Tag: BookReview

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari II

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part II of IV

Harari’s belief that the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have found that their language development and their modes of thought about space, time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies. The Piraha are an extreme case, but the Tauade of Papua New Guinea, for example, with whom I lived only had the idea of single and pair, and no form of calendar or time-reckoning. Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements (see Hallpike 1979).

While Harari recognises that we know almost nothing about the beliefs and social organization of ancient foragers, he agrees that the constraints of their mode of life would have limited them to small-scale groups based on the family without permanent settlements (unless they could fish), and with no domestic animals. But then he launches into some remarkable speculations about what they might nevertheless have achieved in the tens of thousands of years between the Cognitive Revolution and the beginning of agriculture.

These long millennia may have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces…The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes…’ and so on (pp. 68-9).

Er, no. They couldn’t. All these imagined triumphs of the hunter-gatherers would actually have required a basis of large populations, centralized political control and probably literate civilisation, which in turn would have required the development of agriculture.

This is normally regarded as, after language, the innovation that made possible the extraordinary flowering of human abilities. As Harari correctly points out, agriculture developed independently in a number of parts of the world, and tribal societies based on farming became extremely common, many of them surviving into modern times. But he describes the Agricultural Revolution as ‘history’s biggest fraud’ because individuals in fully developed farming societies generally had an inferior diet and harder work than foragers, and their food supply depended on a limited range of crops that were vulnerable to drought, pests, and invaders, unlike the more varied food resources of hunter-gatherers.

These criticisms of agriculture are, of course, quite familiar, and up to a point legitimate. But if agriculture was really such a bad deal why would humans ever have gone along with it? Harari begins by suggesting that wheat and other crops actually domesticated us, and made us work for them, rather than the other way round, but this doesn’t get him very far in explaining the persistence of agriculture, and instead he argues that wheat offered nothing to individuals, but only to the species by enabling the growth of larger populations. But since it is actually individuals who have to do all the hard work of sowing and reaping this won’t do either, so finally he says that people persisted in the agricultural way of life because they were in search of an easier life, and couldn’t anticipate the full consequences of agriculture.

Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering the seeds on the surface – people thought, “Yes, we will have to work harder, but the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.” It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. (p. 97)

It didn’t work out that way, however, because people didn’t foresee population growth, poor diet and disease. Since it would have taken many generations to realise all the disadvantages of agriculture, by that time the population would have grown so large that it would have been impossible to go back to foraging, so the agricultural trap closed on Man for evermore.

The change from foraging to agriculture as principal mode of subsistence would have actually taken hundreds of years in many cases, and there are many important advantages of agriculture which he ignores. It is likely that one of the primary attractions of planting crops was that it allowed people to live in fixed settlements for some or all of the year, for a variety of reasons. Some favoured locations would have provided access to a plentiful supply of food or water; a whole series of craft activities are all more conveniently carried out in permanent or semi-permanent settlements; and these are also very convenient for holding ceremonies such as initiations and feasts. We also know that the food surplus from agriculture can be used in systems of exchange and competitive feasting, for trading with different groups, and for feeding domestic animals. A larger population also has many attractions in itself: it permits a much richer social life than is possible for small foraging bands,  with more impressive ceremonies, a larger labour force for social projects such as irrigation and communal buildings, and more effective defence against local enemies. Agriculture would therefore have had many attractions which would have been obvious to the people concerned, (see Hallpike 2008:52-65).

Agriculture with the domestication of animals, then, was the essential foundation for the growth of really large populations which are in turn essential for the development of complex cultures and social systems in a new ‘tribal’ form of social organization. Land ownership became closely related to kin groups of clans and lineages, which were in turn the basis of formal systems of political authority based on elders or chiefs who could mediate in disputes and sometimes assume priestly functions. A whole variety of groups sprang up based not only on kinship but on residence, work, voluntary association, age, and gender and these group structures and hierarchical organization made it much easier to co-ordinate the larger populations that developed (see Hallpike 2008:66-121). This tribal organization was the essential precursor of the state, particularly through the development of political authority which was always legitimated by descent and religious status. By the state I mean centralised political authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20{745b48424592519896714d7eb9f12ef71c35f3ab17441a70b87f3207bf0913ca} of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has developed (e.g. Claessen & Skalnik 1978, Hallpike 1986, 2008, Trigger 2003).

Unfortunately, Harari not only knows very little about tribal societies but seems to have read almost nothing on the literature on state formation either, which he tries to explain as follows:

The stress of farming [worrying about the weather, drought, floods, bandits, next year’s famine and so on] had far reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food. (p. 114) 

The reader might well wonder how peasants worrying about next year’s possible famine could possibly have been the foundation of any major political developments, and why in any case they would have meekly allowed their crops to be plundered, as well as where these rulers and elites suddenly sprang from. If Harari knew more about tribal societies he would have realised that the notion of a leader imposing his will on his followers misses the whole point of leadership in pre-state societies, which is that the leader has to attract people by having something to offer them, not by threatening them, because he has no means of doing this. To have power over people one must control something they want: food, land, personal security, status, wealth, the favour of the gods, knowledge, and so on.

