Mr. Smith Goes to Christendom
A reader with a Saved-by-Pocahontas style name of John Smith asks the following about the Morlockian reviewer discussed here:
How much of your disagreement with readers such as this do you think could be traced back to those readers not being aware of or lacking understanding of Chesterton, Lewis, and the intellectual tradition those authors represent, especially considering the influence Chesterton and Lewis seem to have on your writing?
Do you think this reader would even agree that western civilization is Christian civilization?
Many people today I’ve met believe that religion is and has been a parasite and that western civilization developed out of secular institutions. Do you think a reader with such difference in axioms could understand your writing without the odd conclusions that you highlighted in your post?
Good question: I simply do not know.
You are asking me to speculate about the thought processes of barbaric and illiterate men who have been trained in schools to think of themselves as being not merely literate, but enlightened.
It is a question I have often pondered, because the thought processes are so bizarrely alien to my own.
The postmodern man emotes rather than uses logic; he ignores the connotations of words, assumes your are speaking dishonestly and elliptically in order to manipulate him, and answers you dishonestly and elliptically in turn, making no attempt to answer your argument, only to change your emotions by rhetoric.
The postmodern man sees all human relationships as power struggles between weak and strong, with the strong always being in the wrong, and all civilized institutions as being instruments of oppression meant to be used dishonestly and deceptively by the strong to oppress the weak.
The Christian sees right and wrong as reality, and believes in justice, which is to judge a man who is wrong as wrong, or who is right as right, regardless of his person.
The postmodern sees only who and whom as reality, and believes in partisanship, which is to say, to judge a man by whether he is on your side. Whoever is with you is right, regardless of right and wrong, and whoever is against you is wrong, regardless of right and wrong.
This requires them to regard all reasoning and evidence as Marx regarded the conclusions of the science of economics, namely, as the corrupt and partisan propaganda, meant to deceive, offered only out of self interest.
The possibility or justice or reason or compromise is dismisses as unthinkable from the very outset.
However, in order to adhere to this partisanship-over-reason mindset, the postmodern is required to obliterate other sources of truth and objectivity, lest anything disturb the false narrative his partisanship demands he, as a moral imperative, use to deceive himself and the world.
The first source eliminated is revelation: postmoderns are all skeptics, freethinkers, atheists.
The second source is reason and logic: postmoderns, like Nazi, believe each different race or social class differs so fundamentally that no understanding obtains between them. You cannot write a story starring a black or a homosexual character, for example.
The third source is history: all years are Year One of the Revolution, and whatever has gone before is not merely misleading, it is an evolutionary shed shell of the egg of falsehood that led to the modern glorious truth.
The fourth source is beauty: the postmodern promotes modern art on the theory that ugliness can be made beautiful by fiat.
The final source is love: the postmodern hates the family as the devils in hell hate the light of heaven. Between promoting sexual perversion, no fault divorce, and man-hating feminism, the welfare state or the nanny state has replaced mother and father.
Now, no one in reality can be a consistent postmodern in all his thought, or he would be utterly unable to reason in any regard, and would be more helpless than a newborn, and die.
He has to trust some institutions and make some real decisions using logic and reason, see some beauty, and so on.
In debate, the postmodern has one single, sole, solitary and lonely weapon in argument: ad hominem. He never can answer any questions, or provides any evidence, or offers any chain of reasoning, and never intends to. What he does is make a statement taken on authority of some sort, and if you argue the point, he undermines your authority to make the statement by accusing your motives of being untoward, unhealthy, nasty, vile, selfish, bad or racist.
Any attempt to return the conversation to the topic is met with another accusation, usually more strident.
Attempts to introduce facts, history, or proper debate procedure (such as a request to define terms or proffer sources of evidence) is met is accusation.
If you accuse him, he never defends himself. He only accuses you back, and more stridently.
The purpose of this effort is to render reasoning vain.
It can be seen from their use and overuse of this sole and single weapon, and their whole reliance on it, that the only way they get anything practical done at all, or reach any conclusions, or decide what beliefs to adopt and what to reject, is by hypocrisy. Their standard is to have no standard.
This applies to art as well as reasoning. No book is judged on whether it is good or bad, merely on whether it favors their cause or opposes. Whatever favors is good in all ways, regardless of how bad it is, and whatever opposes is bad in all ways, regardless of how good it is.
