Preamble
I think October’s newsletter breaks a record for me, for the number of times I’ve started, stopped, scrapped, and rewritten sections therein. It’s just been one of those months: filled with so many extremes on the world stage, and such a range of personal lows and highs, that finding one’s footing seems nigh on impossible.
How should we respond to the background radiation of climate change events and escalating Eastern European war? Or how both are driving pre-existing systems of socioeconomic uncertainty to the brink at every local level? Energy costs, rental costs, inflation in general… It’s a real shame that evolution works on much longer time-scales, by and large: we could have used a boost in mental capacity to deal with how much more we’re aware today of crises on the macro scale.
Personally, I struggle most with the cadence of infotainment media. It’s not just that people seem so dedicated to their daily tempests in a teapot. It’s also the games that mainstream news make out of, say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the possibility of nuclear war that looms over all of it. For instance, when every Western media outlet seemed to be cheering Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive actions, I felt like a negative nelly while writing a news brief for OnlySky that noted Russia’s immediate retaliatory attack on civilian infrastructure, knocking out power and water to some three million, and also that Russia hadn’t shown any interest in the DMZ strongly recommended by international groups around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (whose director was recently abducted, it seems, by Russian forces).
It was just a quick news brief, but my message was clear: we needed to pay attention to Russia’s response to such decisive regional losses. And sure enough, Russia quickly announced a new conscription order, drummed up false referendums, and declared its annexation of four zones in Ukrainian sovereign territory. NATO and EU, in turn, more clearly outlined the actions on Russia’s end that would compel them to respond with a more concerted show of force.
But my point here isn’t a “told you so”—because Russia would have done all of this whatever I wrote. My point is to highlight how uneasy I felt, when writing that note of caution, while all around me were so many people celebrating Ukraine’s military successes. I felt profoundly out of sync with mainstream reactions to world events, and also… didn’t want to be in sync with them. Not if it meant gamifying everything.
And yet, it’s easy to lean too far into pessimism, too. Granted, there’s plenty in the news to inform a bleaker outlook, but going around looking for a bleaker outlook is little better than credulously buying into any fleeting rhetoric of military triumph.
This is why I found it quite healing to end off last week’s work at OnlySky with an article that highlighted three instances of things getting better: in Colombia, in Cuba, and with the Indian Supreme Court. It isn’t that we should always fixate on what’s going well, to the exclusion of paying needed attention to everything going wrong. It’s more that we need to remind ourselves sometimes of the baseline we’re using, to measure both the good and the bad in worldly affairs.
Put another way, our aim shouldn’t be pessimism or optimism. If we treat either of those concepts as end-goals when moving through the news of the day, all we’re doing is looking for evidence to reinforce a pre-existing conviction: a specific, rigid view of what the world is. The goal for me is much simpler: to hold on to my humanity through everything—and to hold on to others’ humanity, too.
Goodness knows, there’s enough in life to dehumanize us all.
So wherever your own struggle finds you this month, with the macro and the micro in the way of worldly and personal afflictions, I wish you three things:
The courage to be uncomfortable when trend cycles game-ify human lives.
The kindness to go easy on yourselves, whenever balancing personal and global stressors proves a messy affair.
The compassion to remember that you’re surrounded by people struggling to find their own balance between the two, too.
Because who knows where the world will find us next?
All we can hope for is to move with greater personal integrity here and now. Until November, then:
Be well. Be kind. Try not to worry too much about nuclear war unless you are in a position to do much about it. And, relatedly—seek justice where you can.
With all love in the struggle,
M
Table of Contents
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A moment with a friend (M2)
A personal question (M3)
Three notes on writing projects
Global Humanist Shoptalk, the podcast (WP1)
AI tools and a short story collection (WP2)
Thucydides and the next novel (WP3)
Three articles of note
“An Epidemic of Delusions: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People” (A1)
“How the Myth of Human Exceptionalism Cut Us Off From Nature” (A2)
Putin’s October 1 speech, on the annexation of four regions in Ukraine (A3)
Three TV series
The Rehearsal (TV1)
Ms. Marvel (TV2)
Chef’s Table: Pizza (TV3)
M1. A quotation
“I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight... I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh, from Being Peace
WP1. Global Humanist Shoptalk, the podcast
At the end of September, I dropped the remainder of my podcast episodes all at once. I’d been trying all year to post them with a consistent schedule, but the original plan tied them into a posting framework for OnlySky that changed very quickly once the latter launched in January. My original plan for the column? To build a space for actual dialogue about global humanist issues, via posts that built off one another. I wanted to move from humanist-policy theory to praxis on Mondays and Wednesdays, with a related essay tied into each humanist podcast episode every other Friday.
Quaint, no? Very Early Internet Blog Culture, for sure. Meanwhile, launching a brand new, yet fully formed news media outlet has been no mean feat, and this first half year in operation has offered all of us an education in rolling with the punches of digital infrastructure. For instance, as much as I loved the idea of more collaborative dialogue through linked posts around a given subject, it turns out that one cannot break into our internet’s dominant “search” model—to boost readership, to grow the venture’s stability on whole—without playing the SEO game well.
Now, there’s a great recent 99% Invisible episode on the problem of “search” that already covers this whole issue, so I’ll just focus on the part that really sticks in my craw: an SEO-based system favours articles with distinct key terms instead of, say, work that builds off pre-existing work. In doing so, our search engines offer far greater market incentives to the sort of amnesia-ridden click-bait that makes up our internet media sphere. In practice, that means that, even if my readers wanted me to do more linked pieces that build upon one another in a more traditional blog format (as some have definitely suggested), it would be at cost to overall reach and viability.
So much for the internet cultivating a better democracy, eh?
