the institution.

Or, put another way, the Government just published a report which ensured they denied the existence of institutional racism. Pretty clearly then, its institutional racism which is the problem. And challenging it becomes a political question. You can’t just remove the racism from it like fumigating a building. You need to transform the institution.

Black Lives Matter, overall, would seem to me to be doing pretty much the right thing. It rejects performative gestures, photo-ops from the powerful and feelgood platitudes. It challenges institutions. And it’s a groundswell, decentralised movement without much in the way of appointed leaders, in which both black and white people participate but which is based on the black experience. Not problem-free. But pretty good going.

Andrew Stevens said...

Then a genuine question, cannot there be a genius reader?

Sure. You could probably ask me for a commentary on George R.R. Martin if you wished. In most respects, I'm quite certain I'm a great deal smarter than he is. To give an extreme example of this, when Andrew Rilstone used to comment on the Daily Mail, I (silently) agreed with one of his critics here that this was all rather beneath him. Crushing a fly with a sledgehammer and for an audience which didn't include a single person who might have been helped by it (i.e. who was likely to otherwise believe whatever nonsense the Daily Mail was spouting).

Indeed, I often am interested in criticisms by "great readers." It's why I read any criticism at all. I just don't think they are telling me what a text means when they're giving, say, some wild interpretation of a text, though it may be fascinating in its own right. (On the other hand, generally speaking, the more perceptive the critic, the less likely he is to do that. On the other other hand, the more imaginative the critic, the more likely he is to do that.)

Andrew Stevens said...

As for myself, I consider myself a man of very high perception and very low imagination. I am fascinated by imagination, but I don't possess much myself and am rarely gulled by fanciful imaginative theories.

Andrew Stevens said...

(I am sure this occasionally steers me false, where a fanciful imaginative theory turns out to be true. It is possible that Elon Musk will continue to be successful, for example, despite my extremely grave doubts about the man and all his businesses. In my experience though, the number of true negatives is much more valuable than the number of false negatives.)

Andrew Stevens said...

As for Mr. Burrows and Mr. Rilstone specifically, I would be surprised if either of you did not qualify as a genius in the ordinary high-IQ sense (more than two standard deviations from the mean, or roughly 2% of the population) or at least come awfully close.

On the other hand, while it generally takes a person of high intellectual caliber to write a great work of literature, that isn't necessarily true of other artistic endeavors. Marlon Brando was a great actor, but as near as I can tell, was somewhat dumber than my pet spaniel.

Aonghus Fallon said...

I wonder how often a work mirrors an author’s value system? Anna Karenina might have been a much less sympathetic character were it not for suggestions made by Tolstoy’s wife.

Plus sometimes an interpretation of a certain work can supersede the author’s intentions - in a good way. Queen Maeve, a key character in 'The Tain', is commonly seen by Irish readers as an accurate depiction of emancipated Celtic womanhood. In fact, the author (a medieval monk) intended her to demonstrate how woman were promiscuous and disruptive.

Another example would be the plays of Martin McDonagh, which could be classified as the worst sort of stage Irishry, but which assume an integrity of their own when performed by an Irish cast.

And isn’t ‘race’ just something invented by racists? It’s impossible to define because it’s essentially a prejudice - the fact that African-Americans have appropriated a lot of racist terms (in an understandable attempt to neutralise their negative connotations) tends to blind one to this simple fact.

Andrew Stevens said...

I wonder how often a work mirrors an author’s value system?

It is, of course, quite possible to deliberately create a work which doesn't mirror one's own value system. (I have done it myself.) And it's extremely possible to create one unintentionally (see Mr. Burrows's example of a Mark Gatiss script).

Andrew Stevens said...

And isn’t ‘race’ just something invented by racists?

Melanin differences is a real thing. It may not be an important thing and may even correlate with virtually nothing else (though we do know some things which it definitely does correlate with), but it really does exist. I have circadian rhythm disorder, not uncommon among so-called white people, but nearly unknown among so-called black people.

Andrew Stevens said...

Food for thought: it is my opinion that racial/cultural differences are interesting and matter, but that our common humanity matters more. I think it is very easy to argue that the denial of any kind of human nature can easily lead one to different beliefs.

SK said...

Pretty clearly then, its institutional racism which is the problem. And challenging it becomes a political question. You can’t just remove the racism from it like fumigating a building. You need to transform the institution.

But won't the new, transformed institution just be racist too? Or if it isn't, how could you tell? By what objective standard can we judge whether an institution is more or less racist than it used to be?

Mike Taylor said...

SK's question does highlight one of the problems with saying "everything is racist". Unless we're prepared either to say that some things are not racist, or at least have some way of differentiating between more and less racist things, then how are we ever going to perceive improvement?

Because what we don't want is this:
* Metropolitan police force: racist
* Address this by reorganization and retraining
* Metropolitan police force: still racist
* Conclusion: there was no point doing anything

Gavin Burrows said...

”I would be surprised if either of you did not qualify as a genius in the ordinary high-IQ sense (more than two standard deviations from the mean, or roughly 2% of the population)”

Lumme, when the clocks changed I spent ages trying to figure out how to change the one on the microwave. God knows how the other 98% managed.

Though I make this point jocularly, I do think if this definition of genius could extend to… well, me it’s too elastic to be useful. You say ‘genius’, I say ‘active reader’. I’m also unconvinced on the division between perceptive and imaginative critic.

As Aonghus has managed something pithy, I’ll try to do the same for this question. To misquote David Mamet via Danny De Vito, “everybody needs the text. That’s why they call it ‘the text’.”

Gavin Burrows said...

”isn’t ‘race’ just something invented by racists?”

Pretty much, yes. Though in one way potentially misleading. There’s nothing wrong with race taken as a broad, cultural category. Some may say “I like listening to Fela Kuti which eating chicken jerk, it just feels me.” Or others “I prefer Ed Sheeran and fish and chips”. Beyond the usual disclaimers over Ed Sheeran, there’s not much of a problem there. It’s just someone expressing something about themselves, not making judgements about others.

