John C. Wright's Journal

If man is just a programmed mass of reflexes, again, there is no reason to treat him as a human being, no reason to criticize or judge his actions, no reason to allow him his liberty. There is no freedom of conscience in a behaviorist world, because there is no conscience.

If man’s ideas are just an ideological superstructure or a false consciousness impress on his brain by the material dialectic of means of production, he is a cog. There is no reason to judge or condemn him, no reason not to treat him like a cog in a machine.

If man’s ideas are nothing but the products of sub-conscious drives and buried forces, the intellectuals know his thoughts, and he does not. There is no reason to punish or condemn, no reason to treat him as a free and equal moral agent; he is a patient, a thing, an object.

If man is not better than a beast, no different than a dog, no reason not to breed him like a dog. And inferior breeds like the Homos and Jews can be gassed.  No one objects to killing a dog, or spaying a cat, right?

And those dark-skinned peoples, if man is no different than a dog, there is nothing wrong with aborting all those little black babies, right? Planned Parenthood can help slaughter the Sambo’s pickaninnies. We don’t want them to breed beyond their grazing area. It’s scientific!

(If the Church teaches that all men are created in the image of God and that human life is sacred, we can dismiss that as unscientific. Good thing that superstitious nonsense is behind us, and a brave, new world is before us! I love big brother!)

Do you see the pattern? Not one of these modern, allegedly scientific, nonsensical non-theories calls on a man to do anything high or noble or moral or romantic or just or temperate or manly or good.

None of them demands the Faithful to pray to Mecca five times a day and give to charity: that would require self-discipline.

None of them swears by his life and his love for it never to never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for him. That would require an independence of spirit, a sense of pride.

None of them demands respect for the ashes of one’s fathers or the temples of one’s gods: that would require selflessness and love.

None of them says a man must die with a weapon in fist to see the joyful feasting of Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain. That would require courage.

All of them excuse and encourage tyranny and contempt for one’s fellow human beings, who are not human beings after all, but madmen or hairless apes, breeding stock or machines.

These moderns, in the grand scale of things, are less morally developed than Objectivists and Jihadists, Paynims and Pagans.

Here is a typical utterance, uttered by one Axiem. If he is actually a dog with a keyboard, my argument fails of its point. 

“In terms of sheer processing capability, it would seem as though humans have more than dogs. My computer now has more processing capability than the first calculators, and it can handle more data types (high-precision floats and the like). Fundamentally, there’s not really anything different, just the power.”

Axiem’s claim is that the man’s brain has more processing power than a dog’s brain. This may be true, but his claim is more astonishing than that: his claim is that there is no difference “fundamental” to human thinking: a difference of degree, so to speak, not a difference of kind.

Suppose I mentioned that I am taller than my son. I can reach the cookie jar atop the refrigerator, and he cannot, no matter what he does. Height-wise, I differ only in degree (I am taller). But in terms of cookie-eating, I differ in nature (I have them, and he does not). The first difference is a matter of degree. If his height were doubled, he would have height equal to mine. The second is a matter of kind. If he had twice zero cookies, he would still have zero cookies. I can simply do something he cannot do; I have something he does not have. 

Dogs do not play music. As far as we can tell, no animals, even close relatives like apes, have any conception of beautiful or ugly music. Birds have bird-calls but not bird-composers. They do not seek it out, they do prefer jazz to pop, opera to symphonies.  That is something (one of countless things) humans do and animals do not. Composing music is a deliberate mental act, an act of the free will, because it is not automatic, not a habit, not a frozen & stereotyped instinctive behavior, like nest-building.

Again, Axiem is not making a rational argument. He is not making an argument at all, rational or irrational. He is expressing a preference. He prefers to think of humans as dogs, or as machines. He emphasizes those things that man has in common with animals, or as machines, and simply pretends that there is no way in which humans are exceptions from animals, or different from inanimate objects.