So I suppose the real answer is that it depends on how far down the path of postmodernism the mind of the reviewer has degraded.
The first step away from proper artistic judgment is merely to equate sales with quality. It is a cynical pose, and obviously not the case: sometimes dreck sells like crazy, and genius languishes.
The second step is the ideological step, which equates the books usefulness to social engineering projects, that is, its propaganda value to the Party, as the standard.
The third is a pure subjectivity that denies art has standard: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The final step is ULYSSES by James Joyce, which is a standard of utmost nihilism. Nothing in the universe is beautiful save that thinking makes it so.
This final nihilism is the state of modern art as seen in museums. It is rubbish, deliberately meant to be as offensive and worthless as possible, presented as a sneering defiance and blasphemy against God and Man. Science fiction, born in the pulps, was long overlooked by the Morlocks, and only since the New Wave of the 1960s has the rot started here.
At a guess, I would say the reviewer is nowhere near the final stage of the brain cancer of postmodernism. He actually tried to write a review, but he could not grasp the ideas that men and women are complementary, not locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival or a Hegelian struggle between master and slave.
I think he is hovering somewhere around the second step.
He cannot grasp the idea that Christians think, and so any portrayal in my book of a complex or nuanced theological reality, such as the idea that the pagan gods could be as real as the devil, and permitted by God to bedevil rebellious mankind, the reviewer automatically rejects as too subtle for simpleminded Christians, who, by definition, are bigots, oppressors, sexists, and pure evil.
He solution to explain away my skill at writing is to say that I am making arbitrary decisions about the scenery, props, and characters based on auctorial fiat. That explanation fits the Party Line, and therefore his mind is soothed as if the draft of an soporific elixir poppies and nepenthe to see reality so. The explanation that I am basing all my decisions on traditional sources and Catholic metaphysics, not to mention pure awesomesauce and a sense of fun, is too confusing to contemplate. It would be an explanation that is too serious (metaphysics is heavy) and too light (fun is puzzling to Morlocks).
The idea of an immortal race of sadists he sees, not a pure awesome villains as black and dire as Eddoreans of Boskone, but as a partisan proposal about the nature of men and woman, that is, he concludes I think women lack agency rather than concluding I think the family structure was imposed on man by God after Eden, and will be no more in Heaven.
The idea of vampires created by Greek alchemy he sees, not as a pure awesome villain because it means the vampires are deliberately self-inhumanized, not innocent victims of a passing bite. This reviewer sees as a partisan proposal about the nature of the crucifix of Christ, that is, he concludes I think Christ trumps over all but that I am inconsistent in other scenes where other powers operate. He does not conclude that I think the crucifix in the older vampire stories acts like a sacrament not like a sacramental — even though I said exactly that in the text, unambiguously — and that I am simply following the older model to produce a desired artistic effect.
To a degree, he is like a Eunuch reading a lurid romance. The emotions and reactions this work seeks to provoke in the reader are alien to his worldview. Morlocks do not grok awesome.
And so on. He needs to see me in a certain light forces him to view my work in a certain light, despite that if the same story had been written by Neil Gaiman or George RR Martian, this reviewer would make opposite assumptions about the meaning of what he is reading.
He said he tried to put aside his hate of me to give my work a fair trial. I have my own opinion, which I keep to myself. I leave it to the readers to decide if this reviewer was successful in the noble attempt. Successful or no, I thank him for making the attempt. He is the first. No other Christhater even so much as tried.
I cannot answer the question you asked, which deals with (if I understand you) how much education is needed for a proper aesthetic interpretation of a work of art is possible. I simply do not know.
I will answer an easier question instead:
Do I think it possible for an atheist reviewer to put aside his bigotry and read a Christian writer with eyes unclouded by hate? Of course. Christianity is the religion that grows out of pagans growing up. All it takes is a miracle.
And atheist of strong mind and good character could make an effort and comprehend, albeit not sympathize with, Christian art.
Our art is multidimensional: theirs is monotone, simple, black-and-white, Soviet Realism style garbage.
Civilized men can understand the pleasures of barbarians; barbarians cannot understand the pleasures of civilized men.
We can sympathize with them, because we know what darkness and sin is: they cannot sympathize with us, because they love the darkness and hate the light.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