Also, racists have started using this to disprove their racism. “So there’s no essentialist definition of race? Well that means I cannot be attacking you with this club then.”

Accused of anti-semitism, David Icke replied there was no such thing as Jewish, so the question couldn’t arise. I thought - either this won’t be true of Jewish people, or it will apply to any race. I looked it up. I found i) it’s the second one and ii) David Icke is full of shit. One of these things mildly surprised me.

’Melanin differences is a real thing.”

True, but the fact you say differences is telling. Melanin is not the ingredient that makes black people black. We all have varying levels of it, including the blondest Scandinavian you ever met.

Colour is sometimes used as a euphemism for race. And you can get people to agree that colour’s just a spectrum, and the way we divide it is arbitrary. In fact different cultures divide it in different places. Exactly the same is true of race, tho’ people have a harder time with accepting it.

”how are we ever going to perceive improvement?”

* Metropolitan police force: XXL racist
Address this by disbanding Metropolitan Police

Retraining is a classic example of the “bad apples” approach, which fails to recognise what institutional racism is. It’s precisely what I don’t mean. Racism is no more essential to human life than race is. It can be defeated. But it’s both deep-rooted and interwoven with other oppressions. This is sometimes even used as an excuse. So many more black people died of Coronavirus not because they were black but because they were poor. Phew, that was a close one, eh?

Which means if we solely try to eliminate racism we won’t be able to eliminate racism. In one way I welcome a government report which is such a whitewash. It shows us where the solution isn’t.

SK said...

Address this by disbanding Metropolitan Police

But won't whatever you replace it with also be racist? Or if it isn't, how could you tell? By what objective standard can we judge whether an institution is more or less racist than the institution it replaced?

Andrew Stevens said...

I do think if this definition of genius could extend to… well, me it’s too elastic to be useful.

I imagine you wouldn't qualify on most topics, just those which are your especial study. (It is a very rare person indeed who would qualify on virtually any topic.) I am uninterested in the works of at least 95% of all professional writers, probably more. So what I am thinking of as "genius level" is probably higher than the ordinary high-IQ definition of genius, but of course could be reached on some topics by people who wouldn't even qualify as a genius in the ordinary high-IQ sense.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I think that what we are coming to here is that people mean different things by things and they need to think about what they mean when they say something and clarify their terms where necessary.

Andrew Rilstone said...

January doesn't exist. We made up the calendar and we had to fudge a good deal to get 12 lunar cycles into one solar cycle.

On the other hand, if you say "January is a really bad time to go for a beach holiday in England" I would perfectly well understand what you meant.

Aonghus Fallon said...

'Melanin differences is a real thing.’

Absolutely - but red-haired people suffer from a whole plethora of unusual conditions due to their colouring and nobody has ever classified them as a distinct ‘race’.

‘There’s nothing wrong with race taken as a broad, cultural category.’

I actually think the negative outweighs the positives, mainly because you’re talking about something that can mean whatever you want it to mean - I’m thinking specifically of the US in this regard. I’d even argue that the term be removed from popular discourse entirely (something that I think is happening anyway, albeit slowly and discreetly).

SK said...

The fact that 'race' is made up by racists is true but given that the racists are the ones beating people up for bing the wrong race, it doesn't really matter that what they are beating people up for is all in their heads. Race might not be real but the being beaten up is.

There wasn't really a cabal of doctors planning to murder Stalin either, but that hardly mattered to the doctors who were tortured for being part of it.

Andrew Stevens said...

I actually think the negative outweighs the positives, mainly because you’re talking about something that can mean whatever you want it to mean - I’m thinking specifically of the US in this regard. I’d even argue that the term be removed from popular discourse entirely (something that I think is happening anyway, albeit slowly and discreetly).

Oh, my goodness, is that not true (in the U.S.) anymore. I think it was slowly and discreetly disappearing for most of my life, but then it made a roaring comeback circa 2010. (Nothing to do with President Obama, as far as I can tell, for what that's worth.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Absolutely - but red-haired people suffer from a whole plethora of unusual conditions due to their colouring and nobody has ever classified them as a distinct ‘race’.

Are you sure about that? We really do talk about redheads quite differently from the way we discuss blondes and brunettes and, I think, for more or less that reason.

See Tim Minchin.

Aonghus Fallon said...

A quick google suggests I may be talking through my arse. I'd heard apocryphal evidence that redheads have weaker immune systems and are thus more susceptible to certain cancers, but the wiki entry just mentions skin cancer, and there's even a plus - a higher tolerance to pain (albeit only certain kinds of pain).

Andrew Stevens said...

And possibly a lower tolerance for pain for certain other types of pain (e.g. they seem to need more anaesthetic). I had done all this research before for a redheaded friend of mine. (I have even irresponsibly speculated that a lower pain threshold for certain types of pain may even translate to emotional pain, thus explaining their supposed reputation for having bad tempers.)

I suspect if almost everybody in Ireland had red hair and just about nobody outside it did, we would be talking about the Irish as a different race. In any event, many, many characteristics which we do not view as racial now were viewed as racial in the past. See the Romans on the northern barbarians who were always described as huge, pale, gross, and stupid, whether it was the Cimbri, the Celts, the Gauls, the Germans, or whatever. The great-grandparents of modern U.S. Jews and Italians would be astonished that their great-grandchildren are now viewed as the same race as Rockefeller.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Absolutely. Plus in Europe most prejudices are predicated on nationality. Being a bigot in the US is a bit trickier because everybody is nominally an American citizen. Hence the survival of ‘race’ as a way of categorising people. This wasn’t viable for people from South America, so they’re categorised according to ethnicity.

Gavin Burrows said...

”I suspect if almost everybody in Ireland had red hair and just about nobody outside it did, we would be talking about the Irish as a different race.”

The Victorians used much the same racist tropes for Irish folk as they did black, ‘proving’ they had more ape-like craniums and the like. They even sometimes classified them as black.

