fantasy, politics, epistemology--the usual

[truepenny]

jaylake has asked a question about fantasy and politics (which I answer here with an addendum here).

[ETA: my answers are also provided behind the cut-tag, as I realized this morning (02/16/10) that the rest of the post makes more sense if you know what I've just been saying/thinking about the ideology and idealization of monarchy.]


My answer to Jay:
I hate politics--for reasons which became apparent in that thread on my blog t'other day--and yet the five fantasy novels I've written are all intensely political, in the quite literal sense of being about government.

I'm still trying to figure out why I do that to myself, so this is an interesting question for me.

I think, though, that for a lot of people (me included), when they say they don't want politics in their fantasy, what they mean is, they don't want democracy. Because democracy is complicated and hard and no matter which side of the fence you're on, it always feels like the other guy wins 75% of the time. And that's frustrating--which is not really what most of us turn to fiction for. On the other hand, if you write your democracy so that the good guys do win, you have to work twice as hard to make it a believable victory and not just that thing (which also happens a lot in fantasy) where "good" turns into "agrees with protagonist."

Also, it requires a much larger cast of characters.

Whereas, if you're writing fantasy with a monarchy of convenience (as opposed to writing political fantasy about a monarchy, which is what keeps happening to me), all you need is a king off somewhere making decisions. If he's a good king, that's all you need to say about him and your characters can get on with their own lives. If he's a bad king, then your characters can go assassinate him and (because "good" equals "agrees with protagonist") be lauded as heroes. It's not that any monarchy anywhere in the world at any point in history has ever actually worked like that, it's that a king serves as a metonymy for government in a way that a president just can't. (See, for example, Shakespeare's history plays. There's a reason they're all titled by monarch, and why Shakespearean criticism talks about the Problem of Kingship.) And if you don't want to talk about politics, that's a really handy metonymy to have.

Monarchy gives the illusion that politics isn't political, that the guy in charge is in charge because of Divine Right or inheritable, magical, innate superiority (yes, Dr. Tolkien, I am looking at you), or because a watery tart chucked a sword at him. And I understand the temptations of that illusion. I really do. I just can't write the effing thing.

Addendum: I should add that I agree with the other commenters who are essentially saying "the personal is political." You can't write anything without politics in its broad sense--but that makes both the comment and your question meaningless, which is an unfair rhetorical trick. If you're using "politics" as shorthand for "human society is inevitably unfair, and the good guys get filibustered to death in committee," with that sense of claustrophobia and boredom and helplessness and impotent, frustrated fury and whoops! there goes my blood pressure--which is what I mean when I grumble about hating politics--then, yes, only dystopian fiction (whether fantasy, science fiction, or something else) tends to discuss that part of the human condition.


[And now on with the original post!]


This is a huge, complicated question, and obviously your answer to it depends on how you define "politics" in the first place. It also ties in with a couple of things that Behemoth is making me think about. (N.b., this is a segue: what follows has no necessary connection to the discussion in Jay's blog except a cross-connect in my brain.) Neumann's historical analysis is oversimplified and hoo boy with the Marxism, and as an anthropologist, he makes a pretty good lawyer, but he is, nevertheless, thought-provoking, at least for me. One point is his use of the word "decisionism," which is "the demand for action instead of deliberation, for decision instead of evaluation" (45). The other is his remarks on charismatic leadership (using "charismatic" in its older sense):

This entirely irrational belief [in the charism of the leader] will arise in situations that the average man cannot grasp and understand rationally. It is not only anxiety that drives men to embrace superstition, but inability to understand the reasons for their helplessness, misery, and degradation. In periods of civil strife, religious turmoil, and profound social and economic upheavals productive of misery and distress, men are often unable, or deliberately rendered unable, to perceive the developmental laws that have brought about their condition.
(96)

Both these ideas have obvious and direct application to the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression; in particular, the fact that the Weimar government was a government that literally did not work because not one of the institutions holding power in interbellum Germany could look past their own self-interest to cooperate with the others, and because, as Yeats says, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." The Nazis told people that the government didn't work because democracy didn't work, and they were believed, in part because they promised--and delivered--decisionism. And they promised mono-arkhos, rule by a single person. They promised, in other words, to make things simple.

The other thing bumping around in my head, from last week's post on The Case for Auschwitz, is the Know-Nothingism demonstrated by Holocaust deniers and Creationists and anti-vaxxers (in the Cap Times recently: "A study linking vaccines to autism is discredited, but a local activist remains a believer"). Because it seems to me that this Know-Nothingism (which term, yes, I am borrowing because it seems to me to encapsulate perfectly the thing these various movements have in common) dovetails into the idea of charismatic leadership arising when people can't understand, to paraphrase Neumann, why their lives suck. All of them are the act of taking a very complicated situation, in which many of the variables are uncontrollable or simply unknown, and reducing it to a slogan. (I noted, btw, in reading about Irving in both van Pelt and Rosenbaum that he seems to be very good at coining slogans.) W.'s Weapons of Mass Destruction fit in here, too.

And the other thing this bumps into (seriously, it's all bumper cars here in my head today, or possibly inflatable hippopotamuses bobbing about in a jacuzzi) is Steve Schwartz's blog post on The Three Types of Knowledge, those three types being (1) the shit you know, (2) the shit you know you don't know, and (3) the shit you don't know you don't know. Because modern Know-Nothingism is all about confusion between those three categories, where (1) and (3) become inextricable and (2) becomes "the lies everybody else tells"--and about defending that confusion as if it were a virtue.

Many of us hate to ask for advice (this is stereotyped as a male trait, particularly vis-à-vis getting directions, but I do this kind of stupid shit all the time). We're afraid of owning up to category 2, as if somehow demonstrating category 3 is going to make us look smart. Where do we get this from? (My best guess it's from our peers as children, because it's other kids who are going to make fun of you for exposing ignorance, not adults.) But that means that Know-Nothingism is highly seductive, because you never have to ask.

Hitler scorned experts. His Know-Nothingism was unshakable and vast, and it was made of slogans, magical thinking, and decisionism--and it fed, and fed on, the Know-Nothingism of a large segment of Germany's population.


---
WORKS CITED
Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 1942. Expanded ed. 1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

Yeats, W. B. "The Second Coming."

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

something I've noticed in a lot of online discusssions is that someone at some point makes a claim and people who line up on that side of the argument repeat it as utter truth without ever checking - and I assume that's just a more visible version of what people do IRL. 'somebody told me' is so much easier than digging through sources ;-(

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

The "Know-nothing" link points back to this entry.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

ARGH!

Thank you for catching that!