It is not an argument, it is a pretense, an act of play-pretend. No dog talked him into this belief or this idea: it is an idea unique to humans. Dogs do not debate the similarities and differences of human and animal thought. Dogs don’t talk.

It is beyond pathetic that, in the modern world, it is necessary to remind people during a serious discussion that dogs don’t talk. It is beyond satire, beyond exaggeration, and well into the domain of total psychotic break with reality. As Picasso is to painting, so is modern philosophy to philosophy: just a distorted and disproportionate blur of lines and shapes, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I am not saying Axiem is psychotic. I am saying he has been hypnotized by a meaningless Picasso painting of modern thought, and as staring at it like a wee bird staring at the eyes of a snake.

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“You are claiming, if I understand you correctly, that there is also some fundamental aspect of human thought–free will–that exists that dogs don’t have. The onus of proof is on you to demonstrate that it does exist.”

(He asks for proof! But what will the court of law between his ears accept as allowable evidence? Perhaps the testimony of a witness?)

I call as my first witness Axiem. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so Help you God?

Please answer each and every question honestly. I remind you that you are under oath.

1. Mr. Axiem, could you please tell the jury if you have ever had a mental experience, that is, performed an action or uttered a statement without forethought, such as, for example, exclaiming when you stub your toe, or blurting out a word before you caught yourself, or when you were drunk or distracted, or otherwise not paying attention to what you were saying?

2. Have you ever, for example, played a sport or a musical instrument where the practice of the sport or instrument allowed you to play without concentrating deliberately on the actions of your hands? Have you ever done something “on autopilot” so to speak?

3. Do you acknowledge that you wrote this sentence: “You are claiming, if I understand you correctly, that there is also some fundamental aspect of human thought–free will–that exists that dogs don’t have. The onus of proof is on you to demonstrate that it does exist.” ? You are the author of these words, and no one else? Please tell the jury.

4. When you wrote those words, what was your state of mind?

5. Specifically, did you write them in an automatic fashion, without forethought, without being aware of what your fingers were doing, as a habit, or did you pick and chose and ponder the words you needed to express your thought? Were you or were you not paying attention to what you were saying?

6. Have you ever had a word on the tip of your tongue? Have you ever written a poem, or groped for a way to express, perhaps to a loved one, or perhaps to someone in grief, how to express your emotions of love or sympathy in fitting fashion? Did you pay attention, close attention, to what you were saying at that time?

7. Have you ever been in a philosophical argument? Is this a philosophical argument? Are you pondering the meaning of the words you read, thinking them over, promising to reflect on them, and, in a word, performing a deliberate cognitive act? Are you paying attention?

8. As a man who has been in a philosophical argument, I would like to call you as an expert witness on the state of mind that accompanies such acts. In your expert opinion, is the cognitive act that accompanies your own deliberations and thinking an automatic, thoughtless, ingrained habit, or is it a deliberate act? Are speaking with forethought or without forethought? Are you paying attention or not paying attention?

9. When you deliberate, think, or perform an act of cognition, do you assent to certain conclusions, accepting them, and reject other conclusions, setting them aside? Do you make a judgment of true and false? Do you make a judgment that some things are convincing and some things are unconvincing?

10. What do you call the fundamental aspect of human thought involved in making decisions of this kind, making judgments, assenting to or setting aside conclusions?

11. Is thinking with forethought the same as the aspect of human thought involved in an automatic, thoughtless action?

12. If thinking with forethought is the same as automatic and thoughtless actions, is it exactly the same in every respect, entirely and completely indistinguishable?

13. If it is not indistinguishable, what, please tell the jury, is the distinction?

Closing statement:

I submit to your candid judgment, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this distinction is the faculty of reason, the faculty of free will, and it is precisely the faculty humans have and dogs lack.

I will only respond to any counter-arguments or abstract reasonings written by a dog, and then only if the dog quotes only dog philosophers and writers, not using any abstract ideas borrowed from human philosophers and writers. Thank you.

