A digression on the word subversive.
I overheard this quote as part of a conversation on another journal. A leftist was criticizing the Republicans for derailing the sovietization of the medical industry, and the words he used were: "The GOP has been as unreasonable and subversive of the spirit of the process as any dictator you should name, and the Democrats should stop pretending they have a good faith partner in government."
I will not discuss the pith of the comment, which is mere lunacy and hyperbole. Instead I will express pleasure that he used a word correctly rather than politically correctly. He intends its indeed as a criticism to use the word "subversive" in reference to the Dumbo Elephant Party.
Well! Maybe it is just me, but this is the first time I have ever heard a Homo semisapiens statidolaterus (to use the Linnaeus classification for the farleftwing subspecies of our race) use the word "subversive" in any but a complimentary way.
I remember sitting on a panel at a science fiction convention, and they were all complimenting some book (I think it was Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND) for being "subversive" and wondering if, for example, Cory Doctorow’s LITTLE BROTHER would be as "subversive"–all in tones of glowing admiration.
I pointed out (gently and politely, but firmly) that whether or not being a subversive was laudable or not depended on (1) what the current social order supported, good or evil, and (2) what institution in the current social order, a good one or an evil one, one was trying to subvert, and (3) whether the candidate for a new institution would indeed (and not just intention) be better or worse. Being a "revolutionary" in the sense of John Adams and George Washington is not the same thing as being a "revolutionary" in terms of Napoleon and Lenin and Mao and Che and Castro (not to mention "revolutionary" in the sense of Joyce or Picasso).
I was greeting with blank looks. The cosmopolitans of the Left, being so well read and widely traveled (even in a science fiction convention) could imagine no social order but their own, and no social revolution but their own. Ergo I assume they could not picture in their brains the idea that the current social order (which I assume they imagine to be a cross between the Jim Crow south, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, and the Spanish Inquisition of Torquemada) was not universal, and that overthrowing it might not lead to the Better Social Order (which I assume they imagine to be across between some world out of an Ursula K. LeGuin novel, the lyrics to a John Lennon song, the Land of Oz, and the Land of Cockaigne where pastries and cooked chickens fall from the sky.) They could not picture that the Revolution, having dynamited the Cathedrals and Castles, burned the rich and starved the Kulaks, torched the fields and scuttled the fleets, and thrown out the Czar, Batista and W Bush, might leave nothing but cratered rubble in its wake.
The sexual revolution (to use an example at random), having subverted the institutions, habits, and manners which once defended young women from sexual predation and defended children from being abandoned, has created, not new institutions to replace what was lost, but instead created an industry in sexual harassment lawsuits for the benefit of trial lawyers: The science fiction panel did not know or recall what things had once been like, and could not picture they had ever been better in the past or could ever be worse in the future. It was as if they could not imagine any situation different from the myth of eternal golden revolution that they told themselves about the current situation.
Subversion for the sake of subversion, like revolution for the sake of revolution, is admirable only if you assume a Hegelian (or Marxist) metaphysic that proposes that all change in and of itself is a good thing because it accelerates the culling of the weak and the rise of the superman or the socialist commonwealth, or whatever you take to be the next stage of an ever-improving ever-rising evolution.
Since I have it on good authority from a Time Traveler of my acquaintance that the human race of the year A.D. 802,701 will consist of cannibal troglodytes called Morlocks rather than Nietzschean posthumans; so I have never been a fan of natural selection for its own sake, nor for revolution for its own sake, nor for subversion for its own sake.
I had thought the mainstream of Leftist opinion disagreed: that the current social order was so bad that any subversion of it was good. I am pleasantly surprised to find out I am wrong, and that there is at least one Progressive who uses the word to mean a thing that happens to be bad if what is being subverted is good.
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.
