THREEDOM! (#3) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM!
(#3)
M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
Well, folks, I think I finally have the format down pat. Drafting entirely offline seems to be the way to go. Wipe Word formatting, copy and paste to TinyLetter, pop in images and separators, format headings, and… you should be good to go. (There is no editing after posting, which was the entire reason I chose TinyLetter, to overcome the feelings of failure that immediately follow production for me, due to a perfectly useless strain of perfectionism I’m trying to overcome. Fingers crossed that the third time’s the charm!)
Some folks have written me with surprise about the length of these newsletters. I want to stress again that this is not meant to be read all at once—or even in full at all. Rather, each month I’m trying to distill a month’s worth of nervous energy observations away from social media, and to present these observations in a format that allows you to skip about as you please. Granted, there are some overarching themes in each newsletter, but that’s just a bonus for completionists. Life is short. Skim or skip what doesn’t interest you!
And thanks, as always, for reading any of this, if you do. Quite a few of my current projects rely on industries that have slowed to a crawl. Setbacks with the humanist column/website, mainstream fiction publishing, in-roads with the translation community, and even podcast post-production have left me spinning my wheels furiously in place. It's not just that I have plenty of ways I could be useful to the world; it's also that, absent a clear community in which to contribute, what knowledge and skills I do have are understandably growing rusty. I need the whetstone of a consistent critical outlet to stay sharp. This newsletter serves that function for now.
If you enjoyed what you read and have the means and interest in supporting the work, Patreon and BuyMeACoffee are two wonderful platforms. Patrons will be getting some special content this month related to the latest novel-length manuscript. But since we're also nudging toward winter, please remember that displaced people in places like Syria (near the Turkish border especially) are facing bitter conditions in the months ahead, while folks in Canada and the US are going hungry and facing eviction and unconscionable medical debts. Haitians and Venezuelans are still seeking safe harbour all across South, Central, and lower North America, carceral justice reform remains a horrifyingly urgent issue in the US, environmental justice issues are seeing activists killed in Colombia (more on that below), and many African nations are enduring civil war, preventable disease, and major struggles with long-term drought.
UNHCR is my favourite international non-profit for its scale and reach, but I'm sure you have your own, along with local networks to address other needs closest to home. So let's just all commit to doing what we can, where we can, okay? What a world.
Table of Contents
Three articles:
"When hope is a hindrance" (A1)
"Identity Fraud" (A2)
"In 'Rationality', Steven Pinker Sticks Up (Again) for Reason’s Role in Human Progress" (A3)
Three personal futures:
Never writing again (PF1)
Never performing knowledge again (PF2)
Giving up on false extremes (PF3)
Three books:
Fernando Vallejo's La Virgen de los sicarios (B1)
Mike Davis's Planet of Slums (B2)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow (B3)
Three existentialist films (revisited):
A Serious Man (EF1)
My Dinner with Andre (EF2)
The Matrix Reloaded (EF3)
Three miscellaneous items:
A quotation (M1)
The civilizing “miracle” of cake (M2)
Eric Geusz’s spaceships from the everyday (M3)
Three reflections on Colombia and the peace:
Five years of the "peace" (CP1)
Ongoing trauma (CP2)
Where we stand now (CP3)
Three TV series:
Worldbuilding with Foundation (TV1)
Nate's arc on Ted Lasso (TV2)
Critique versus stated reality in Squid Game (TV3)
M1. A quotation
“What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)
…which is usually reduced in common use to:
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
Is there a difference in meaning? I would argue that there is.
In the original German, the full sentence reads: “Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.”
The word “Völker,” which means “nations, tribes, peoples,” is in some texts translated as “people,” but “people” has a different range of meanings in English from the “peoples” of the original. (It’s the same as Spanish’s “el pueblo,” the village that can also refer to the totality of the people, “la gente,” that it contains—but which differs in significance from the everyday “gente” used to specify people in a casual way.) This slight shift in meaning allows the original Hegelian expression, on the construction of broader myths of civilization, to be reduced to the personal. And what a disempowering soundbite this translation then becomes: all our different levels of human agency consigned to the same, mass, defeatist “we.”
Today we’re going to talk about “civilization”—or at least, many illusions of what it even is, and how building it better requires thinking about all the “peoples” that ours contains.
TV1. Worldbuilding with Foundation (2021)
The first season of Foundation is still underway, so I’m not going to dwell on the plot; I’m more interested in how this work, simply by existing, gives us a snapshot of the world in which it was created. The AppleTV+ series is based, of course, on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a thought-experiment in the 1950s that grew out of the pages of Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog Science Fiction and Fact), and explored how one might preserve the essence of civilization, if a theory of “psychohistory” allowed you to anticipate its collapse.
In my SF writing community, one of the many perennial arguments on our “socials” involves gatekeeping. Are you a “true” sci-fi writer if you haven’t been published in X, or read Y? In the case of Foundation, which is widely considered one of SF’s classics, overt defense of the work is generally regarded as defense of an age of non-inclusivity. After all, Foundation has no major female characters whatsoever, and the women who show up in subsequent books are not exactly well-portrayed. White male is the standard in these texts purporting to speak for a sweeping galactic empire worth preservation in some form.
I’m an unusual person in these debates, because I’ve devoured vast swaths of older work in the commercial SF genre, right back to the 1920s pulp magazines, but by virtue of being a female-sexed younger-ish person with a couple of queer identities, fewer aspersions are going to be made about me from my reading history alone. Did I absorb a boatload of naturalized misogyny, homophobia, racism, and xenophobia in many of these older texts, which also introduced me to worlds of wonder in my childhood and adolescence? And how! But my love of historiography also means that these readings have left me far better prepared to explain the hows and whys of canonization, to resist today’s ongoing erasure of marginalized writers from the genre's histories, and to call attention to the fact that there was never, ever a period of “pure” science-fiction in our field.
What also makes the difference, though, is that I don’t use my knowledge of these past works to shame anyone for not reading them today. Quite the opposite, in fact: I very much seek to assure newer writers and readers that it’s 100% okay to skip these “classics” if they want to, and will happily explain the "gist" of these past works so they can take what's useful from them and move on to the next. Just because everyone who grew up in the genre at the same time all read the same books and stories doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. That’s pure canonization by nostalgia, the way that some of us still use old Simpsons quotes to bind ourselves to “tribes” of like-minded people who shared the same cultural moment twenty-odd years ago.
Jorge Luis Borges had a great teaching style in this regard: In class lectures, he would retell the stories they were studying, so that everyone could focus on the lessons to be gleaned from them, and less on reading the material firsthand. Not insignificantly, he was losing his eyesight at the time, and so, for all his many prejudices (e.g., he was overtly racist and an admirer of brutal dictators), the empathy that this physical experience afforded him was amply reflected in a more generous approach to education than we often find today.
Which brings us to Asimov, a charismatic man who often harassed women, made jokes about them in his far-flung science-fictions, and couldn’t keep his gob shut while Black SF writer Samuel Delany was busy enjoying two well-deserved Nebulas (novel and short story) in the prize’s third year, 1967. (No, Asimov just had to remind Delany that his racialized identity would always be an isolating factor in their shared professional realm. As a “joke,” I’m sure he would have insisted—but it wasn’t at all funny.)
And yet, Asimov, an atheist of Russian and Jewish heritage, was also dealing with an even deeper store of bias from editor John W. Campbell, whose prejudices absolutely shaped the development of Foundation. You might have wondered, for instance, why this series about a massive galactic empire contains no aliens. Well, according to Asimov’s comments in The Early Asimov (1972), it’s because Campbell’s views of racial superiority (which Asimov misguidedly took not to be “racist” because Campbell was always fine with him, a Jew; he didn’t hate others so much as… just thought that white people were a little bit better, a little more intelligent and civilized, than everyone else) informed the editor’s beliefs about aliens, too.
Asimov kept aliens out of the original Foundation stories published in Astounding, that is, because Campbell would have wanted the standard white-American-male spacefarer to have dominated them as a matter of course, and because Campbell would also not tolerate this white-Western demographic in anything but heroic roles in relation to aliens in such a text. (It bears noting, too, that many "aliens" in these early SF magazines mapped onto stereotypes around Native Americans and other racialized identities. Fears of alien conquerors were oddly enough joined with fears of domination by supposedly "primitive" societies... in SPAAACE.)
For me, then, this publishing history offers a fascinating backdrop to a TV series now trying to capture the best of some supposedly “pure” hard SF, while also broadening its scope. Yes, it makes of Empire a nuanced trio of flawed white male emperors—the kind of representation that Campbell would have hated. And it normalizes the fuller range of human skin tones, and foregrounds the essential role of women in sustaining civilizations.
And yet, the show has been middlingly reviewed so far. Many complain that the scope of the series is its inevitable downfall. Others are grouchy that the series is not doing enough to go into the Big Ideas. (And as the series goes on, yes, there’s a definite skewing to Star Wars in its depictions of galactic war.) I find the actors’ performances strong and the visuals mostly satisfying; and many of the scripting choices do seek to balance the personal and expansive—but I too find a definite wobble to the work, both on the level of individual storylines and overall momentum. For a story about grand plans with goals spanning millennia, the pacing often conveys uncertainty about what the show wants to say.
Ironically, though, I think this has a great deal to do with the core lesson of psychohistory: the idea, that is, that learning from the past is what best prepares us for the future. Foundation feels like a show entirely responding to the present—leaving no room for insights from the past.
This isn’t surprising, though. Commercial science fiction is under 100 years old, forged in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and convention cultures developed largely by Hugo Gernsback. (Speculative fiction, on the other hand, is as old as literature itself.) But even in that brief twinkle of recorded time, and even among people who write SF today, our genre histories are often taken too credulously, to prop up simplistic timelines of prejudice and radical resistance, when the full story is more nuanced.
Something closer to the “truth,” then, is that even for the original author, Foundation’s precursor texts were works of compromise, their universe hobbled from the outset to appease the racialized and flat-out racist views of their editor. There was never an objective body of “pure” hard SF canon to be adapted in the first place—only Campbell’s space-western white imperialism.
But it does serve both progressives and traditionalists well to think otherwise, doesn’t it? Because, for both groups, Foundation gets to serve as a symbol of something larger than itself. It’s something for traditionalists to pine over, longing for a “return” to a “simpler” time, and something for progressives to condemn without interrogation—even if a deeper understanding of its publication history would better prepare us to anticipate and avoid ongoing acts of prejudice and erasure in the genre today.
This is a side of human behaviour that exhausts me. But it builds our civilizations, too.
A1. "When hope is a hindrance"
Who better to turn to next, then, but another Jewish-heritage US-immigrant, contemporaneous to Asimov but with profoundly different views on civilization—or more specifically, on the people who think themselves committed to sustaining civilization’s dream?
Enter Hannah Arendt, of course.
And for context, let’s start by sitting with the fact that Asimov’s Foundation, an account of sprawling galactic empire, was published in the same year as Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which not only addresses its titular theme but also the pathology of expansion for expansion’s sake. For Arendt, this call to empire is something that inserts the private market into the business of states-craft—and in so doing, undermines individual ability to act spontaneously for the common good. How so? Because, as Arendt writes,
[t]he ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
This distinction cannot help but be lost, though, when private and public spheres are blurred to the extreme, and when private actors are incentivized to shape state/public knowledge. Give “the people” a sense of informational paralysis by encouraging them to assume a profit-motive behind all public advocacy, and meaningful advances toward a better collective justice stop in their tracks as well.
A few recent articles have been exploring aspects of Arendt’s life and work this past month, but I’d like to focus on Samantha Rose Hill’s “When hope is a hindrance,” which looks at what the German philosopher meant when she disavowed hope as dangerous for those who wish to resist injustice, and when she sought a vocabulary of “natality” to take its place.