In other words, there must be dependency, and leaders must be seen as benefactors. In tribal societies, where people are not self-sufficient in defence, or in access to resources or to the supernatural, they will therefore be willing to accept inequality of power because they obviously get something out of war-leaders, or clan heads, or priests. Political authority in tribal society develops in particular through the kinship system, with hereditary clan heads, who are also believed to have the mystical power to bless their dependents. When states develop we always find that the legitimacy of kings is based on two factors: descent and religion. It is only after the advent of the state can power be riveted on to people by force whether they like it or not, and when it is too late for them to do anything about it except by violent rebellion.

Part III of Dr. Hallpike’s review will be posted tomorrow.
Part I

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part I of IV

The biological title Sapiens is intended to give the impression of a work of hard-nosed science in the Darwinian tradition. Human history is presented as ‘the next stage in the continuum of physics to chemistry to biology’, and our ultimate destiny, and not so very ultimate either, is to be replaced by intelligent machines. It is a summary of human cultural and social evolution from stone age foraging bands through the agricultural revolution, writing and the rise of the state and large-scale societies, through the gradual process of global unification through empires, money, and the world religions, to the scientific revolution that began the modern world and its consequences.

As an anthropologist who has trodden roughly the same path as Harari in a number of books (Hallpike 1979, 1986, 2008, 2016) I was naturally curious to see what he has to say, but it soon became clear that its claim to be a work of science is questionable, beginning with his notion of culture. Language is obviously the basis of human culture, but one of the central themes of the book is the idea that not just language but what he calls ‘fiction’ has been crucial in the ascent of Man:

…the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled…But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. (p. 27)

The claim that culture is fiction is not an important insight, but is simply a perverse way of stating the obvious fact that culture is a set of shared ideas, and ideas by their very nature can’t be material objects. Language has been revolutionary because it has allowed human beings to be linked together by shared ideas into roles and institutions. One cannot see or touch the Prime Minister, for example, but only a human being, and someone who does not know what ‘Prime Minister’ means has to be told. This can only be done properly by explaining how this role fits into the British Constitution, which in turn involves explaining parliament, cabinet government, the rule of law, democracy, and so on. This world of roles, institutions, beliefs, norms, and values forms what we call culture, but just because the components of culture are immaterial and cannot be seen, touched or smelled does not make them fiction, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, or the myths of Genesis or the Australian Aborigines. We can’t see, touch, or smell truth because truth is not a material object, but that does not make it unreal or fictitious either.

If Harari’s test of reality is only what we can see, touch, or smell then mathematics, like truth, should also be a prime example of fiction. Maybe simple integers might just pass his reality test, since we can see groups of different numbers of things, but how ‘real’ in his sense are zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers like π or imaginary numbers like the square root of -1? And if mathematics is fiction, then so is the whole of science including the theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, which Harari would find very embarrassing indeed because he loves science. He is just in a philosophical muddle that confuses what is material with what is real, and what is immaterial with fiction. But the opposite of fiction is not what is material but what is true, and what is fictional and what is true can both only exist in the immaterial world of thought.

When it comes to the task of explaining social institutions, the idea of culture as fiction is about as useful as a rubber nail:

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together round the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. (p. 31)

Really? He takes the Peugeot motor company, with its image of a lion, and tries to argue that the company itself is no more real than an ancient tribal totem, but nevertheless can form the basis on which large numbers of people could co-operate:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history…It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them…In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was formed. (p. 34)

Harari seems unable to distinguish a belief from a convention, presumably because neither is a material object. Beliefs in ghosts and spirits may be shared by members of particular cultures, but derive from the nature of people’s experience and their modes of thought: they did not sit down and deliberately agree to believe in them. Conventions, however, are precisely the result of a collective decision, consciously taken to achieve a certain purpose, and as such are completely different from myths in almost every respect. Peugeot SA rests on the legal convention of a limited-liability company, which performs a very useful social function, and another very useful social convention is the rule of the road by which in Britain we all drive on the left. Neither beliefs in spirits nor social conventions are material objects, but they are still quite different sorts of thing, as are legal documents and magical rituals, and Harari achieves nothing by confusing them.

More unsustainable claims do not take long to appear. It may well be true that by about 400,000 years ago Man became able to hunt large game on a regular basis, and that in the last 100,000 years we jumped to the top of the food chain. There also seems little doubt that after humans migrated out of Africa in the last 70,000 years or so they exterminated large mammals in Australia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. But part of his explanation for this is that:

Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump (pp. 12-13). 

No, we’re not full of fears and anxieties about our position in the food chain, and never have been, because a species is not a person who can remember things like having been the underdog of the savannah tens of millennia in the past. Knowledge of our life on the savannah has only been vaguely reconstructed by archaeologists and anthropologists in modern times.

