Fair warning, everybody: this one is a rant where an Old Dan Yells at Clouds. Proceed with the appropriate amount of caution, anticipatory umbrage, and/or popcorn.
Music, or Metatron?
In 1992 or thereabouts, I got caught in the middle of an argument at work—the kind of argument where the foundational premise of the argument is so squishy it could be made of pudding.
At issue: whether Amy Grant (and a few other aggressively evangelical pop stars) counted as a “Christian.”
I was living, for the summer, at a summer camp where I served on staff, and the management had put in place an absolute ban on music that wasn’t “Christian,” which they said meant “part of the artistic tradition of the Christian community” but by which they actually meant “praise music published by the CCM1 corporate establishment.”
The argument went on between my co-workers and the administration, endlessly, on points of doctrine and cultural conformity, scrutinizing the publicly-revealed “sins” of the artists in question, with all the anal-retentive attention to policies and Bible verses that a clever lawyer might pay to the way that an uncongenial Supreme Court decision is punctuated. And they kept pulling me into the middle of it; my co-workers dragged me in because my father was a theology professor, and by the administration called me in for regular dressing downs since I didn’t care whether I got fired so I just listened to whatever music I damn well pleased.
When I left, I was profoundly relieved as I knew for sure (in the way only a sixteen-year-old can) that I would never again be stuck in a place where people were such goddamn fucking idiots.
I was going to college as soon as I got home, a place of freedom and honest inquiry, where I would begin my studies for a literature degree.
The Rabbis of Rabelais
And so I embarked on the glorious seas of literary studies. I read authors I’d never even heard of before; some good, some horrible, some who’ve become lifelong loves. I learned to parse theme and symbol, learned the semantics of semiotics and the necromacy of scanscion and the diviniatory power of deconstruction.
But it wasn’t long before I found the arguments in classes—and in assigned papers—turning towards the mandatory evaluation of the author’s ideology. How does The Handmaid’s Tale exemplify feminism, and where does it go wrong? How does one appropriately detect misogyny in a text—internalized or otherwise, unconscious or overt? How does the application of sex or violence reveal the author’s secret perversions and political commitments? And, most importantly, at what point do ideological transgressions rule them out of order?
Is LeGuin feminist enough? Is Jane Austin? Should Anne Perry be cast out as reactionary and harmful to goodness? And what of black writers? Is Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou a more honest source of the Black Experience? Can you take Marquez as a true voice for Latin American literature, or do his comments about English’s superiority to Spanish mean that one should prefer Isabelle Allende?
Who speaks for their people? And who should never be heeded? William Burroughs shot his wife. Hemmingway was an abusive drunk and a brawler. Huxley was a psychonaut. These reprobate minds, surely, should be looked at with suspicion, no matter how seemingly benign (or even positive) their messages, nor how entertaining their fiction; the more entertaining it is, the more effectively it propagandizes, after all.
Sitting in those programs, listening to that talk, witnessing how easily a writer’s words get twisted to impeach the writer’s character, and knowing how many of my classmates were headed for careers that would make them cultural gatekeepers (some of them are names you might have heard, if you run in the right circles), I took solace in the fact that I was interested mostly in writing genre fiction—the stuff that was beneath the notice of such inquisitors.
I was starting up a career writing Science Fiction, and when I left college I could leave all this bullshit behind.
The Priests of Pretension
I went to my first science fiction convention expecting to get into arguments about whether Kirk was better than Picard, whether Philip K. Dick had a better bead on human nature than Robert A. Heinlein, whether emerging tech could solve environmental crises, and to listen to more advanced pros argue about whether it was easier to novelize a screenplay or adapt a novel to a screenplay.
While I’d been a lifelong science fiction fan, I’d never been involved with “fandom.”
And what did I find?
One of my intellectual heroes sitting in a bar—we talked for two hours about subjects of mutual interest before we introduced ourselves. I’d never seen his picture, and so had no idea who I was talking to (and I managed not to embarrass myself) I also met couple writers I’d been reading since I was a kid. And, in that first weekend, I made a handful of friends who are still friends nearly twenty years on.
And, again, a quiet rumble of something tiresome: the argument over whose science fiction/fantasy was legitimate, and whose was secretly evil and/or corrupting.
By the time I quit going regularly six years later, the mutual excommunication and purity societies had sprung up like zits on a teenager’s face. One after another, famous writers suffered “takedowns” for the crime of being insufficiently in-step with the new moral fad of the day (I suspect it was not a coincidence that such takedowns happened always at the hands of younger, less accomplished, less talented, more resentful writers or wannabes). Those younger writers who had real talent were subjected to endless scrutiny for moral and ideological failings. Over the following decade, the once-vibrant scene fell into a perpetual cycle of boredom, nastiness, and purity spirals.
But, happily, I smelled it coming and got out while the getting was good and, after another few years, I discovered Substack.
