A good friend needed help facing the blank page. I found this quote for him. Now I present it too you.
(It’s often attributed to Goethe, but in fact the authorship is unknown.)
Please share with anyone you think might love it.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back – concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
I am that person who, regardless of where I am taken, will end up in the first stationery shop I find, examining notebooks.
I’m guessing that, as a writer, your share my passion for excellent writing materials.
But all too often our love for stationery is unrequited. Please don’t misunderstand me. The ideal stationery does exist. It’s just hard to find.
Disappointed too often by unfaithful stationery, let down by pagination that never considered my needs, failing yet again to find that one true notebook, I decided to do the unthinkable.
I decided to make my own.
I’ve created a new stationery product, based on one of the all time classics, that also aims to help us all be a little bit more creative.
We live in strange political times. Around the world far right leaders are adopting traditionaly socialist policies to get elected. Trump promised huge public spending on infrastructure. Le Pen is promising a huge rise in social benefits. What’s going on?
The bottom line is, working and middle class people in America and Europe are poorer than they once were. So much poorer that we are falling into the conditions of developing nations. Wealth is capitalising in the hands of the very rich. Ordinary people can no longer afford college, to own a house, or access proper healthcare. The far right can see this, and are exploiting the fear it’s creating.
In the UK we have one political leader who is offering hope instead of fear. Jeremy Corbyn is similar in politics to Bernie Sanders in the US. A traditional, centre left, democratic socialist. His political offer is similar to the existing policies in the Nordic nations or Germany, all much more equal and fairer societies. But in the UK, that makes him look like a far left radical.
Like Sanders, Corbyn has faced bitter opposition both from conservatives, and the liberal wing of his own party. The liberal agenda doesn’t address poverty effectively, and opposes the policies, like tax rises, needed to tackle it. So a leader like Corbyn faces intense opposition from people who are, theoratically at least, on his side, making his position look much weaker than it really is.
Unlike Sanders, Corbyn succeeded in becoming leader of Britain’s major left wing party. And now with the calling of a snap election by the Tory party, Corbyn has a shot at putting Labour in power. We’re being told that Corbyn absolutely can not win. But we’re being told this by a media entirely owned by conservative and liberal interests, who aren’t presenting a fair picture. In fact, Corbyn has a good chance. Here’s why.
Because of the high expectation of a Tory landslide victory, Corbyn can win simply by holding the ground that Labour currently control. If the Tories don’t gain significantly at this point, it will be seen as a rejection of their destructive stance on Brexit and their austerity policies. And winning is much more difficult for the Tory party than the polls reflect.
To win a large majority, conservaties need to win a raft of small towns surrounding cities like Leicester, Shefield and Manchester in the midlands and north of the UK. These places, which have suffered worst from growing poverty, have protested by voting for UKIP and Brexit. Pollsters are giving the Tories a major advantage on the assumption that UKIP / Brexit votes will translate to Tory votes. This assumption is almost certainly false. Corbyn and Labour are much more likely to hold all these seats, maintaining the status quo, than polls suggest.
In the south the Tory party face a huge resurgent threat from the Liberal Democrats. The south east in particular has been tipping from conservative to liberal for the last 30 years, with constuencies like Guildford flipping yellow to LibDem. Factor in Brexit, which the south east voted against, and there’s a strong possibility the Tories will lose significant seats to the LibDems in this election.
If Labour holds in the midlands and the north, and the LibDems win significant seats in the south east, then the Tories lose their majority and we are into a situation of coalition government. Corbyn would almost certainly emerge as leader of any coalition government in those circumstances. Even if he didn’t, this outcome would shatter the current Tory leadership.
Add to this, that only four days into the election campaign, Labour and Corbyn have halved the Tory poll lead. How? Corbyn’s team have been planning for a snap election. They have a raft of policies ready to go, like the end of college tuition fees, and raising taxes on earners over £70k. These policies offer hope of a fairer and more equal society to millions of Britons who have been crushed into poverty by both conservative and liberal policies over the last 40 years.