He then describes us as ’embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees’ and claims that:

Our societies are built from  the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks – sensations, emotions, family ties – the less difference we find between us and other apes. (42)

In fact, however, if we study the research on the differences between human infants and chimpanzees, such as Tomasello’s Why We Co-operate (2009), the greater we find the differences between us and other apes. Tomasello’s studies of pre-linguistic human infants between 12-24 months and chimpanzees showed marked differences in behaviour related to co-operation, for example. Human infants start co-operating at about 12 months, and when 14 – 18 month infants were put in situations where adult strangers needed help with problems, the infants, unlike chimpanzees, spontaneously provided it. Even before speech develops human infants will try to provide information to adult strangers who need it by pointing, whereas apes do not understand informative pointing at all. Infants also have an innate grasp of rules, in the sense of understanding that certain sorts of activities, like games, should be done in a certain way, whereas apes do not. 14 – 24 month old infants also collaborate easily in social games, whereas chimpanzees simply refuse to take part in them, and infants can also change and reverse roles in games. Human collaborative activity is achieved through generalised roles that can potentially be filled by anyone, including the self. This is the basis of the unique feature of human culture, the institution, which is a set of practices governed  by rules and norms. ‘No animal species other than humans has been observed to have anything even vaguely resembling [social institutions]’ (Tomasello 2009: xi – xii).

For Harari the great innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa, which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. ‘At the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history…Survival in that area required superb mental abilities from everyone’ (p. 55), and  ‘The people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have’ (p. 44). 

Not surprisingly, then,  ‘We’d be able to explain to them everything we know – from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics – and they could teach us how their people view the world’ (23).

It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon in Peru (Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind, They could teach Everett how they saw the world, which was entirely confined to the immediate experience of the here-and-now, with no interest in past or future, or really in anything that could not be seen or touched. They had no myths or stories, so Alice in Wonderland would have fallen rather flat as well.

Part II of Dr. Hallpike’s review will be posted tomorrow.

A review of SJWADD

A detailed review of SJWs Always Double Down by an author who prefers to remain anonymous.

One of the most staggering pieces of hypocrisy in the colonial era was known as ‘The White Man’s Burden.’

On the face of it, the basic concept looked sound.  The colonists would civilise the natives, giving them modern technology, learning and attitudes that would allow them to leave their roots and join the enlightened colonists as equals.  There was nothing wrong with it, as far as anyone living in that era believed.  The hypocrisy, however, was not hard to find.  The majority colonists – consciously or not – never intended to allow their subjects to rise to the highest levels.  They would never be treated as equals, never considered fully civilised.

On one hand, this provided a justification – an excuse – for exploiting the natives.  It’s all for their own good (anything can be justified for a good cause).  But, far worse, it also provided an excuse for the civilisers to keep finding newer and better reasons to keep moving the goalposts.  The natives will never be declared equal – they will never be free of the colonists – because that would put the civilisers out of work!  This creates what I call a perverse incentive – an incentive to do something that is morally wrong, but works in your favour.

This is why the billions expended on international charity have produced very limited results.  On one hand, the cause is good; on the other, charities are too concerned with idealism rather than practicalities, the people the charities are trying to help are not allowed much of a say in decision-making, thus depriving the planners of people with local knowledge, and the charity bosses have too great an incentive to keep the money flowing.  The outcome shouldn’t really be surprising.

The thing you have to bear in mind about modern-day Social Justice Warriors is that they have their own version of ‘The White Man’s Burden.’  And the unintended consequences are pretty much the same.

One thing I have always considered to be a point in Vox Day’s favour is that he makes you think, even though you – and I – may disagree with him on many points.  Indeed, I have come to prefer his non-fiction to his fiction, if only because it is strikingly thought-provoking and often provocative.  In writing SJWs Always Double Down – the title comes from the three laws of SJWs – Vox has expanded upon his earlier work, SJWs Always Lie and carried us forward into 2017.

The essential difference between a person who is genuinely concerned and a full-fledged SJW is that the former has essentially limited goals, while the latter’s objectives are nebulous, wide-ranging … and permanent.  The former will identify a problem – and it is often a very real problem – and propose practical solutions, then retire gracefully when victory has been achieved.  The latter will not retire, even when he gets what he says he wants.  He’ll just come up with newer demands, which will be harder to resist because one has already conceded the earlier set of demands.  It is, in short, about power and appearances rather than practicalities.  Somewhere along the way, the idea that one is trying to solve a single very specific problem is lost.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a public building – a library, perhaps – which is only accessible through a short flight of stairs.  Hardly a problem for an able-bodied person, but an impassable barrier to someone trapped in a wheelchair.  This is obviously a problem that needs to be fixed, right?  It’s a public building.  The disabled have a right to use it too.  Who could possibly say otherwise?

The genuinely concerned will suggest replacing the stairs with a ramp.  A simple, very practical solution.  And one that, in most cases, will not be too difficult.  The SJW, on the other hand, will insist on writing a set of very vague laws to cover ‘disability discrimination’ and then expand them as much as possible, all under the cover of doing good.  They will never declare victory for the simple reason that declaring victory means giving up their power.  And while it may look good, on the surface, a cynic might note that the side-effects – able-bodied people growing to resent disabled people – will bring forth a poisonous fruit in time.