In the end, then, it was the right move to give up on trying to find opportunities within my new workflow to post reflections on each of these podcast episodes.
Still, I was initially discouraged when I dropped all the episodes at once. The whole venture felt like just one more project in a whole sea of work I’d been trying to develop with limited resources, which couldn’t find a home.
But after a bit of reflection, I’m quite happy that I decided to get these episodes off my plate. There was a rough learning curve with these pieces (Apple, for instance, really doesn’t want me to be able to host a podcast from Colombia), but it was, nevertheless, a learning curve. This year I tried something new.
(Again.)
And if it didn’t work out exactly right the first time?
Well, that’s fine.
We go forward, and we try our best to put all those lessons to work anew.
I’m already making plans for a better—and more standalone—season two.
TV1. The Rehearsal
In December and January, I learned something about myself, while moving through a period of great stress and heartbreak: I have deeply compulsive coping behaviours. Back then, one of them involved listening to messages over and over and over again. I’m talking well over a hundred times apiece—and I’m not entirely sure why. However, I was also struck by the fact that, the more I listened to these messages, the more I seemed to forget their content. The ritual of repeating them, of filling the dead air around me with them while grieving a loss of stability, had transcended the words themselves, and was now doing some other kind of work in my old, befuddled noggin.
Really weird experience. But! A necessary part of coping and processing, I suppose.
In general, though, I’ve always been someone who “rehearses”—who practises what I’m going to say many times over before a big moment, or sometimes even a small moment. For instance, I’ve drafted quite a few seemingly innocuous text messages days in advance, and in the interim before sending them, returned to the draft to slightly tweak an emoji or punctuation mark or bit of wording for what amounts to just a few lines of text. Why? Probably for a sense of control—and not just over what I’m saying, but also when I’m saying it: not too hastily, that is. Writing it down in the heat of the moment, then letting it sit awhile before I hit send.
Out of anger? Oh gosh, no. More like, out of an awareness of the minor-manic energy that shapes life with bipolar II. I think I just want to be sure that I’m not acting impulsively, by making grand plans or assertions that will wear on me later. I want to make sure I’m reaching out to people in the right way, with the right intentions, and using the right words. (Alternately, it always surprises me when people respond to my texts or emails right away with long responses of their own. What?! Don’t you also need to sit on your response awhile? Who are you that you can just… reply like that?)
All of which is to say that, while I was intrigued by what I’d heard about The Rehearsal, I also went into this recent HBO docu-series with great trepidation drawn from my own complex relationship with “rehearsing” for life. Would I be able to bear up to watching others with similar idiosyncrasies? Would seeing other people caught up in over-preparation prove instructive, or destructive?
The premise is pretty simple: Nathan Fielder (of Nathan for You) offers people the opportunity to undergo elaborate rehearsals for real-life events they’re nervous about. The first episode offers an excellent baseline: a man who lied to his trivia group about not having a master’s degree, and who now wants to fess up, but is inordinately afraid of how one teammate will respond. Nathan builds a replica of the bar where the event will take place, hires background actors to flesh out their rehearsals, hires a person to stake out the teammate before playing her part, and even manipulates the contents of the trivia night the two of them will be attending—all to ensure a smooth final run.
However, even with all that practice, all of Nathan’s careful blocking of his client’s actions through flow-charts of every possibility that might arise on the big night, unexpected variables creep in when it comes to the main event.
Because of course they do.
And this “twist” is integral to the thematic heart of the whole series, which then offers a far more complex story-line around its second subject: a woman who wants the experience of raising a child. Nathan tries to set up her dream scenario (a house outside the city, with a partner, and a child actor scenario that allows the baby to grow in three-year increments over the next few months), but nothing is quite what it seems, and many things go curiously wrong. I won’t spoil too much, except to say that her scenario ends up becoming the main focus for the season—which is, unto itself, a huge turn from the episodic storytelling that the show’s pilot first set up.
And by the end of the season? After a lot of painful twists that may have involved actual harm done to a small child? You wouldn’t be alone in wondering if the whole series had been staged. There is a lot in the editing and construction of the final product to suggest that Nathan’s been running us through a very different kind of story this whole time: not a “trick” exactly, but a conscious meditation on the nature of we who would so readily accept the show’s surface gimmick: its repeated tagline, that “If you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn't have to be left to chance.”
I’m honestly not sure what to think about how genuine all the situations here were. Certainly, life is always stranger than fiction, and plenty that might seem too on-the-nose for a literary editor could still absolutely occur in the wild.
But “real” or not, I do know that, whenever I try to sift through everything I watched, I catch myself making the mistake of thinking that I’ve come away from this series knowing anything about Nathan’s inner self and actual motivations from the version of himself that he’s put on screen. And that’s a meaningful discomfort to sit with, because it also speaks to how repetition and rehearsal works in my life, too. Yes, apparently I repeat and rehearse as coping mechanisms. And that’s fine—to a point. We all have our quirks and our damage. But I must never let myself forget that ritualized preparation for life is always performed in a simulacrum.
The real world, and all the microcosms it contains in the hearts and minds of other people, is always stranger. And therefore our outcomes in it are never just our own.
A1. “An Epidemic of Delusions: When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People”
For me, the best nonfiction reviews not only summarize and assess the arguments of the work under scrutiny, but also carry the conversation forward. This was definitely the case with Ryan M. Brown’s excellent “An Epidemic of Delusions”, a piece that reviews When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves by Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro.