Or, as Hill writes:
Arendt’s most devastating account of hope appears in her essay ‘The Destruction of Six Million’ (1964) published by Jewish World. Arendt was asked to answer two questions. The first was why the world remained silent as Hitler slaughtered the Jewish people, and whether or not Nazism had its roots in European humanism. The second was about the sources of helplessness among the Jewish people.
To the first question, Arendt responded that ‘the world did not keep silent; but apart from not keeping silent, the world did nothing.’ People had the audacity to express feelings of horror, shock and indignation, while doing nothing.
(Goodness, that sounds familiar, no? And all before Twitter!)
[As to the second question, i]t was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.
…
Caught between fear and ‘feverish hope’, the inmates in the ghetto were paralysed. The truth of ‘resettlement’ and the world’s silence led to a kind of fatalism. Only when they gave up hope and let go of fear, Arendt argues, did they realise that ‘armed resistance was the only moral and political way out’.
In place of “hope,” Arendt wanted people to pay attention to birth-sites of action: the ways of thinking that compel individuals to enact concrete change, along with the emergence of new human beings that inherently offers its own, novel opportunities for different social interactions. Hill expresses scepticism about Arendt’s attempt to coin a new word around this concept, but the idea Arendt was driving at is certainly not unfamiliar today—and perhaps further affirms why, for Arendt, “hope” alone was not enough.
With climate change’s bleak forecasts, for instance, many now speak openly about having lost hope, but in “doing the work” anyway. Katharine Hayhoe, author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (2021), even argues that people haven’t lost hope so much as changed its definition, situating their sense of the word in their children, or in the existence of children in general. It’s the same sentiment that drives the last two paragraphs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), in which a man has been trying to raise his son in a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape where no food grows, and at the end of the boy’s journey to a safe haven—
"She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery"
Both Hayhoe and McCarthy’s notions of hope, however—as something passed on from life to life, if nowhere else—give a clear sense as to why Arendt was impatient with the limits of that word to carry a fuller semiotic load. Hope could involve action, that is, but more often it fostered a passive “wait and see” attitude among people who were willing to hold on to the thinnest promises of a better world without committing to significant and drastic changes to help it come to pass.
This, too, we’ve seen in the present—and especially around the “Oh, nonsense, it won’t be that bad” attitude toward elected politicians with terrible track records, platforms, and cronies ready and waiting to be appointed for life.
So long as we rest on vague promises that “the system” will eventually correct itself, we remain complicit witnesses (at best) to worlds of injustice all around us.
The question thus becomes: Even if we do want to resist, and to lean into natality as a guiding principle for cultural and civilization-wide reform… how? What is today’s “way out”?
CP1. Five years of the "peace"
I’m going to share Colombian history often in this newsletter, but from a particular lens it's important to name in advance. I was born and raised in Canada, which means I’m fully aware of the gaps outsiders often bring to any discourse around Colombia’s half-century of civil war, and its ensuing “peace.” I have also been working hard to fill those gaps, as part of trying to make Colombia my home, and that work has inevitably taken place alongside new history—living history—which I have been privileged to witness firsthand.
Some of that living history is happening right now, as Colombian media discusses the fifth-year anniversary of a series of actions around the initial implementation of a peace accord with FARC, the guerrilla group that’s been in operation since 1964, when it first mounted a violent defense of rural Colombians against socioeconomic exclusion by urban-conservative forces. The preceding and also violent state oppressions had essentially split the political left, with standard liberals matched back then by a self-described Marxist-Leninist contingent ready to do whatever it took to stop Indigenous and other “campesino” (rural) communities from being denied representation and local self-governance. At its height, FARC controlled 40% of the country’s territory, with a maximum force of around 18,000 combatants (in a country of then-44 million, to give you a sense of how few people it takes to do great damage).
For years, people living in major cities like Medellín took their lives into their own hands if they ever tried to travel to surrounding towns, or cities in other departments, while many people in rural communities lived under even more immediate terror from armed forces in general. For a while, guerrilla groups routinely attacked intercity busses, kidnapping, torturing, and murdering civilians to send a message, seek leverage, and extort funds. In cities large and small, police and military staged retaliatory actions, which themselves trapped people in their homes and neighbourhoods. Sometimes, with tacit or express government sanction, police, military, and paramilitary operatives committed war-crimes of their own—attacking, torturing, and mass-murdering especially Indigenous and other poor rural peoples under the cover of suspected alignment with or support for FARC and related operatives.
Even though violence between liberal and conservative parties long-preceded the official formation of FARC in 1964, this brutal guerrilla war, loosely shaped around rural/urban issues of access to full socioeconomic and political participation, was considered by many to be in its 52nd year when the first version of a peace accord was signed on September 26, 2016. On October 2, 37.43% of the registered electorate then voted on the accord: 49.78% in favour of the peace, and… 50.21% against it. Next steps went forward anyway, with then-president Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño (alias “Timochenko”) promising to take “No”-voter concerns into account in the coming negotiations to flesh out terms of the accord.
Those negotiations took place in Cuba, with past vice-president Humberto de la Calle leading a team including two peace commissioners, the then-president’s brother, retired generals from police and military service, and representatives for major businesses and industry. This governmental task force sat down with various commanders of different sections and forces within FARC to hash out terms for disarmament, economic recovery for agricultural zones, and the reintegration of victims and FARC combatants into civic-political life through congressional representation, truth and reconciliation initiatives, and re-training programs.
Maybe you can guess the problem, then, from the preceding paragraph: who was foregrounded in these negotiations, and who was not. For those who count the start of the war from actions going as far back as 1958, this armed conflict saw 4,222 massacres up to 2018—not individual losses of life, mind you, but 4,222 distinct events of multiple murders by armed forces. 80,000 people went missing in relation to the civil war—98% of them civilians. Over eight million were victims of displacement, murder, threats, and kidnappings.
You’ll note, of course, that 2018 is later than 2016, when the peace accord was signed and the first foray into disarmament began in November. That’s because the police in a little town in the department of Tumaco killed seven campesinos on October 5, 2017—claiming that they had no choice but to retaliate when “dissident FARC” intervened in a peaceful protest.
And, yes, we’ll get to dissident FARC—the members of the guerrilla group that refused to turn with the rest of the organization into a peace-time political party. The key point first, though, is that campesinos—and in particular, “social leaders” (i.e., rural organizers working in defense of agricultural livelihoods, youth, and environmental protections) continue to be murdered at staggering rates post-“peace.” Over 1,000 have been killed since 2016—one thousand!—and many more live under death threats.
Meanwhile, victims from the outset of this peace process felt sidelined not only by the paucity of direct representation in negotiations, but also by the sluggish progress of the “JEP,” a special government jurisdiction set up in March 2017 to advance Truth, Justice, Reparations, and “Never Again”-ism, through the hearing of victims and the gathering of evidence against perpetrators of war-time atrocities.
Now, to be sure: The JEP has done good work, and in part because of how slow and methodical it’s been in its building of robust case files. What it essentially does is prioritize the acceptance of responsibility and commitments to community healing over prison-time. Once people have been identified as the culprits of specific war-crimes, the JEP has called upon them to accept the crimes evidenced in the process as their own, to confess in public to them, and to receive restrictions on mobility and public service, along with specific obligations to give back to their communities through victim-centred social action. All of this is meant to spare victims the further anguish in criminal trials, and to bypass incarceration as a pathway to healing.
Incredible stuff.
The problem is that public confession, even when the JEP finally reached that stage for a wide number of culprits this year, has been painful. Very, very painful. Have you ever seen a grown man attempt to speak openly about the brutality he participated in—the rape, the torture, the kidnapping, the murder, the general terrorizing of countrymen for years if not decades—with the “right” look on his face for the entire confession? It’s very hard to do. More normal for human beings is eventually to grimace or affect some similar facial or bodily quirk that makes one look like one is smiling or proud of something, as one lays out detail after detail of these brutal actions for a crowd. A nervous laugh is easy to mistake for sociopathic good humour. A lilt in one’s voice can even make it sound like they’re enjoying talking about the harm they did.
Crime shows have made armchair analysts of us all, and so a long and difficult process of public confession in recent months has not played well in the media. Rather, for many, the broadcast of these statements, issued by ever so many uncomfortable and unschooled faces for public confession of past atrocity, has only re-opened old wounds with respect to the conviction that these men have “gotten away” with heinous crimes.
The ache for retributive justice is strong, in other words, and missteps in the performance of acknowledgment and atonement can make that ache stronger. To alleviate this triggering sight for many victimized Colombians, I think the Rwandan format for truth and reconciliation councils, which involved a much more localized sharing of confession among immediate communities, might have been the better way to go—with transcripts alone shared nationally. (I think there’s precedence for not releasing audio-visual materials in US court proceedings, too?) But even with these missteps, and the complexity of media spin in general, there’s also an astonishing wealth of innovative justice-work being put through its paces here.
Which is… kinda sorta maybe a large part of why I’m so thankful to be here—to be learning from all of this, to bear direct witness to both hurt and healing, and hopefully to contribute my skills and perspective to the ongoing recovery work associated with a complex issue that has many sides.
B1. Fernando Vallejo's La Virgen de los sicarios
This month I treated myself to a new book in Spanish, something I only do once I’ve finished the last—shocking, I know! And not just any book, but one by a writer on Medellín’s history whose prose is so rich in local flavour that I am never just rereading lines to double-check language comprehension. Rather, after processing the raw content, I’m often hit full-on by the poetry, wit, and often irony of the erudite author’s words.
Fernando Vallejo’s La Virgen de los sicarios (1994) is one such emotional wallop: a slender, highly contentious recent classic. It’s also a book that invokes a host of intersectional issues for me.
What makes it contentious is that Colombia is a culture where sex work is legal, with restrictions on where brothels can be placed, but very little in the way of protections for the people themselves. This is also a country with immense poverty, and profound disparity in life outcomes, such that sex trafficking, the cultivation of young people into this life, is fairly gender indiscriminate: male and female persons alike face starvation, and so male and female persons alike are often found engaging in whatever it takes to eat, and maybe thrive.
North America has embraced the work of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, up to and including books like Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004 in Spanish), in which a 90-year-old falls in love with a 14-year-old child who is in the sex trade to support her family. Garcia Márquez of course joins a long line of male authors who get away with glorifying sexual predation—Henry Miller perhaps being the 20th-century standout in his wildly confessional approach to sexual transgression, while Milan Kundera belongs to a later school of writer who gets away with it (got away with it, for years?) through more elevated literary gloss. And in the world of film… well, Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) is shooting fish in a barrel, isn’t it? After all, the choice to pair a 17-year-old with 42-year-old Allen is not far removed from what many directors still do when making casting choices for men’s love interests.
(Friendly reminder that Keira Knightley was 17 when filming for Pirates of the Caribbean, which released in 2003, with Orlando Bloom, then-25, and Johnny Depp, then-39, as normalized potential partners.)
My point, though, is that even though overt glorification of such age-power "relationships" permeates literature and film… Vallejo’s La Virgen de los sicarios still stands out for me.
This is because Vallejo has put himself more overtly into this book, as a writer returned to Medellín in the middle of some of the hardest years for gang violence, but with none of Miller’s theatrics around the sex acts themselves. (His narrator insists on not being "pornographic.") Rather, Vallejo draws on a personal, admitted history of sexual relations with male adolescents, overtly paid for or through other exchanges, to tell the tragic story of male adolescents and boys drawn into the work of Colombian cartel and gang violence as assassins.
And that… that is a very complicated subject-position. I don’t think it’s one we really know what to do with in North America—and yet, it’s one that feels incredibly important to learn how to incorporate into our equations of transgression, transformation, and restoration.