People imagine nations are as fixed as they do race. Neat, inhabited silos. Fixed, stable borders which people rarely cross. In fact they work the way that race actually works. Completely fluid, while pretending to be solid.

”it made a roaring comeback circa 2010. (Nothing to do with President Obama, as far as I can tell,)

Racism re-arose as a consequence of neoliberalism. A society of such massive economic disparities will always need a whipping boy. As much as it was one over the other, it happened on a popular level first. There didn’t seem to be much point blaming Donald Trump for being rich - being rich made him seem untouchable. Whereas the black family down the road didn’t. Then Trump figures he can capitalise on this. (In general I see Trump and Johnson as craven opportunists, not master schemers.)

We’re often told this happened on class lines. The ‘indigenous’ white working class turns against the black. But there’s scant evidence for this, and it seems more just something some want to believe. Instead it seems much more generational. In a fast-changing world, whiteness represents the security of the past, when things were still ‘ordinary’. And as lots of things are taken from you, your whiteness seems to be unassailable.

And for the younger generation it’s the reverse. The BLM demos here in Brighton had a very clear demographic. But there were no more black faces than you’d normally see on the street. Instead the common factor was youth. As the old get more racist, the young get more anti-racist. (With exceptions. I was on those BLM demos, where I must have looked more like an old codger than normal.)

We seem to have strayed a long way from ‘Talons’. Shall I go back and check if its still racist?

Andrew Stevens said...

I think your interpretation of what is happening in the U.S. is quite wrong in a number of different ways, but that's another debate. Just as a factual matter, for example, economic disparities were declining at the time. (Though, of course, the perception of economic disparities may have been increasing for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with reality.)

My problem with blaming the concept of race on racists is that we all seem to be agreed here that racists constitute pretty much 100% of humans who exist or who have ever existed.

Gavin Burrows said...

Perception versus reality of economic deprivation is a strange, almost un-entanglable thing. Hardline Trump supporters don’t tend to be economically disadvantaged at all. And in Britain theres been a feedback loop of older people voting Tory, the Tories doing more to benefit them and so on. Arguments Brexit would make Britain worse off largely washed over hardline Brexiters, who were more fixated on cultural signifiers, flags, “foreigners telling us what to do” and so on. (That whole debate was largely cross-purposes between cultural and economic arguments, with culture winning.)

Overall, the perception’s important, and it wouldn’t be there if someone wasn’t getting deprived. And it combines with feeling culturally beleaguered, into an extra-virulent cocktail.

It’s the young who are getting economically disadvantaged, to the point the retired are often significantly better off than the working, which would have seemed impossible only a few decades ago. And it’s the young who are more anti-racist.

Saying “everybody’s racist” isn’t much of a help in a situation where one group base their identity around racism and the other around anti-racism. The degree of racism you have, and your attitude towards it, they kind of count.

Andrew Stevens said...

It’s the young who are getting economically disadvantaged, to the point the retired are often significantly better off than the working, which would have seemed impossible only a few decades ago.

This is true, but how is this possibly surprising? Of course older people have more assets; they have had longer to accumulate them. This would be true even if we lived in a world with absolutely perfect equality. The poor in the U.S. have in fact gotten much better off over the past 50 years (never mind the last 250). This can be demonstrated in a very large variety of ways. The "hollowing of the middle class" is purely because so many middle class people have gotten rich, leading to the U.S.'s "mass affluent" class.

Andrew Stevens said...

On the other hand, this is why I favor means-testing Social Security in the U.S. Currently it is a transfer program which takes a bunch of money from the poor (the young) and then hands it out to the rich (the old). I am in such a tiny minority on this though that it isn't even worth talking about.

Andrew Stevens said...

The Bush/Romney/Ryan wing of the Republican Party, who were the only ones who were ever in favor of entitlement reform, were thoroughly and soundly walloped.

Gavin Burrows said...

”This is true, but how is this possibly surprising?”

I’ll preface my response with “here in the UK”, just in case it’s all somehow different in the US.

Here in the UK assets do not accrue as an automatic function of age, like amassing birthday cards. They’re essentially income minus outgoings.

Post-war generations tended to assume that assets would pile higher and higher, from one generation to the next. (And I am in fact now forming a mental picture of your own generation.) But they were wrong.

For those currently in their 20s it’s the reverse. Earnings have fallen and prices risen. Property is the one commonly cited, the more you have to shell out in rent the longer you will be stuck shelling out in rent. The retired have been insulated from that, partly for political reasons but partly because they were earning when it still paid to earn.

The Right tend to assume we all drift rightwards as we age, as a universal truth. You can see why they would. Partly, so many of them did. And it suggests that they’re in (no pun intended) the right, that we all come to our senses eventually and so on.

But the causes of that drift were always material. 68-style radical youth slowly morphed into “get orf my lawn types”, becoming more property-defending when they had more property to defend. But this won’t happen to the current generation. They are making a big mistake.

Overall on this thread, there’s been way too much looking at racism the way the Medieval world looked as disease. We all have a propensity towards it, we live in a fallen world, fight it and it will just come back and so on. But in reality, there’s reality. Racism has material causes and by determining those causes we can come up with material solutions.

SK said...

Here in the UK assets do not accrue as an automatic function of age, like amassing birthday cards

Not automatically no, but as a general rule, the older you are, the more assets you will have just because, as you say, they are income minus outgoings and so the longer you have lived with income > outgoings the more you will have built up. Obviously there are exceptions (a fifty-year-old who invested their life savings in a business which went bust and so have nothing; a twenty-year-old who wins the lottery) but the exceptions are notable for being exceptions to the general rule. I mean I personally have a lot more assets now than I had twenty years ago; do you not?

The massive UK housing supply deficit is real and, yes, building up exactly the terrible problems you point out, but it's a bit orthogonal to the general point that one's assets increase over time so one wouldn't expect the young to have as much in asset wealth as the old.