Nadler and Shapiro’s book aims to address what its authors call an “epistemological crisis” in Western mainstream discourse, and to offer some critical thinking tools they believe will help. According to Brown’s summary, this crisis involves a serious case of “‘epistemic stubbornness’, a refusal to give up one’s beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence”, and it can afflict the “intellectually gifted”, folks who "understand the ‘canons' of good reason’ but refuse to abide by them”, as much as those who aren’t and don’t. Obviously, examples of “bad thinking” abound in the book’s mainly US context (anti-vax, false flag, and Satanist cult conspiracies alike). But what’s the cure?
Brown is so gentle in laying out what Nadler and Shapiro propose—the obvious solution, that is, of a humanistic education. Or, as he puts it:
More broadly, the “antidote” is the examination of life promoted by Socrates, which seeks to cultivate a deep intellectual humility: I must come to recognize what I do and do not know, and I must never act as if I know when I do not know. If the conspiratorial, epistemically stubborn person can come to recognize what counts as good reasoning (valid deduction, statistically sound induction) and then begin asking herself, “Why do I believe this? Do I really have good and compelling evidence to support this claim?” then she can set forth on the road to recovery. When she learns to approach each of her beliefs with the same humility and demand for sound reasoning and evidence, then she will become wise.
But Brown clearly knows what he’s doing when he sets up Nadler and Shapiro’s argument in its strongest light, because you can already get a whiff of the obvious counterpoint: namely, that choosing the cultivation of humility is a tall freaking ask to make of a body of people already entrenched in conspiratorial beliefs, and living in their info-silos at a stark remove from most shared institutions of public life.
Or as Brown much more delicately puts it, drawing from another aspect of (Plato’s description of) Socrates’ teachings:
Reason, however, can’t be turned toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful until everything else in the soul, including our desires and emotions, has been redirected—just as your eyes can’t be directed toward what’s behind you until you move the rest of your body to face the same direction.
…
[Nadler and Shapiro] believe the problem lies mostly in the form of one’s thinking (does one abide by the “canons of good reasoning”?) rather than the content (what one thinks about). They want us to hold opinions based on evidence and believe that merely developing the logical tools of reasoning will suffice. This makes it hard for them to answer an important question: Why do even professional philosophers—those most conversant with the rules of logic and the standards of evidence—fall into bad thinking?
I was recently trying to explain this problem to a friend of mine, whom I felt was taking talking points advanced by right-wing action groups far too credulously, without questioning why they were engaging with cultural issues on the terms these groups had set. A question like “What is a woman?”, for instance, doesn’t come out of the ether, but from a very specific cultural context, which should not be overlooked when we decide how best to invest our energies in related debate.
Similarly, if you have a whole slew of scientists keen to argue for the right to study IQ in relation to racialized demographics, it would be inappropriate for us to respond as if concepts like IQ and race had appeared out of thin air. (And yet, so goes the arrogance of many who wish to think themselves rationalist and empirical thinkers. “Science” may well be impartial, with plenty of self-corrective mechanisms built into its methodologies over time. But individual practitioners? Absolutely not.)
Brown continues to be a generous reader of Nadler and Shapiro when he adds:
To their credit, the authors do discuss the problem of akrasia—when we know what’s right and yet can’t get ourselves to do it because of the force of some opposed emotion or desire—and they do briefly acknowledge extra-rational motivations in the last few pages of their book. Still, they remain placidly confident that the epistemically stubborn person just needs to start asking herself the right questions.
But how, exactly, would you persuade her to do that?
And therein lies the issue for us all. Worse yet, the proposed corrective in this text, a “humanistic education”, comes with its own un-interrogated assumptions. Is this “humanistic education” supposed to arise, top-down, from universities? From earlier public school education? If so, those will be some fun policy debates—because, hey, it’s not as though our worst conspiracy theorists aren’t also harassing teachers and campaigning against what’s taught in public and post-secondary schools, right?
I’m being a bit glib, I know—but only because Brown has already done the harder work of discussing more meaningful responses to this problem of “epistemic stubbornness”. For this segment of his review, he draws from two texts that identify motivating factors for our current ideological schism: Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. According to Brown,
Eagleton and Sandel both recognize that we don’t think in a vacuum; if we want to understand why people fall for crazy, debunked ideas, we have to understand the material conditions from which their reasoning emerges. And if we want to combat those ideas, we have to address those conditions. That means our approach to the problem must be informed by history, politics, and economics, not just logic and epistemology—important as these are.
A class-conscious critique about the diminished state of our public discourse?
Oh, be still my heart. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.
TV2. Ms. Marvel
I haven’t watched many of the recent Marvel or Star Wars franchise outings, in large part because I can only take so much storytelling that treats itself as progressive because it contains more wide-ranging surface representations of different human beings, without actually allowing these differences to inform anything more about the worlds they inhabit. The ensuing work tends to be as progressive as, say, supporting Raytheon Missiles & Defense if it ever reached a magical 49/49/2 balance of female, male, and trans/nb upper management (with equal pay for all, of course!).
Or, for a more direct example of this nonsense: an Israeli Marvel superhero, Sabra, is set to show up in 2024 on screen, and she’s already causing a lot of discomfort among the sort of liberals who were against DC for Gal Gadot’s pro-Israel remarks—because that’s literally how ridiculous we’ve become, in trying to shape our political action around the output of two major mainstream film studios out mainly to make a buck.
(Criticize them both! By all means! But without falling prey to the belief that any major franchise is morally superior except for this one thing.)
All that said, though, Ms. Marvel was so glowingly reviewed that I gave it a go anyway, and was deeply charmed by its wise, teen-oriented tale, which was well crafted for a six-episode arc that covers all the key coming-into-one’s-powers story beats, and has a distinctive musical and visual aesthetics to match its choice to deviate from the usual presentation of a “superhero” on traditional Anglo-Western terms.