A further, more fundamental, difference between the genuinely concerned and the SJW is that the latter believes so deeply in his cause that he finds it impossible to comprehend that someone might have a reasonable reason to disagree.  No, anyone who disagrees must be evil.  This has a great deal in common with a number of religious groups, which assume that anyone who doesn’t think like them is either ignorant or wilfully evil. Instead of questioning his own assumptions, as Vox Day demonstrates, the SJW always doubles down and attacks anyone who dares to question him.  Thus, for example, anyone who points out Hillary Clinton’s massive failings as a candidate for President is a sexist, as far as the SJWs are concerned.  This allows them to comfortably dismiss anything that runs contrary to their narrative.

In essence, Vox Day argues that a counterattack is now underway.  GamerGate, BREXIT, President Trump, the NFA boycott … they’re all spurred on by opposition to SJWs, however defined.  There is a great deal of truth in this – Trump managed to define himself by his opposition to ‘political correctness’ (a key part of maintaining the SJW narrative) – although I don’t think it goes as far as Vox suggests.  The people who were the losers in the new world order were the ones who voted against it.  That said, the Left can reasonably be said to have overplayed its hand.  The gulf between the real world and the reality presented by the media, for example, cannot be overstated.  This has the ironic effect that any genuine problems with President Trump will not be taken seriously, as the media has cried ‘racist’ one too many times.

Such a problem is understandable.  A person has only a limited amount of credibility – and, when they babble about something they don’t understand (guns, for example) they only lose that credibility faster.  The NFA protests have little credibility because the worst that can happen is the players getting fired … which, given that most of them are multimillionaires, is unlikely to worry them.  Colin Kaepernick is supposed to be worth around $25 million dollars, more money than the average American (white, black, whatever) is likely to see in a dozen lifetimes. Indeed, they really do nothing more than distract Americans – and everyone else – from more important matters.

The SJWs do not help their case by demanding complete submission from friends and enemies alike.  They do not leave any room for reasonable disagreement.  This makes it impossible to debate them, let alone question their positions without unleashing a tidal wave of accusations … even if the questioner is a former friend.  The effects of this have been devastating, in everything from comic books to corporate life.  It does not matter, in the end, if the SJWs had a point or not.  Once credibility is lost, it will never be regained.  The tactics they use poison the well.  This is why, in far too many places, we now live in a low-trust society.  Why should anyone trust the media?  Or celebrities?  Or corporations like Facebook and Twitter?  Or random strangers on the internet?

This is not an academic question.  The last couple of years have seen all sorts of questions raised about the power wielded by Google, Facebook and Twitter – even Wikipedia.  It doesn’t matter, really, what you think of Vox Day.  Anyone, regardless of their political beliefs, should be concerned about how that power can be misused, particularly if there’s a ‘good’ reason for it.  Once you set a precedent – legal harassment of pro-life groups, for example – someone else can use that precedent to justify their own actions.  As a number of wags have observed, the Left spent eight years turning the US federal government into a weapon – and that weapon fell into the hands of Donald Trump!

Vox Day goes on to describe the effects of ‘SJW Convergence’ in governments, churches and corporations.  In some ways, this is not entirely a new problem.  The larger the organisation, the harder it is to keep focused on what actually matters.  On one hand, the guys at the top lose touch with the ground floor; on the other, it’s hard to believe that the organisation can actually collapse.  I don’t know if Marvel Comics – to use one example – is really on the verge of collapse, but sales have slumped alarmingly over the last few years.  And while the push for ‘diverse’ characters may not be the sole cause of the problem, it has – I think – played a role in the corporation’s decline.

It’s hard to say how seriously one should take these assertions.  On one hand, the problems are rarely as cut and dried.  Marvel’s constant revamping of the status quo probably paid a role too.  On the other hand, traditional publishing is in decline because the old-fashioned gatekeepers have been unable to adapt to the changes over the last ten years.  There comes a point where an organisation – Borders, for example – simply cannot survive.  But what cannot be denied is that power can easily be abused and perhaps it would be better to prevent any abuse.

Vox then discusses the ‘typical’ SJW, with extensive reference to his expanded social-sexual hierarchy.  This is, in many ways, the weakest part of the book; on one hand, his portrait of many intensive SJWs is quite accurate, but it doesn’t account for people who are swept into the process because they believe the cause is good or people who want to take advantage of SJW activism for their own ends.  I have, frankly, never placed much credence in the social-sexual hierarchy – people can and do move up and down, either through self-development or a sudden shattering change in their circumstances.

One point that bears mentioning is the assertion that SJWs simply cannot accept that they might be wrong.  There’s some truth in that.  But, on the other hand, I’ve noticed that being wrong, or admitting to being wrong, comes with a penalty these days.  There is no such thing as a limited surrender.  A person who loses one argument will often find himself accused of being wrong again and again.  This is a serious problem, for obvious reasons.  Why should anyone concede a point when they will be expected to concede everything?  Being able to accept being wrong requires being able to survive being wrong.