But the real point about:

'the retired are often significantly better off than the working, which would have seemed impossible only a few decades ago'

is that it's not about assets at all, but income. Even a few decades ago the retired were generally richer than the working in terms of assets but they didn't have the same level of income specifically because their wealth was generally locked up in assets.

Then the triple lock came along and had the obvious effect of eliminating that difference, at least if you deduct housing costs from working-age income: cf https://www.unbiased.co.uk/life/pensions-retirement/what-is-the-average-uk-retirement-income

So that's where the confusion came in: if you use loose terms like 'better off' then you really do need to specify whether you're talking about assets or income because they are very different things.

(And sometimes you also need to be careful about whether you're talking about net assets, because if you get that wrong you can end up in the ridiculous situation where you count a newly-qualified doctor in the USA on a $70,000 salary as being 'poorer' than a subsistence farmer in the third world because the doctor's student debt means they have a large negative net wealth, whereas the farmer has positive wealrth to the tune of a couple of goats.)

Andrew Stevens said...

Not automatically no, but as a general rule, the older you are, the more assets you will have just because, as you say, they are income minus outgoings and so the longer you have lived with income > outgoings the more you will have built up. Obviously there are exceptions (a fifty-year-old who invested their life savings in a business which went bust and so have nothing; a twenty-year-old who wins the lottery) but the exceptions are notable for being exceptions to the general rule. I mean I personally have a lot more assets now than I had twenty years ago; do you not?

SK delivered the obvious response. I am about three times wealthier than I was ten years ago, about three hundred times wealthier than I was twenty years ago, and incalculably wealthier than I was thirty years ago. This is a normal life progression.

Post-war generations tended to assume that assets would pile higher and higher, from one generation to the next. (And I am in fact now forming a mental picture of your own generation.) But they were wrong.

No, this is still correct. (By the by, I think we are of the same generation? I am somewhat younger than Mr. Rilstone.)

Aonghus Fallon said...

But maybe not as true for anybody under forty, given the casualisation of work and the fact that the population grows in size all the time? Thereby making certain assets (unless supply keeps up with demand) harder to acquire? I’m thinking specifically of property, but I could just as easily be talking about a full-time, pensionable job. Another factor is that it was possible to pay a mortgage and rear a family once upon a time, but maybe not so much today?

My partner’s father (now in his early eighties) got a full-time post in a university at the age of 26 and was also able to put down a mortgage on a sizeable house - something we always point out to him when he starts telling us how hard things were in his day.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Sorry - meant to say that it was possible to pay a mortgage and rear a family on one income.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Also - while I agree that people generally accumulate wealth as they get older - you have to look at the historical context. I’m Irish, but the UK is a good case in point. You had the rise of the welfare state after the war (a good thing) increasingly belligerent unions holding the country to ransom (a bad thing) Thatcher (initially seen as a good thing because she was seen as a corrective to the unions) followed by Thatcherism (a bad thing) and an inexorable drift to the right ever since, even though most of the right’s economic theories - the trickle-down effect etc - have been largely discredited. This is really about a handful of very rich people lining their own pockets.

Gavin Burrows said...

" am about three times wealthier than I was ten years ago, about three hundred times wealthier than I was twenty years ago, and incalculably wealthier than I was thirty years ago. This is a normal life progression."

It's generally not a good idea to universalise from your own situation.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2021/mar/31/uk-housing-crisis-how-did-owning-a-home-become-unaffordable

SK said...

It's generally not a good idea to universalise from your own situation.

Neither is it generally good to universalise from one class of asset (housing) to all assets, especially when there are specific factors constraining supply of that asset class and distorting the market.

Even thirty-year-olds who don't earn a home are richer, in terms of assets, now than they were when they were twenty-year-olds, as a rule. They will, for example, have more money in savings, which is an asset.

(And even then the factors which distort the market for housing are only really making a difference in London and a few other cities; there are vast swathes of the country where housing is not unaffordable at all, they're just not the places it's cool to live in. Staffordshire, say.)

Andrew Stevens said...

I have no idea what is going on in the UK. In the U.S., only the big cities with restrictive zoning laws and rent control have these sorts of housing shortage problems. It's very easy to afford a home where I live. Whenever my friends in the east complain about housing prices, I always advise them, "Move out of the blue states."

Andrew Stevens said...

It's generally not a good idea to universalise from your own situation.

I never do. I am an expert on U.S. economic data and history. It's what I do.

Andrew Stevens said...

You had the rise of the welfare state after the war (a good thing) increasingly belligerent unions holding the country to ransom (a bad thing) Thatcher (initially seen as a good thing because she was seen as a corrective to the unions) followed by Thatcherism (a bad thing)

I won't quibble with your analysis here. I am responding only because you make an interesting point. There is an old saw that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." In fact, in the U.S., this has never happened even once. The rich and the poor invariably get richer or poorer together. Curiously, in the UK, Thatcher was an exception. Under Thatcher, the rich really did get richer while the poor got (slightly) poorer. Which is interesting because it is so rare (in the Western capitalist democracies anyway). I suspect it was due to the decline of the unions, but I have never made a serious study of it.

SK said...

I have no idea what is going on in the UK

Basically the entire UK is under a restrictive planning regime which gives local pressure groups an effective veto on any development of new land (which is always called 'green belt' even if it's dead scrubland).

The result is entirely predictable.

There are even moves to establish rent controls in the UK's biggest city, presumably because they want to destroy it totally but can't afford saturation bombing.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Considering the number of trees being cut down, high speed railways being built, to say nothing of motor ways and shopping centres, I don't think this can be quite right.

Mike Taylor said...

These two things are both true:
* Trees and being cut down, and motorways and shopping centres built.
* Not enough new homes are being built.

SK said...

Considering the number of trees being cut down, high speed railways being built, to say nothing of motor ways and shopping centres, I don't think this can be quite right.

Railways and motorways are government projects, so (if the government has the will) can be pushed through in the face of local opposition. Housing developments can't.