Yes, technically, the series still has Marvel’s trademark plot point of “we have to stop the whole universe from being destroyed!”, but even that plays out as a mere aside to what’s mainly a family tale—and one filled with wise treatments for a wide range of points of view among its Muslim cast. (The imam was especially nuanced: sweet, sensitive, and supportive one-on-one, while also running a mosque that let the women’s section moulder until a young woman joined its council to pursue change.)
Many have also celebrated this series for its excellent treatment of Partition, which focusses on the experience on Indians and Pakistanis caught up in the frantic and brutal mess, and not on the British who caused it (kind of a no-brainer, once one sees it done right!). I also loved that our main character was introduced to the literal geography of displacement when she visited extended family: the layers upon layers that don’t just exist between countries, but also in neighbourhoods within them.
Ms. Marvel might just be my favourite of Marvel’s TV show outings—although that bar is, again, very low due to how little patience I have for Marvel’s faux-progressive moralizing in other ventures. Maybe it’s better to say, then, that I’d love to see what members of this creative team are able to produce, independent of Marvel, on the back of this show’s success.
Because, outside the limits of a franchise?
That’s really where storytelling with integrity has a better chance to shine.
WP2. AI tools and a short story collection
Speaking of independent projects…
This October, on top of a book I need to plan, a translation project I need to finish, and the humanist essays for OnlySky I’m producing twice-weekly, I’m also training myself on Midjourney, an AI art tool I’d like to use to craft illustrations to accompany a short story collection I’m thinking of self-publishing soon. (For December? Maybe?)
Specifically, I have quite a few stories at market’s end—plus a few pieces outside their first publication window—that I think would work well together in a properly curated, theme-guided collection.
My plan is to revisit the written work, too, and refine quite a few of my speculative stories from the last decade or so, to produce a polished encapsulation of the best of my creative thinking over that same time frame.
I’m not sure how many pieces this collection would contain, or what order will best serve the work, or how the illustrations will sit on the page. But I can say this much:
As with the rest of my podcast episodes, which I dropped in late September to clear my slate for new work, I’d very much like to define and put aside a period of my writing life in short fiction. And with the help of Midjourney, I think I’m better-positioned to produce a more polished and enjoyable collection than ever before.
Does this mean I have any idea what will come next for my short fiction? Am I expressly planning this collection to bring a close to my writing of fiction entirely?
To the first: No, I have no idea what will come next.
To the second: No, I have no express aims at this point.
It’s more… an exploratory gambit, and an opportunity to check in with myself. I think I can learn something from the exercise of distilling ten years or so of SFF work into its sharpest forms: the best of the best, made even better wherever possible, so as to better understand what I want from my work (and from myself) from here on out.
And hey! If it all goes well, maybe next year I’ll also produce another collection, of all my unsold mainstream literary work—also polished, and also framed with illustrations into a more cohesively curated whole. And maybe, between the two of them, I’ll also gain a clearer sense of where I want future work to go. We’ll see.
For now? Look…
It hasn’t been the most promising of years for my fiction. Failing to sell books to mainstream presses will definitely take the wind out of any writer’s sails. But turning setbacks into opportunities to try something new is something I’ve become pretty good at, in these past few years. I look forward to putting that talent to work (yet again) in developing my first AI-art-informed indie book—and in the process, to clearing the slate for one phase of my writing life, to prepare for whatever comes next.
Sometimes the best we can hope for is the opportunity to make good use of the rubble from all our preceding lives.
M2. A moment with a friend
While Hurricane Ian was beginning to wreak havoc in Cuba, and already giving off signs that it would hit Florida at an unusually high and destructive level of force, I went to check on a street friend I knew would still be working in the midst of our own seasonal rains. It’s technically “winter” in Medellín: a time of frequent rains that do immense damage to poorer, handmade homes on the red-brown sands of local mountain-valley hillsides, and which also also flood older barrios where the city doesn’t effectively maintain what little storm drain infrastructure exists.
(I live, I should probably add, in a place where most homes require the use of a garbage can beside the toilet, because city-building and barrio pipes are for the most part too small to handle added detritus like toilet paper. That was a huge learning curve when I first moved here, spoiled Western in-the-toilet-tosser that I’d been!)
Some mornings have been worse than others. On this one, I’d seen from my window that the winds were almost horizontal, sending heavy sheets of rain whipping past—so even though my rumba class was most certainly cancelled, I popped out to check on Don I—, a friend I knew would have no choice but to stay hunkered down at his spot until around 4:30 in the afternoon, when a local would be by to pick up the table and chairs he provides daily to this man who uses two crutches to get around.
How does my friend bear up to inclement weather? Well, he has a plastic tarp that he ties to two of the metal bars on the gate behind his concrete stoop. Letting it drape over his worktable and himself, he sits under its cover and lifts the plastic with one hand while making coffee or tea, or while fishing out candies and cigarettes, for those who pass by. On really rough days, even his local vendor friend, “El socio” or Don A—, doesn’t show up to sell freshly squeezed orange juice—so then it’s just him, the rain, the birds he calls his “children”, and any passersby still brave enough to venture out.
On this day I found him in a puddle of water, up to an inch all around, and sat with him under his plastic tarp while the rain poured down. It would end in another couple of hours, and clear up by midday, but for that moment, sitting in a puddle also meant that the usual scores of morning customers were giving my friend a wide berth. They might wave and offer cheer from a distance, but no one was going to get their shoes wet standing around waiting for a coffee in the middle of all that dirty water.
So it goes, some days.
Still, my friend remained in his usual, grounded good spirits. It wasn’t a great day, but it was a day. His have many obstacles that mine do not, and whenever I pass a moment with him in his world, I always come away with an acute sense of how many obstacles we set for ourselves in lives of far more opportunity. No, I don’t mean to say that I come away thinking how “fortunate” we really are, compared to people on the street—nothing as crude as that kind of poverty porn. It’s more that talking to folks here on the street sharpens my sense of which challenges in so many Western lives are constructs of our socialization: mental traps we live within, and hold each other in. Sometimes we’re no better to one another than crabs in a bucket, always trying to bring each other down for daring to try to crawl out.