The real question on which this election turns is this. Will the people of Britain see and vote for the economic justice in the policies Corbyn and Labour are offering? If so, you can expect your next PM to be Jeremy Corbyn. If not, it will be Theresa May. But as poverty and inequality grows even starker, you will eventually see a far right leader exploit that anger to sweep to power in the UK. And that will truly be a dark day.
One of the major barriers to a Corbyn win, is the perception that Corbyn can’t win. If you agree with this post, please share it on social media. Follow me on Twitter @damiengwalter
Sci-fi sells us fantasies. Margaret Atwood’s classic novel is all about the danger of fantasy. Why should they be pigeon holed together?
Damien writes on scifi, culture and politics for The Guardian, Independent, Wired, BBC and Aeon magazine, and also right here. Follow on Twitter @damiengwalter
Women understand, I think much better than men, how horrifying it is to be the object of another person’s fantasy. Glen Close going stalker crazy on Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction is so alien and horrifying to men that you can make a box office smash from it. Women experience that behaviour from men daily.
“The men who founded Gilead probably read and enjoyed John Norman’s Gor novels.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is a story all about the skincrawling horror of being held captive as an object of fantasy. It’s literary lineage is closer to The Collector by John Fowles than anything by Arthur C Clarke. Margaret Atwood has generally resisted all labels for it, including the most commonly applied, that it is a feminist novel, preferring to call it simply a human story. And despite being nominated for numerous sci’fi awards, has never accepted that label either.
Science fiction fans have proved less than happy with that refusal to pigeon hole. As The Handmaid’s Tale has grown in fame, SF fandom has frequently asked why the book isn’t sold or marketed in the genre. It’s not an unreasonable question, after all it shares some similarities with science fiction. It’s set in the near future, in what you might think of as a branching alternate timeline from our own history.
Imagine an alternate timeline where The Handmaid’s Tale was published as science fiction. Possibly in the kind of pulp cover that many novels featuring women enslaved to strange obsessive Nazis often featured, with a subtitile like “I was a captive of fundamentalist perverts!”, and shipped out to bookshops, as one of many sci-fi novels released in 1985.
The sci-fi edition of The Handmaid’s Tale would have found itself in strange, and deeply inappropriate company. Among the actual scifi bestsellers of 1985 was Mercenaries of Gor, the 21st novel in John Norman’s Gor saga. For the unaware, the Gor novels are about a fantasy world where men are muscular barbarian warriors and women, many abducted from Earth, are their sex slaves. By the standards of the modern internet the Gor novels aren’t terribly shocking, but they are full on BDSM sex fantasies.
To give John Norman some minimal credit, he wove such a potent sexual fantasy in the Gor novels that they gave rise to the Gorean subculture, and remain quite widely read today. Is there anything wrong with the Gor novels? Only if you think there’s anything wrong with Laurel K Hamilton’s kinky wereleopard sex novels, with erotic fiction in general, or with pornography as a whole. Few people today believe that repressing our sexual fantasies leads anywhere good. We live in a liberal society that believes it’s much healthier to recognise, express and even celebrate our sexual fantasies.
But there is a serious problem if we can’t distinguish between indulging fantasy, and critically discussing the dangers of fantasy. Because without that critical discussion, we face the serious risk of fantasy being allowed to slip into reality. The men who founded Gilead probably read and enjoyed John Norman’s Gor novels. And enjoyed their fantasy so much, they used murder and violence to enforce it as America’s new reality.
Look at ISIS today, the Nazis in the 1930s, or any brutal patriarchal society in history. These are men driven to make their personal fantasies of power, dominance and control the reality that others must live under. The newly empowered Trumpist far right is terrifying because it shares so many features with those patriarchal regimes, not least its worrying preference for fantasy over reality and fact.