Your honor, defense rests.

Okay, okay, just kidding. There are absolute no religious themes or symbols in any science fiction story. Not one. But let us review a few other credoes before we close, shall we?

I believe in Michael Valentine Smith, the Man from Mars, and the Old Ones from whom he came. He was chased by the police, taught way cool psychic powers to Jill, was hounded by mobs, and was stoned to death. He shows up in heaven wearing a halo. I believe in cannibalism, and in sexual liberation, and that I am God!

I believe in Klaatu, the space man. He was hounded by the army, shot with bullets, and lay to rest in a jail cell. In the third reel he rose again from the dead, thanks to thank way cool gizmo run by Gort. I believe atomic weapons cannot be used against other planets. Klaatu Barada Nikto!

I believe in Spock. He sacrificed himself to save the Enterprise, placed his soul in Bones McCoy, and saved the ship. In the Third Movie he rose again from the dead, thanks to the Genesis Torpedo. I believe in the Prime Directive, the inter-fertility of all humanoid life, and in the Organian Peace Treaty. Idic!

I believe in Blackie DuQense. Even though he was disembodied as a Pure Intellectual, trapped in a Zone of Force, frozen in a time status, accelerated out of the galaxy at multiple times the speed of light, and rotated into the fourth dimension, he will return with the Capital D to rule the Earth, and fling all the navies of the world into the Great Salt Lake with tractor beams.

I believe in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She gave her life to save us all fighting an evil goddess. When the show switched to WB, Willow the Witch raised her from the dead. I believe in the singing episode, that Angel will get a soul, and in female empowerment.

I believe in Superman, strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond mortal men. He died fighting Apocalypse. Funny, but Clark Kent has been missing since then. I wonder where he is? Supes shall return again from the dead in a funky blue costume.

I believe in Fu Manchu. He survived the explosion of his secret base hidden in a volcano, when the broadcast power mechanism overloaded. The world shall hear from him again.

Thats enough. You can fill in the rest yourselves. There are people who die and return in glory in science fiction and fantasy literature than there ever were in the Bible.

It is common longing on all human hearts, and so cannot be absent either from the greatest literature or the humblest. Life is everlasting, and Death is the last enemy. Those with hope know it to be true, and those without hope wish it were true.

The limitation of empiricism is that it only speaks to empirical things. Empiricism is silent on the matter of whether human consciousness is real, morality is real, geometry is real, economics is real, truth is real, beauty is real, or even whether the rules of logic are real. These are all things that cannot be proved, or even addressed, by the empirical method.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.” Fine. But the property ‘self-evidence’ is a logical category, and has no mass, and so cannot be measured by a balance scale, and no length, and so cannot be measured by a yardstick, and no duration, and so cannot be timed with a stopwatch. The Rights of Man are likewise immune to yardstick, scale, and stopwatch. I can weigh and measure Peter and Paul, and see whether their height and weight are equal. But how can I tell whether their rights and rank and dignity are equal? If Peter is a Peer, he can only be tried by Parliament. If Paul is a slave, he has no right to a jury trial, and no right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. Measure that for me with a yardstick, Empiricists! Or don’t you believe in the equality of Man? Or are these things neatly separated in your mind, one airtight compartment from another, with no bothersome logic communicating between them?

Empiricism is also silent on whether or not the empirical method is real.  The empirical method is something that assumes logic, assumes the sense are accurate, assumes the noumenal reality behind the phenomena is consistent, universal, and unchanging. It assumes that there are laws of Nature and that the laws of Nature do not vary from place to place or time to time. It assumes the categories of cause and effect, essence and accident. It assumes a moral standard of accuracy in reporting and honesty in thinking. And so on. One cannot use the empirical method to prove any of the apriori axioms, definitions or common notions on which the empirical sciences are founded any more than you can rest your basement atop your attic.

