Someone explain it to me.
So I am reading a description by a well-read science fiction bigwig about Michael Moorcock’s early work, COUNT BRASS. It is a series I remember reading and liking as a youth; I don’t know what I’d think of it today. I do admire how the ‘Eternal Champion’ motif allows the author to tell and retell the same stories in slightly different versions over again–the idea of a Multiverse is simply sublime.
The writer is giving a sum-up of JEWEL IN THE SKULL, and complimenting (and rightly so, in my opinion) the ease and economy of the writing. But then I stumble across this line:
Brilliant? What, treason? Contempt for one’s fathers? Spitting in one’s own face?
(Besides, didn’t Orwell in 1948 cast his own country as an evil empire? Didn’t Chesterton in 1904? Didn’t Swift in 1726?)
I would not comment on this, except that I have seen it before, elsewhere, many times: a spontaneous burst of admiration and enthusiasm for what, at first glance, would seem to be the rather unnatural sentiment of hating one’s own. I think of it as a phenomena related to the gushing love that surrounded critical attention of V FOR VENDETTA; it is always somewhat unearthly, like seeing your own people stand up and boo when our team wins an unexpected victory over the Russians at the Winter Olympics.
Why in the world would what seems (to me, at least) to be trite moral retardation be lauded with the appellation of intellectual accomplishment? Brilliant, really? Like you have to be Einstein to mock your own? And all this time I thought that ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ was the by-word for being as stupid as a chicken.
Someone explain the philosophy or psychology of it to me. I really don’t get it.
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.