I fear that, had The Handmaid’s Tale been published as science fiction, it would not today be playing such a pivotal role as a symbol of resistance against Trump and the far right. Because sci-fi floods the world with fantasy. Sometimes high quality entertaining fantasy like those great MARVEL movies. Sometimes rather cheap and exploitative fantasy like John Norman’s Gor novels. But if we’re going to understand, and change for the better, our reality, we need to clearly recognise the work of writers, artists and other creators, who are doing more than selling us escapist fantasies.
Cyberpunk’s literary roots have always dug deep into themes of self destruction…both our terror of losing, and lust to be liberated from, our self.
No comments here, but come talk to me on @damiengwalter.
It’s hard for a human as universally recognised as Scarlet Johansson to pass as a nobody. But Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of the new Johanson vehicle and cyberpunk franchise Ghost in the Shell, is the ultimate nobody. The Major is a synthetic human, who appears in the form of an athletic young woman primarily because creator Masamune Shirow understood the young male audience for his 1989 manga series. There’s no small irony that, in the ongoing project to create her star self, Johansson has stumbled by trying to remake a story that is all about the destruction of self.
Beneath the surface of its now cliche iconography – mirrorshades, black leather trench coats, flickering neon lighting – cyberpunk has always been about the self. Or more precisely, a philosophical investigation into what will remain of the self once technology has remade human life. Before cyberpunk gave Bladerunner and The Matrix to cinema, those ideas were evolved in two related literary forms – Japanese manga and American / European hard science fiction, which began asking hard questions of identity and self at around the same time.
“But we’re also powerfully drawn to any experience that allows us to escape our self. Video games, virtual reality, cinematic CGI, all provide a technological liberation from our self.”
William Gibson’s novella Burning Chrome features a young woman who is hustling to buy new eyes, the latest Nikon’s, so she can become a “simstim” star. It’s an image Gibson builds on with the character of Molly Millions (a likely influence over Major Kusanagi), a cybernetically enhanced bodyguard whose eyes are sealed behind mirrorshade insets. His skill at composing such poetic metaphors for self transformation made Gibson the spiritual leader of the cyberpunk movement, even before cyberpunk as a name was coined.
For much of it’s history science fiction treated technology as a power controlled by men. Competent scientists who built rockets, and explored alien worlds. Cyberpunk inverted this equation to ask harder, more interesting questions. When technology allows us to replace first our eyes, then our entire bodies, what will be left of “us” at all? When technology lets us reprogramme our minds as easily as we programme a computer, what of our self will be left? For most of us, especially those brought up to believe in some form of soul or spirit at the centre of our human self, these questions can be terrifying.
That terror at losing our selves gives cyberpunk its strange mix of dystopian darkness and fantasy wish fulfillment. Anyone struggling to “unplug” from the internet understands the terror of having our self obliterated by technology. But we’re also powerfully drawn to any experience that allows us to escape our self. Video games, virtual reality, cinematic CGI, all provide a technological liberation from our self. Watching Scarlet Johansson deconstructed and remade as Major Kusanagi, we’re watching our own selves experience this fantasy…or nightmare.
Japanese creators of cyberpunk perhaps have an advantage in exploring the nightmare fantasy of tecnological self destruction. Buddhist cultures already understand the self as “empty“, a construct of perception, subject to constant change. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, arguably the greatest cyberpunk narrative, sculpts a baroque and horrifying metaphor for the self. In the anime’s infamous climax, a young hero cursed with psychic powers is mutated into a vast mound of human flesh, crushing the city beneath muscle and bone, as his full psychic self is manifested in our physical world.
