Dreamer Easy

I guess everyone has feet of clay, or a blind spot - pick your metaphor. In the case of Hannah Arendt, it seems to have been Africa. I read her chapter on "Race and Bureaucracy" and her account of the colonisation of Africa with mounting unease, realising that she was not just describing the attitudes of colonists like the Boers, but her own. (I got so cranky that I pulled the very readable African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone off my infinite "to read" shelf.)

"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*

I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)

Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)

Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.

It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)

Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:

"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)

There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".

McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.


* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]

** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)

*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(

I read Chapter Six, "Race-thinking Before Racism", which describes the development of racism as a philosophy or "science" at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Opinions about race predated this, of course, but now racism became an ideology.

Two ideologies have "essentially defeated" the rest, writes Arendt: "the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." Both have been adopted by states, by intellectuals, and by the masses. Why do ideologies persuade? Not because of science or history. "Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine." For example, Arendt points to how the idea of progress guided late Nineteenth Century scientific thought, rather than being a product of scientific research. "The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow citizens."

In the early Nineteenth Century, this ideology was the attempt of "certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin." IIUC this was a flop, so there was a switch from language to what we'd call genetics, a "naturalistic appeal... which addressed itself to tribal instincts". All Germans were related by blood, and were of "pure, unmixed stock". At this stage, though, it's only the precursor of racism: there are supposedly separate "races", but they're still equal.

In France, by contrast, the idea was that the French aristocracy descended from the rightful conquerors and were a different "race" to their inferiors. Eventually one such aristocrat, Arthur de Gobineau, puts forward the view that the aristocracy is doomed, and so are Western civilisation and humanity itself; this is "due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dominant." (The Victorian fiction I've read is nervous as hell about this.) What to do? eugenics, of course.

(What an unpleasant thing to realise that the Ernst Haeckel who did those bewitching biology illustrations was also a raving racist.)

In conclusion, Arendt remarks: "It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the 'scramble for Africa' and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism."

I'm reading a saddening but helpful book from 2005, Bipolar Disorder: Your Questions Answered, by Neil Hunt. It's meant for GPs but has plenty of info relevant to patients. It's sad because having an incurable, sometimes fatal illness is sad, and also because so many people (and their families, friends, and doctors) have struggled with this one. I have never forgotten a pamphlet which said "most people with mental illness suffer very much".

Anywho, it's a good refresher on both depression and hypomania (I have Bipolar II Disorder, where you don't get full-blown mania, thank goodness). For example: "... it is unusual to find a depressed patient who is sleeping well." Having trouble getting to sleep, waking frequently during the night, and what I call the "early morning wake-up call", where you wake up at ridiculous o'clock but can't get back to sleep - all too familiar, and compounded in my case by sleep apnoea and medication side-effects. (About a week ago I got so fed up with not sleeping that I reduced my recently increased dose of Epilim back down to 500 mg. Instant and almost total cure - though I'm having to take a little Xanax to get my sleep schedule nailed down again.)

"Depression tends to be the problem that dogs manic depressives in the long term... mild but persistent low mood is the commonest mood state that patients experience, so that on average bipolars can find themselves in a recognisably depressed mood state for a third of the time." This is what my shrink calls "sitting low". I believe my mood stabiliser, Epilim, prevents me from reaching my previous hypomanic highs, which I'd come to accept as a normal part of my life after decades; but I may be wrong about that, and it would be dangerous to stop the Epilim while I'm still taking an antidepressant, as multiple awful episodes of uncontrolled hypomania made all too clear.

Most recently we added Allegron to kill the depression that resulted from the hypomania that resulted from jetlag, but once it had done its job, I came back off it: my liver lacks the enzyme to break it down, so it was building up and up in my blood, making me tireder and tireder, giving me an incredibly dry mouth, and making me have odd, existential thoughts (it can provoke schizophrenia-like symptoms in some people). I'm having a DNA test to check the enzyme thing; I suspect it could explain my history of incapacitating sedation on various antidepressants.