A fortiori, the empirical method is silent on supernatural reality of any kind. God is a Spirit. You cannot see God with your eye any more than you can weigh Ash Wednesday in the right pan of the balance and Easter Sunday in the left, to see which one weighs more. “Wednesday” refers to a duration of time. It does not have weight.

The reader asks:

So if we cannot verify the spiritual world within the physical, how can we verify it? What measurement should we then use to ascertain the rationality of our assumptions and conclusions?

Well, we cannot verify even the material world by means of empiricism. Empiricism assumes that the material world is objective and rational, governed by cause and effect, and logically self-consistent; it does not prove these things. Why are you asking me to build a tower to heaven without bricks or lumber when I cannot even build a toolshed, if you do not give me the bricks or lumber needed to do the work?

The question about measuring rationality had me stumped. Logic is something we use when we think logically, and something we ignore when we think in a sloppy fashion. It is not something open to doubt, and it is not something doubtful open to proof.

How do you demonstrate to a skeptic that reasoning is useful, either by demonstration or by not demonstrating it? Does not demonstration require and presuppose reason? Will the skeptic be convinced by an illogical string of words, or perhaps a series of noises without meaning, such a trumpet blasts or drumrolls? Any objection that can be answered with a loud noise is not a logical objection, and need not be a concern of philosophers.

My answer for the other part of the question was this:

You yourself are a spirit. How is it that you are thinking and talking? How is it that you are deciding to write some words and not other words?

For that matter, what is a word? The word is not the idea to which the word points: “2” and “Two” and “ii” all point to the same concept, but they are not that concept, because there are many symbols that mean two, but there is only one concept.

When you ask what measurement we use to ascertain the rationality of our assumptions, I can only point to the tools you already use in your daily life, every hour: reason, experience, conscience.

His startling reply was this:

I am thinking and talking because I am a machine that through its course of operation moves certain appendages and acquires a result.

Yes, you can only prove the scientific method through the scientific method. I’ve run through the argument before. I would simply note that the scientific method has also produced computers in the long run, which is sufficient enough for me to take the basic axiom (the universe is mechanistic and repeatable) on faith.

I point out the illogic involved in using the scientific method to prove the scientific method, but he does not or cannot reply.

A little later he says:

You are assuming that curiosity has a final cause. You are assuming my curiosity has any will behind it. Therefore, my suggestion that I have no such will seems to be a logical contradiction, because of the earlier assumption. How do you know I’m not a Chinese room?

For those of you who don’t catch the reference:

The Chinese Room argument is a thought experiment and associated arguments designed by John Searle (Searle 1980) to show that a symbol processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a “mind”.

Searle asks his audience to imagine that many years from now, people have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. The computer takes Chinese characters as input and, following a program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs this task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing test. In other words, it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a human Chinese speaker. …. The conclusion that proponents of artificial intelligence would like to draw is that the computer understands Chinese, just as the person does.

Now, Searle asks the audience to suppose that he is in a room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a book containing an English version of the computer program, and processes the Chinese characters according to the instructions in the book. Searle notes that he does not, of course, understand a word of Chinese. He simply manipulates what to him are meaningless squiggles, using the book and whatever other equipment is provided in the room, such as paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. After manipulating the symbols, Searle will produce the answer in Chinese. Since the computer passed the Turing test, so does Searle running its program by hand: “Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don’t speak a word of Chinese,” Searle writes.

Searle argues that his lack of understanding goes to show that computers do not understand Chinese either, because they are in the same situation as he is. They are mindless manipulators of symbols, just as he is. They don’t understand what they’re “saying”, just as he doesn’t. Since they do not have conscious mental states like “understanding”, they can not properly be said to have minds.

Myself, I cannot read about the Chinese Room argument without the bitterest laughter. Turing, and others of his ilk, have simply set themselves an impossible task, a stupid task. They are looking for the quarter under the streetlamp, and not in the alley where they dropped it. They are looking for empirical, material, visible evidence of a mental and spiritual and psychological reality.