Next, the book assesses the current state of anti-SJW pushback, from the evolution of GamerGate to the decline and fall of the Hugo Awards.  This section is something of a mixed bag.  On one hand, internet sleuths have done a great deal of good by making it impossible to stick to a single narrative and/or for criminals and rioters to hide from justice.  On the other hand, the section on the Hugo Awards is difficult to follow.  While the whole affair does outline just how far the Hugo Awards have fallen – the concentration on pointless diversity as opposed to good writing, the willingness to rewrite or break the rules to drive out the Sad/Rabid Puppies – it also highlights some other absurdities.  Picking a book called – I kid you not – Space Raptor Butt Invasion – looks silly.  It is very easy to argue that Peter F. Hamilton deserves a Hugo, but not Chuck Tingle.  This was something of an own goal.  But, at the same time, the whole affair did illustrate the blatant hypocrisy of the awards.  And, more importantly, just how small the voting population, all sides put together, is, compared to the entirety of fandom.

At the end, the book discusses ways to build SJW-free organisations.  This is not an easy task, as one must be prepared for a barrage of negative publicity – or worse – whenever you do something or are seen to do something to upset the SJWs.  In some ways, this is the most important part of the book – and not just for the declared reason.  Competition helps keep organisations honest, rather than allowing themselves to forget their core goal.  The NFL can reasonably be said to have forgotten that its purpose is to entertain people, rather than play politics.  Some of the advice is good, some is bad … although it strikes me that insisting that directors have actual experience before they become directors might be the most practical step anyone could take.  There are certainly ways to allow dissent without letting it turn into emotional blackmail and suchlike.

One question the book does not answer, not directly, is simple.  What’s wrong with social justice?  Why should well-meaning SJWs be opposed at all costs?

There are essentially three answers to that question.  First, SJWs have no concept of individuality.  A person is defined by their identity (female politician, for example, instead of a politician who happens to be female).  This is made all the more confusing by intersectionality, which suggests that a person who has two separate identities may be oppressed by the interplay of both identities.  Confused, yet?  What this does, in practical terms, is draw lines between people, thus triggering off the ‘Us v. Them’ mentality and, worse, separate people from each other.  By this reasoning, Condoleezza Rice, Will Smith, Barack Obama and Trayvon Martin would all be classed as ‘black,’ rather than as individuals with their own identities.

What makes this worse is that the people who are taken to represent each identity are often the worst of the bunch.

Second, SJWs have made us less empathic – not more.

The concept of social justice is powered by emotional blackmail – sometimes called ‘weaponised empathy.’  You feel sorry for someone and thus give them an inch, which they use to take a mile. No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes. However, people resent having their emotions manipulated, even if it is for the greater good.  The natural response to emotional blackmail is to tune it out and, eventually, learn to ignore it.  As Dave Freer put it:

“The idea that the cup of sympathy is a finite one, even smaller in hard economic times, is simply beyond [SJW’s] grasp, despite the fact that we see this in practice all the time. Joe calls in to work to say his kid is sick, and he has to take the child to the ER, gets sympathy. People pick up his slack, and the boss cuts him some extra. But even if the kid IS really very sickly, and it’s not just Joe’s excuse for a hangover, it gets used up after a few repetitions. People think Joe is taking unfair advantage, even if he isn’t. They also just get tired of giving. If you’re on the receiving end and all you give back is more demands, more ‘guilting’ your audience into more giving, the faster that’ll happen.”

People can become tired of constantly being told that they’re the bad guys, that they have to do everything from watch their speech, thus limiting rational debate, to take someone’s side automatically because they’re a designated victim.  However, there is a more serious point.

The two reasons I mentioned above intersect in several different ways.  One of the most important is that people can lose sympathy for groups, because they’ve been taught to think of people as belonging to their group first and foremost.  The rising tide of anti-immigration sentiment in both America and Europe owes its existence to a combination of bad behaviour and identity politics.  Ironically, the rise of ‘white nationalism’ in the US is a direct result of identity politics.  If every hyphenated-American can have an identity, why can’t white Americans?

This poisons the well in quite a few ways.  By pushing for diversity quotas and hires in businesses, SJWs both fuel resentment against the people who benefit from measures like Affirmative Action and directly harms them, because everyone who doesn’t benefit believes that the people who do have an unfair advantage.  This does not do wonders for social harmony.  Indeed, it does the exact opposite.

We, as a society, have started to slip into ‘Nag Rage.’  We are sick of being lectured by people who consider themselves our betters.  We are sick of being told what to do by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about.  And we are sick of being told that we have to be nice to people who want to hurt us.  This is fuelling a pushback that – perhaps worst of all – will hurt the people the SJWs claim to be trying to help.  Social Justice has a bad reputation because, above all, it simply doesn’t know when to stop.  And people are sick of falsifying their preferences and pretending to like it.