In the last week of September, for instance, a few Western folks did something fascinating in conversation with me: they kept leaping to assumptions that things were better on my side, so that they could tell me how much they envied me for [X]. Invariably, their idea of [X] was incorrect—but it also wasn’t the point. The point was that they’d positioned me as someone having something they do not, simply so that they could springboard into a conversation about this lacking [X] in their own lives.
And in each case, with each person who took this approach to our conversation, I was struck by how alien that whole mode of discourse is here. Chatting with Westerners, that is, reminded me that my local friends don’t use such comparisons. If they talk about their strife at all, it’s never done by contrasting what you have that they don’t.
But Westerners? Oh, we’re plagued by this competitive drive. It’s what leads so many of us to feel self-conscious about, say, singing or dancing in public around one another (and why we as a culture so rarely do either!). It’s what makes it difficult for us not to feel like we’ve “failed” somehow, if doing work that differs from what we’d originally thought we were going to do. And it’s what makes us miserable even in houses of plenty, in the comfort of being able to work from home while so many have no choice but to be out in the world, or on the street. Our “keeping up with the Jones” mentality has us ever-dwelling on what we lack, and narrating around it.
And no, I don’t count myself as significantly removed from Western practice, either, because being present with my friend was a lovely reprieve for me, too. I’d been frustrated that morning by a change in project workflow, and decided to walk away from the internet to decouple myself from investment in the whole competitive feel of back-end discussion. And it worked! Sitting quietly in a rain puddle, sipping tea together and talking about the sopping wet birds huddled in nearby treetops, didn’t change the world—let alone the work issue that I’d have to return to in due time.
But it did remind me that, while plugged into Western discourse, I was plugged into a set of mental games that often made life more difficult than it needed to be.
Even when life is difficult (which is often) some of our struggles are caused less by our material circumstances, and more by the fabric of cultures that won’t let us reframe hardship as it comes our way. Cultures that always want to play comparative games with successes and failures, and thus keep us fixated on our relational standings.
And so the waters of our discontent keep rising in our lives… but why? Because we, individually, have gotten ourselves stuck in puddles of bad thinking?
Or because our social “infrastructure” isn’t up to the job of managing the deluge?
TV3. Chef’s Table: Pizza
Okay, bear with me through this last TV commentary. Chef’s Table was a lovely meditation on world-class chefs around the world, and this new variant, Chef’s Table: Pizza, also talks about highly acclaimed creators of tasty eats. Pretty straightforward, right? What’s there to discuss?
At first, I found myself watching because I honestly couldn’t believe there would be this much to say about a single dish—I mean, it’s just pizza, right? And on that accord, I was certainly wrong, because every one of these six episodes had a spin on the concept. But that’s not why I kept watching.
Rather, I kept watching because I was struck by how failure was presented within these chefs’ stories. It felt like the food industry had learned something from the sad end of Anthony Bourdain, and the dangerous hagiography that preceded his death.
Why? Because almost all the chefs in this series had lives that didn’t go the way they’d planned. Things fell apart for them—they had break downs, they made grievous mistakes, they had to give up dreams, they were un-moored and even cut off from family for a while. Pizza may have become a passion, but it was by no means the first for the vast majority of acclaimed creators here.
And yet, this series is so gentle with the fact of those preceding failures.
No, I don’t mean that the creators sugarcoat it—neither the show’s producers, nor the chefs themselves—because they don’t. Everyone here comports themselves with full self-awareness of their missteps, their losses, and their hard times.
I also don’t mean that the show gets teleological with the chefs’ suffering, by pretending that their pain and all the damage in prior lives was the best thing that could have happened to them, because it set them up for current success.
No, what Chef’s Table: Pizza invites instead is a celebration of what lovely things these folks have done amid some truly messy, harmful circumstances. The two concepts sit side-by-side in most of these episodes—because, yes, these are all excellent chefs, whose food delights the world, and… they’re also human beings, for whom excellence in this craft has been but one part of a much more complex story.
Does this show mark a sea change in how we’re choosing to narrate excellence in a given field? No idea. But even if this was only a fluke in the genre, I found the shift in storytelling here to be quite refreshing.
The pizzas looked delicious, too, of course.
I was simply far more nourished by the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’re getting better at treating creators as people who don’t have to be (and certainly aren’t) perfect or perfectly driven in all that they do, just to bring us the products we enjoy.
A2. “How the Myth of Human Exceptionalism Cut Us Off From Nature”
Near September’s end, I wrote a piece for OnlySky on what I call “tomorrow sorrow”: anticipatory grief for the world ahead, which I argued could also be a source of great strength of conviction for better action here and now.
In “How the Myth of Human Exceptionalism Cut Us Off From Nature”, excerpted from Portraits of Earth Justice (an essay anthology), Robin Wall Kimmerer invokes something akin to tomorrow sorrow when she writes, “I sometimes despair of my inability to change the fearsome trajectory of our species, but there is one place where I have total power—and that is in how I think.”
Mind you, I don’t agree with the whole of that statement. I don’t think any of us has “total power” in how we think, because we are invariably shaped by our contexts. But there’s also something endearingly ironic about her ending this essay in particular—an essay about the importance of a more “kincentric” world view—with that claim to “total power”. I mean, it’s a contradiction, isn’t it? She goes on to write, “I choose to jump off the jagged pyramid of human exceptionalism and land in the soft embrace of all my relations”—but surely letting go of exceptionalism involves recognizing that choice is to some extent an illusion because we belong to systems far beyond ourselves.