Only a radical solipsist would even regard the question as pressing. If the computer is self-aware, then it is aware of itself and is, indeed, aware of its self-awareness. If the computer cannot demonstrate its self-awareness through the process of passing an empirical test, that is a fault (and a stupid fault) of the test.

The test to be used in not the Turing test but the McNaughten Test. In law, if a defendant pleads insanity, it must be shown, for him to be shown leniency or these grounds, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or did not know it was wrong. Finding out whether Skynet or Colossus is capable of moral reasoning is much more important than finding out whether it is intelligent.

The people who love and are loved by the intelligent computer will know it has a soul the same way you know the writer of a love-letter has a soul: not my measure the physical properties of the ink-shapes on the perfumed page, but by reading the words, knowing their meaning, and understanding them by means of the faculty called understanding.

What? Are you saying intelligent computers cannot fall in love? I know people like that too. Too bad for them. If lovelessness is the problem faced by an A.I., proving itself to be self-aware to a fool (like Turing, who deliberately closes his eyes not all non-empirical evidence) will be the least of Robby the Robot’s problems.

It is this faculty, the understanding, that meat machines and radical empiricist pretend does not exist, even thought they use their understanding in the act of arguing the point. A solipsist understands other people exist when he talks to other people, telling them that they do not exist, and when he reads books by other solipsists, telling him they do not exist. The only answer to a solipsist is, “To whom are you talking?”

All a radical materialist is, is a solipsist who takes the next step down the road of folly, and becomes convinced that neither you nor he actually exist. The only answer to a radical materialist is, “From whence come the words issuing out of your mouth?”

But enough about the Chinese room. Back to my conversation with the poor soul suffering the delusion that he is a machine.

My reply was too long to fit in a comments thread. I post it here instead.

“That is, you are assuming that curiosity has a final cause.”

That is not an assumption: it is a deduction. Curiosity is directed toward the end or goal of satisfying curiosity. A falling stone or spinning cog in a clockwork does not have an end a goal, because it is not self-aware. Describing the parabola of a falling stone tells us  nothing about the goal-directed behavior of a stone, precisely because there is nothing to tell. Stones have no goal-directed behavior. They are not alive. They do not think, act, decide.

So, to put it more clearly: (1) all physical properties whatsoever can be reduced to, or expressed in terms of length, mass, duration, current, temperature, luminous intensity, moles of substance. (2) Curiosity cannot be expressed in terms of, or reduced to, any of these. (3) therefore curiosity is not a physical property.

“You are assuming my curiosity has any will behind it.”

That is not an assumption I am making. You can be curious against your will, depending on how much self-control you exercise over your curiosity. But curiosity is a motive, and it moves toward an end goal or final cause, because that is the definition of motive. All passions, whatever else they are, are motives. Hunger is a motive toward food, thirst toward drink, fear toward avoiding what one fears, hate toward combat with what one hates, love toward companionship, curiosity toward knowledge.  Motives are mental realities. Inanimate objects are moved by outside forces, not by internal motives. They do not do things because they want to. We do.

Wanting something logically implies the satisfaction of that want to be its final cause. The definition of “final cause” is that it is the causes that motivates the action toward the end desired.

“How do you know I’m not a Chinese room?”

If the man who set up the Chinese room had enough foresight to anticipate all my questions and all your answers, that he is the one I am addressing. If you are a Chinese Room, I am not talking to you, because you do not exist.

When I get a love letter from my wife, I don’t actually think the piece of paper is talking to me. When I type a message into a computer, and get back a response, even a complex response, I am reading the words the programmer typed it, and set the machine to show to me under certain conditions. But no matter how complicated the Chinese room, or the computer game, or the letter, there is always someone behind it, some mind who originally wrote the words.

But this is all to one side. I am not asking you to convince me you exist. I am asking you to stop pretending that you are not convinced you exist.

The question is, can you seriously, to yourself, without giggling, convince yourself you are a Chinese room?