The excitement inspired by a movie adapation of Ghost in the Shell is because, as we stare into our smartphones, and soon our VR headsets, we’re living in the midst of a revolution in how we see our selves. Masamune Shirow’s manga and anime originals have something to say about that. But as is so often the case with Hollywood adaptations, Scarlet Johansson’s visually impressive, but intellectually shallow retelling, does not. That’s a shame, and not only because the movie’s “whitewashing” also robs of it of the cultural context that gave it the Ghost in the Shell meaning. But also because Johansson, as one of the most adept sculptors of self identity alive today, might have had so much more to say on the subject.
I’ve never done a WorldCon, and I’ve never been to Helsinki, so damn it I’m going to tick off both these ambitions in a single weekend! I’ll be at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, 9-13 August of 2017.
And I’d like you to be there also.
So if you’re hesitating (I know it’s a reasonably major financial commitment for most of us) then just know, if you’re among the many friends I have online, I would LOVE to see your actual face over a drink in the convention bar.
Also, I am looking at AirBnb apartments close to the convention centre. Interested in sharing? Shoot me an email: damiengwalter@gmail.com
Trump voters. Brexit voters. The AltRight. The people who read Infowars, and Breitbart, and the Daily Mail. They’re all early stage socialists, who just haven’t figured out that’s what they are yet.
Here’s why.
For most of the 20th century, global capitalism was a pretty good deal. If you were a white western citizen.
Most of the stuff you bought was manufactured by low paid labour in Asia. Most of the drudge work was done, either at home by women, or by immigrants. Life kept geting cheaper, and you kept earning more, assuming you were a white male, even in a relatively low paying job. Global capitalism, clearly an unfair system that exploited millions of people, was widely supported by white Americans, because they benefited from that exploitation.
“As a citizen of a western nation you are now much more likely to be exploited by capitalism.”
My how things have changed! Not. But, if you’re a highly priviledged citizen of the US or Europe, you can see that they are changing. Asia and other less developed areas are quickly catching up with the West. Women play on a more equal footing, and the immigrants who came to work in developed nations are now citizens, demanding and fully deserving equality. People aren’t stupid. Especially when it comes to protecting their own social status. Those who benefited from these inequalities can see those benefits slipping away.
Capitalism remains a deeply unfair and unequal way to organise the global economy. But in one regard it has become fairer. As a citizen of a western nation you are now much more likely to be exploited by capitalism. Capitalism has become trully global. Corporations, banks, hedge funds and billionaires move freely around the world. They are equal opportunities exploiters, as happy to profit from low paid labour in England as in China.
And the benefits of capitalism have also moved around. New middle classes in Asia, South America and Africa are being given the deal that the US and Europe got before them. Capitalism now has many new fans and supporters, in places like China that previously tried to get rid of it. But back where it began, in the US and UK, a lot of people are furious with global capitalism, and the “neo-liberal” agenda that today drives it.
Right now, what the people of the US and UK are demanding is a return to the capitalist deal of 40 years ago. They want jobs brought back from Asia, immigrants sent back beyond their borders, and women back under the thumb. That’s the agenda that got Trump elected, that leads to Britain voting to exit the EU, and is powering audiences for sites like Breitbart. The winners of capitalism can see they’re at risk of being made the losers, and they’re terrified by the prospect.
I don’t think it takes a genius to realise that global capitalism isn’t going to roll back 40 years because some old people in Idaho and Bolton are unhappy about it. And I think anybody with half an eye on the future can see that new technologies and automation are going to make the capitalist deal much, much more unequal.
So what happens when Trump and Brexit fail to deliver a temporal shift back to 1957? This is one of the last campaign advertisements run by Donald Trump before his election as president.
Anyone familiar with socialism will recognise the message of the Trump ad as a radically socialist one. Trump is no socialist, but he was willing to say anything to win. And Steve Bannon of Breitbart, alongside other altright political sites like Infowars, had devised a winning formula. Nationalist yes. Dog whistle racism yes. But also radically socialist, for a huge audience of Americans in the very early stages of questioning capitalism.