Local pressure groups are way less concerned about, and therefore likely to campaign against, retail development, because more shops doesn't threaten the value of their properties like expending housing supply does (indeed might even increase the value of their properties, if it's the right kind of retail, ie, a Waitrose instead of a Lidl).

SK said...

Expanding, not expending.

Andrew Stevens said...

Certainly, in the more developed parts of the U.S. (e.g. the Northeast), you find states - like my home state - where some cities have nothing but wealthy residents and other cities have all the poorer residents. This is because the richer cities simply zoned out poorer people by forbidding multi-family housing and such, thereby restricting the housing supply there. Low supply, high demand = high prices. Ergo, only rich people can afford to live there.

As for environmental things, I certainly agree with the critique of capitalism concerning externalities. Capitalist companies certainly will pollute the commons in pursuit of their business interests. The problem with the usual proposed solution (government intervention or even full government control over development) is that this does not solve the tragedy of the commons as we saw in all of eastern Europe. The government is quite capable of exploiting the commons themselves.

Andrew Stevens said...

I have never denied that capitalist actors will generally act to enhance their own power, prestige, and wealth. What I find puzzling is the people who will deny this is true of government actors despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Mike Taylor said...

One important difference is that government actors are to some extent answerable to the population, whereas capitalist actors absolutely are not. It's certainly true that government actors are much LESS answerable than we would like — we only need to look at the absolutely rampant corruption in the present government to see that — but they are nevertheless still more answerable to Joe Public than Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos is.

SK said...

One important difference is that government actors are to some extent answerable to the population, whereas capitalist actors absolutely are not.

Contrariwise, capitalist actors are totally answerable to their customers — if they fail to provide the services people pay them for, then people switch to their competitors and they go bust — whereas government actors are totally unanswerable to their customers (except insofar as customers are also voters, but that's a very imperfect mechanism for a number of reasons, such as the extent to which 'government actors' are regarded as truly political or civil-service bureaucratic, and the common problem (eg, in social care) of the actual users of a service not being the ones who can complain about it) and so can get away with providing terrible services forever as they have no competition, no consequences, and therefore no incentive to improve their service.

I certainly wouldn't, for example, like my telephone line to be provided by the government, GPO-style, and have to get my MP to ask in the House why I hadn't been connected yet. Would you? Really?

Mike Taylor said...

"Contrariwise, capitalist actors are totally answerable to their customers."

Yes. Which is completely different from being answerable to the population.

Gavin Burrows said...

”The problem with the usual proposed solution (government intervention or even full government control over development) is that this does not solve the tragedy of the commons as we saw in all of eastern Europe.”

Proposed short-term solution to factory just polluting a local lake with its waste products: Problem exposed and publicised. Widespread grassroots protest. Owners, politicians and bureaucrats who won’t do anything harassed and harangued until they do.

Proposed long-term solution: Factory taken over by workers and run collectively. Who may well be less keen on their local lake despoiled than a tax exile in the Bahamas.

It’s kind of cute the harping on about the failure of the Soviet model like it’s new information. But trust me, there’s not many people in Britain today saying “the problem is that Boris Johnston isn’t in charge of enough stuff.”

SK said...

Which is completely different from being answerable to the population

It's not completely different. Their customers are a subset of the population. And, you might think, the relevant subset; why should, for example, whoever runs the trains be answerable to people who never step on one? Customers have skin in the game.

SK said...

Proposed long-term solution: Factory taken over by workers and run collectively. Who may well be less keen on their local lake despoiled than a tax exile in the Bahamas.


When has it ever worked out like that in real life?

Mike Taylor said...

"It's not completely different."

Oh but it is, Oscar, it is. The customers of your factory just want your product to be on sale as cheaply as possible, unhindered by all the expensive mucking about with environmental regulations. Whereas the population wants not to drink poisoned groundwater.

Andrew Stevens said...

Proposed long-term solution: become wealthy enough that we can afford to care about environmental degradation. This is, I believe, the reason we (meaning the U.S.) have made so much progress on the environmental front since circa the 1970s.

But trust me, there’s not many people in Britain today saying “the problem is that Boris Johnston isn’t in charge of enough stuff.”

I'll take your word for it. You can trust me that there were lots of people in the U.S. saying "the problem is that Donald Trump isn't in charge of enough stuff," though they never phrased it that way.

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh but it is, Oscar, it is. The customers of your factory just want your product to be on sale as cheaply as possible, unhindered by all the expensive mucking about with environmental regulations. Whereas the population wants not to drink poisoned groundwater.

Mostly correct, but see Gavin's "short-term solution" above. There is a great reputational risk to being known as an irresponsible polluter, even with no government intervention.

Andrew Stevens said...

E.g. Bernie Sanders was constantly saying, "the problem is that Donald Trump isn't in charge of enough stuff."

SK said...

The customers of your factory just want your product to be on sale as cheaply as possible

Well yeah. Like the man said:

'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.'

Whereas the population wants not to drink poisoned groundwater.

And, again, yeah: given the customers are part of the population, neither do they.

But more to the point, capitalism doesn't override the rule of law; hitmen are capitalists, but they are also murderers and we lock them up. And the common law already includes remedies for the pollution of water under the tort of nuisance, which pre-dates capitalism.

Gavin Burrows said...

”Proposed long-term solution: become wealthy”

As a simple matter of fact, the US has a deplorable environmental record. (Some individual States do better, but overall deplorable.) Like so many things that supposedly started with Trump, this didn’t start with Trump. The Bush cabinets were stuffed with oil barons. Mainstream politicians routinely deny climate change is even happening.

What wealthy countries often do is simply send the problem overseas. Rather than stop the factory polluting the lake, move the factory to where it pollutes someone else’s lake. Britain is a prime example of this.

And while some environmental measures will involve R&D, plenty don’t. A new train line is a more green measure than electric cars. And we already know how to make trains.

”see Gavin's "short-term solution" above.”

Ah, but that’s just what you’re not doing! Corporations are often happy to talk about ‘reputational risk’, in the same way police departments will about ‘due process’. Which is a fairly hefty clue they’re unconcerned about it. The harmful effects of petrol were known for decades, they knew and we know that they knew. But oil corporations don’t seem to suffering any great deal of reputational damage.