If you do, whom are you convincing?

Who is being convinced?

What is the process of conviction? How is it done? By logic, or by something else?

How can you believe in that the scientific method is a valid means to convince a reasonable mind to decide your statements about the physical world are accurate, if, at the same time, you also believe that there is no such thing as accuracy, as statements, as decisions, as minds, as validity, as methods, and as belief?

For accuracy is not a physical property: it refers to a relation between mental symbols and the objects those symbols represent. We call correct representation accurate and incorrect or unliteral representation inaccurate. We call the symbols by which the mind contemplates, when reduced to subject-predicate form, statements. We call deliberate actions of the mind decisions, and, because reasoning is deliberate, we call the process of thinking and talking deliberately about statements the process of deliberation. The mind we call that internal reality which is aware of external reality through perception and reflection, and also self-aware of internal reality through introspection or thought.  Validity is the condition when statements fulfill a priori rules of logic, for we know axiomatically that reality is self-consistent. A method is a means selected to achieve an end sought: in philosophy or science methods consist of epistemological methods, that is, a means of verifying verities. A belief is a statement whose final cause is to be valid and verified, that is, it is a thought meant to reflect reality.

None of these mental realities (accuracy, statements, decisions,  minds, validity,  methods, belief) can be reduced to physical reality (length, mass, duration, amperage, temperature, luminosity, substance).

Come now: your comments have passed the absurd and verged into the insane. You have decided to make the attempt to make certain statements to convince me that you (your consciousness) do not exist. But things that do not exist cannot make statements, do not make decisions, do not write words, do not put together arguments.

Here is the reason why you can believe in God with absolute, apodictic certainty: the absence of a belief in God has led you to being unable to believe in anything else. You mind is now a void. You are a machine. You have no soul. You are not alive nor dead, merely a cloud of atoms vibrating and moving with no purpose and no sense.

Those are your two options: being and nothingness. Since you cannot logically choose nothingness, you must chose being.

Machines are irrational. They do not think. They are clockworks, moved by a spring. The gears turn and cogwheels wheel. That is all. There is no thought involved. A machine can be oiled or rusted, broken or fixed, but it cannot be rational or irrational, honest or dishonest. A clock that runs slow is not “lying” about the time. Pocketwatches do not giggle and try to fool their owners out of malice. A sundial is not being honest when it tells the time on a sunny day, and is not dishonest on a cloudy day.

If your axioms lead you to the conclusion that you are a machine rather than a moral agent capable of reading this sentence, thinking about it honestly and rationally, and answering it honestly and rationally, then your axioms are false.

You cannot think you are not thinking when you think you are not thinking. In order to think the thought “I don’t think” you must think.

Dorothy asks the Scarecrow, “How can you talk, if you haven’t got a brain?” The Scarecrow ponders that a moment, and answers, “I don’t know. But it seems to me that people without brains do an awful lot of talking!”

Now, this is a joke in a musical comedy, and we are right to laugh. But now, in real life, you are telling me that you are really a Scarecrow, a Chinese Room, a Machine. When I ask you, “How can you talk, if you haven’t got a brain?” you do not and cannot answer the question.

You are asking me what physical evidence can prove to you that God exists, and yet your standard of evidence is so deranged that you cannot even prove to yourself that you exist.

You are being as totally irrational as it is possible to me: you write direct and manifest self-contradictions, statements which, merely by writing them down and meaning what they say, prove that they themselves are false. “I am a machine” is not a sentence that a machine can deliberately mean to write, because machines do not deliberate meanings and attempt to convey them by writing. 

You might say it is irrational to believe in the existence of God without evidence. From anyone but you, I can answer that question without laughter. You, I cannot answer because I must laugh like Jove himself. Believe in the existence of for God without evidence? You cannot believe in the existence of yourself with evidence, overwhelming evidence.  

