Dreamer Easy

"Gender is not the issue. Gender is the battlefield. Or the playground. The issue is us versus them. Any us versus any them."

-- from Kate Bornstein's play Hidden: A Gender, reproduced in Gender Outlaw (1994). This book has blown my mind.

I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment: that human conflict can generally be boiled down to "our side good, your side bad". Our culture is divided again and again into opposing factions. In many if not most cases, one faction is more highly valued than the other. Crucially, we must stay in our assigned factions -- or be punished for being uppity or sissy or just unreadable. (This last is critical for gender, but also for other kinds of categories: find an online argument on a controversy like Creationism or genetically engineered foods, and ask questions, declining to identify which side you're on. You'll be assigned the opposite side -- by both sides. You cannot be neutral.)

This text is from the defunct Tracker magazine, and was written by Chris Munro. It's from an account of Wiradjuri men Yarri and Jacky Jacky's heroic rescue of nearly 70 people from the 1852 Gundagai flood, now commemorated by a statue. The Wiradjuri people had been warning the town that an environmental disaster was inevitable. Anyway:

"John Spencer, a relative of the town’s punt owner and also the Inn Keeper spent 36 hours in a tree until Yarri came for him. Spencer was near frozen and completely naked at the time, save for a cash box strapped around his neck."

I found it -- the description of nanomachines being splashed onto a man, reproducing, and suddenly hitting critical mass: "The crete does nothing for a moment. It's in the long flat part of the exponential curve. Then, like a switch has been flipped, it sinks through his clothes, eating." It's in Daniel H. Wilson's short story "Small Things". The long flat part of the curve is what we lived with, with COVID-19 -- it was coming for such a long time, from so far away, and then BOOM! (See also comparisons with Lancelot's arrival at the wedding in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

"The rise of scientific communities, curiously, tended to reduce sentence complexity because specialized common knowledge allowed complexity to be encoded into words instead of grammar."

-- Michael Segal, "Say Again", Nautilus 23 Nov/Dec 2017

"If you’re someone that really doesn’t like people, don’t go where the people are. Everyone will be able to tell you’re unhappy. Stay home and post pictures of your cats. We’ll be much cooler with that. Don’t make yourself miserable because you have to do something. There is no one person who holds the key to your career. There’s no single technique that gets you that super mega ultra bestseller... You have to live the way you want to live, and if that’s in isolation, just make sure you keep reading, stay abreast of genre and what’s going on, and you’ll do fine." Seanan McGuire, interviewed in Locus, December 2017.

I'm so aware of a vast and vigorous community of writers, editors, publishers, and fans, of which I'm not a part, due to chronic illness and social anxiety - so these words were greatly encouraging.

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."

"Does anybody ever feel sincerely pleased at the prospect of remaining in eternal opposition, a social misfit, for the rest of his life? I knew, at any rate, that I myself didn't. I wanted — however much I might try to persuade myself, in moments of arrogance, to the contrary — to find some place, no matter how humble, in the scheme of society. Until I do that, I told myself, my writing will never be any good; no amount of talent or technique will redeem it: it will remain a greenhouse product; something, at best, for the connoisseur and the clique."

— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows

Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with / I remain as steady as the three legged cauldron.
— Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

(My gods, if it were only so!)

"The science of automation has surely reached the point where your company could design a machine... that would correct galleys."

"... such a machine would require that the galleys be translated into special symbols or, at the least, transcribed on tapes. Any corrections would emerge in symbols. You would need to keep men employed translating words to symbols, symbols to words. Furthermore, such a computer could do no other job. It couldn't prepare the graph you hold in your hand, for instance."

— Issac Asimov, "Galley Slave", 1941. irl ASCII was two decades away. In the future of US Robots and Mechnical Men it was apparently still a distant dream. :)