This is one of the biggest Western dilemmas we face, though. We’re just smart enough to realize that our current systems are doing us great harm, but wer’re also so habituated to thinking through our problems within those systems that their toxicity can’t help but inform even the language of escape.
Or as Audre Lorde more eloquently put it: “[T]he master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Which isn’t to say that Kimmerer’s essay is mortally wounded by its Westernism. Elsewhere, for instance, her essay does a lovely job illustrating what a kincentric worldview entails:
As Anishinaabe people, embedded in the “all my relations” worldview, we are guided by the Seven Grandfather Teachings, the cultural values that are understood to support a good life in balance with all our relations. Among them is edbesendowin, which translates in English to something like “humility.” According to language teacher James Vukelich, the word actually means “to think lowly of oneself,” not in the form of false modesty or low self-esteem, but, rather, not to consider ourselves to be above our relatives.
It contains the realization that our lives are totally dependent on the gifts of others. It is remembering that we do not sustain ourselves; it is the natural world that gives us water, without which we would not be.
And in the absence of this awareness, what are we left with?
The Western world seems to have asked the question “What would happen if we believed in a pyramid of human exceptionalism, the notion that our species stands alone at the top of the biological hierarchy, fundamentally different and superior to all others? What if a single species, out of the millions who inhabit the planet, was somehow more deserving of the richness of the Earth than any other?”
…
It is this deep-seated fiction of human exceptionalism that fuels the rampage of exploitation, commodification, and hyperconsumption, and that has us facing a crisis of survival of life as we know it.
These are important points, that can’t be stressed often or diversely enough. When we look back in deep time, we find that the earliest recorded cave art depicts humans in fluid arrangements with other animals, adopting their characteristics in representations of ourselves—and also, finds us visually diminished in size, next to impressive displays of neighbouring herd species and fellow predators on the walls.
But have we “lost” this different perspective, a more kincentric world view? No, of course not. We’re simply living in contexts where another ideology dominates.
That’s it.
And there’s great comfort to be taken from that fact, in a way—because it means that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. No grand leap forward is philosophy is required.
All we need to recognize is that our world has been shaped in one way out of many.
And that, if we’re ready for it as a collective (for nothing is ever truly done alone), then other possibilities can yet return to holding the centre in our lives.
A3. Putin’s speech on the annexation of four regions in Ukraine
This is the section that delayed this newsletter’s release.
I must have read Vladimir Putin’s October 1 speech, on the annexation of four Ukrainian territories, over half a dozen times. It’s a powerful work of rhetoric, filled with truths amid lies, virtues amid evasions. There are times when, reading it, I too began to doubt some of my preconceptions, and had to actively remind myself of the active reality behind so much manipulative prose.
In other words, I can see why many would be swayed.
And it chills me. It chills me to realize, through this speech, how profoundly unprepared we are for the media and civic literacy challenges that lie ahead.
To be clear, Putin’s speech is filled with falsehoods. Some of them are obvious, and easily dispelled—like his claim that only five percent of grain out of Ukraine going anywhere outside rich Western countries, and his claim that the West is responsible for recent Nord Stream pipeline explosions: a concerted, multiple-site work of sabotage that has all the fingerprints of Russia itself on it.
Others are powerful evasions, diverting attention from the present moment to a list of all the times that the US has been involved in battles and wars that did egregious wrong. From these accurate remarks about specific points in US foreign politics, Putin weaves a story of vast Western conspiracy—diminishing the agency of every other European country, to fabricate a tale of the US as a hegemonic puppet master.
Here’s an example of the delicate interplay between concrete details and the contrivance of conspiracy:
Washington is demanding more and more sanctions against Russia, and most European politicians meekly agree with this. They clearly understand that the United States, pushing through the EU’s complete renunciation of Russian energy carriers and other resources, is practically leading to the de-industrialization of Europe, to completely taking over the European market—they understand everything, these elites are European, they understand everything, but prefer to serve the interests of others. This is no longer servility, but a direct betrayal of their peoples. But God bless them, that’s their business.
But sanctions are not enough for the Anglo-Saxons, they switched to sabotage – unbelievable, but true – having organized explosions on the international gas pipelines of the Nord Stream, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they actually began to destroy the pan-European energy infrastructure. It is clear to everyone who benefits from this. Who benefit[s? They do], of course.
The US dictate is based on brute force, on fist law [awkward translation, I know]. Sometimes beautifully wrapped, sometimes without any wrapper, but the essence is the same – fist law. Hence the deployment and maintenance of hundreds of military bases in all corners of the world, the expansion of NATO, attempts to put together new military alliances such as AUKUS and the like. Active work is also underway to create a military-political link between Washington-Seoul-Tokyo. All those states that possess or seek to possess genuine strategic sovereignty and are capable of challenging Western hegemony are automatically included in the category of enemies.
It is on these principles that the US and NATO military doctrines are built, requiring nothing less than total domination. The Western elites present their neo-colonial plans in the same hypocritical way, even with a pretense of peacefulness, they talk about some kind of containment, and such a crafty word wanders from one strategy to another, but, in fact, means only one thing: undermining any sovereign centers of development.
What’s particularly chilling about this web of discourse is that it’s not completely wrong. Western hegemony does continue to involve the meddling with and undermining of many other nations’ fortunes. Neoliberalism dictates so much of the Western-driven international banking system, and that binds many vulnerable world regions to Western terms of recovery and growth—even when their current vulnerability was first generated by Western colonialism and/or 20th-century political interference. The West is not a pure, or particularly righteous, participant in this war.