Hunt describes a trap I've let myself fall into: doing nothing but work. "Many people who are depressed have brought their range of activities down to the bare minimum - 'just the grind' - and have stopped doing the things that brought pleasure to their lives." In my case that's reading books and watching movies for no purpose other than enjoyment. (I just read Christopher Isherwood's roman a clef Lions and Shadows for no reason other than that I enjoy his writing, and enjoyed the living hell out of it.) Getting my ass published overseas has become the consuming purpose of my life. It keeps me going when nothing else does, but as this last week showed, it can be a miserable 'grind' when I'm too exhausted or burned-out to attend to it. I need a better balance.

The book also mentions SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder - depression in winter, mania in spring. I think there may be a little of this in the mix: I associate the change of the seasons, spring and autumn both, with feeling "high". Though I no longer see God when I see bougainvilleas, which is a shame.

Fair bit more of the book still to go.

This may be the best collection of short stories I've ever read. In fact, I've been trying to review the book for ages. After reading Krys Lee's novel How I Became a North Korean last year, I returned to Drifting House and was surprised to discover I'd already read it, apparently cover to cover, probably in Rockville Library during one of our visits to the US. I bought myself a copy during this year's trip, only to have it vanish in the post. Now I've borrowed it from the library again (and it's overdue).

Each story came back to me as I read them, but the stories that had stuck in my mind were "The Salaryman" and the title story, "Drifting House". Most of the tales in the book consider some aspect of Korean society: immigration to the US, the trauma of the Korean War still felt generations later, the continuing US presence in South Korea. "The Salaryman", written in second person, forces you to accompany an office worker on his way down after the 1997 financial crisis in Asia, finishing with a punch that took my breath away. Lee often writes from the point of view of a child; "Drifting House" follows three siblings as they try to survive the journey across the border from North Korea into China.

The writing is precise and confident, detailed and absorbing. Korean words are peppered through the text, as well as literally translated phrases ("Have you eaten rice?"), but never in a way that would puzzle the reader. For me, the only off note in the anthology was in "A Temporary Marriage" - I just find it hard to believe a woman would eroticise her abuse.

These spoiler-free reviews are a bit frustrating because I can't get into the meat of a book. These reviews will tell you more:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/09/drifting-house-krys-lee-review

http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/KrysLeeDriftingHouse.htm

I'm enjoying re-reading some Isaac Asimov robot stories which I haven't read since adolescence. I'm struck by how complex robo-psychology is, and how rich and different the personalities of the robots are. They are people - certainly no less people than Asimov's humans, who are often as constrained by their own psychological quirks as the robots are by the Three Laws (the Aurorans' terror of human presence, for example). This only underlines the creepy idea underlining Asimov's whole project of getting away from the stock pulp storyline of robot uprisings. In creating the Three Laws, he created the perfect slave: loyal, willing, disposable. Or almost perfect, since the things keep going wrong. I read "Little Lost Robot" this morning, in which Susan Calvin (cheers cheers cheers) explains that robots are entirely aware that they are superior to human beings: it's only the Three Laws which keep a potential rebellion in check. Even Calvin, that great champion of robots, calls them "boy" (as does Lije Bailey), in a disturbing invocation of the era of segregation during which the stories were written, and is coldly willing to destroy dozens of them rather than let an unbalanced specimen escape. (Cf the Star Wars universe, in which Anakin's mum's slavery is tragic but the droids, for all their personality and loveability, are strictly property.)

Disturbed by Kelly Robson's column in the April issue of Clarkesworld, "Another World: Being James Tiptree Jr". She discusses the letter which Dr. Alice B. Sheldon left to be released in case of her death, in which she outed the science fiction writer Tiptree as being a woman writing under a male pseudonym. Robson quotes a key passage from the letter: "Everything sounded so much more interesting coming from a man. (Didn't it. Didn't it, just a little? Be honest.)" She remarks, "Writing as Tiptree, Alice Sheldon didn’t just avoid gender discrimination; she supercharged everything she wrote with gravitas and authority... Writing as a man gave her freedom that was missing when she wrote as herself... Being Tiptree certainly allowed her to avoid gender discrimination, but more importantly, it allowed her to overcome the barriers in her own mind."