Why? Because we cannot wait for moral purity to begin to talk about the problems in our world. And we cannot expect that people with the deepest understanding of marginalization and the moral quandaries it creates are somehow going to have acquired the ability to speak about all of this violence and horror with clean hands.
And so, Vallejo’s fictionalized self has returned to Medellín after thirty years because he wants Colombia to kill him off, the way it has killed off so many others. He’s come home to wallow in the fatalism of being Colombian, that is, in the middle of years so dire that taxi drivers are excited to hear the daily death count on the radio because sometimes it’s less than it was the day before. (Oof, strong COVID vibes there, no?) Our narrator has no one and nothing else to live for, and for this reason he calls his teenaged male escort, then live-in “companion,” his guardian angel. Told from the older man’s perspective, the book depicts an adoration for what Alexis represents—even though, considering how much the narrator loathes what the youngster loves in the way of music, it’s clear they have little in common save for a mutual need for the other to survive.
Vallejo tells us about Alexis’s last days in the lead-up to Christmas in Colombia, because Alexis is the far more common type of “assassin” in Medellín's urban histories of violence: a child, that is, frivolously killing in the streets until he himself is killed. Then our narrator moves on to a new “love,” who has a secret that leads to the narrator having to decide if he could be a killer, too.
I cannot stress enough how impossible this work would be in contemporary Anglo-Western writing—but also, how essential it is, for the Colombian crisis it depicts.
For one, by presenting Medellín’s gang violence as rarely rising above the desperate actions of a neglected and ill-used group of young male persons who would do pretty much anything to stay alive—sling drugs, sell their bodies, shoot at will—Vallejo is blatantly refusing both the hagiography and the demonization of “assassins” in his era.
And by putting himself in the role that he has here, as an older “patron” observing the brutal lives of these young people, Vallejo also stands in for a whole, educated class of Colombians that somehow thinks it can pass judgment on those who kill, when older Colombians have been complicit in building the society that has (sometimes literally) “fucked over” this desperate underclass in the first place.
Even the title of the work, “The Virgin of Assassins” (or Our Lady of Assassins, in the English version of the filmic adaptation), refers to a cognitive dissonance that infuses this whole culture of violence perpetuated mainly by children and adolescents, based on the callous example set for them by many of their elders. In the book, these child-assassins still pray to the Virgin Mary, but what they're asking for is her blessing before carrying out murders and other violent acts, with “success” seen as an affirmation of her favour. Similarly, the churches here are indeed havens... for gang members to gather in: the cathedrals of Medellín often used as bases of operation for crimes that might then take place mere steps from its hallowed interiors.
In English, we would sensationalize either these brutal actions or else the narrator’s agony over his complicity in them (as in The Kite Runner, a perfect example of how English-language depictions of individual depravity in brutal systems are reduced to a narrator trying to get you to understand how ashamed of himself he already is, so that you can feel sorry for him, too, and forgive him, before the book even gets to a confession of the transgressions themselves).
La Virgen de los sicarios is different. It does not seek apology for the author/narrator’s choices. It also does not make demands upon the reader’s capacity to be shocked, or to forgive. It simply invites the reader to pay attention to the butterfly-brevity, the paper-lantern-fleetingness, and the altogether insensate waste of lives (both long and short alike), when played out in a climate with so little hope for change.
The whole system needs to change.
And I think many of our stories of civilization forget that, when they prioritize the quest for clean-handed protagonists to bear witness to otherwise unjust worlds.
PF1. Never writing again
I’m currently trying to get my third SF novel ready to send to my agent. If successful in time, it will be the third book I’ve finished this year. The first was a labour of love and intentionality, a dream project I could die happy having completed. The second was a translated collection of short stories from a difficult local Spanish, complete with an intro essay and two glossaries: one for unusual expressions, the other for plant-life referenced in the text. And the third… well, the third was supposed to be lighthearted, an easy-breezy SF mystery series, but if you’re reading this dense tome of newsletter, you already know that I went and turned that book into something with loads of social commentary, too.
I’ve also put together a first-season’s worth of podcasts, prepped columns for the launch of a new secular website, sold three stories (two published in Clarkesworld, one forthcoming in the January/February F&SF), and started this behemoth of a monthly newsletter.
At the same time, for these past few months, I have lain awake quite a few times at night, wondering if this is when I walk away and never write again.
Oh yeah. Brains are weird.
The problem is twofold: First, I’m at a point in my writing career where the arbitrary and iniquitous nature of my industry has become more obvious than ever. The new secular website has been delayed twice. Publishing backend processes have slowed to a crawl. All kinds of feedback about my writing, when pitched for new opportunities, come down to “excellent, but not what we’re looking for right now.” And so on, and so forth.
But also, the arbitrary and iniquitous nature of publishing was always pretty obvious. So what did I expect?
I recently read a piece meant to tackle writers’ envy, an affliction that I have thankfully never had. But even though it wasn’t really written “for” me, Lincoln Michel’s “Kicking Over the Ladder in Your Mind” still helped to clarify what my affliction is. When Michel writes,
Of course, all this is a psychological trick we play on ourselves. Because the truth is this works the other way too. The success we have had was subject to the same luck. Our brain likes to tell us our successes are always hard-won and deserving, while our failures are always unfair. And just as we’re looking at the people a few rungs “above” us, people a few rungs “below” are looking up and thinking, Why is that asshole where I’m supposed to be?
I had my “aha” moment, because the fact is that I am very much aware of how structurally skewed even my successes have been in this genre. And this weighs on me, especially when readers regard me as worth paying attention to because of what little platform I have. If I don’t rise any higher on the ladder of publishing, well, that’s not really surprising. Very few ever do—and I’ve already gone higher up than many others ever will: not just among the people actively writing with hopes of acceptance into the “big leagues,” but also the sweeping number of humans who never get to cultivate creative practices like this at all.
And yet, this awareness makes me frustrated, because while I have a small platform, I don’t really have enough of one to effect meaningful changes; and so, I keep aspiring to climb the ladder, crapshoot those it is, in the hope that one day maybe I will. Maybe one day I will be “enough.”
In the process, though, I also have to keep committing to the idea that this is the best way for me to effect change: By continuing to play the game. By continuing to gamble in a lottery I know is rigged. By promising myself that if I “win” bigger prizes, then I can extend the platform better to all.
I did this once before, with my life in academia. I knew that game was rigged, too. I knew that the cost, for folks who didn’t have the financial support to wait out the fickle fortunes of PhD life, was too high for the realm’s “victors” to reflect merit alone. And I walked away from it in 2016, even when people were insisting that I should go into further debt, to embrace the sunk cost fallacy of waiting out my committee’s lack of clear feedback on my second full dissertation draft, so that I could… what? reach the defense stage and then, market-willing, enter another half-decade of adjunct professorship in a two-thirds short-term-contract-based post-secondary teaching field, glutted with far more degree-holders than jobs?
When I left, I was not furious with the system.
I was furious with myself, for having thought I could play in a rigged system and make it better.
And that’s where I find myself now with writing. I have a tiny platform: just enough to give me a taste of what it might be like to have the means to contribute to industry-wide change. But I may not ever have anything more than what I currently do. So how long will I keep buying into sunk cost fallacy here, too, until I’m willing to accept that I can rise no higher?
Are my reasons sufficient to keep going in this field? Or is it pure narcissism, again, to think that I can eventually make a meaningful contribution through a field made unjust by design?
EF1. A Serious Man
I’m in the camp of film-viewers who find A Serious Man (2009), the Coen brothers’ film about a Jewish physics professor losing the plot in every part of his life that he’d been pursuing with great seriousness, uproariously funny. Oh, I know: We’re a strange, fierce few, we lovers of A Serious Man, because it’s not exactly everyone’s idea of a good time to watch a human being’s life fall apart—but for some of us, a film like this is absolutely a cure for what ails you. And I needed a good remedy for my latest sense of losing the plot in my own life.
A solid measure of whether this film will work for you, though, is how much you’ve been exposed to—and want to be exposed to—a style of shaggy-dog storytelling deeply informed by Judaic practice. I’m not Jewish, obviously, but I grew up in classrooms filled with Jewish students, and as a kid I thought that if I were ever to pick an active “faith” tradition, it would probably be Judaism. (Most of the Jews I knew were atheist—I was actually shocked the first time I met a Jewish theist!—so the practice really seemed to me to be more about community-building, a respect for history, and a love of learning. Plus, the FOOD. But I digress.)
Judaism’s core texts, and related theological discourse, differ significantly from how Judaism is usually talked about in our dominant Christian culture. While most of mainstream Christianity is presented to us as centred around the primacy and (variably) inviolate truths of the New Testament, the Jewish faith takes as one of its core precepts (entrenched in its veritable maze of foundational texts) the practice of extensive intertextual commentary. For this reason, you’ve got “Written Torah” (better known as the Pentateuch, a different version of the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament), along with “Oral Torah” (made up of prophetic decree and other holy writings). But “Oral Torah” eventually needed to be written down as well, which posed a significant theological problem: How could one be sure that “Oral Torah,” thought to contain the word of Moses, too, was being transcribed with any accuracy?
The Talmud, then, is made up of "Mishnah" (the transcribed Oral Torah, which essentially provides examples of Torah as it was applied in case law and related societal guidance around six key themes: seeds, seasons, women, damages, holy things, and purities) and "Gemara," a collection of multigenerational rabbinical debates and interpretations of the former’s prescriptive rulings.
Oh, but we’re not done yet! Because then we get into Midrash, a term referring both to a methodology for interpreting the meaning of core Judaic texts, and also a concrete series of rabbinical analyses that continue the work of "Gemara" from the fifth century C.E. on to around the end of the twelfth century.
In other words, although the act of telling stories about the stories we tell ourselves is not at all exclusive to Jewish tradition, Jewish tradition… definitely has a leg-up in making the quest for meaning feel like something it’s okay to laugh at with great seriousness—because look! just look! See how many generations come before you have been wrestling with this labyrinth of conflicting meanings, too!
This duality is what I treasure in A Serious Man. Its opening anecdote is a sordid old Yiddish tale of a wife who either killed a dear old man or maybe vanquished a trickster spirit (who’s to say?), but the modern-day example the film then leaps to—wave-particle duality, at the centre of our professor’s moral dilemma with a student—is every bit as useful for understanding the role of our uncertainty about the outcomes in our lives, until they actually come to pass. It’s not the specific metaphor, or story, that ever matters when facing the unknown. It’s whether the story helps us to wrestle with the wait for clarity—or not.
And if not? Well, “godspeed,” so to speak! Find another rabbi, another story, and begin the quest anew.
TV2. Nate's arc on Ted Lasso
Right now, for wish fulfilment about a better style of human discourse, there’s little better on the ’tubes than Ted Lasso. Plenty have raved about this show from a variety of angles—its emotional honesty and directness, its healthy approaches to conflict, trauma, and transgression, and its pointed refusal of traditional toxic femininities and masculinities. But I want to dwell awhile on the obvious hunger for this sort of narrative, along with this hunger's current limits. And Nate’s character arc is perfect for both.
Spoilers ahead, of course. Nate starts Season One a bullied and beleaguered, soft-spoken kit man for AFC Richmond, overlooked by players and administrators alike as a person of no greater worth. Ted takes him under his wing, empowers him to contribute, and raises him up the ranks when his contributions reveal a splendid strategist in the making.