A Dustbin of Dissidents
Finally, a space devoted to free speech! Vigorous arguments! Curious people (and the occasional fuckwit—such is the price of admission to any heterogenous space). A breath of fresh air!
Earlier this week, I had the predictable and thoroughly dubious pleasure of watching this dynamic play out again. An inquiry passed my feed asking for “some good conservative authors who aren’t C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.”
The term “conservative,” of course, doesn’t actually mean anything. America has no population of political conservatives, and never has—it has only competing tribes of revolutionaries.2 Culturally, though, it does have conservatives of various stripes, whom I’d broadly characterize as people who find the erosion of community in the face of technological development and state intrusion distasteful in some sense.
And boy, howdy, are there authors who fit that description, and in spades, from across the political spectrum. So I replied with a list of particularly good (and influential) authors who make excellent reading for someone looking to explore stories that depart from the current elite orthodoxy…only to be greeted with a series of strident (and unbelievably stupid) arguments over who, really, qualifies as “conservative/right-ish/libertarian/anti-leftist.”
An author who wasn’t a fan of Christian sexual morality? One who is know to have voted Democrat from time to time? An atheist? An author whose books include sex, blackmail, or graphic violence? An author whose characters earn their own redemption by discovering virtue? These, it turns out, don’t count.
The Illiteracy of the Fool
I—as I have pointed out from time to time (and as anyone who has read my books will know—am not a conservative of any stripe (unless one wants to count an affection for virtue as “conservative”).3 I have, however, found myself in the company of conservatives as frequently as liberals, leftists, and various species of weirdo.4 I was a panelist at BasedCon. I’ve participated in the Based Books Sales overseen by the astonishingly and disturbingly right-wing physicist Hans Schantz (who is, by the way, a lovely quirky dude in person).
Anyone, really, who is literate, curious, earnest, courageous, and/or pushing the envelope to make their mark in the world holds my interest.
When one is in a minority, it’s natural to look for books (or other arts and entertainments) that confirm one’s worldview, that serve as comfort, and/or that deepen one’s own contemplation of one’s pet philosophy and its implications. One of the proper uses of literature is to give one an arena in which to explore the values one holds dear.
And, if the advent of the Internet and destruction of traditional media channels has revealed anything at all, it’s that we are all ideological minorities. Cultural consensus in America is a phantom created by our voting system, and by a hundred years of careful control of the channels of information by those who fund and license those channels. In truth, microcultures abound, and always have—probably, they always will, regardless of how vigorous the attempts to manufacture consent and consensus become.
There is, however, a broad-and-fuzzy bright line between the desire to retreat into literature for comfort or deepening, and the compulsion to protect at all costs the purity of one’s labels, the ramparts of one’s worldview, and the conceit of one’s confidence.
The horror and ugliness that permeates Woke art is the same that permeates Christian fiction and music, “conservative” media of all sorts, and the tiresome clusterfuck that is the cinema of the past decade-and-a-half:
The elevation of the ideology to the exclusion of the human.
If your interest in fiction, or essays, or art, or film extends only as far as that which reinforces your values, comforts you in your narrowness, and feeds your sense of being right in the world, you’re not interested in thought, or goodness, or beauty, or learning, or culture. You’re a Philistine.
You live in an age lousy with riches, offering you the opportunity to see farther afield and deeper into your own culture than any member of a non-elite cadre in history.
To look at such an opportunity and sniff in superiority at men and women of the past—or from a different class or place in your own time—is an act of marking yourself. It shows that you, moreso than most of the meanest and lowest in history, are an illiterate, small-minded fool.
Teaching you to read was an injustice to the language and culture that birthed you.
i.e. Contemporary Christian Music
If you’ve read enough of my other essays, you’ll have heard me make this argument at length, so I won’t re-hash it here.
And no, I’m not a liberal or a leftist either. I have long since learned that my politics and values are so far out of step with the general map of popular discourse that it’s absolutely fruitless to attempt to shoehorn myself into any given tribe. But, if you’re one of those unfortunate souls who must label people, if you can come up for a label that would encompass a synthesis of…actually, never mind. It would take a book to do, and it’s not one I’m interested in writing, because I am, to quote a lovely story, only quite a little fellow in a wide world, after all.
Including, but not limited to: psychonauts, old hippies, gang members, radical individualists, makers, steampunkers, nudists, kinksters, pornographers, brewers, vintners, sculptors, filmmakers, actors, reenactors, homesteaders, singularitarians, activists, engineers, intelligence officers, cultists, occultists, and cat lovers.
"The elevation of the ideology to the exclusion of the human."
You've summed up an age. Or perhaps all of human existence.
Dan, I processed some tomatos today for juice. It was largely an apolitical venture, though I heard whispers from the pot that it was a shame I used so many non-renewable paper towels in the process and they were preparing to take a stand and sacrifice some to burn on the bottom (thus creating more waste...go figure right?) . Its hard to escape it sometimes. Hang in there ;-)