I could go on about this for quite some time.  But I’m not going to bother.

There are people who will dismiss this book because it is written by Vox Day.  That is unwise.  A person may be widely disliked – and very few people seem to be neutral about Vox Day – but that doesn’t stop them from having a point.  And while you may disagree with his, this book is still worth a read.

And, if you’re interested in how society has started to come to the boil, you could do worse than read this book.

Kirkus, converged

Kirkus is supposed to be a serious professional book review site. But, as has been written, SJW convergence always prevents an organization from being able to fulfill its primary purpose:

Around the time when diversity became the cause célèbre for young adult fiction’s most passionate activists, trade reviewer Kirkus implemented some unique rules to establish its bona fides at the forefront of the movement: characters were to be explicitly identified by race, religion, and sexual orientation in every YA book review moving forward; furthermore, the writers of those reviews would be selected according to their race, religion, and sexual orientation as well, critiquing texts for sensitivity in addition to entertainment value. A statement on the Kirkus website reads:

“[Because] there is no substitute for lived experience, as much as possible books with diverse subject matter and protagonists are assigned to ‘own voices’ reviewers, to identify both those books that resonate most with cultural insiders and those books that fall short.”

The implementation of these policies hasn’t been without hiccups, but overall, Kirkus had more or less successfully positioned itself as a reviewer striving to be sensitive to pressing contemporary concerns about diversity and representation in YA — right down to the use of the word problematic to describe books that aren’t adequately woke.

It was with these policies in place that Kirkus published its review last week for American Heart, a YA novel by author Laura Moriarty. American Heart takes place in a dystopian future where the U.S. has rounded up and relocated its Muslim population to internment camps in Nevada. Its protagonist, Sarah Mary, is a 15-year-old from Missouri who doesn’t question the validity of the ban until she meets a Muslim woman on the run, an Iranian immigrant and professor named Sadaf. In a story loosely modeled on Huckleberry Finn, Sarah Mary ends up traveling north with Sadaf in the hopes of helping her escape to Canada.

For some members of the YA community, the premise was objectionable from the get-go (the first Goodreads review, left on September 7, begins with “fuck your white savior narratives”). But after a research and review process including multiple sensitivity reads, Moriarty was prepared to stand by her work, and the notoriously prickly Kirkus gave the book a starred review. Published on October 10, it described American Heart as “terrifying, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and touching” and “a moving portrait of an American girl discovering her society in crisis.”

Only a few days later, the review was pulled amid continued criticism of the book from community members. The review was replaced by a statement from Kirkus’s editor-in-chief Claiborne Smith explaining that the editorial board and the reviewer — described as “an observant Muslim [woman] of color” and “expert in children’s & YA literature [who is] well-versed in the dangers of white savior narratives” — were “evaluating” the review. Shortly thereafter, Kirkus published an amended review that retracted the book’s star and condemned Moriarty’s choice to write the story from the first-person perspective of a white teenage girl.

“Sarah Mary’s ignorance is an effective worldbuilding device,” read the new review, “but it is problematic that Sadaf is seen only through the white protagonist’s filter.”

Add “book review sites that don’t review books” to the long list of SJW-converged organizations unable to perform their primary function. And speaking of SJW convergence and YA novels, look at what sort of creature Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Tor Books is now attempting to push on young readers.

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders mashed up technology and witchcraft in her debut novel All the Birds in the Sky. Now, in her latest project, she’ll be journeying into space and delving into the teenage psyche, in a new young adult science fiction trilogy recently acquired by Tor Teen.

“Now it can be told: I’m a YA author at last!” Anders tweeted. “I’ve always loved YA and I have been toiling in secret on this for ages.”

I expect everyone in science fiction will be tremendously surprised when it gets arrested for something to do with YA readers within 18 months of publication. We may need to lower the time estimated for when Castalia’s sales pass Tor’s.

Review: Six Expressions of Death

Peter Grant, the author of the Maxwell Saga, reviews Mojo Mori’s Six Expressions of Death. He calls it “an unusual thriller with some intriguing twists.”

I don’t particularly enjoy most thrillers or suspense novels.  I find most of them wanting in one or more aspects, failing to hold my attention.  This one is different.  It’s set in samurai-era Japan, and offers a fascinating insight into that culture in the guise of a murder mystery.  Added to that is an element of the mystical and spiritual, a supernatural twist to the classic whodunnit genre.

An excerpt from Mojo Mori’s debut novel:

A faint sound made the man freeze, his heart racing. Holding his breath, he listened intently. Utter silence prevailed for several moments. Then his ears detected furtive sounds—the soft, irregular noises of a living creature creeping through the grove nearby. The man rose to a crouch, laying his hand on his sword-hilt as he peered into the gloom.