Then, in Season Two, while Ted is busy grappling with a mental-health crisis, Nate experiences a surge of popular-media success that doesn’t change a thing for him in the eyes of his cruelly indifferent father—and then that moment in the spotlight goes away. The confused agony of being lifted up for the first time in his life, then dropped back hard into indifferent reality, fits perfectly into his lifelong experience of being used as the butt of the joke. He retaliates by nursing the idea that everyone around him is the real joke, and that everyone around him is keeping him from the fame that he’s due. Throw in a toxic person who sees an opportunity in Nate’s wounds, and a brutal rift between Nate and the rest of the team becomes inevitable.
But here’s the thing.
For all that this show celebrates flipping the script on how we see ourselves and each other, damned if many a media outlet didn’t get the memo, because of how quick write-ups of this season were to describe Nate as the new “villain” in Ted Lasso. But then again, why not, when even members of the cast have likened his narrative arc to Darth Vader from Star Wars?
Our hunger for a healthier way of thinking about relationships keeps fighting to emerge from a deep well of tired cultural vocabularies. (And honestly, when it comes to the healing focus of Ted Lasso, the Star Wars franchise, with its disappointing reliance on killing off male characters who’ve transgressed, instead of providing more constructive justices for their worlds, might have been the worst possible reference for Nate.)
This series has a compassionate approach to all of the characters it’s chosen to see as fully human in the first place (everyone, that is, except the cruel ex-husband to our leading lady, and the Ghanaian billionaire who insists he wants to be a different sort of billionaire… until he doesn’t get his way). Nate is one of those fully human beings on the show, and so, a lot has been invested in his character arc, to make his rise and fall coherent from an emotional-intelligence standpoint.
What comes next, though, is really up to us—because while I’m confident that this breakaway success of a series will be looking for Nate to heal by the end of Season Three, the real measure of this show’s impact is more likely to emerge in whether or not fans are ready to accept that narrative turn.
“But it’s just a TV show!”
Well, yes, but what we openly support in our media choices is often taken as a sign of what we will and will not sanction in terms of transgression and healing in the real world. And our world is filled with Nates, which means it’s also filled with people that Nates have harmed. Nate having a redemption arc that doesn’t condemn him to permanent isolation or death is absolutely critical to normalizing better vocabularies for justice that include a full half of our population… but it’s also not something we’re good at.
Maybe we’ll be a bit better at it, though, after Season 3?
B2. Mike Davis's Planet of Slums
Actually, no—let’s modify how I started that last paragraph, at the end of TV2:
What we openly support through our media choices is often treated by people on “the socials” as the most important staging ground for political action. And yet, the most urgent issues of transgression and healing in the real world require us to look well beyond our cozy, one-thirds-world media for solutions. (As noted, for instance, in B1, about a book that contains wide-ranging complicities in trauma to reveal the problem's depth.)
When a friend mentioned Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums to me last month, I thought I had somehow missed the text when it first came out in 2006, but after (re)reading this Verso Books exploration of what the mass transition from rural to urban settings actually means for huge swaths of humanity, I was thrown right back to my poli-sci undergrad days.
(Good grief, have I ever forgotten so much more than I will ever know.)
The key message of Davis’s book is that the very idea of a clean rural-urban divide is deeply misleading. After all, when we think of urbanization, most automatically picture the fruits of industrialization, including increased access to more and better goods and services. Unfortunately, as Davis notes, only urban spaces that have not seen significant population surges have been able to sustain decent social and labour relationships between their rural exteriors (including nearby areas feeding the city) and service-oriented interior sectors.
So, what about all the “urban” spaces that instead saw huge population increases in a short period of time? Well, that gets trickier, because Davis argues that there are essentially two driving factors for these reclassifications of human settlement from “rural” to “urban.” The first is that many didn’t actually move to the city at all; urban sprawl came to them, in parts of the world expanding so fast that villagers with stable lives and rural livelihoods often saw their local economies collapse overnight—say, with shipping routes disrupting their fishing, and with larger industries replacing local supply chains.
The second factor involves the mass migration of “surplus” rural folk to the city—but out of necessity, not pure preference. Davis argues that “policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF and World Bank” reduced rural job opportunities, but without stimulating the urban job market, which has also significantly shifted to an automated and reduced workforce while continuing to boost overall economic output.
Both situations yield the same outcome, and give this book its title. We don’t really have as much urbanization as we think we do: What we have is increased urban claims to communities of “slums” forged by migration or engulfment on the outskirts of older urban centres. These slums include precarious, poorly regulated, high-density low-income housing, often handmade from cheaper materials. And a full eighth of the human species resides in them.
I live near a few “barrios humildes” (humble neighbourhoods) myself, here in Colombia. I only have to wander a few blocks uphill to find the lower-middle- and middle-class housing give way to mountainside homes of uncertain quality, where many of the cash-poor who spend their days begging on the streets spend their nights keeping out the rains and the mud. Residential sectors like these are sometimes nestled between newer high-rises, or near hopping little commercial districts for low- to lower-middle-class residents. Some modest-income farmers, caught amid urban infrastructure expansion in barely held-together brick-and-corrugated-metal huts, also let their cows graze on the grassy median of my highway. Roosters can be heard on an evening run, and I spy two of the farmers setting up an egg stand for evening sale by the highway on my return.
Meanwhile, to my far right, up the mountain but closer to a military base, electric- and water-grid infrastructure, and a bit of buffering private farmland, are also a few grand and secluded homes, modern-minimalist in design, whose occupants are absolutely of the upper class.
In other words, I literally need only scan the vista from my apartment balcony, to see a full range of classes in a part of the city spilling unevenly into surrounding countryside.
Now, obviously, there are also plenty of cash-poor people in traditionally urban zones—and Davis’s book explores facets of their existence in this precarious equation, too.
But the rise of slums and “megaslums” poses a distinct problem that has only worsened since Davis first published this book, fifteen years ago.
Obviously, the pandemic illustrates one key component of that problem, because the living conditions in the world’s high-density urban-adjacent slums absolutely contributed to the spread of COVID-19, just as it has contributed to the spread of many other diseases and the exacerbation of quality-of-life-reducing pollution. (The tragic story of nomadic-Mongolian “urbanization” is one I’m sure I’ll get around to in a newsletter down the line.)
But the other problem, the problem of what peripheral communities create in the way of behavioural and political crises, is perhaps even more urgent, because it has already left an almost unfathomable legacy of violence and trauma across multiple generations. And so, while many in more affluent countries can barely bring themselves to forgive one TV character for “betraying” others in the world of fictional Premier League football… we have a devastating problem before us in the real world:
How do we forge the moral consensus we need to address the widespread reality of underserved and traumatized youth taking to violence by force, out of despair, or because violence seems the only coherent means of finding stability in so blatantly an unjust world?
CP2. Ongoing trauma
We’re carrying forward from Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (B2) to explore the broader traumas that Colombians are still struggling to address in this latest stage of “peace.”
Here are two paragraphs from the situation in Colombia, as Davis described it in 2006:
The unending civil wars in Colombia likewise have added more than 400,000 IDPs [internally displaced people] to Bogotá’s urban poverty belt, which includes the huge informal settlements of Sumapaz, Ciudad Bolívar, Usme, and Soacha. ‘Most displaced,’ explains an aid NGO, “are social outcasts, excluded from formal life and employment. Currently, 653,800 Botoganos (2002) have no employment in the city and, even more shocking, half of them are under the age of 29.’ Without urban skills and frequently without access to schools, these young peasants and their children are ideal recruits for street gangs and paramilitaries. Local businessmen vandalized by urchins, in turn, form grupos de limpieza [cleansing groups] with links to rightwing death squads, and the bodies of murdered children are dumped at the edge of town.
The same nightmare prevails on the outskirts of Cali, where anthropologist Michael Taussig invoked Dante’s Inferno to describe the struggle for survival in two ‘stupendously dangerous’ peripheral slums. Navarro is a notorious ‘garbage mountain’ where hungry women and children pick through waste while youthful gunmen (malo de malo [the worst of the worst]) are either hired or exterminated by rightwing paramilitaries. The other settlement, Carlos Alfredo Díaz, is full of ‘kids running around with homemade shotguns and grenades.’ ‘It dawns on men,’ writes Taussig, ‘that just as the gue[r]rilla have made their most importance base in the endless forests of the Caquetá, at the end of nowhere on the edge of the Amazon basin, so the gang world of youth gone wild has its sacred grove, too, right here on the urban edge, where the slums hit the cane fields at Carlos Alfredo Díaz.
I’ve been to Usme, in Bogotá. It is today every bit as horrific a living space as it must have been back in 2006. When I was living in Bogotá for a month in 2018, fires were routinely set on trash heaps in the middle of the region’s southern streets, to protest the lack of city services, while raids of young men beat their way through metal protective shutters at night, to take what they could from various businesses (some, known to have ties to FARC, and therefore viewed as justified targets for impoverished citizens; others, collateral damage due to proximity to the former). Nightly curfew was a given. Police and military patrols in all parts were, too.
When I visited Usme, I saw many homes that looked like photos from bombed regions in Palestine and Syria. No rooves on many, and often broken-open walls on others. The most heartbreaking for me was the hollowed-out wreck of a second-floor living space, with a tarp drawn tight to reach three of four corner posts (to make a roof, of sorts) and a little splash of bright paint on the one bit of wall still connected to a post, which was where a young child rested while her mother cooked on a fire on the other side of the bare concrete.
The humblest barrios of Medellín, whether running up various mountainsides or else packed tight in Centro, at the uptown heart of the old city, are mostly different. There is often a sense of community in even the most precarious—and many more splashes of life and colour to insist upon the value of even the hardest existence. But Usme… Usme was a place with many pockets of clear distrust, and anger, and restlessness, and despair, overseen by a heavy military presence where a heavy social-welfare-presence should have been instead.
One of the rare exceptions in Medellín is a winding river corridor that leads out from the city up into the mountains of the west. This corridor starts with the humble neighbourhood of Altavista, a place I would run through early in the morning to reach a lovely nearby hilltop—and that part of the corridor is just fine, for all its poverty. The streets are often taken up by little neighbourhood parties. Sancocho, a great big communal stew, was often being cooked in a giant pot on cinder blocks over flame on the streets. At Christmastime, too, there were always half a dozen massive, elaborate Nativity village scenes—some with fancier components, and some with whatever the community had on hand to represent key players.
On two occasions, I took a city bus deeper into that corridor, though, and it was indeed a different, more uneasy world. The bus driver insisted that I stay in plain sight at all times, and not veer from the bus route if I could help it. I’d moved through many humbler parts of Medellín, but this narrow stretch of mostly forest, interspersed with modest homes, is notorious for assassinations of people either connected to the drug trade, or who might have fled to this part of the city to escape problems elsewhere. I did not feel safe there. Not at all.
And yet, what still happens in that remote mountain corridor just outside of Medellín also happens in a great many other remote parts of this department, Antioquia, and in many other remote and highly rural departments of Colombia, too. In the Davis excerpt above, I bolded a section pertaining to local businessmen murdering street children in retaliation for theft; that happened just a couple of weeks ago in Tibú, in the department of Norte de Santander, which borders on Venezuela and has been having trouble managing violent prejudice as immigrants overwhelm the smaller, already impoverished towns on their way to larger urban centres.
A photo in El Mundo tells the heartbreaking story well: a boy of thirteen, still wearing his backpack—a reminder to us that he was in school, before he left Venezuela in search of money for his sick mother—is lying in the dirt with his hands tied with adhesive tape, and a piece of cardboard dropped over his body. On it, the word “ladrones”—thieves—is meant to offer explanation for why locals took his life, and the life of an older teen with him. Originally the group had claimed that it was just going to drive the two through town to humiliate them, and put photos on social media, but the mob’s fury instead drove them to this hideous end.