At most it creates a stick. And when no-one wields a stick, it just lies helplessly on the ground.

This is a system that isn’t, and never was, intended to work for us. It only moves when we kick it. And then it will always pretend to be moving of its own accord.

And this remains true even if the simple binary of ‘corporate rule’ versus ‘everything State-run’ was accurate. It would just change who we needed to kick. Not our need to kick.

SK said...

And while some environmental measures will involve R&D, plenty don’t. A new train line is a more green measure than electric cars. And we already know how to make trains.

Trains are a lot less convenient than cars, though. And whatever replaces petrol cars has to be at least as convenient to use as petrol cars or no one will switch.

It is, as always, about the customers.

This is a system that isn’t, and never was, intended to work for us.

It's intended to work for the customers. As a customer, I support that. I'd certainly rather that than a system designed to work for governments.

And this remains true even if the simple binary of ‘corporate rule’ versus ‘everything State-run’ was accurate. It would just change who we needed to kick. Not our need to kick.

The beauty of capitalism is that the kicking happens automatically. If someone else provides a better service then the old lot get kicked out — ie, go bust — automatically as all thier customers switch.

Mike Taylor said...

"Trains are a lot less convenient than cars, though. And whatever replaces petrol cars has to be at least as convenient to use as petrol cars or no one will switch."

This is 100% true. I am all in favour of cycling more and using public transport more, but there's no denying that people often need cars: for bringing groceries home from the supermarket, for ferrying their kids and all their stuff to and from university, for going on holiday with lots of luggage, and indeed for almost anything if, like me, you live fifteen miles from the nearest railway station and the bus service runs once a day.

Unless there is a very very radical shakeup of public transport — making it much cheaper, much more pleasant and much easier to use — lots of people are going to still want cars. So let's give 'em electric ones.

Andrew Stevens said...

That magical electricity is mostly still provided by fossil fuels

Mike Taylor said...

There is some truth in this. But:
1. Where the electricity that powers electric cars comes from fossil fuels, it does so significantly more efficiently than an internal combustion engine.
2. The proportion of the electricity supply that comes from fossil fuels is decreasingly rapidly.

Andrew Rilstone said...

I am pleased that we have gone from racism in old TV to housing shortages and electric cars. Maybe we an get onto guns next?

Aonghus Fallon said...

I suspect the electric car is probably too little, too late. My guess is - while you might own a car - your use of it will be monitored and doing so will be prohibitively expensive due to heavy taxation. Maybe one trip per week? And that dependent on distance, necessity etc? Public transport will be augmented, but you’ll also be expected to shop online and your children will either walk to school or attend online classes. In this regard, the society of the future will be not unlike the current lockdown, mainly because governments/service providers will have no alternative (dead citizens/customers not being much use to anybody).

SK said...

My guess is - while you might own a car - your use of it will be monitored and doing so will be prohibitively expensive due to heavy taxation. Maybe one trip per week? And that dependent on distance, necessity etc? Public transport will be augmented, but you’ll also be expected to shop online and your children will either walk to school or attend online classes.

I don't think that would be possible in a democracy. Do you think I am wrong and that people actually would vote for that, or are you suggesting that democracy will not exist in the future and we will all live under controlling totalitarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party?

Andrew Stevens said...

I am pleased that we have gone from racism in old TV to housing shortages and electric cars. Maybe we an get onto guns next?

We could talk about the social contagion started by a man with a brain tumor (Charles Whitman) in 1966 and hugely amplified by the media for 50 years since.

Gavin Burrows said...

I had a fiver on the Super League coming up before we got to Saturday.

To pursue the sporting metaphors, you think it is time to call time?

Aonghus Fallon said...

‘I don't think that would be possible in a democracy. Do you think I am wrong and that people actually would vote for that, or are you suggesting that democracy will not exist in the future and we will all live under controlling totalitarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party?’

Well, we’re facing a man-made extinction event, something democracy and capitalism has largely failed to address, despite a lot of handwringing. My little scenario is probably - and sadly - one of the better outcomes. How we get there is another matter. But I’m also drawing an analogy with the government’s strategy on - say - cigarettes. You have something that is harmful but banning it outright could cause an international outcry. So you tax it, you restrict where and when people can use it, and so on and so forth.

I’m resigned tbh. I don’t see us getting out of the hole we’re in. As you say, most of us live in some sort of democracy. The changes necessary would be so draconian they’d meet with widespread resistance and the governments and the global economy are understandably reluctant to take the bull by the horns. So it goes.

Andrew Stevens said...

Fortunately it's not actually an extinction event, even under worst-case scenarios, though those could potentially be extremely bad.

Andrew Stevens said...

It's actually kind of funny that worries about human extinction have become so popular precisely at a time when human extinction is no longer a realistic scenario. (There are just too many of us and, unlike the dinosaurs, we have really big brains.)

Andrew Stevens said...

(For that matter, even some of the dinosaurs survived. I can see three of them at my backyard bird feeder right now.)

Aonghus Fallon said...

Just to clarify: I only meant an ‘extinction event’ in the sense of a widespread and rapid decrease in biodiversity. Humanity is a pretty resilient and ingenious species - I don’t expect them to become extinct in the near future.

I’ve always seen seagulls as basically pterodactyls with feathers.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Superleague? What, has Snyder got even more footage we didn't see?

Gavin Burrows said...

'Superleague? What, has Snyder got even more footage we didn't see?"

Blimey, no wonder it was so unpopular.

'I’ve always seen seagulls as basically pterodactyls with feathers."

Are you from Brighton, by any chance?

Aonghus Fallon said...

Hah! Dublin is full of them, but I remember Penzance as being particularly bad - although it does take a certain amount of chutzpah to snatch an ice-cream out of somebody’s hand while they’re eating it. With your beak.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Statistics can mean pretty much whatever you want them to mean, but I decided to do a price comparison anyway re the cost of living in the US in 1980 and 2010. I chose - entirely at random - three indicators: house prices, health insurance and college fees.