In the UK much the same trick was played. Brits were told that £350 million a week would be taken back from the EU and spent on the National Health Service. This lie was believed by many because, for at least 30 years, the British tabloid media has been equating the EU with global capitalism, via the issue of immigration. There’s a deep irony here of course, because the EU actually acts as a bulwark against the worst excesses of capitalism.
“In 5 years or so, the vast majority of Trump voters will be calling for nationalised healthcare, tax hikes on the rich, and free college tuition.”
In the US and UK a huge section of the population, who previously voted to support the free market capitalism of Reagan and Thatcher, are for the first time in their lives questioning that capitalist model. In the short term that’s pushed them towards nationalism, protectionism and racism. But regressing to racist political ideals will only hurt the economies of the UK and the US more deeply. And as that pain kicks in, those people are arriving at exactly the same socialist ideas that exploited people all over the world have been arguing since Karl Marx – socialism.
Socialism is a dialectic. Robbed of their faith in capitalism, Trumpists, Brexiteers, Breitbarters and AltRighters are now at stage 1 of the socialist learning process. That’s why so much of what they say sounds like communist revolutionaries shouting “down with the elite”. But as they learn, they’re going to arrive at the same democratic socialist ideas that were squeezed out of US politics decades ago. In 5 years or so, the vast majority of Trump voters will be calling for nationalised healthcare, tax hikes on the rich, and free college tuition. Because these socialist ideas are neccesary to balance a modern economy. Even Trump voters are on track to realise they are socialists, whether they know it now or not.
Why does this matter? Because the political left just lost its best electoral opportunity in decades. A huge swathe of the voting public are looking for answers to failed capitalism. But the left offered the same compromise position that brought it victory in the 2000’s. The left lost because it refused to argue for its own ideals, and stood watching as the right wing stole it’s ground. We can’t afford to make the same mistake again.
With fascism growing at a terrible pace today, Olaf Stapledon’s words from 1937, written at the height of the Nazi menace, hold meaning for all sci-fi fans, readers, and writers.
This post could not have been written without the support of my patrons.
“Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis.”
~Olaf Stapledon
I’m privileged to be a part of the worldwide science fiction community. As a writer and blogger, as a graduate of the Clarion science fiction writers workshop, as a regular columnist on SF for The Guardian, and as a lifelong reader and fan.
Like many in the SF community and beyond, I’ve watched the emergence of modern fascism with bleak Lovecraftian horror. It feels as though our little world of sci-fi readers and writers got an early foretaste of this when a group of far right activists turned the Hugo awards into a platform for their bigoted ideology. But there’s a good reason why the Sadly Rabid Puppies targeted the world’s biggest SF award – science fiction can be a powerful way of resisting fascism.
The small minded nationalism that lead to Brexit in the UK, and the outright racism that fueled the Trump campaign, have left the whole world in no doubt that the far right is making its strongest push to assert fascist ideology on us all since the 1930s. That time it lead to global war. Today we are all searching for any way we can prevent that tragedy repeating. How can science fiction be more than an escape from today’s reality? One of the greats of the genre has an answer.
Writing in March 1937, at the height of the Nazi threat in Europe, the legendary science fiction author Olaf Stapledon wondered what response he and other writers could make in such dark times.
“In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced judgment. Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with minds closed against the world’s most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their contemporaries, but also are subtly insincere.“
Stapledon is keen to identify that a central risk for any writer, artist or creator in the face of terror, is too hide. But Stapledon sees an equal and opposite risk, for writers who “take up arms” as political activists.
“The very urgency of their service may tend to blind them to the importance of maintaining and extending, what may be called the ‘self critical self consciousness of the human species’, the attempt to see man’s life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan.“
These words, that so accurately capture the conundrum faced by writers today, were written by Stapledon for the introduction to his seminal SF novel Star Maker. It’s a story that reaches beyond the bounds of human existence, to life in the broadest possible sense, on the galactic scale, and has been inspiration to generations of SF authors. And it’s a novel that, far from worshipping only at the altar of science, also dives headlong into the spiritual.
