Eternal Verities and Elitist Myths
This question from the reader mentioned in my last post was so odd, and was based on such an odd assumption, that I wrote this reader privately and asked: where did you get the idea that science fiction presupposes no eternal verities? Are are reader of science fiction yourself, and this is your conclusion, or is this something you overheard someone else saying about the genre?
The answer:
I got the idea that science fiction presupposes no eternal verities by reading Star Wars on Trial (an excellent little book, by the way); David Brin wrote that statement, if I recall correctly.
Ah. David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover were the editors of that delightful little book, and it was one to which yours truly contributed his humble article on religion in STAR WARS.
Mr Brin’s actual statement in that book is “Many campus postmodernists … find anathema the underlying assumption behind most high-quality SF: a bold assertion that there are no “eternal human verities.” Things change. Change can be fascinating. And science fiction is the literature of change.”
This is in the midst of a discussion where Mr Brin is trying to draw a distinction between the way science fiction would handle matters (such as by drawing a blood sample from Superman and learning the secret of his Kryptonian powers to share with the common man) and the respectful awe ancient poets like Homer used in dealing with the demigods and aristocratic heroes which were the subject of their epics.
Mr Brin’s argument (which is too deep to pause here to examine) is that STAR WARS follows the themes and tropes of ancient epic and not the themes and tropes of high-quality science fiction.
Even if one were completely convinced by Mr Brin’s argument about STAR WARS (and I urge my readers to buy the book and read it to find out!) his conclusion does not necessarily hold true for other works of science fiction, or all works.
In the context of the paragraph in which it appears, the phrase ‘eternal human verities’ means confirming the customs of one’s own tribe and city-state as the laws of the universe derived from the gods who fathered and hero-ancestor of the current ruling class. That, at least, is the point the surrounding essay emphasizes.
In other words, I don’t think in that context that phrase means a belief in any objective truth. He is using it sarcastically, putting it in quotes, and his meaning logically must be restricted to cultural mores rather than, say, scientific or mathematical or even philosophical and theological truths.
Mr Brin himself might or might not hold that all philosophical and theological truths are no more than cultural mores asserted falsely to be universal, but that is itself a philosophical stance meriting a separate argument. He is not, in the paragraph above, speaking about universal truths, but about cultural myths.
The Church, as her name implies, is universal, ecumenical, and catholic. Every effort of the saints and martyrs since the morning of the Resurrection has been bent to the subversion of the worldly powers, the world-system, the customs and the political correctness of the elites of this world.
I venture to say that Mr Brin’s distaste for the comfortable little social myths people use to justify their worldly elites, powerful and mighty, from running and ruining the lives of the poor and weak and dispossessed is of course shared, nay, has no other origin in history or justification in logic, apart from the hatred of the Church for the world and its Prince and his lies.
We Christians do not like pagan myths about the grandeur of the chosen aristocrats and the contemptible nature of the poor and meek any more than do the so-called Progressives; and, further, the Progressives got the idea from us.
Indeed, even before the birth of Christ, St Mary the blessed Virgin sings this canticle:
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden:
for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things;
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him
from generation to generation.
He hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats,
and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.
Please notice that the first thing Mary thinks to sing as the praise of the Lord who has granted her this miraculous birth and signal favor to be the mother of the Messiah, is to exalt over the promised downfall of the proud and mighty and rich, and to glory in the elevation of the low and hungry.
A more stark opposition to the type of ancient epic that traces the lineage of Romulus to Aeneas to the goddess Venus cannot be imagined.
Now, it is true that modern elitists want to run and ruin the lives of the poor and lowly in the name of social justice, or eugenic progress, or radical egalitarianism, or the triumph of the proletarian class, whereas ancient elitists wanted to run and ruin the lives of the poor in the name of the cosmic order of the universe, or the caste system ordained by the gods.
This does not mean that the modern elitists are not elitists.
No, the modern elitists are Christian heretics, that is, persons who accept (knowingly or unknowingly) the Christian moral landscape, along with its fixtures and mental furniture and assumptions, and then reject one logically necessary part or another of the Christian message, creating an illogical, or at least arbitrary, jury-rig.
Socialism is another such jury-rig, the one now the most popular and persuasive. Related philosophical pathologies include the environmental movement, radical feminism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and various other attempts to take one aspect of Christian teaching or another and make that usurp the whole of it.
Because it is a jury rig, such heresies and half-truths hid gaping logical lacunae, and so the main effort of the partisans of a heresy is not the orderly enunciation of the reasonable arguments and evidences supporting their position: it is the hysterical effort to draw attention away from the gaping flaws in their ideas.
If there is more than one tactic for doing this, I have never seen it in action. The only tactic I have ever seen in action is the ad hominem attack, combined with a strawman argument.
Philosophically, the defender of the logically indefensible position must demote the normal things used to judge philosophical merit: logic and reason are denounced as being worthless, or biased, or the mere ‘ideological superstructure’ of hidden ‘class-interests.’
Freud and Darwin are dragooned into support of this flimsy ad hominem, since Freud can be used as an argument from authority to state that one’s opponents have invalid motives of which they themselves are not aware. Darwin can be used as an authority to state that, in the same way new species arise from old with no fixed forms, new ideas and new power of logic, Aryan Logic or Proletarian Logic, arise through a process akin to natural selection. One’s opponents occupy a lower plane of such alleged mental evolution, using categories and axioms which higher thinkers have superseded, but of which one’s opponents are themselves once again unaware.