So from what solid ground is one supposed to push back against such rhetoric? Or other, even worse parts of Putin’s speech, like this one:
It is clear that the current neo-colonial model is ultimately doomed. But I repeat that her real owners will cling to her to the end. They simply have nothing to offer the world, except for the preservation of the same system of robberies and racketeering.
In fact, they spit on the natural right of billions of people, most of humanity, to freedom and justice, to determine their own future on their own. Now they have completely moved to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family.
Let’s answer some very simple questions for ourselves. I now want to return to what I said, I want to address all the citizens of the country—not only to those colleagues who are in the hall—to all the citizens of Russia: do we want to have, here, in our country, in Russia, parent number one, number two, number three instead of mom and dad – have they gone made out there? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation? Do we want all this for our country and our children? For us, all this is unacceptable, we have a different future, our own future
I repeat, the dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves. This is a challenge for everyone. Such a complete denial of man, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom acquiring the features of a “reverse religion” [the opposite of what the religion is]—outright Satanism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ, denouncing the false prophets, says: By their fruits you shall know them. And these poisonous fruits are already obvious to people—not only in our country, in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
I know many people in the Western world who would agree with Putin’s criticism of the West for the (fleeting) welcome and acceptance of trans and queer people, and the general move away from Abrahamic faith as the cornerstone of public life.
And although I can see so clearly the political cynicism that underlies the rise of trans and queer panic in the US—the push, that is, by right-wing parties to cultivate single-issue voting around these easily scapegoated populations—I don’t think many folks who’ve bought into the Western “debate” are going to be any more capable of recognizing its clear political underpinnings even when Putin himself is advancing similar in the middle of a speech meant to rally Russia in a Holy War against the West.
Sorry—the “Satanist” West.
And that’s what gives me chills.
That’s what’s had me reading and rereading the speech since October first, trying to figure out how to name the challenge it represents: to put the danger adequately to words, without yielding yet another “hot take”.
The problem is that, when I read this speech, I see in it two terrifying realities:
First, that we’ve reached a hard limit to what direct engagement with another’s claims can achieve. All the fake news and eroded trust in media these past few years, all the info silos that have been radicalizing so many of us into wild conspiracy theories online, are all now coming to bear on our current inability to ascertain what matters. We are creatures now of disinformation webs far too intricate to combat head-on.
And second, those disinformation webs are co-ordinated and purpose-driven, such that we need some form of response to their existence—but if not through head-on confrontation, then what? How do we reclaim what matters, and re-orient our worldly action around what matters, while disinformation floods our networks and sends obstructive and violent noise into every facet of our local and international lives?
I have no answers to these questions—though they are pressing, and they are grave.
For now, learning to sit with the chill is going to have to be enough.
WP3. Thucydides and the next novel (WP3)
And yet, there might be some comfort I can draw from the work ahead. I talked about recent setbacks in my latest Patreon post, “So It Goes: On to the Next Project”, and the need to produce a new work in the next few months, to take to publishers hopefully in 2023.
It took a little bit of processing to get to that point, mind you, and I still wobble into fatigue over the whole situation. After I finished my first speculative novel, I was sure I didn’t have another in me—and then I did! And my “Brothers Karamazov in Space” book was every bit as dear to me as my “alt-history humanism-in-Soviet-Russia”.
With my third book, I was trying something more commercial—a series opener, sci-fi mystery that tackled neoliberalism as embodied by an alien species somehow worse than our own. My agent still thinks it might work in something closer to its original form (i.e., the novella versions I’d first written), but that leaves the pressing matter of what to give to editors who were mightily impressed with “Brothers K in Space” but “didn’t know how to market it”, and wanted to see more from me.
As noted in my Patreon post, the working title for my next project is A Fertile Source of Ruin. That’s a line from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which will inspire the themes, voice, and arguments for facets of my new space opera outing. Why that text? Well, as I wrote in September:
This is a beloved text for me—I even took my granddad's copy with me to Colombia—because it shows how little about human nature has changed over millennia: how the slippery slopes from nationalist hubris into colossal, ruinous war haven't aged a day. Yes, the book covers military campaigns and diplomatic struggle, but also plague, societal collapse, and mass displacement. In short, there's lots of potent territory upon which to build resonance with today's major crises, while still offering room for "marketable" action and intrigue.
Now, when I wrote “today’s major crises”, I hadn’t yet encountered Putin’s October 1 speech (A3)—but it absolutely fits in. One of the greatest strengths of Thucydides’ text is its depiction of the rhetoric used by opposing sides as they present diplomatic arguments to potential allies and foes. Through those speeches, the reader receives full, competing portraits of the same situation—and though there’s more overt dishonesty in Putin’s speech, the principle isn’t so far removed. Putin, too, is presenting the world with his version of the situation.
The key here is that, irrespective of each speaker’s eloquence, Thucydides made clear that power still lay with the forum. If they were afraid, and allowed themselves to be guided by fear, one argument would sway over another. If they were proud, and allowed themselves to be guided by proud, a different discourse would win the day.
That, then, is the comfort this book project might yet provide: a change to explore, through speculative fiction, how “the forum” in our current world might be moved to lean into the argumentation that best serves more humanist aims.
But how? Well, as I noted in my Patreon post, my book certainly won’t be a “strict retelling” of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In fact,
Far from it! [Because] I also love the complex questions we've built as a culture around the narrator himself: one of our earliest recorded historians, and a military general. Obviously, Thucydides wrote a history shaped around the fortunes of two warring giants, Athens' form of democracy and Sparta's complex oligarchy—but that's not the only way to document the passage of time, let alone all our sentient striving in it.
So I'll have a second main story-line, which will feature not only a different set of narrative priorities, but also alternatives to the grand state systems that collided in Thucydides. The stories in this alt-history of the same time frame will offer a strong counterpoint to the idea that chronicling the passage of time is always an exercise best served by focusing on war.