I am cherry-picking a single story, of course, because that’s what the research says helps to drive home the severity and the humanity of a given crisis. The fact is that the ongoing displacement of Venezuelans to Colombia is being matched by ongoing internal displacement, as social leaders continue to be assassinated at staggering numbers in smaller, remote, and impoverished communities. This, in turn, is because power vacuums have been left to fester through an incomplete implementation of many facets of the peace accord. As Mexican cartels, dissident FARC, ELN, and any number of minor drug-related gangs move in, plenty of deeply impoverished locals are driven out.
(In this section's opening photo of Bogotá, from CableNoticias, you can see that the national city park recently become an Indigenous refugee camp from one such bout of internal displacement. Over the last few months, internal displacement in Colombia from people fleeing armed forces grew 213% over 2020.)
And the worst part of all this precarity and violence? Outside of the fact that COVID-19 didn’t help, because home confinement for health reasons made many rural targets easier for assassins to track down? The worst part is that the sheer spectacle of it all, joined with Colombians’ ongoing and unhealed trauma from the very recent Difficult Times, is doing here what it would do most anywhere that has also experienced a lot of uncertainty amid war: It’s driving people to want security at any cost. And so, a schism is clearly growing, between a frustrated body of citizens who loathe the state for its corruption and complicity in violent oppression, and those who long for a strongman leader to bring the full might of the military crashing down on regions of extreme poverty and unrest.
Many more people will die unjust deaths before this is over.
And many others, driven by a complex set of motivating factors to kill, will remain a part of the equation that cries out to be resolved by better justices in the years and decades still to come.
M2. The civilizing "miracle" of cake
Whew. Let’s take a beat, shall we?
Carl Sagan famously suggested that “[i]f you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the universe.” The quote always makes me smile, because it’s one of those gentle reminders that so much of what we take for granted today—the bad and the good alike—is shaped by billions of years of activity converging on this single moment in time. And then the next moment. And the next. And the next.
More recently, Étienne Fortier-Dubois walked the world through a similarly extraordinary journey through history that we echo every time we make a cake. In October 24, 2020, he wrote the following tweets:
Sometimes I think of how cakes are a miracle. Take a pound cake. It's made of equal amounts (one pound each) of four ingredients. Sounds simple, right?
To get the first ingredient, you need to find some species of grass that grows in the Middle East. When the grass is ripe and golden, you harvest the grains. Then you grind them to get a fine powder. You remove the darker parts of the powder to just keep the white.
That was the easiest ingredient. You'll need another plant: a large grass that grows in tropical areas. The part you need is some sweet juice in the stalks. After a lot of labor-intensive processing and refining, you turn this juice into thousands of tiny white crystals.
You're not done yet. For your next ordeal, you must hunt this flightless bird from the jungles of Asia. Don't kill it though. Just take the weird round things the females lay. Crack the weird round thing open: it's slimy and fat and bright yellow. That's exactly what you want.
The last one's tough. You need the female of this massive (but peaceful) beast. You need it to have just given birth. You need to take the white liquid it wanted to give its baby. Then you need to extract the fat from that liquid, and mix it until it becomes a yellowish solid.
Now combine these four things in a very specific order before you apply a very specific amount of heat for a very specific amount of time, and you have a pound cake!
Maybe you'd like to add something for flavor? Perhaps the tiny fragrant seeds of an expensive orchid? Or the bitter processed fat from a Central American fruit? Or the dried bark of some tree in India? Maybe we shouldn't get too fancy...
The reason cakes exist, of course, is that we had centuries to domesticate plants and animals, and to create culinary innovations. Complex things can come into being, with time and mechanisms like culture or natural selection. But make no mistake: cakes are a miracle.
I was going to share some apple pie tips this month, along with similar remarks about the journey behind its ingredients—but honestly, why reinvent the wheel? You can buy Étienne a coffee if these tweets made you smile, or check out his own blog and newsletter here.
Apple pie in December, then, minus all the fancy-talk.
For now, I’m just sitting with the reminder embedded in all our food cultures, that we have more inherited wisdom with us than we often realize; and that “civilization” is a thing that happens to and around us whether or not we’re fully cognizant of it. For all that we tend to indulge in the belief that we are protagonists of immense agency in our collective stories, we are rarely doing more than trying to process the moment in which we live, and hoping that the actions we carry forward will be the “right” ones for the world ahead.
EF2. My Dinner with Andre
I guess I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick with my film choices this month, but revisiting My Dinner with Andre (1981) was an especially insightful treat. When I was in my early twenties, this film, about a deceptively simple dinner conversation between two old friends in the film and theatre business (real friends in the industry, using real-life names, but crafting fictive versions of themselves from past conversations) was usually rented to signal a person’s taste for “cerebral” films, and their familiarity with “important” filmic movements.
And I could see why, as a younger twit. First, you’ve got the titular Andre, a restless person with enough financial comfort to indulge various wild theories and experiences in pursuit of something, anything, to fill the void of performative meaninglessness that haunts and horrifies him. He has a long monologue for most of the dinner, regaling his companion with stories of travel to all sorts of unusual corners of the world, and all the mystical connections he reads into what transpired in these extreme encounters.
Then there’s our standpoint protagonist, Wally, who has more trust in the moorings of empiricism, which allow him to enjoy the quotidian and domestic pleasures as just as good as anything that requires throwing away money to gallivant across the world. And yet, these daily comforts also keep him so narrow in his focus that he misses the chance to appreciate even just a little bit more on his home front.
Together, the pair leans into the confusion of trying to make sense of the other’s point of view, and come to a pleasing end in the act of shared estrangement itself. It’s a style and aim of discourse not often seen today: an exchange of ideas performed less to convince the other party, and more to clarify one’s own position through a full examination of other possible worldviews.
My memory of this film was quite vague when I decided on impulse to rewatch it, but even then, I’m convinced that my view of the film has drastically changed over fifteen years.
In particular, I wasn’t as interested this time in Wally or Andre’s positions, so much as the “seat” that the film itself was providing us at the table. I’m dead sure that, on first viewing, I thought we were supposed to be aligned with Wally. After all, he’s the one we journey with to and from the restaurant, and it’s his internal monologue that provides framing exposition for the whole experience. Conversely, we never get Andre’s interiority, and his life before and after this meal is not clear.
But I’m almost Wally’s age now, so I suppose I now have a sharper ear for the contents of that inner monologue, and the little clues in it that position the viewer in an entirely third realm.
Wally, after all, is a playwright without much in the way of work. Precariously situated, he insists in his monologue on the Great Importance of the many things that go into a working day that starts at 10 a.m., and which usually ends with his girlfriend fixing him a good meal. Alack, such a meal wasn’t an option on this night anyway, because his girlfriend has to work three whole shifts a week, so that between the two of them there’s at least a little money coming in.
Now, granted, Wally is not exactly aspiring to any life of material affluence. When Wally finally tells Andre what he thinks of all the latter’s quixotic quests to find meaning, he contrasts all those worldly adventures with his own, small, perfect delight at finding a cup of cold coffee left out overnight still waiting for him—without a dead cockroach or fly in it!—the next morning.
But even in the shabbiness of his attire in this fancy restaurant, there’s an open defiance of class performance that can only come from someone with some level of confidence in “belonging” to posh society at another, more cerebral level. (Folks who’ve never experienced that vague sense of belonging generally try to groom as best they can to look as sharp as possible, whenever an opportunity arises to nudge up against the finer life. Even in the most hard-up barrios here in Colombia, there’s nothing more coveted than a good buzzcut or nice nails, and a bit of flash to one’s knock-off apparel. Shabby chic is not low-class attire.)
Likewise, Wally’s opening voice-over also reveals that neither he nor Andre is truly speaking from the experience of the “common man”—for even in Wally’s precarity there is a residual buffer, formed perhaps by community associations in the absence of material wealth, that allows him to continue making art without considering the possibility of more than his girlfriend’s three shifts a week as a solution to his money troubles.
And so, far from being “on” Wally’s side, the structure of these opening lines gives the impression from the outside that we’re going to be joining him in an experience where his self-awareness will meet new and confusing limits. And it does.
But there’s also something a touch maddening, on second viewing, in just how little the dial has really moved for either person at this table. Andre believes that he was empty before his questing, and now knows more fully how to live—but the way in which he wants to live will necessarily confound that new knowledge, because an embrace of the spontaneous fullness of any given moment invites unexpected upheavals at every turn. He can’t ever “really” settle down without losing whatever it is he thinks he gained from his adventures, and so those adventures will probably turn into recycled stories at more dinner tables over time.
Meanwhile, Wally goes home with a sharpened sense of wonder for the moment, to share the story of the night with his girlfriend… who remains little more than background shelter and abiding audience for his own form of affluence, which is never fully confronted in this script: the ability to pursue an artistic life itself.
I do feel a little closer to Wally than to Andre, then, even after all this time—but in ways that merit closer inspection of my own strange life, and a heck of a lot more self-doubt.
A2. "Identity Fraud" & "Being-in-the-Room Privilege"
Okay, so this is two articles in one, but the second is referenced in the first, and absolutely too good to leave out. In the first, “Identity Fraud” (published by the recently resurrected Gawker), author Jenny G. Zhang explores not just the commodification but also the weaponization of identity by individual marginalized actors, at cost to equity-improvements for the group. Specifically,
In the hands of people who are both marginalized and disingenuous, identity has been stripped of meaning and transformed into a rhetorical cudgel, alternately used to silence detractors and assume a kind of moral posture. I call this “Identity Fraud”: a knowing misuse of identity that primarily benefits those brazen enough to wield this maneuver.
Some might refer to this as pulling the race card or any other variation thereof. But such a term has become antiquated, co-opted and tainted by conservatives and those reacting negatively to what they see as excessive “wokeness” in contemporary discourse. My viewpoints do not align with theirs; rather, I would argue that it is to the detriment of left, progressive movements that a bad-faith weaponization of identity has saturated the fount of sociocultural dynamics. The danger of what I’m talking about lies not with the ideas behind brandishing identity — that it is meaningful, and that people of marginalized identities as a whole continue to suffer from inequities — so much as how inadequately this cynical rhetorical strategy addresses those fundamental problems in favor of shallow optics, cheap distractions, and personal gain.
This approach to activism, which Zhang considers centrally individualist, exists at a stark remove from the movements of generations’ past. The Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group of Black feminist lesbian socialists, especially exemplifies for Zhang what can be done when people seek to resist systems of oppression in a more comprehensive way, for
The C.R.C. was, above all, a solidarity coalition that aimed to bring together those who suffered under capitalism, imperialism, and the patriarchy: an alliance of race, class, gender, and sexuality. What made the C.R.C.’s conception so revolutionary half a century ago was its focus on those at the bottom of the pecking order — poor, Black women with little socioeconomic mobility — rather than those who sat atop the pyramid of representation. Identity politics as it is commonly understood today — individualist, tied to shallow ideas of representation and authenticity — is far from the radical imagination of the past.
Zhang’s argument draws from standpoint epistemology, but in its original sense: not the one that has been heavily distorted and commodified under neoliberal usage. And this is where a reference to Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s “Being-in-the-Room Privilege,” an article originally published by The Philosopher in November 2020, comes in handy.
Táíwò’s piece is not just a description of standpoint epistemology, which argues that a) all knowledge is socially situated, b) some people can more easily access certain bodies of knowledge, and c) our research practices need to reflect these facts. Rather, from hard-won personal experience, Táíwò illustrates that an attendant phenomenon, our automatic deference to a person superficially seen as a better fit to hold the centre in any given discourse, is also damaging. Why? Because,
when people say they need to “listen to the most affected”, it isn’t because they intend to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Instead, it has more often meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to those who most snugly fit into the social categories associated with these ills – regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced. In the case of my conversation with Helen, my racial category tied me more “authentically” to an experience that neither of us had had. She was called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it.