My contribution to Chicks Dig Time Lords, "If I can't Squee I Don't Want to Be Part of your Revolution"*, contains a puzzled self-examination: what makes women's writing different from men's, and thus made my Doctor Who novels different from the others, which were overwhelmingly written by men? I consulted a couple of books on the subject of women's writing: one pointed out that women generally have different experiences to men; the other seemed to warn against lumping all women together. My problem was, and is, my slightly loose connection to the category "woman". Though I am a ciswoman, and share many experiences with other ciswomen, I am also sufficiently gender non-conforming to be occasionally mistaken for a man.

In the Chicks chapter, I pointed out that the style of all of the Doctor Who novel writers was somewhat constrained by the fact that we were writing science fiction adventure stories, with the main characters already provided. Although we drew on our own lives, like any writer in any genre, the books are still fairly homogenous, and that may have overwhelmed any gender differences.

Robson recounts meeting a male SF fan who proudly proclaims that he never reads books by women. I seem to recall that, as a teen, I eschewed female SF authors because they didn't seem to be writing the kind of SF I enjoyed (Asimov, Niven, a Heinlein phase). Perhaps they were drawing on interests or experiences I didn't share; perhaps there were fewer female authors available, so I was less likely to hit on one that I liked**; or perhaps it was simple prejudice. I am frustrated by not yet having found women who write the sort of SF I've recently enjoyed, by Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, and Liu Cixin.

As well as being disturbed by my freakish gender, it troubles me that I insist on reading and writing SF, even though fantasy seems like it would be my more natural home. Perhaps the reason I write science fiction is to grab some of the "gravitas and authority" that Tiptree's assumed gender provided. Some part of me insists that SF = srs bizness, fantasy = mucking around (the same part that insists that YA is also mucking around). I worry that this prejudice is also somehow grounded in gender. I guess that's why Robson's column troubles me. (OTOH, maybe I don't want to write fantasy because I'm far less interested in reading it?)


* Neither my best title nor my greatest piece of prose ever, but I am still desperately proud of having been part of this landmark book, particularly its role in triggering the Sad Puppies. I'm also chuffed to see it being quoted in academic books, which must mean I got something right. :)

** The two most significant anthologies in my youth were Tomorrow's Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, and The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus. The former contains 18 stories, three by women, but they seem to have made no impression on me, compared to Damon Knight's "Cabin Boy", Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air", Mark Clifton's "Star Bright", Asimov's own "The Ugly Little Boy", and, gods help us all, Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life". The Omnibus contains just one story by a woman - "The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean, which I do remember, but it's a bit of fluff, damnit, surrounded by more memorable stuff.

I'm reading Buchi Emecheta's novel "The Joys of Motherhood", set in Nigeria around WWII, and there's a bit where the white master addresses his 'house-boy' as 'baboon'. She writes:
I've sometimes drawn a comparison between my experience of bullying and what I imagine it must be like to be the target of racism. There are crucial differences: the people who continually, unpredictably chipped away at my soul in high school were not trying to keep a whole class of people* miserable, afraid, and aware of how unwelcome they were; and once I escaped high school, I escaped them**. There's no such merciful exit for the young hijabi, the Indigenous athlete, the Sudanese refugee - all the Australians who have to cope with harassment from the media and in the street on top of systemic racism.

That constant drip-drip-drip is what makes people sometimes suddenly explode over seemingly small insults. I don't know what it's like to live with bigotry day in and day out, but I do know what the drip-drip-drip can do to you. When I read Buchi Emecheta's words, the familiar and infinite rage rose up in me. It's there now, in my chest and arms, almost nauseating. I think she may have been feeling something like the same feeling when she condemned the people who stoop to "that type of wickedness".



* Although there was gender policing involved; I would not have been the only young woman being called a "lemon" for being insufficiently feminine.