How will I do this? Where's the actual sci-fi here? That's where the story's context comes into play. I've had an idea for over a decade to write about a medical-science vessel caught up in the complex political and humanitarian crises that emerge after a world's destruction. I seeded part of that concept into my second novel—where a planet is destroyed! and refugees abound!—but this piece is going to have a very different time scale, and focus far more centrally on the factions and border politics that emerge after one species is left homeless in a messy, fraught system of fellow power brokers.
The end result? Ideally, a work every bit as informed as books one and two by my philosophical and humanist priorities, [and] my love of history brought to life for a new generation—and also, in the process, a ripping good read that follows both a military-minded storyteller and a whole crew of scientists-turned-anarco-humanitarians during their adventures on the front-lines of a decades-long, species-wide disaster.
Goodness, mid-September-me was ambitious, weren’t they?
But you get the general idea. My version will use Thucydides’ approach to history and discourse as a backdrop to exploring different approaches to community-building through a much more immediately humanitarian cast of characters.
Now, I haven’t had much time to work on that novel yet—but I will. And I plan to have the major movements of this piece blocked by month’s end.
(NB: I’m not someone who structures every beat in advance, but I like having a clear sense of all the players, the stakes, and the overall trajectory of a work before I dig in. This helps especially with finding the “voice” of my novel early on. I’m also someone who edits as I go, not someone who burns through a bare-bones draft, then goes back.)
Keeping a project in the back of one’s thoughts, though, doesn’t mean it idles there, unchanging. I’ve already realized that my “Thucydides” character is going to be in an unusual subject-position: in cryo, but imperfectly frozen—dream-thinking his contribution to the overall story-line. So far as he knows, he has a ready audience to regale with all the slings and arrows of early violence in the region (a nebular formation, I’ve decided, with one major powerhouse of a station at its heart [Sparta] and many scattered chains of more advanced and daring coalitions [Athens]). Through his dream-narration, and the active stories it contains, we’ll learn all about the historical backdrop for this region—at least, through a military and diplomatic lens.
The truth, though, will be that this character is himself in transit—with an injury that couldn’t be healed on site—to the medical vessel where the majority of this story takes place. (And no, that’s not a spoiler, because I intend to make our slumbering historian’s subject-position clear from the get-go.) I like this concept because it allows me to play with the idea of a storyteller who is himself a living text: a vessel for narrative both fixed to a specific context, and also susceptible to change and influence.
I also like the idea of the other main characters—that is, others on the medical vessel—going about their own stories without the foggiest idea that someone in cryo on their ship is intoning quietly, in his dreaming, one version of communal history for them all. I especially look forward to finding points of resonance between the story my “Thucydides” will tell, and the contrapuntal stories (e.g., of society-building as something more than military might and diplomacy) playing out among the crew.
Will my historian be healed by the novel’s end? Will he wake to a new and better world forged in part by the medical vessel’s humanitarian crew? That, I don’t know.
Yet.
But this month? As I develop those medical-vessel story-lines and characters in full?
I’m looking forward to finding out.
M3. A personal question
At the back of my head, through all of this work, remains the uneasy question:
“What does it serve?”
Many times this year, I have seriously considered a “kill date” for my writing. Some people think that I must be joking, because writing has been my life for my life—but I’ve had to grapple with sunk cost fallacies before, and I’ve walked away from plenty deeply connected to my sense of self. I could do it again, if need be. I really could.
Nevertheless, in this case I suspect that my ideation is just a coping mechanism, in response to the horror of watching so much unfold on the global stage with so little attendant maturation of human response: climate change, Russian war, other wars and genocides, and so many roll-backs of human rights and dignity, safeties and protections, even in countries convinced of their own moral and state superiority.
Like some of my other, curiously compulsive behaviours (TV1), I think this one comes down to trying to bargain with my writing life against the helplessness I feel when I bear witness to so much awfulness in the news. Surely I could be doing more, no? Obviously it’s just the time I’m frittering away on fanciful writing goals that’s keeping me from making a more meaningful impact, right?
It is much more difficult to sit with—and to accept the immense discomfort of sitting with—the sheer fact that so much is going wrong in the world, and to accept that it cannot be fixed by private, cosmic bargains such as the one I keep trying to make with myself, via my work. (Well, except in the case of a few billionaires, who could absolutely make an immediate difference by adopting new approaches to their work.)
It is painful to accept that the world has gone wrong in ways that will not be made right again. (Not in my lifetime, at least—if some can be “made right” at all.)
Painful, to watch as waves of fellow humans buy into media rhetoric—from the game-ification of military “wins” among supposedly progressive types, to conspiracy theories and other politically contrived scaremongering among right-wing groups—that undermines meaningful and democratic discourse for us all.
Painful, to live with the fact that we are daily moving through deep societal messes, and witnessing complete failures of worldly action to provide a more cohesive path to some better, more humanist world ahead.
And so, yes—this personal question is a good one:
“What does it serve?”
But the contents of that “it” go far deeper than my writing—or anything else that anyone else is doing, in part to get by and in part to make a difference where they can.
What does our despair serve?
What does our horror serve?
And also—
What does our hope serve, too?
Because the answer in all these cases has to be that “it” serves our humanity: your own, and the humanity of everyone around you.
And humanity cannot be served by over-determining the shape of any world to come.
Including our own.
Easier said than done, of course—but here I’ll close off with a promise, and a pact:
I’ll try my best this month not to catastrophize unduly, if you don’t.
What counts as “unduly”?
Well… let’s just say figuring that part out will be our work for October, too.
May there be greater clarity on the other side.