Táíwò goes on to explain how this behaviour serves something called “elite capture,” in which more privileged members of an underserved group are given disproportionate access not only to a “way out” but also to opportunities to “speak” for the rest.
(In other words, classism is a hell of a drug, and although it cannot be addressed without intersectional -isms, we need to do a much better job talking about it at all.)
This "deference," of course, is happening in conjunction with another major and well-known problem with the application of standpoint epistemology, in academia and similar institutional spheres: namely, the time and energy that marginalized persons are expected to pour into representing these standpoints, at cost to other parts of their careers and research pathways. However, Táíwò explores how even that exhausting obligation to represent can also serve as a kind of “being-in-the-room” privilege. Or, as he puts it:
It is easy, then, to see how this deferential form of standpoint epistemology contributes to elite capture at scale. The rooms of power and influence are at the end of causal chains that have selection effects. As you get higher and higher forms of education, social experiences narrow – some students are pipelined to PhDs and others to prisons. Deferential ways of dealing with identity can inherit the distortions caused by these selection processes.
And,
Deference practices that serve attention-focused campaigns (e.g. we’ve read too many white men, let’s now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.
…
Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside.
But probably not.
(LOVE that term, “the chattering class.” That’s us! We’re it!)
Unfortunately, neither Zhang nor Táíwò have the magical powers needed to fix this situation: both only offer, in the end, individuated solutions to a systemic concern.
I do think there’s something to be said here, though, about the difference between the “hope” that Arendt despised (A1) because it led to similar sound and fury without change—long before the internet, long before Twitter!—and the path to more truly collective action.
The problem, to my mind, is that we currently have access to too many of the wrong kinds of opportunity to help fragments of our hurting world escape the injustice of its socioeconomic arrangements. And those “wrong” opportunities are unfortunately some of the easiest to participate in, as well as the easiest to use to create activist factions.
Just as “being in the room” can be both a burden and a privilege, so too can our access to certain tools and related resources signal an affluence that we have to grapple with, if we’re truly going to use our platforms to reach and uplift more of our widely hurting world.
PF2. Never performing knowledge again
“There’s just no neat sum-up to the story … In the few years since I’ve started to travel in the world, I’ve found myself changing. The cramped cynical worldview of a man who’d only seen life through the narrow prism of the restaurant kitchen had altered. I’d begun to believe that the dinner table was the great leveler, where people from opposite sides of the world could always sit down and talk and eat and drink, and if not solve all the world’s problems, at least find, for a time, common ground. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe the world’s not like that at all. Maybe in the real world, the one without cameras and happy food and travel shows, everybody, the good and the bad together, are all crushed under the same terrible wheel. I hope, I really hope, I’m wrong about that.”
—Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations: Beirut (where filming was disrupted by Israel bombing Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah kidnapping Israeli soldiers, and Bourdain’s crew needed to be evacuated after watching the war from a luxury hotel).
If you’ve ever seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), you might remember the moment when Christopher Lloyd, in his most terrifying filmic role, lures Roger Rabbit from his hiding spot by doing the one gag that no ’toon can resist, tapping the beat to “Shave and a haircut” until Roger Rabbit can’t help but burst out singing “—two bits!”
I resonate deeply with this scene, but in the realm of performative knowledge. It is very difficult for me to sit by and let other people argue over literature, film, political theory, nation-state dynamics, various -isms, academia, justice, children, education, public policy… oh, you name it… without feeling the need to add my “two bits.”
And I am honestly often furious with myself after, for not having been able to keep my gob shut and just let others wax on about a subject without comment.
Would it really matter if I didn’t say something? Would the world change? Do the scales of justice tip at all to the side of reason because THUS SPAKE M. L. CLARK?
Obviously not.
This is part of the reason I adore the presumption of ignorance that comes with living in another language context—although, my Spanish is good enough now that the same “two bits” are starting to come to the fore in conversation here, too. Still, it happens less, and I find myself able to sit back and listen more, which is… wonderfully healthy.
As such, and as I ruminate over what would happen if I were ever kicked out of my new home, I find myself deeply preoccupied by this question of how I would train myself, or otherwise situate myself, so that I could shut my gob more often in English, too.
One critical factor would be an avoidance of as many temptations as possible. Some extended family members, for instance, absolutely enjoy a good hypothetical argument where they go for cheap wins by pigeonholing me into radical straw-men stances on various issues. Being around them is not good for me in this regard, but the issue runs deeper. My CV is mainly in post-secondary education and related literary fields: none of those would be great spaces for me to exist without getting caught up in the performance of knowledge, either.
I find myself fantasizing, then, about going somewhere no one knows me—either doing volunteer work for people in extreme precarity, or working for a feed shop or some similar small, rural outpost: anywhere, that is, where rapport could be formed on the basis of simple everyday pleasantries. No one would need to know about my past—my life in Colombia, my time in a PhD where I’d written on literary histories of science in the 19th centuries, my life as writer on humanism and as a published author of SF stories. There would be zero cause for people to think me a person with Things To Say on various topics, and thus, no need to perform outside my basic role as one human being supporting another. I could listen. I could contribute by listening.
Or, at least, I like to pretend I could actually kick the habit.
But the fact is that performing knowledge is one heck of a drug. (Yes, I know I already said that once in this newsletter about classism. They're related!)
If I can’t even stop myself from doing it here in Colombia, when I could easily rest on the fact of being a non-native speaker and stay quiet… how would I ever manage to keep from piping up in whatever English-speaking community I was driven to next?
And if I can't make the urge go away, then how do I make it useful?
TV3. Social commentary versus stated reality in Squid Game
I might have a “take” for you on Squid Game that you haven’t heard before—which would be a tall order, I know, because in my circles it feels like everyone has something to say about this nine-episode South Korean death-game TV show, whether or not they’ve watched it.
It’s mere gore fetishism, to some. To others, it doesn’t do enough for its racial-minority and female cast. To others still, it's maddening to be asked to empathize with its protagonist, a gambling addict, careless son, and neglectful father. (I too also almost turned it off during the opening story sequence, because I find it painful to watch someone’s addiction ruin a person and his relationships in the world—on screen, and off.) Oh, and its subtitle game is weak on conveying crucial cultural context, especially around forms of address.
NB: For those who are worried about the gore level, this is a remarkably tame series for its genre. Apart from organ-harvesting scenes, where the value of having a trained professional do the work is debated over the open cavity, the camerawork significantly glosses over the spectacle of death. There are blood pools and corpses abounding, but mostly at a distance. Atmosphere is created more by reactions to the sound of gunfire and the mass spectacle of loss. This is a lot tidier than Battle Royale, Saw, and other such entries in the death-game genre. (Possibly that tidiness is part of the real horror of this series, too.)
But for me, the major sticking point around this latest Netflix phenomenon lies with audience reception, and especially any surrounding media that’s been raving about Squid Game as a work of social commentary.
In watching reactions to Squid Game take the form of guard-costumes in South Korean labour strikes, but also in the creation of tourist hotspots around show-related statues, death-game-inspired cafés, and of course Halloween costumes, I’ve come to realize how much I loathe how casually the term “social commentary” is used to describe “realist” fiction. Is simply setting your work in the “real” world enough to make your story a “comment” on it?
In the case of Squid Game, I don’t think it’s a very good work of social commentary.
Or rather, it seems to me to be no more a work of social commentary than any other creative product, because of course everything we create invites comment on the context of its creation, and can be used to foster debate about human nature. Which is not to say that its aesthetics can’t be put to good use! But I do think that there’s a danger in assuming that Squid Game has a clear and pressing message about the painful aspects of reality it's placed on unflinching display.
But but but!, one might retort: Squid Game has a whole bunch of characters in the worst kind of debt! And a whole bunch of other characters are exploiting their desperation to entertain the rich! And in the course of these games, human beings are giving into destructive tendencies in the name of self-preservation! It's incredibly painful for many of us to watch these scenes when thinking about our own losses, fears, and humiliations! How can this not be social commentary?
Yes, the show uses pressing socioeconomic topics to drive the plot and shape character backstories. But is there a point being made with all of this? Is it enough for the show to be set in a given context (e.g., South Korea’s devastating debt crisis, the broader world’s skyrocketing rich-poor divide, and the arbitrary cruelties that this situation invites us to enact) for it to be making a coherent comment on its stated, baseline reality?
I promise, I’m not splitting hairs here. The difference matters because, if Squid Game really is a more incisive social commentary, with a message deeper than its stated reality, then it’s an incredibly dangerous message.
It’s the message that there’s nothing intrinsically worse about a blood-sport designed to create the (false) illusion of equal opportunity, when the surrounding world is also unequal. But also that, when our lives are on the line, the selfish nature of those with money will be matched only by the selfish nature of those without.
Thank goodness, then, that Squid Game presents a snapshot of the real and truly hurting world without making any clear claim for one position or the other.
It’s less a coherent comment, that is, than a Rorschach test.
How can I be so sure? Well, I could easily point to the speed at which many businesses figured out how to make money off the show's supposedly anti-capitalist aesthetics—but let’s keep this in-house, and look at some signs in the content that illustrate how socioeconomic issues serve as plot devices more than exceptional social commentary.
SPOILERS, from three examples:
First, take a look at the final game. At the outset of these games, participants were given to believe that everyone would have an “equal” chance of winning, but that absolutely wasn’t the case. As games proceeded, plenty of factors were introduced to ensure that it would become a death match where only one person could “make” it. (And not just any person, but probably a male person on the young-to-middle-aged side.) As such, the whole idea that these games are “better” than the world outside should be considered absolute bullpucky.
On the storytelling side, though, this manipulative squeeze could have been the perfect playing field for some sort of clear social commentary to emerge, if it was ever meant to. The winner of these corrupt games, for instance, could easily have been used to advance a specific idea about the world we should be striving for. Heck, in the final match up, we even have two warring philosophies: one opponent who thinks everyone is only out for themselves, and our story’s hero, who thinks otherwise. And, yes, our hero “wins”… but does his “side” of the debate win with him?
Not at all—because his opponent kills himself, shielding our hero from making a real choice.
Well, but that’s okay, right? I mean, we’ve already seen another character choose to die at marbles so another can survive, under the pretense that the person who wins should be someone with something to live for. And even if the one whose life was spared then didn't win in the end, doesn’t our main hero also fit that definition?
No, sadly, because when our hero leaves the game, he goes a year without touching the staggering amount of blood-money he won. Instead, he dives even deeper into his old, vagrant ways—without apparently reconnecting with his daughter, or saving a teammate’s brother from an orphanage sooner, or looking for the families of others in the game, or helping his friend’s elderly mother with her store, or… anything, anything at all to extend the spirit of community that he argued for in the final game: the idea of being there for others, too.
And yes, to a point, we can chalk this up to grief-trauma—but it also means that, for the first year after his direct confrontation with the depths of systemic injustice on the most visceral level possible, he remains every bit as self-oriented as his friend insisted that everyone truly is.
Worse still (for our third example), what ultimately drags him out of this stupor is meeting a player from the game who was actually in on the whole thing from the start. That player makes a final bet with him that should have been so easy to win, because all our hero needed to do was make a call to help the street person himself. Instead, he just watches, and only after the other “player” dies (moments after the street person is saved by someone else) does our hero finally spring into action—by helping two people he should have helped a year ago, and then committing himself to a personal, single-handed quest for vengeance.
