Why PCniks should not debate serious topics, like Make-Believe
In a previous post, a post that generated an amount of controversy that surprises and disappoints me, I stated that anyone who does not sense that modernity is missing something has no heart for high fantasy.
The statement is not controversial at all: it is practically a tautology. People who feel no need for high fantasy are those for whom fantasy has no glamor. They are content, and need no escape or release form modern life.
Politically Correct types among those who have commented apparently feel free to assume that by the “something” I am talking about, and attacking, whatever it is about the modern world they most treasure, and so so they react as if their ox is being gored. This is foolishness.
If the “something” is a religious thing, only then is the statement about religion: if the “something” is a political institution, only then is the statement about politics. But so far, not one person, not one, has asked me what this “something” was to which I referred.
All that happens is PCniks have used the statement as a Rorschach inkblot to talk about whatever it is they think the statement remind them of. It takes the the folly to the next level, to wax indignant should anyone question whether or not such misreadings were legitimate. (The number of those who waxed indignant in this doubly foolish way, so far, is two.)
Political Correction freaks arrogate to themselves the right to correct anyone, on any topic, because they are possessed of the secret knowledge of all men’s wicked motives, and so they can ascribe any motive they wish (provided it is a despicable motive) to anyone they wish, and wax indignant. Everything is actually about politics! Everything is actually about religion! Everything is actually about them! — whereas actually everything is about the indignation. The indignation services their lurid internal psychological drama without any real-world referent.
PC-niks are men who have bent considerable effort to make themselves as shallow as possible, so that all topics have only one dimension, power relations, and all questions of power relations have one answer, rebellion.
The poor fools don’t know what to do when someone is not attacking them, so they pretend to be defending themselves from imaginary enemies even when everyone else is talking about something else, history or art or life.
And yet, nonetheless, the statement that started this firestorm is not about anything controversial. It is not even a “conservative” statement, nor, in itself, a nostalgic one: I know a healthy number of orthodox leftwingy types who object to factory smoke and rat races and superhighways clogged with motionless and honking traffic, not to mention the atom bomb. I even know at least one friend who is a leftwing nutjob in every other opinion but who correctly who thinks modern art stinks and that Nietzsche was a meretricious monster.
They are the types who have a taste for high fantasy. They want an oasis from the Morlockian dreariness of modern life.
The idea that only conservatives feel nostalgia, or that Conservativism is nostalgia, is just one more propaganda-spread bigotry of the Left. Conservatives want human liberty, and liberals want tyranny. (To be fair, they want peace and prosperity, but think tyranny will produce peace and prosperity.) Either party would each crave and pursue their goals whether they found themselves in an era that once enjoyed great liberty and was losing it, or whether in an era that once suffered great tyranny and was emerging from it. Only in an era moving from liberty to tyranny is the Left radical and the Right nostalgic: in an era moving from tyranny to liberty, the roles are reversed, but the political parties are the same.
This mislabeling is done so that conservatives, who at that the time of this writing seek radical changes in society toward liberty, can be called reactionaries and old-fashioned, and so that Left, who seek to conserve the oppression of our present bureaucrat welfare state and expand it, can be called progressive and futuristic. This is done for the same reason unscrupulous merchants package old stuffs and call them new. Novelty allures those enslaved to fashion.
By the way, since it seems that no one is ever going to ask, that something of which I spoke was not politics nor religion. It was beauty. People read high fantasy because they think the modern world has lost its beauty. An elfin forest gleaming golden on the twilight is less useful than a timber stand, and indeed more perilous. A sword is more beautiful than an Uzi even if it is a less efficient killing machine. A king is more surrounded with pomp and glory, gold and scarlet, trumpets and coronets, than a legislative assembly of men in black and gray suits, even if his government is less democratic. A winged dragon is less fearsome than a helicopter gunship armed with napalm: Beowulf could not have killed one. There is something passing brave about a knight on a white charger, plumes from his helmet streaming and pennant from his lance. There is something as romantic about a walled city as about a walled garden.
Anyone with no heart and no taste for cities and knights and kings and fiery dragons and elfin woods has no business reading or writing high fantasy. Let him read sword and sorcery instead.
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.