“At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words “spiritual” and “worship”, which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive.”
That experience, in Olaf Stapledon’s thinking, is to see the world from a perspective beyond the human individual, or any political ideology. Stapledon believed that the highest calling of science fiction was to show us the universe, our world, and our selves in new ways. To see our “turbulent world against a background of stars”.
“The attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis.”
As the last year has unfolded, and the peril of our new political situation has become clearer, my thoughts have gone to Star Maker many times. Seeing our moment in the full context of our history, and potential future, is a form of self-healing, and a way to reorient our perspective away from the immediate tumult, and back to the bigger, universal, picture.
Fascism can only win by reducing us to the most narrow minded and bigoted ways of seeing the world. Science fiction is a perfect way to show people the widest, most imaginative, and most hopeful ways of seeing. As SF readers and writers we might choose activism, we might choose withdrawal. But if we really want to make a difference, our best tool is to write, read and promote great science fiction.
A myth is more than just an old story. In their day, hundreds or thouands of years ago, myths shaped reality. WOAH! That’s a big claim, right? That the Ramayana actually shaped the reality of the people who read it two thousand years ago? That’s like saying Star Wars: Rogue One is shaping our reality today. Maybe it is. Story is how our mind works, and the stories we tell say everything about how we think.
“If Viking myths made humans fearless, I think ours tend to make us fearful.”
If like me you have a new addiction to the Vikings tv show, you’ve probably been doing some thinking about Viking myths. Stories of Odin One-Eye, that eye given to look in the well of knowledge, resonate especially in the frozen months of northen climates. Thor, Loki, Baldur, Freya and the other gods have never truly gone away. Their still on every cinema screen thanks to Marvel, and being read by millions thanks to authors like Neil Gaiman.
Viking myths described a world that was remarkably small. The world was only as wide a longboat could row. The gods lived just overhead, but out of reach, in the heavens above. And they watched and judged our lives. Men and women lived out their destiny, and fought bloody battles to pursue their fate, all to be judged well by the gods. Where today we see the universe as infinite, Vikings saw their cosmos as eternal. An endless battlefield, on which the eternal dramas of gods and men cycled forever. A mortal man was just a shadow of a greater reality. The point of life wasn’t to live a long life in safety and comfort. It was to commit acts that would echo in eternity.
Vikings weren’t alone in this worldview. The myths of the Greeks and Romans, and of the ancient Hindu world, all painted a similar picture. These were all pagan mythologies, and warrior cultures. We idolise these times, because they were well suited to the telling of great heroic tales. Of course they were, by our standards, brutal and unjust times, filled with terrible human suffering. But that’s to judge another reality by our own standards. Those who really believed the pagan worldview had no reason to fear death or suffering. Those things were just a gateway to eternal life.
Vikings is impressive as a tv show because, under the guidance of writer Michael Hirst, it dedicates a lot of time to the clash of Viking culture with the Christian culture of Anglo-Saxon Britain. In a memorable scene, a small band of Viking warriors in a “shieldwall” obliterate a far larger Saxon army. The Vikings are better warriors because they do not fear death. The weird mashup of pagan and juedo-christian beliefs that were Anglo-Saxon Christianity made them fearful of death, and of the judgement that would be made upon their sinful souls.
If stories are the operating system of human consciousness, then myths are culture specific upgrades, each new version bringing new features and retiring some old ones. Viking myths made men fearless. Christian myths made us compliant. They took the wild heroism of Viking and pagan cultures, and tamed it into the more stable, communal Anglo-Saxon world. We’re a thousand years or more on from that cultural shift. What do our myths make us?