Without God, you are a machine, and your life is meaningless. I do not mean you are unhappy, I mean literally, your thoughts and actions and words have no meaning. They are gibberish. Sounds signifying nothing.

There may be atheists who can erect a theory of the world that is both rational and godless. You are not one of them. Your world-system is irrational and godless. Believing in God is the only thing that can save you from believing you are a machine. Those atheists who are rational face a different choice. For you, your choice is between sanity and nonbeing.

Fear not. It is less difficult to believe in God, the necessary being, than it is to believe in one’s own self-nonexistence. If you actually believe in your own self-nonexistence, you already have faith muscular enough to make a mountain jump into the sea.

Believing in the mysteries of our faith is as nothing compared to believing in the mysteries of your faith. Trust me. You have already swallowed a camel. Swallowing bread and wine is nothing compared to that.

If Dan Brown ever revealed that secret, our church would be finished, laughed out of existence! Good thing not a single atheist or liberal regards us as ridiculous now. Whew. Dodged that bullet.

As it is, the only thing Brown managed to spill was our closely-guarded secret that Mary Magdalene was a Space Alien from the star Alpha Drarconis, and was married to robot duplicate of Jesus our savior kept in the Fortress of Solitude (these robots were useful in preserving His secret identity during his years as a vampire hunter on the Lost Plateau of Jurassica), andgave birth to Charles Martel, king of the Merovingia. So the royal families of France are all space lizards. You knew that. And the Knights Templar were involved. They always are.

Ho, ho, just kidding. Kidding! If the Christians had the power that popular fears ascribe to them, I assure you that they would have used this mysterious power to make sure that THE GOLDEN COMPASS totally bombed at the box office, or to topple the Soviet Union, or bring hope and healing to the drunkard, the wretched, the hungry, the lost.

If Christians had this power, there would be miracles. Hardcore atheists would see visions of the Blessed Virgin, and convert. But that cannot happen. So what are you afraid of?

Ben Jeapes

“Consider: would Heinlein’s juvenile SF novels have benefited in the slightest if he had added what we would consider ‘normal’ young adult feelings to his young adult characters? Alternatively, would Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy have benefited if he had written it all as a thrilling adventure for Will and Lyra but minus the sexuality? In both cases, let’s go for ‘no’.”

“The only reason any fiction gets explicit is to turn on the readers; it’s rarely for information purposes.”

He goes on to say that, in his opinion, most YA is explicit enough to be honest but not so explicit in “turn-on” detail to be adult.

I agree with Mr. Jeapes for his analysis. If you want to write mere light escapism, fine, write it. But one needs to deal with certain weightier themes in order to be honest about them, and artists have a duty to be artistically honest to their audience. A young audience is more demanding, and requires more honesty. So the work has to be explicit enough to be honest. Mr. Jeapes draws a line at mere titillation: whatever is so explicit that it becomes prurient crosses over into the adult area, and should be labeled and sold as such. If the youth reads a grown-up book he knows is for grown-ups, at least the author did not deceive him or tempt him.

I might disagree with his conclusion, because there are YA books I think are clearly over that line. I won’t name them for you, because some of them are written by a family friend.

Finally, belatedly, came an answer that I agreed with, both in its analysis and its conclusion. I quote here that answer in full.

Orson Scott Card

It seems to me that if YA writers want to write about adult stuff, they should change category. Nothing stops young readers from following them into the adult shelves. When the YA label is placed on a book, it’s a promise to parents, teachers, and librarians that certain standards are being adhered to. This is not a trivial matter. There is genuine damage to some young readers from being exposed too early to sexual or overly violent material. Other young readers seem to be unharmed. But the writer is in no position to judge the maturity of each reader. That is up to parents, teachers, and librarians – and part of the information they use is the YA label. When you put out a book with “adult” content under a YA label, you’re not a hero of artistic liberty, you’re a liar and a cheat. You want to keep getting the same income by pretending your writing belongs in a category that you have left behind.