Suddenly, the silhouette of a man glided stealthily between two trees not seven feet from where the traveler crouched! The fog provided a background against which a peasant’s wide straw hat appeared clearly. The fellow also bore a suspiciously long pole in his hands. A second and third, each carrying a similar pole, followed the first. A moment later, the traveler glimpsed the trio moving to his left, creeping methodically through the grove and thrusting the long poles into any place that might conceal a man. Hunters! But of men, not beasts.

The traveler immediately recognized his danger. The long poles were spears, and it was for him the men were almost certainly searching. He did not know if they were agents of his lord’s enemies, attempting to thwart his mission, or merely robbers alerted to potential prey by the innkeeper at the village.

Who they were mattered little at the moment. They would surely kill him if they found him. If he remained in the grove, they were certain to discover him soon. Though he was not unskilled with a sword, the traveler knew he stood little chance against three men at once, particularly men armed with spears.

The man climbed to his feet as quietly as he could, picking up his own straw hat from the forest floor. Easing himself through the trees slowly, and cautiously, the traveler moved away from the three men and in the direction of the road. He could no longer see or hear the hunters. His heart beat violently as he stole among the trunks, keeping one hand outstretched to feel any obstacles hidden in the murk before he stumbled noisily into them. His whole body was tense with the expectation of steel plunging into his flesh from the thrust of an unseen ambusher’s spear.

Soon he reached the far end of the grove. He would have liked to proceed more cautiously, but he knew that lingering even a moment too long might well prove fatal. Once clear of the pines and away from the hunters, speed would prove essential. A clump of small bushes stood between the road and the end of the grove, clinging precariously to a low bank. He clambered down through them carefully, trying not to tangle his legs with the thin branches and snap one loudly. Fortune remained with him, though, as he made his way through them without breaking any, and he was relieved to feel the road’s firm earth under his feet.

The man moved off along the road as swiftly as he dared, his straw sandals making little noise on the damp, hard-packed dirt. Crouching low to make his silhouette less visible, he glanced warily from side to side as he fled. In the pre-dawn light, the road seemed lined with dark, mysterious shapes watching him in brooding silence. He found himself keenly aware of how far away he was from safety, and how close he still was to the men trying to kill him.

A sense of looming menace dogged the man, almost as if he could feel the breath of a pursuer on the back of his neck. The recollection of the innkeeper touching his shoulder as he slept returned to him with blazing clarity.

Is that how they tracked me so easily to the grove? he wondered, as a new fear tingled along his limbs. Did that man put a devil on my back, which rides there even now? If he did, then their witch will know which way I fled!

He had no choice. Better to deal with it now than after daybreak, when he could be seen for miles along the road. The traveler halted and reached deep into his garments. After a moment, his questing fingers found the small bag where he kept sacred salt from the shrine at Shiogama, which he had kept for just such a moment. After whispering a desperate prayer to Shiotsutsuno-oji-no-kami, he withdrew a large pinch of the blessed salt and threw it over his back. Immediately, he felt lighter, and freer, as the sensation of clinging menace left him.

Looking east, he saw that the line of pale light along the horizon’s edge was growing. Despite the fog’s uncertain protection, he knew he needed to put more distance between himself and the pine grove where danger had come stealing upon him on padded feet.

Once he had gone two hundred paces from the grove, the traveler stood more upright and picked up speed with longer, faster strides. He was still stiff from his night’s sleep, but he was refreshed too, and he could feel that he had the strength to run until noon, if need be.

As he ran at a relaxed, ground-eating pace, he listened for the sound of heavy feet running up behind him, holding himself ready to turn and fight for his life. But he heard no sounds, and when he occasionally looked back, he saw no human forms moving amid the gradually fading fog. He went on for half an hour before halting for a moment at the top of a slope leading down to a footbridge across a stony mountain stream. It was morning now, and the sun had fully risen, but silence lay over the lank, motionless grasses almost as thickly as the mist hovering over the water.

The man drew in a deep breath, released it slowly, then walked quickly down the slope towards the stream. Despite the meal the night before, the exertion had stirred his appetite and he wished he had bought food for breakfast at the village.

The traveler walked quickly through the fog, his hand poised close to the hilt of his sword. His ears detected no sounds beyond his heart’s swift drumming and a faint whisper of air breathing through the roadside grass, despite his urgent listening. The traveler’s eyes stabbed right and left as he walked, trying to pierce the solemn white vapor hanging sluggishly half a pace above the ground.

The man now felt grateful for the straw sandals he wore. He welcomed their presence even though they had become sodden from the wet road, with water soaking through to chill the soles of his feet. Normally he would have preferred the cleanliness of a pair of geta, that would lift his feet comfortably above the mud. But with peril skulking at his heels this morning, the filthy, water-logged sandals offered him what he now craved more than anything—silence.

The traveler descended a slope towards a stony creek, noting the wooden footbridge crossing the swift mountain stream, whose dark waters gurgled and splashed steadily in the deep pre-dawn hush. He glanced up at the facing hillside, his eyes questing for signs of danger among the pines that dotted it.

Well, perhaps they were only brigands after all, the man thought as he crossed the wooden footbridge and began to climb the facing slope. He looked back and saw there was still no sign of his pursuers.