Even as I’m writing all this out, of course, I can imagine ways that the script could have made pointed social commentary out of all the above… but it doesn’t. No one notes that our hero was spared from having to commit murder under duress in the final game. No one notes that if he were any better than the game’s investors, he would have done something, anything, without needing one of them to spur him on again. And no one notes that he didn’t have to sit by and watch the man slowly freezing to death in the streets, any more than he had to wait so long to give a child a home and an old family friend her closure. (The very ending, too, which is expressly setting the series up for a second season, also massively undermines its motivational thrust as being about anything but keeping viewers hooked, entertained, and begging for more.)
Why doesn't it do or say more? Because the world of Squid Game, for all its overt socioeconomics, is simply using this material for plot devices and worldbuilding in a fairly conventional death-game storyline. For a few hours, we might be moved by having met and lost a motley crew of players with hard-luck stories, but then… what have we learned about the world that we didn’t know before? (Except, of course, to always pick the safest shapes in death games, and to err toward the end rather than the beginning of any suggested line-up?)
No, really. I encourage you to take a beat and read something like Daniyal Mueenuddin's "Nawabdin Electrician" (2007, The New Yorker), a story about a lower-class worker trying to make the best of a very difficult life, and ask yourself if Squid Game does anywhere near as good a job at destabilizing our sense of what constitutes ethical conduct, who is "good," and how to cultivate meaningful change in a fundamentally unjust world.
Squid Game was well-written and compelling told, but for me it was all surface around its core ideas. And so we beat on, morally broken in a world of rigged currency, borne back ceaselessly into our next Netflix repast.
A3. "In 'Rationality', Steven Pinker Sticks Up (Again) for Reason's Role in Human Progress"
I wish I could remember the exact point in one of Steven Pinker’s earlier books where he taught me the importance of not assuming that an expert in one field would be an expert even in adjacent disciplines. His earlier texts on linguistics and related sciences were for the most part careful, methodical, and accessible, and I learned a lot about critical debates in a few fields, with plenty of references to inspire further reading. (I’ve also forgotten a lot, which is amusing to realize. Life is long. Memory can always use a good sprucing up.)
Either way, in one of those earlier texts, I recall coming across what was essentially a “kids these days” screed about grammar, and feeling deeply disconcerted—not just because I was still a young person myself, but because when I catch one clearly biased argument in a text, it makes me start to wonder if there were others that my subject-position allowed me to overlook all along. Something in the book’s ethnology, maybe? Or its approach to different faith traditions?
I am thankful to Pinker for this unintended lesson against expert-worship, though, because in the same era quite a few prominent public thinkers, having risen in popularity for specific disciplinary knowledge, were also treading into topics around which they were less informed, and not doing a good job of deferring to more relevant experts. Alack, when the New Atheist fervour declined, I guess it was too much to ask that new figures wouldn’t rise to fill the gap. Today we have many secular folks who treat science and reason as existing at a Platonic remove from the messy realities of implementation—and Pinker lies among them.
And yet, when I think back to what first jarred me as a whippersnapper, I’m not at all surprised by what early reviews have to say about his latest work, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, & Why It Matters (2021). Take this doozy of a line, from a promoted excerpt of the book:
Though I cannot argue that reason is dope, phat, chill, fly, sick, or da bomb, and strictly speaking I cannot even justify or rationalize reason, I will defend the message on the mosaic: we ought to follow reason.
No, really. Please take it, and the whole preceding paragraph tying Zorba the Greek, the Talking Heads, Prince, postmodernism, and critical theory together (as part of some sort of up-to-60-years-old gang setting out to ruin Western civilization?) and chuck it out your nearest exit. Pinker has written on linguistics long enough to understand implicit meanings, and he even wrote a whole darned book on the importance of bringing conversational tones back into our academic writing. There is no excuse for giving the pearl-clutching impression that academia and society writ large has gone to “the streets” because of—gasp!—postmodernism!
But I haven’t read the book in full—nor am I going to, because after reading a chapter excerpt and then Jennifer Szalai’s New York Times review, “In ‘Rationality,’ Steven Pinker Sticks Up (Again) for Reason’s Role in Human Progress,” I think I’ve seen enough. Yes, there seems to be plenty in the book about logical fallacies and common statistical and probability errors, but none of it sounds like new research. This is more of a "greatest hits" volume, and the argument's novelty supposedly lies in explaining why such “rationality” is rare today. Apparently, though, that’s where Pinker veers into claiming as “rational” whatever views he already holds, and I just don’t have the time to waste on being cranky at yet another secular person doing exactly what we atheists often criticize in evangelical theists: conflating personal conviction, that is, for absolute truth.
NB: You can read the article without paywall, but with proper linking to the original, at the Washington Inquirer, if you’re not really impressed with, say, the NYT’s utterly skewed reporting around police assertions about U.S. crime and the defund movement. Also, the book excerpt I mentioned comes from Quillette; I'm not happy with myself for having clicked-through to that site, but figuring out a better politics of online engagement is easily a whole newsletter unto itself.
As Szalai observes, when it comes to the book’s central argument,
The trouble arrives when [Pinker] tries to gussy up his psychologist’s hat with his more elaborate public intellectual’s attire. The person who “succumbs” to the “small pleasure” of a lasagna dinner instead of holding out for the “large pleasure of a slim body” is apparently engaged in a similar kind of myopic thinking as the “half of Americans nearing retirement age who have saved nothing for retirement.” His breezy example elides the fact that — according to the same data — the median income for those non-saving households is $26,000, which isn’t enough money to pay for living expenses, let alone save for retirement.
Some of Pinker’s observations on racial issues are similarly blinkered. Are mortgage lenders who turn down minority applicants really being racist, he muses, or are those lenders simply calculating default rates “from different neighborhoods that just happen to correlate with race?” (A long history of racist redlining may “happen” to have something to do with this too, but Pinker doesn’t get into it.) He goes on to ask why “race, sex, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation have become war zones in intellectual life, even as overt bigotry of all kinds has dwindled.”
Anyone paying attention to what’s been happening in the last few years might wonder where he got his information. In support of his vague claim, Pinker directs the reader to a footnote citing two sources: a study, whose data ended in 2016, that measured a person’s “explicit attitudes” based on self-reporting (i.e. the respondents had to admit their bigotry); and a few (unhelpful) pages from “Enlightenment Now.”
I’ve cited a huge section of the article here, in part because I just remembered that the last two paragraphs in the full version bring up the disgusting case of a person whose name I don’t care to see in the news anymore, and whom you might not want to, either. So, short version for those who don’t click through: Pinker also once consulted for a defense team looking to use the letter of the law to defend a certain major someone, now deceased, who was arrested for a vast number of sex-trafficking charges and related offenses against minors.
Rationality. Where were we?
Right. Nowhere better than we were, oh, long before the Talking Heads, Prince, and Zorba the Greek. Is there any great difference between the “rationality” of Pinker today and that of John W. Campbell and Isaac Asimov of the late ’40s and early ’50s (TV1), when they were busy crafting a sci-fi canon of supposedly hard, rational, empirical thought… which was also based on maintaining an illusion of Western supremacy at all cost? An illusion, in Pinker's case, apparently so delicate that a few people “talking street” or interrogating systems of power could bring the whole thing crashing down?
Dog-whistles come in many forms. One of the most dangerous is any body of rhetoric that invokes the idea of civilization not with an eye to the future growth, but out of an ache for past societies that are then imagined to be far purer and more rigorous than any of ours ever were.
B3. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow (B3)
This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was UK-based Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah, but the committee's selection brought a new-to-me Kenyan author to my attention, as well, and I happened to read the latter's work first this past month. Many feel that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o should have won the Nobel Prize years ago, and after reading Wizard of the Crow (2006), I wholeheartedly agree.
Wizard is a sprawling volume, but also a speculative allegory so wisely and wittily told that it makes for a far speedier read than its nearly 800 pages suggest. At the same time, this huge size also absolutely suits the theatrics and grandiosity of its subject matter: a tyrannical ruler who thinks himself the beginning and end of time, the entitled father to a fictional African nation that must obey and honour him in all things. This tyrant's rule is about to meet his match through collisions with a Western power structure where all his delusions of grandeur mean nothing, and through the actions of men just clever enough to be able to subvert his reign from within, but not powerful enough to fully overturn the structures that created this leader in the first place.
The book is both immensely hyperbolic and also highly attuned to the way that the hyperbolic often becomes the only way to talk about atrocities at scale—like a public works project meant to provide the ruler with a path to divine elevation, which symbolizes any number of similar real-world vanity projects only brought about through the slaughter and oppression of dissidents. Wizard does this grandiose allegorical work so well that I committed a cardinal sin of “good” reading from other contexts while I was tearing through it: I read this story's grand, sweeping claims about the African world in light of what they suggest about my own context, too.
Yes, Wizard of the Crow is clearly meant to embody the haunting legacy of 20th-century African-continental liberation from Western colonialism into fractured, distorted, and differently oppressive dictatorships. (And I mean literally ‘embody’, too, because a major component of this book's conflict lies in the tension between one man who wishes to be the corporeal whole of his country, and the “voice” of his country's actual body of citizens, which is desperately stumbling towards an uneven and ultimately hobbled democracy.)
Nevertheless, the book's depictions of how tyranny shapes group behaviours and corrals forms of resistance also uncannily echo how many of us in the Western world are currently responding to our billionaires, who also very much enjoy being seen as godheads embarking on ridiculous vanity projects at immense and mortal cost to others in our societies. You'll see the connection, too, I'm sure, right from the beginning of the story, where we’re not just given a dictator (because a dictator cannot dictate in a vacuum); we’re also given a society that is relentlessly paying attention to what the dictator is doing, and spending all of its time and energy on the contrivance of theories to explain any setback or variation in their supreme leader’s life.
How is this any different from the way that our pandemic-ridden, climate-change-facing, environmental-refugee-shaken, starkly rich-poor divided society still finds itself writing with intense and intimate speculation on the personal lives of billionaire manipulators in a system that’s crushing us all?
I want to believe that we can commit to dreaming up other, better forms of civilization. I really do. But I also see us—our media, our online discourse—so utterly mired in colonial mindsets, that we would often rather rail at those who exploit us than take the more dramatic actions needed to bring them down. (Including, for starters, not allowing individuals the name-brand fame they currently enjoy across social media.) And if Wizard of the Crow is any indication, even the wins we might achieve against our current oppressors could easily prove to be far lesser victories than they could have been, if only we'd refused the terms of the game from the outset.
(Must Hannah Arendt be right about human behaviour forever?)
CP3. Where we stand now
In the last two sections on the five-year anniversary of Colombia’s peace accord with FARC, I outlined some of the problems facing its initial implementation. Here, we come to the present day. Ongoing threats to Colombia’s peace process include dissident FARC—that is, the people who refused to lay down arms from the start, along with members of FARC who later felt failed by the peace accord (because, yes, ex-FARC have also been assassinated since the accord was signed)—and the ELN, a paramilitary organization that started in 1965 and has also been waging its own brutal war for autonomy in (mostly) rural regions.
(You might have heard some reports about ELN activity inside Bogotá and Medellín, but these are more youthful hijinks than coherent paramilitary operations: “ELN” is sometimes used as a kind of inner-city call-sign for radicalism among teens and young adults wanting to appear tough on the streets.)
And of course, this month the world learned a little about Clan del Golfo, a notorious South American narcotrafficking ring, when Colombian military seized the head of the organization. Less widely broadcast was the Clan’s swift retaliation, in an attack that killed three soldiers—or the telling fact that the big bad cartel boss, Otoniel, had been captured alone, instead of along with a whole local cell. So, we’ll see how long it takes for the power-vacuum to be filled, but locals suspect it will be sooner rather than later. Just because a leader with a 5-million US bounty was taken into custody doesn’t mean that a whole cartel folds overnight.