1980

Average US salary - 12513

Median House price - 47,200
Health Insurance - 1018
College Education - (for four years): 9438

2010

Average US salary - 26,363

Median House Price - 230,500
Health Insurance - 8412
College Education - (for four years) 22074

I’m surprised to see college fees more or less a constant (I thought going to college had become largely unaffordable in the US, unless you were rich). That said, while salaries doubled, house prices quadrupled and health insurance increased eight-fold. So in real terms your average American was substantially worse off in 2010 than in 1980.



Aonghus Fallon said...

'more worse off'???

Gavin Burrows said...

Pah! I bet your Dublin seagulls are all poets, pub raconteurs and experimental novelists. Here in Brighton we have hipster seagulls. They nick your chips, then come back and squark at you if they weren't fried in organic oil.

Aonghus Fallon said...

If only! Your average Dublin seagull (ie, Herring Gull) is basically the avine equivalent of a bloke in a tracksuit. Normally they'd hang around the MacDonald's on Grafton Street and dive bomb tourists, steal crisps from newsagents and tear every binbag on every street to flitters. Pickings must be pretty thin, right now. :(

Andrew Rilstone said...

Statistics can mean pretty much anything you want them to mean...

https://youtu.be/hKWQ-iHDRJY

Aonghus Fallon said...

Pretty on the nail!

Time was, whenever you went into an Irish country pub, there’d be some ancient farmer sitting on his own. Somebody would point him out, then tell you how he was ninety and had smoked sixty woodbines a day all his life. I never had the bad manners to ask what had happened to his friends.

Andrew Stevens said...

Actual figures (in real inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars):

Median personal income:
1980 - $23,532
2019 - $35,977

(Figures above from St. Louis Fed)

Median housing prices (there are no figures for median housing prices available - only for new homes which is different - new housing numbers are from Census Bureau, again in inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars):
1980 - $184,388
2019 - $264,659

Note that new houses in 2019 are quite a bit bigger than they were in 1980.

Health insurance and education have indeed undergone "cost disease" for unknown reasons. It's also hard to make comparisons since health insurance, certainly, is worth a lot more in 2019 than it was in 1980. College education, on the other hand, has probably gotten worse (and less valuable).

Andrew Stevens said...

Even your figures don't show what you think they show. The only annual cost you have there is health insurance (to compare with income) and, taking that, the 2010 American is quite a bit better off. Housing and education must be amortized into an annual value to make a real comparison.

Andrew Stevens said...

"Statistics can mean pretty much whatever you want them to mean" is the sort of thing non-statisticians and non-mathematicians say. It is, of course, not true. But certainly liars figure.

Andrew Stevens said...

Also, health insurance is generally heavily subsidized by the employer in the U.S. so most gains go to reduce wages, but the U.S. worker in 2019 was not paying $8412 a year for health insurance or anything like that.

Andrew Stevens said...

In other words, even on health insurance you were "double counting" it.

Andrew Stevens said...

For what it's worth, that the average American is, in fact, much better off now than in 1980 is so obvious that I honestly don't even know what to say to people who deny it other than "human beings have the capacity to believe whatever they like."

Andrew Stevens said...

Just FYI, I think the reason for the cost disease in health care and education is the Baumol effect, but there are arguments against that which I'm not sure are wrong.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Thanks for all the info, Andrew! I appreciate houses might be bigger. Also, that my figure for health insurance was probably incorrect. That said, health insurance has got more expensive, right? This, along with your figures, seems to suggest that median salaries have only kept pace with the cost of living rather than outstripping it.

I guess another demographic would be poverty, which I realise has been in decline in the US for sometime but is still very high in comparison to other countries in the developed world. By extension, any improvement would be relative. A hobo in 1980 had one shopping trolley, now he has two etc, etc.

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh, median salaries have definitely outstripped cost of living. No real question about that. Just look at all the things the average family in 2020 has compared to 1980. It's not really a contest. You can, of course, always argue that those things are now part of the "cost of living" and, indeed, that is usually how the argument goes. I always tell people if they want to live a 1950s cost of living, I can easily find them a house built in the 1950s with no air conditioning, just like people lived back then. They can get it real cheap too.

Health care and education have gotten more expensive (relative to everything else) in the entire Western world. As I said, I think this is due to the Baumol effect, but I can't be sure. Most economists think so, but some very smart economists have disagreed.

Cross-country poverty comparisons are very hard since each country defines poverty differently. Some use relative figures (which means we will always have poverty), others absolute figures. So, for example, the latest figures show 10.5% of Americans live in poverty compared to 20% in Great Britain. What does that mean? Damned if I know without a lot of research.

But, yes, the U.S. still struggles with mental illness as the entire world's population does and the U.S., due in part to its wealth, has more than its fair share of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Andrew Stevens said...

Homelessness is an odd thing. E.g. Sweden has 3 times the homelessness of the U.S., the UK and Australia have twice as much, but the U.S. still has 70% more than Brazil. Do I know that everybody's figures are accurate? No, of course I don't. They're usually all compiled by the governments which can be more or less competent and more or less accurate.

Assuming it is legitimate, what would I theorize is the reason for this? Simple. The U.S. has far bigger problems with alcohol and drugs than Brazil does (as consumers). It even has more problems with tobacco.

Andrew Stevens said...

When I was a kid (circa 1980), there used to be a joke: "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you make too much money." Nowadays, we all make too much money.

Aonghus Fallon said...

The Social Progress index reckons a decline (albeit a small one) with the usual suspects - e.g. health, education - being an issue. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that while people earn more, they have little or no disposable income (your average American would be strapped to come up with $400 at a pinch). This seems to be supported by how - when adjusted for inflation - your average worker’s salary has the same purchasing power as it did forty years ago.