** With the exception of the Unpleasantness here in lj, many years ago now, which forced me to deal with the damage from high school - as well as requiring me to broaden my horizons, which led directly to the discovery of Emecheta, now one of my favourite authors.

Fiction
Buchi Emecheta. The Moonlight Bride.
Judith Burnley (ed). Penguin Modern Stories 4.
William Gibson. The Peripheral.
Ha Jin. The Bridegroom.
Krys Lee. Drifting House. I realised I'd already read this whole book, probably in Rockville Library, so this was really a re-read, but I didn't regret a word of it.
— How I Became a North Korean.
劉慈欣 Liu Cixin. Death's End.
Neal Stephenson. Seveneves.
Neal Stephenson and George Jewbury (as Frederick George). Interface.
Charles Stross. The Jennifer Morgue.
Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti. Zeroes.
Monique Witting. Les Guérillères. 'There was a time when you were not a slave... Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.'

Non-Fiction
Anthony Bourdain. Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical.
Dean Buonomano. Brain Bugs: How the brain's flaws shape our lives.
Roger Luckhurst. The mummy's curse: the true history of a dark fantasy.
Serena Nanda. Neither man nor woman: the Hijras of India.
Phil Sandifer. Neoreaction: a Basilisk.
Neal Stephenson. In the Beginning... Was the Command Line.
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.
Kevin Warwick. Artificial Intelligence: the Basics.
Fay Weldon. Auto da Fay.

The Probably Unwise "Man's Inhumanity to Man" Reading List Project:
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl.
John Hershey. Hiroshima.
George Orwell. Animal Farm.

Manga etc
Hirano Kōta. Hellsing vol 1.
Hamish Steele. Pantheon: the True Story of the Egyptian Deities. No less silly (or rude) than the myths it's based on. :)

( Books bought and borrowed )

"The Origins of Totalitarianism" explores the history of antisemitism, imperialism, and the rise of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. I'm reading it because of that series of Tweets going around which explains that fascists say not what is true, but what would have to be true for them to take the steps they plan - for example, claiming that millions of non-citizens voted in the US election, as a precursor to (further) voter suppression.

1. The difference between totalitarian governments, which aim to control every aspect of their subjects' lives, and merely authoritarian governments, which are tyrannical but allow some freedom; for example, evidence of the end of totalitarianism in the USSR was 'the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts', albeit underground. (pp xxxvi-xxxvii) Also, IIUC, totalitarian regimes make a 'claim to global rule' (xxi), and therefore, 'total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.' (p xxviii) (Is this the goal of North Korea? If so, we're lucky they just don't have the means to put that claim into practice.)

2. "... the fact that totalitarian government... rests on mass support is very disquieting. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars as well as statesmen often refuse to recognize it, the former by believing in the magic of propaganda and brainwashing, the latter by simply denying it... secret reports on German public opinion during the war... shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets - massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc - and, second, the "extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions"... this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime." (p xxiii) My mind went at once to the general support amongst Australians for our mistreatment of refugees. Perhaps our government can drop its efforts to keep it out of sight.

I was struck by the blurb which says this novel is written with "heart and passion", because I was hypnotised by its flattened affect. The narrative is drawn from the author's real encounters with North Korean refugees. The cruelty faced by its characters face is described so matter-of-factly that it reminded me of journalism, which in turn was a reminder that these fictional events are the shadows of the real abuse suffered by thousands of North Koreans who have fled across the border into China. The danger of being caught and sent back makes them everyone's prey. Lee lets the misery speak for itself.

The story is told from the POVs of three young people, two North Koreans, one rich, one poor, and a Korean-American who goes to ground with them after facing exclusion and abuse from his American peers and betrayal by his family. They fight tooth and nail to stay alive. The rage they accumulate is intense when it finally finds expression. The fact that it is possible to come out the other side of it all, damaged but still human, makes the story bearable. Anyway I couldn't put it down: go and read it.

Krys Lee interview: ‘North Koreans became part of my world, and then I got threats’ (GA, 12 August 2016)