The fog swirled for a moment as a soft breath of morning breeze rolled down from the green heights above. The white curtain parted, almost as if by human hands. The traveler looked out over the grassy slope falling away to the left, down to the curve of the stream he crossed moments before. Beyond it, a second, thickly-forested slope mounted towards the unseen sky. It seemed to him that the hillside next to him lay empty except for a few paltry shreds of mist that refused to dissipate.

The traveler took a few steps, then, feeling a sudden prickling along his neck, looked to his left again with a sinking feeling in his heart. The slope was no longer empty! Three men now stood on the slope ahead of him, perhaps fifty paces distant. All three were staring in his direction, their eyes dark pits under the wide brims of their straw hats.

Spider legs of horror stalked up and down the traveler’s spine. He knew of shinobi, the assassins who knew the occult secrets of the ghost world. Some said they could track their prey swiftly and surely with the aid of spirits, and bargained with terrible creatures from beyond the grave for even stranger powers. Were these hunters who had made him their quarry such men?

Some things don’t change

Mike Glyer reports that someone named Steve J. Wright is “reviewing” A Throne of Bones the way atheists used to do chapter-by-chapter “reviews” of TIA:

Steve J. Wright has assigned himself the quest of reading and blogging about Vox Day’s epic fantasy novel A Throne of Bones and has written half-a-dozen posts this past week. The first is: A Throne of Bones by “Vox Day” – Preamble, on Managing Expectations. Wright doesn’t think much of the writer either as a storyteller or a technician, and all the posts come at the book at an angle similar to this passage in the third post, A Throne of Bones – Chapter 1:

Well.  Basically, in this chapter, Beale is managing to do a little with a lot – his style continues to be ponderous, awkward and clunky, nothing very much happens, and the deficiencies of style lead to the failure of his attempts at characterization – Corvus is clearly meant to be a super-competent military commander, but his laboured and over-long dialogue make him come across as a pompous old windbag instead.

I think that’s the trap – Wright is giving a solid, honest review of something he doesn’t find very interesting. And it’s contagious. When a fanwriter feels contempt for the material he’s discussing, the only way to win is to treat it humorously, because otherwise an audience finds it wearing to keep reading someone taking a superior point of view.

I mentioned this before, and when I did, I was thinking this all reminded me of something else, though. Then, when I saw Glyer’s reference to it, the recollection hit me, almost entirely unlike a cheetah. What it reminded me of is Michael Moorcock’s nominal critique of Tolkien, although, as we know, Moorcock was really just whining about the fact that nearly everyone who is literate prefers Tolkien’s books to his own tedious, poorly-plotted, scrawny little “epics”. And even those who aren’t literate would definitely prefer a Lord of the Rings movie to an Elric one.

Can you even imagine the latter? Ninety minutes of an albino, probably played by Idris Elba these days, repeatedly alternating between self-serving betrayals and self-pitying bouts of weeping. Moorcock’s work didn’t even rise to the level of Harry freaking Potter, never mind the lasting epic greatness of Tolkien.

The sort of prose most often identified with “high” fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies….

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom “good taste” is synonymous with “restraint” (pastel colours, murmured protest) and “civilized” behaviour means “conventional behaviour in all circumstances”. This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure – because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders – if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we’re told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can’t be all bad.

You can always tell when gammas with literary ambitions have it in for an author that normal people like. They hone in on the “prose” and the “style” like lasers, because literary style is a sufficiently nebulous and subjective subject to let them natter on about it without risking being disproven. I’ve only seen one of his posts – I have no use for criticism that is not substantive – and saw he had already committed two major howlers with regards to military history and the use of magic. He’d be wise to stick to complaining about the style, which no one has ever claimed is any better than “workmanlike”. Including me.

But let the critics natter on, by all means. This is a big step forward from simply being ignored. The more hate from these circles, the better. I expect that in another few years, they’ll start hedging their bets by starting to mention a few of the positive aspects that presently manage to escape their collective notice. And it would certainly be ironic, to say nothing of highly amusing, if Mr. Wright’s take eventually proved to be as much of an obvious joke as Mr. Moorcock’s.

What’s interesting about all this is that someone who shall remain nameless to protect his reputation, but is a Respected and Well-Known Name in science fiction and fantasy circles, told me some years ago that he expected I would eventually become a leading fantasy writer. I’m not there yet, to be sure, but the notion is considerably less ridiculous than it appeared at the time. I have to admit, I scoffed at it myself, not out of humility, but out of a recognition of my stylistic limitations. Of course, since then, I’ve learned that style is only one of the four major components of a novel, and it is far from the most important one. No one reads Eco or Murakami or Tolkien for their literary styles. If I’m very fortunate, perhaps one day someone will write a hate-review called “The Dichotomy of Day” about me in The Atlantic instead of merely posting it on a personal blog.

Anyhow, should you wish to judge my “ponderous, awkward and clunky” style for yourself, Summa Elvetica & Other Stories is still free.