When it comes to health, the big driver in costs is prescription drugs rather than an improved service. Patient outcomes are generally poorer in comparison to other countries (infant mortality etc) even though your average American pays twice as much as, say, Canada.

Home-owners/occupiers. There seem to be a lot more people renting? Plus the age bracket is older (55+) rather than - as in the Seventies - young families starting out? When you consider that rents have increased four-fold between ’97 and 2020….

Andrew Stevens said...

This seems to be supported by how - when adjusted for inflation - your average worker’s salary has the same purchasing power as it did forty years ago.

Read carefully. Both of those were inflation-adjusted. The median salary is 50% higher than it was 40 years ago.

When it comes to health, the big driver in costs is prescription drugs rather than an improved service. Patient outcomes are generally poorer in comparison to other countries (infant mortality etc) even though your average American pays twice as much as, say, Canada.

It's salaries more than prescription drugs or improved service. In any event, new prescription drugs is improved service. Infant mortality is higher in the U.S. compared to other countries because we measure it differently. A baby born three months premature counts as an infant mortality. This is not so in other countries. (Similar to rape statistics in Sweden. Sweden is not a lot more rape-y than other countries. Their definition of rape is just broader than everyone else's.)

There seem to be a lot more people renting?

No, homeownership has been pretty constant for the last 60 years. I believe the peak was 2004, but it never changes much.

Andrew Stevens said...

If you like, I could analyze the Social Progress Index and tell you what they're doing wrong. (I know they are wrong, of course, so it's only a matter of figuring out why.)

As for disposable income, people have lots of disposable income, but as has always been true throughout history, they use it all.

Andrew Stevens said...

Oh, I see. Social Progress Index deliberately ignores economics. This is not surprising. The U.S. would do too well otherwise.

Andrew Stevens said...

As is to be expected, the Social Progress Index is completely dominated by racially homogeneous countries.

Aonghus Fallon said...

Well, my info was based on a quick trawl through the internet -

The fact that purchasing power hadn’t improved in forty years was courtesy of the Pew Research Centre and supported by an article in ‘The Atlantic’ (hardly a reliable source, but still). They also provided the stats for the increase in tenants rather than homeowners - the number of people renting increased by 9.3 million between 2004 and 2015, an increase of almost 25%, plus these tenants were comprised of an older demographic (ie, unlikely to subsequently buy their own homes) unlike the last rental boom of the 1970’s.

Prescription drugs (along with numerous and largely unnecessary tests) were cited as the principal expense in Health Care by researchers at Harvard University. They also said salaries weren’t a factor - American doctors generally were paid twice as much as their non-American equivalents, but there were less of them; in essence one cancelled out the other - Germany has twice as many doctors (4:1 ratio) but on half the salary.

I’m not sure I’d see more prescription drugs as an improvement per se. From my perspective, US healthcare is orientated towards profitability rather than effectiveness, with prescription drugs being a highly lucrative revenue stream. There's a big irony here; American Healthcare is largely responsible for the opioid crisis (or at very least, for creating a culture of self-medication which led to it) and by extension, for the drop of life expectancy in the US.

Aonghus Fallon said...

"racially homogenous countries"????

Andrew Stevens said...

The fact that purchasing power hadn’t improved in forty years was courtesy of the Pew Research Centre

I am talking about the median annual income, which has grown substantially. I.e. the amount of money that 50% of people make more than and 50% of people make less than. The Pew Research Center (who nearly always get their facts right, but very often have an agenda) was talking about "average hourly earnings for non-management private-sector workers." If I'm reading the same article as you, the only thing which is actually factually false was the headline (typically not written by the author - at no point does the author claim it), "For most Americans, real wages have barely budged in decades." This is false since there are many fewer people in non-management private sector positions and they are not a majority. And, late in the article, they actually acknowledge that even these people are much better off, having taken their gains in benefits rather than salary.

Pew acknowledges what I am saying (because they have to): see this piece on household income (scaled for the same family size and adjusted for inflation). The growth is a bit less than median individual income, probably reflecting fewer workers per household.

The homeownership rate in the U.S. has been between 63% and 69% for as long as we've been measuring. It is rather telling that you went from peak to low. We know home ownership has increased since 2015.

Prescription drugs (along with numerous and largely unnecessary tests)

I couldn't agree with you more about numerous and largely unnecessary tests!

They also said salaries weren’t a factor - American doctors generally were paid twice as much as their non-American equivalents, but there were less of them; in essence one cancelled out the other - Germany has twice as many doctors (4:1 ratio) but on half the salary.

You're talking about something quite different here. Now you're talking about cross-country comparisons in health care, which is different from health care costs paid by Americans. Certainly, the reason why the U.S. pays more in health care than other countries is because we subsidize the world's medical research. I don't think anyone denies that.

American Healthcare is largely responsible for the opioid crisis (or at very least, for creating a culture of self-medication which led to it) and by extension, for the drop of life expectancy in the US

Probably true, though if you think the U.S. health establishment fosters a culture of self-medication, I don't even know what to say. That's clearly not true. However, the general claim is true. Over-prescription of opioids by the medical establishment and then cutting off patients was certainly a huge factor in the opioid crisis.

Andrew Stevens said...

(Sorry, I did not clarify that the higher salaries for doctors certainly does impact household U.S. medical costs. Indeed, having fewer of them does as well, though the U.S. has expanded such things as physician's assistants and nurse practitioners.)

Andrew Stevens said...

There is a reason why I always use median individual income rather than other measures (such as household income or "average hourly earnings for non-management private-sector workers"). Other measures introduce distortions such as movement in and out of a given sector, changes in number of workers per household, etc.

Andrew Stevens said...

Now, if you want to argue non-material decline in U.S. standard of living from 1980 to 2021 (suicide rates, marriage rates, etc.), then you might be able to make a case.

Andrew Stevens said...

"racially homogenous countries"????

European nations which mostly do not have or do not allow non-European immigration. To give heterogeneous New Zealand its due, it does well on the Social Progress Index, though honestly I still have no idea what that's supposed to measure. (Not much, I imagine.)

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