The reaction in the comments section was immediate and illogical: Mr. Card is denounced as doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime. He was exposed to the Two Minute Hate.

With particular favor I note Mr. Card’s denunciation of the “hero of artistic liberty.” Some of the answers seemed to have a little too much of that self-congratulation which comes from iconoclasts for my comfort.

To the iconoclasts, every moral rule is merely an unfair taboo, something to be broken merely for the pleasure of breaking. One would think the word “education” meant little else aside from weaning children away from traditional morals rules.

Is YA too explicit? My reaction is two fold. On the one hand, I agree with Dave Barry. If I found my child reading the Marquis de Sade, I would think “Thank God! He’s reading!” On the other hand, I would be taken aback if I heard people hotly defending that particular choice in reading matter, or if they excused the advertiser who sold that book to a child, or a librarian who lent it. If the writer wrote “adult-only” material, and then agreed or urged it to be read by children, he is being irresponsible. To defend or excuse such a writer, or to pretend it is not a problem, or to pretend no child ever gets hurt by such things, is likewise irresponsible.

You see, my experience is different, no doubt, from most of these answerers. I have both been burned, and accidentally burned others. I am chary of playing with fire.

Certain books I read when I was a child perverted my ideas about sex and marriage away from the norm and into a libertarian, libertine, abnormal mold. I am not placing the blame on the books rather than on myself — I mean, I was the one who read them. No one forced me to absorb those ideas.

No one forced me, but they certainly helped me a along, tempted, lured, encouraged, applauded. Some of these books used sophistry and one-sided propaganda techniques that even a bright teen (such as I was) had not the experience to detect and disarm. And these were ideas that lodged in my brain and formed (or malformed) my personality; because that is what happens when an impressionable youth is impressed with an idea. For good or ill, the stamp stays with him for years.

I know a man who tells me that he vowed as a youth always to be a perfect gentleman to the ladies, because he wanted to follow the example of John Carter swordsman-adventurer of planet Barsoom. Can anyone tell me, with the straight face, that this youth would have turned out the same way if he had vowed to follow the example of, say, Tarl Cabot swordsman-adventurer of planet Gor?

(I am not claiming any of these books are YA; I merely challenge the argument that all books are kid-safe, or that kids have such wariness or innate goodness that no adult supervision is required. If you grant me that adult supervision is required, it become a matter of honesty in labeling if you tell a parent that your book is appropriate for minors. If the YA label does not mean it is appropriate for minors, then it has no meaning; which is another type of dishonesty.)

I wrote a book starring teenagers (actually, twenty-one to twenty-four year olds who are told they are teenagers) which many reviewers thought was supposed to be a young adult book. I did not think that, I was shocked anyone would think that, and would have objected rather strongly to marketing the book as such. One of the main bad guys is a sexual pervert, and the perversion is rather strongly implied, if not on stage. I don’t know if the scenes are prurient, but they are tasteless, and not something an impressionable kid should read. There is also an amount of gory violence in my books, as I do not flinch at describing wounds and bloodshed.

Well, the first review I ever read of my book was from a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. It embarressed me, and rightly so. My books were not kid-friendly and not meant to be.

If other authors have different experiences, they are right in coming to different conclusions. I cannot say that they are wrong to be nonchalant about the issue; I can only say that my evidence tells a different story.

My experience, both as someone who has been exposed by material too adult (at the time) for me, and who has written material I would not necessarily want kids to see, is that the YA label ought to be treated with some respect. As Mr. Card says, it is like a promise made to readers and librarians that the material inside is not going toshock or mislead young minds.

To those of you who want to argue that it is the job of the parents, and only of the parents, to monitor the material their children view and read, allow me to say: The comment is only valid (and not a self-serving excuse) when made by those who do not contribute to the lowering of cultural standards.

I grant you it is the job of the parents to raise and school their children: but why do you feel the need to make our job harder, rather than easier? You are polluters arguing that getting a gas mask is the responsibility of every breather.