When it comes to the peace accord’s legacy, though, the point is this: It’s difficult to fulfill obligations to those affected by one civil conflict while other civil conflicts are still in full swing.
And yet, the biggest issue for the peace process is almost heartbreakingly obvious, because shows up on every mainstream Colombian media source I’ve seen talking about this theme, across the political spectrum, during this five-year anniversary season.
Yes, one issue is the slow work of the JEP in providing victims with official acknowledgment of the crimes against them, along with full public confessions by the perpetrators of said crimes. However, the truly pressing problem with Colombia’s peace is the country's ongoing failure to fulfill the accord’s economic obligations to rural communities. These PDETs, Programas de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial (region-specific development programs), are supposed to provide direct socioeconomic uplift to the most marginalized, impoverished, and directly conflict-affected regions of Colombia—and, in the process, to cut off the narcotrafficking trade network used by guerrilla and paramilitary organizations to fund their campaigns.
Instead, President Juan Manuel Santos’s Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning peace deal so thoroughly enraged many Colombians, who felt that it was not just giving FARC a “pass” but also helping them to line their pockets by legal means, that many strongly resisted the delivery of state funds to regions they considered to be more or less complicit in the violence. Then, in 2018, an urban majority voted into office a more conservative president, Iván Duque, who has taken more of a military-first approach to peace-keeping, and whose government has both scaled back the implementation of restorative initiatives, and also directly undermined the accord’s path to peace by limiting Indigenous self-governance and related rural-environmental protections in some particularly critical parts of the country.
Duque’s under some fascinating pressures, though, which a lot of people in the West also don't quite realize. He’s not actually the strongman Álvaro-Uribe-clone that his supporters want him to be (as we saw earlier this year, when he tried to appease everyone during an attempt at tax reform that blew into a month of intense protests and internal chaos), but he’s also definitely not the liberal-leaning politician that this peace calls for. Throw in a bit of US ambassadorial meddling, through recent foreign pressures on Colombia to keep a “strong” border between itself and Venezuela (a mixed rural region with significant dissident-FARC and ELN activity), and the political capital required to fully invest in the nation’s long road to peace is not easily maintained.
Another part of the problem made itself manifest this month, too, when armed campesinos drove the military out of a small town in the highly FARC-influenced department of Nariño, when soldiers were trying to remove a body and take two people into custody. For many urban Colombians, this is a perfect example of supposed campesino complicity in guerrilla warfare, but the truth is messier. Often, everyday campesinos are stuck between local armed forces, who threaten civilian lives to pressure civilians to drive out the military, and a military that maintains an inconsistent presence while insisting that they’re there to provide security. Absent a reliable fount of state support, it often feels far more sensible to go along with the radicalized people who’ve taken up arms in your town, the people you have to live with on a day-to-day basis, than to ally oneself with state forces that may not show up to help at all.
Suffice it to say, then, the peace in Colombia is precarious. If there’s any light at the end of the tunnel here, it’s that this peace is still a wanted peace, across all demographics, and that the terms outlined in the accord are still mostly seen as reasonable steps toward a better future. Yes, local five-year anniversary analysis of the peace deal condemns all the failings that I’ve mentioned above, but it still resoundingly attributes these failings to one key and highly actionable source: the fact that the state needs to commit more fully and comprehensively to implementing the agricultural and victim-forward facets of the 2016 peace accord.
The hurt remains. The profound distrust remains.
But underneath it all, the Colombian people know what needs to happen.
What they’re looking for now—what they’re fighting for, often on city streets and definitely in poorer rural regions—is enough consensus between differently hurting groups to get it done.
M3. Eric Geusz's spaceships from the everyday
This has been a pretty heavy newsletter, so here’s a fun little set of drawings by Eric Geusz, who designs spaceships from the shapes suggested to him by everyday objects—a can opener, a sriracha bottle, a fidget spinner, and so forth. Here's his shampoo-bottle spaceship:
And here's his instagram, @spacegooose (three 'o's!), where you can find a whole whack more of these delightful concept drawings, along with ways to support his work.
This section is a neat little meditative counterpoint to M2, in which I noted how much complexity lies behind seemingly simple everyday creations, like the humble pound cake. For Geusz, the staggering complexity of civilization is something that goes forward, too, from tools we take for granted all around us here and now.
Do we maybe already have everything we need to imagine better futures? And to enact them? Just as most Colombians can readily point to the mechanisms for change necessary for a better peace, so too can the whole world, from its wide range of armchairs for online philosophizing, probably easily articulate at least the broad strokes of what needs to be done with the resources we already have on hand.
It’s just that leap from hope to action we’re still missing.
Swiftly may it yet come.
EF3. The Matrix Reloaded
Rounding out my month of rewatches is The Matrix Reloaded (2003)—or rather, the whole trilogy, in anticipation for the fourth, but we’ll stick to the second film here.
The last time I watched The Matrix series, the Wachowskis hadn’t yet come out to the world as trans. The core thematic tension in their universe—life in an orderly and unjust system, versus life embracing human capacities for growth—obviously resonates on a different wavelength with the sisters’ confirmation that these scripts were written with transgender meanings in mind.
It’s not surprising, though, that before the sisters came out as such, men especially had taken The Matrix’s red-pill speech to refer to the need to refuse a different “unjust system”: the rising rhetoric of feminism and other social justice movements, that is, which many viewed as to blame for their lack of exceptionalism.
It’s not surprising that The Matrix series can be and has been read in so many contradictory ways, though. I know I called Squid Game a Rorschach test more than pointed social commentary—and I’d absolutely say that the same is true for the The Matrix series. It's an elegantly written staging ground upon which viewers can play out their own ideas of systemic order and resistance using the same, core script.
Take the following lines from The Matrix Reloaded, just as The Oracle offers Neo candy:
Neo: D’you already know if I’m going to take it?
The Oracle: Wouldn’t be much of an Oracle if I didn’t.
Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?
The Oracle: Because you didn’t come here to make the choice, you’ve already made it. You’re here to try to understand why you made it. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.
Neo: Why are you here?
The Oracle: Same reason. I love candy.
Neo: But why help us?
The Oracle: We’re all here to do what we’re all here to do. I’m interested in one thing, Neo, the future. And believe me, I know – the only way to get there is together.
At first glance, these lines seem to be brimming with meaning, but they are also so well polished that no specific meaning trounces the rest. What is the exact relationship being articulated here, between deterministic functionalism and any one person's conscious choice to try to understand and move toward a future together?
As noted in EF1, A Serious Man does similar work, in offering up stories that can be used as ciphers to help us wrestle with the unknowns in our lives. And in EF2’s My Dinner with Andre, I noted that the only resolution to our messiest dilemmas is sometimes the act of sharing contradictory stories itself: the pleasure, that is, of realizing that we’re not the only ones bemused by the lack of full answers in any of the core narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, the civilizations to which we belong, and where one ends and the other begins.
The Matrix Reloaded goes one further, though: It uses the most polished version of the idea that “life is what happens while we’re figuring it out,” and actually takes us to a resolution. Not just an end of the meal. Not just the act of running out of rabbis to visit. But an actual end, which has been rushing towards us the whole time.
For all that our mental wrestling matches so often consume us, there will still come a moment when our bodies enact the choices that we’ve already unconsciously made, based on a wealth of pre-existing wisdom and experience that we can hardly put to words even when pressed. The moment arrives.
Life still happens, even to the best of us.
And as for all the rest of it? All our restless ruminating on intentionality and choice and outcome before the moment shows up anyway?
In the most excellent words of Avasarala from The Expanse, all the rest is us just... “whistling in the dark,” running down our nerves and our idle time before we get to wherever the heck it is we’re going next, and have to learn how to “whistle” in some new set of personal and societal conundrums there, too.
PF3. Giving up on false extremes
“ his entire human half was crammed with dreams, with noble, courtly, and vain fantasies; that he wanted to accomplish reckless feats and fight for justice with the strength of his own arms, raze to the ground the densest forests with his vehemence, run to the ends of the earth, discover and conquer new lands, and create there the works of a fertile civilization. All of this, in a way that was obscure even to himself, he wanted to perform before the eyes of Teresa De Simone: to do it for her, to dedicate it to her. Finally, he told me, he realized the vanity of his dreams in the very act of dreaming them, and this was the content of the song of the previous evening, a song that he had learned long ago, during his adolescence in Colophon, and which he had never understood and never sung until now.”
—from Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris,” a short story in which a centaur serves as a fictional cipher for the conflicted heart, mind, and persisting body of a person who lived through Holocaust (like Levi himself, who survived Auschwitz), and went on to write about related themes for decades.
In PF1, I imagined not writing again, and giving up on the notion (just as bad as with academia) that writing could ever be a pathway to meaningful action for me. In PF2, I imagined just shutting my darned trap and listening, contributing more through everyday presence than through the performance of knowledge. And now, at the end of a very longwinded newsletter in which I have clearly neither stopped writing nor learned to shut up, I come to grips with the same sentiment felt by the centaur in Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris” (see: the bolded section above): the dream is clearly foolish, and yet the song of the dream goes on.
So it often goes for us as individuals, when we don’t fit neatly into any paradigm of action that allows us to forget our capacity to make better and worse choices, and simply to engage in the world. If I had a clearer outlet or sense of community and structure right now, I probably wouldn't be agonizing over any of this, or be furious with myself for having so many abilities that seem wasteful and frivolous precisely because I can't seem to put them to work. The gift of the agony, though, is that it allows me to feel the same sense of disconnect that plenty of incredibly talented human beings, all the world over, have to endure whether it's from displacement or downsizing pressures: facets of our present "civilization," that is, which require urgent repair.
Civilization as a whole is no different, though: when it's working well, when we all have a clear role to play in it, and when that clear role gives us a strong enough sense of purpose, we hardly need think about what it means to live in such a society. It's simply the water in which we swim, something we carry forward without fully realizing what we’re doing, as we do when we bake the simplest of foods with ancient stories behind every single ingredient. But when civilization does not work well, when there are millions of moving parts who no longer understand (or never understood) how best to fit in... that's where the problem emerges.
And so, the tedious mental work I'm doing now, in trying to bargain myself into a better inner peace around the seeming uselessness of many skills at this juncture is... not actually so different from the work of the "villain" in this newsletter, the Steven Pinker book (A3) that irks me in its conflation of authorial beliefs and pure reason. The scale is different, granted! Pinker is trying to narrate a story of civilization in which he stands triumphantly front and centre in an urgent battle to uphold true and correct ideas against a swarming mass of irrational "street"-speaking dullards. I'm simply trying to vanquish a body of perceived irrationalism within me, to cut out whatever inner folly is keeping me from being better able to support my idealized version of civilization well.
In both cases, though, we're signs of something much bigger than ourselves: the lie of "civilization" that may well contain multitudes, but doesn't actually speak for (or from) the vast majority of them well.
Suffice it to say, despite the simplistic bastardization of Hegel's original commentary (M1), the "peoples"/Völker of the Earth are filled with histories that we all long to see better integrated in our sense of ideal civilization going forward. It's not at all that we forget ourselves and our pasts—how can we, when they invariably drive decision-making processes that we'll often spend our whole lifetimes trying to catch up to, and understand?
It's that we can barely hear ourselves over the din of how much there is to learn, and to use well, from all our collective and internal stories. The danger, then—for me, as for Pinker—is that, when faced with such a cacophonous multitude, it's easy to want to reduce all these ideas, and histories, and options to false binaries of action. And yet, action is required; the moment of choice will arrive whether or not we want it to.
The question is: Will we have the "right" story in us, when it does?
Be excellent to each other, lovelies. Thanks again for reading, if you did, and see you (with a hopefully lighter newsletter) on December 1.