Patricia S. Bowne

I’ve been reading brutal satire lately. It feels like cleansing my palate, brushing off cobwebs, struggling out of a too-tight sweater that was given me by an easily-wounded elderly relative who’s been here for an extended visit… OK, that metaphor got a little out of control. But it’s how I feel when I pick up something like Lightning Rods or The Sellout.

After spending years reading SFF, my jaw drops when I pick up something like this. She didn’t just say that! Did he really — holy crap!

Then I go to google, expecting a hundred reviews calling out these books for sexism, racism, general problematicality, and find nothing. The folks who put every SFF novel, comic book or movie under a social justice microscope have nothing to say about these books. It is as if I’ve stepped into an alternate universe with completely different standards.

I suppose this is the nature of genre. Someone who picks up a romance with a soft-focus cover would not be pleased to find Lightning Rods between the covers. But SFF has always advertised itself as the freewheeling exploration of ideas, the genre that boldly goes where no-one has gone before. We puff out our chests and say Look at our bad-assitude! Our intellectuality! Our courage and innovation! when in fact right now most of our critical voices seem more focused on reshaping the field into a moral niche market.

I like moral niche markets. I own all of George MacDonald’s novels in two versions. Maybe I’ll be happier with the state of current SFF now that I’ve realized that’s what it is.

I read it over and over. “President X can’t possibly bring back jobs, because ROBOTS. AUTOMATION.” People write it as if they were saying ‘President X can’t possibly fly because GRAVITY.” As if increased automation were an irresistible force of nature.

Know what I hate? I hate when the parochial interests of one segment of society become enshrined as irresistible forces of nature. As a scientist I hate it on two levels – not just the political corruption but the incoherence. Know what was an irresistible force of nature? Smallpox.

Tell me that we could overcome smallpox but we can’t overcome automation. It becomes obvious that you’re talking nonsense, and giving a pass to the people who benefit from automating away all the jobs in the country except their own, and those of the politicians who enable them.

I’ll tell you what’s a real force of nature; unless we start killing unwanted people, they are going to hang around for decades, and they will do something with their time and their energy and their anger and their desire to, I dunno, have meaning? Have money? I’ve been saying this for years, I know, and for years they weren’t doing anything and I would have looked like a fool if anyone were looking at me.

This year, I don’t feel so foolish.

Who isn’t? In particular, I’m irritated by this article from the NYT, in which an economist tries to grapple with the question of why voters simply don’t believe it when economists say global trade is good.  You’ll be glad to know, voters, that he has an answer! In fact he has four; First, you are isolationist. Second, you are nationalist and don’t care about other countries. Third, you are focused on the benefit to your own ethnic group (that’s racist, folks; you needed me to tell you that because) Fourth, you are insufficiently educated.

You’d think that a professional economist reflecting on the failings of his profession would mention things like that 2013 spreadsheet error in the paper supporting austerity economics – especially since that paper was from the very department he works in. But why quibble over trifles?

When I read this article I thought to myself, here we have a discipline that studies large-scale issues that lead to great human suffering, and often gets things about them wrong, and generally seems more interested in analyzing the numbers than in helping the individuals who are suffering, and they wonder why they are not trusted by those people. Duh?  But then I thought about other disciplines with those same potential drawbacks. I thought about epidemiology.

Why do people feel more positive towards the person who writes about how many microcephalic babies we can expect in Brazil than they do toward the person who writes about how many job losses we can expect in Ohio? I think the reason is obvious; epidemiology is subordinate to medicine.  It’s an outgrowth of medicine, and as such it is the servant of attempts to cure people. The epidemiologist or pathophysiologist may seem (or in my case, be) more enthusiastic about the cool disease than about the patient, but the discipline will not even exist if it doesn’t serve the actual doctors and nurses who are helping that patient.

Where is the equivalent moral grounding for economics? Where are the cadres of selfless economics professionals fanning out through underemployed communities to do something about human misery? I have never seen a field economist. I’ve never been asked to donate to Economists Without Borders. So basically, I mistrust economists because I don’t see any evidence that the profession gives a damn about human welfare – yet it expects to influence policies that affect my life. What’s not to hate about that?

I searched for better articles on why economics wasn’t trusted, and found several that seemed to have a faint notion of this issue — at least, they suggested that economics should be more tightly integrated with social sciences  (one also suggested that they pay attention to data, which boggled me). But I didn’t find anything that suggested that economics needed to become subordinate to some discipline explicitly directed toward human flourishing. I’m not even sure what that discipline might be. And that may be the underlying problem.

That was the subtitle of Advice From Pigeons, but only Sofia Samatar got the reference. Maybe Matt Bruenig would have: he has an interesting post up today about how The Discourse marginalizes the people.

I always agree with Matt completely the first time I read his stuff, and then begin to accumulate second thoughts and concerns and objections as I go on. I certainly agree with his critiques of identity politics in this one. He is arguing that the combination of The Discourse and Identity Politics creates a seamless barrier between the working class and the pundit class.

• Lower class people, almost by definition, cannot engage in The Discourse. They do not have the education, credentials, or jobs necessary to do so.
• Upper class people (broadly construed) can engage in The Discourse, but if they do so as a partisan or advocate of the lower classes, they are dismissed because they are not themselves lower class.

This is pretty obviously true. But when I zoom out or in, I have disagreements.

Zooming out, I see Matt’s piece as accepting that the liberal academy and intelligentsia, and The Discourse, are important to social justice. If there’s anything the Trumpening should be making us ask about, it should be this. Working class people have not gone away just because The Discourse has not included them, any more than creationists have gone away because The Discourse doesn’t include them. Matt points out clearly that pundits and practitioners of TD (I am tired of typing The Discourse) are different, become different, from the groups they rose from. What he doesn’t consider is the possibility that they become irrelevant; that TD is simply a way of keeping academic types occupied with themselves, so the rest of the country can go on its own way.

Zooming in, I ask myself if the entire process of education isn’t legitimately about changing people’s approach and language, teaching them to take analytic approaches. TD is the language of analysis, of technical experts who weigh alternatives using abstract terms that apply to all of them, rather than of advocates who are arguing for one alternative over another on far less abstract bases.

Perhaps the problem is not that TD shuts out the people, but that TD speakers insist on bothering the people. If advocates want analysis, after all, we technical experts are available for hire or pro bono; why should we assume that we are assets to movements that have not sought our services? I do not assume that I’d be any use on a hospital floor, even though I could draw a fine flow chart of the patient’s pathophysiology.

I think a lot of what comes out of the academy these days is about our own insecurities and ego issues. The rest of the country is lucky if it gets to ignore our flurrying around as we try to figure out how working in the ivory tower imparts value to ourselves and society, and what to do about the fact that when we come up with an explanation that satisfies our souls, it is usually phrased in The Discourse – so nobody outside the tower either understands it, believes it, or cares about it. Is the answer to require outsiders to learn our language before they can participate in the discussion, or to go and find out through honest research just what our discourse is good for in people’s lives?

In Advice from Pigeons, Charms of Discourse are used to summon demons by flattering them – defining them in ways that lure them into a charmed circle and keep them trapped there, listening to their own stories, until they figure out how to refute the assumptions embedded in the charms.  It was true when I wrote it, and it’s still true today.