In both cases, and in many more cases than this, the modern defender of unreason can merely level accusations that cannot be answered, because the accusation is that you yourself are unaware of your own flawed motives and flawed thinking process. Accusing an overworked and underpaid Jewess of ‘White Privilege’ is a similar unanswerable accusation, because no matter how bad her life is, one can claim she has received some benefit from the conspiracy of a hidden and general social atmosphere of which she is unaware.
In the case under discussion, the modern socialist heretic takes up the Christian concern for the poor, and, with no sense of shame, abandons the Christian metaphysical and philosophical principles which make concern for the poor reasonable.
The Hindu world view proposes a caste system; Confucius proposes submission to a set of filial and governmental obligations which will feed the poor but rob them of liberty; Buddha denounces love of wealth as an alluring trap leading to suffering, but does not enjoin charity as a duty (In Buddhism almsgiving is the respect given by the laity to the Buddhist monk).
Only if we are all brothers have I any fraternal duty of care toward the poor; only if we are all equally sons of Our Father in heaven can we be brothers in other than a metaphorical sense.
Nor can we be brothers if we are all descendant from competing and mutually exclusive tribes of prehuman apish ancestors, for then we are in a competition from which there is no escape nor quarter; for then my unwillingness to do my best to crust the genetically inferior or sickly or weak or idiotic races of man beneath my shiny jackboot, and my reluctance to impregnate as many healthy and intelligent brood-mares as possible, not only betrays my bloodline, but indeed the entire course of human progress toward the superhuman evolutionary future! If we are all descendant from competing and mutually exclusive tribes of prehuman apish ancestors, peace and brother-love is not only impractical, it is race treason!
Now, many a modern will try some makeshift to combine the Christian idea of charity and brother-love with the materialist idea that the cosmos is an empty machine, and we no more than machines made of meat inside it, and with the Darwinian idea that the only way to improve those machines is by the trial and error of brutal total warfare to extinction. It cannot be done. The ideas cannot be reconciled.
As I said above, the only thing that can be done is to halt any inquiry into the gaping logical holes of the makeshift by denouncing the human capacity to think logically.
Or take some other modern heresy, like feminism. Outside the Church, outside of the cultural assumptions created by the philosophical and theological axioms of the Christian worldview, on what grounds does equality between the sexes make sense? Sexual equality cannot be justified on the grounds of Confucian or Buddhist or Hindu thought, nor does the grinding emptiness of Darwinism or Marxism offer any better foundation. Indeed, Mr John Norman of Gor fame (or notoriety) has made a cottage industry of the argument that, from a purely mechanistic world view of Darwinian natural selection, not only is female equality not desirable, female liberty is not. He does not argue that wives should submit to their husbands; he argues that slavegirls should submit to their rapists. We can leave aside, with perhaps a queasy wince, this particular sexual perversion with no more than the observation that history records happy and healthy wives even in marriages where she agrees to love and honor and obey her lord and husband; but history records no happy rape victims who prefer being concubine to being wives.
My point here is not to investigate the fever swamp of the imaginings of someone like John Norman. My point is that no argument from the shabby worldview of political correctness can dislodge the conclusions of even so bizarre and openly evil a conclusion as that of the Gorean. John Norman is in fact merely using the modern notion of Freudian Darwinism to erect a cultural myth for his (I hope) pretend culture that has the same character and purpose as the myths Mr Brin denounces so passionately: it is a myth told to justify the oppression of the weak, in this case, the weaker sex.
The general argument Mr Brin makes is that STAR WARS is suspect, because it cleaves too closely to the antique social myths of epics, which are abundant with lost heirs of kings or sons of gods raised by wolves or shepherds, and whose main point of such social myths is to keeping the underlings in their place by telling them their low estate is part of the cosmic order of being, Karma, Maat, Me, or Fate.
Along a similar vein, I would argue that the modern social myths of the so-called social progressives also keep the underlings in their places by defining them as victims of an innately evil system of oppression, economic as well as psychological, and encouraging both their victim status, and their dependency, and encouraging the elitists to regard themselves, absurdly, as heroes saving the poor, rather than their main foe.
I am sure Comrade Stalin on his death bed thought he had helped the poor by organizing and commanding the Ukrainian famines, and orchestrating the worldwide falsehoods of the mass media to cover it up. I am sure Margie Sanger, founder of Planed Parenthood, to her dying day was proud of her work in the field of eugenics, and convincing Blacks and others she considered lesser races to kill their offspring in the womb, thus lowering their numbers and making room for Aryans of the superior bloodline, I am sure she justified in terms of her compassion for the world, and for the little man, including the defectives by products of miscegenation and race-inferiority she wanted to wipe out.
Mr Brin would perhaps (I hesitate to speak for him) define science fiction, since it deals with technological change and weirdness as its main theme, as loyal to social change, both warning of social devolution into dystopia, and urging social progress to higher levels of enlightenment, both scientific and social and economic.
Whether one agrees with a narrow definition of science fiction tying the theme of science fiction to social progress, or whether one prefers a wider definition of science fiction that would include more outliers, either way I submit that it is hard, nay, it is impossible to imagine either the modern science or the modern adventure romance springing out of any other worldview or cultural assumptions or moral atmosphere than that produced by Christendom, either of an orthodox or heterodox variety.
The non-European and non-Christian nations who have produced a modern crop of science fiction writers, by no coincidence, are the ones that most aggressively and rapidly Westernized: Japan and India.
The scientific adventure romance or lost race novels could not be written for or appeal to a Hottentot, much less a society oppressed by Confucian notions of absolute rule or a society sunk in the passive oriental slumber of Buddhist despair.
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.