Our tv screens are filled with heroic tales. And you don’t have to look far to find overbearing patriarchal sky gods still stalking the world. But the real myths of the modern world are stories told by science. A universe some 12 billion years old, measured by the speed of light in a vacumn. Life emerging from a blind process of evolution. All of it beginning with a Big Bang. A very 20th century idea, reflecting all the bullets, combustion engines and nuclear bombs that kept recent history banging. And we do have all these stories of powerful machines, The Terminator or The Matrix, determined to enslave or kill human life.
If Viking myths made humans fearless, I think ours tend to make us fearful. Terrified specks of animate matter in a vast inanimate universe. Once the gods walked with us shoulder to shoulder. Now there are no gods. No eternal drama of life. Only an infinite empty universe, not even ambivalent to our cause, but utterly unaware of it. These are the stories that shape our reality. These are our myths. And even a fearless Viking would find them soul shudderingly bleak.
This post is my answer to the political battles of the last 12 months. To Brexit, to Trump, to the resurgent racist #AltRight, and most of all to a kind of conservatism that I do not see as an enemy, but which seems to see me as one. But it doesn’t quite begin there.
I’m a writer, and the essay is one of my favourite forms. I love storytelling the most, but there’s also a need in this world to speak plainly about what we think. My best essay to date was published three years ago by Aeon magazine. Entitled “Sparks Will Fly”, it was an essay about what I call “Creator Culture”, the idea that technology and social progress are making all of us, instead of passive consumers, active creators.
That essay was brought back to my mind this week with the publication of a new and rather fine audio edition. Listening to this new narration, I realised that my essay of a few years ago had already answered, in part, the political realities I find myself chewing over today.
I write to understand. I write because, until I go through the disciplined process of composing disparate ideas into a coherent argument, I don’t truly know what my position is. Through the summer of Brexit and Trump I thought through a number of written responses. Most weren’t trying to understand. They were a call to arms. A fight-them-on-the beaches rhetoric, certainly a feeling many liberals hold today. But I don’t think fighting conservatism is ever the answer. Instead, we need to out create it.
Conservatism is not a creative ideology. It relies, always, for growth and new energy, on liberalism. Five centuries ago, not torturing people to death was the new liberal idea on the block, along with the Earth not being flat. Conservatives were outraged. They always are. But deep down conservatives know they are always doomed to lose, because the the only true alternative to growth and change, is stasis and death.
“the strains on our social order created by high speed progress are the core of 2016’s many political conundrums”
In political terms 2016 grew out of two problems. The less serious, but more dramatic, is the huge new influence of crazed demagogues in our political system. Nigel Farage and Brexit, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, the various petty agitators conglomerated as the #AltRight, and their early cultural indicators like Gamergate and the Sad Puppies, are all the same problem. Social media empowers demagogues, and the left has a few of its own to admit to (Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Adam Curtis, I’m looking at you…and anyone on the left who repeats the junk they put out without questioning it.)
But these demagogues are exploiting a deeper and far more serious problem, of which they are only one of many symptoms. It’s an age old social conflict, from which many of humankind’s greatest achievements, and worst failures, have sprung. We’ve had these same arguments at every stage of social growth, from the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society, to the emergence of industrialism, capitalism and of course communism. Today this struggle is out of control, and causing serious problems.
On one had we have the forces of social progress, most often championed in Liberalism. On the other hand we have the forces of social cohesion, represented in bulk by Conservatism. I choose to call the goal of conservatives “cohesion” because I think it’s important, actually essential, to acknowledge that the basic aim of conservatives – a stable social order – is not in and of itself a bad thing. And that the strains on our social order created by high speed progress are at the core of 2016’s many political conundrums.
What are people really saying when they talk about wanting manufacturing jobs back? Well, in large part they just a want a stable work life, that allows time with their family and friends. Instead, increasingly, we have debt fuelled lives, insecure jobs with crazy work hours, and crumbling family relationships. I’m sure everyone recognises that new reality, and feels a little grief at least for the losses. Nearly all of us can react in deeply conservative ways, when change places our basic happiness at risk.
“For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.” Mark Zuckerberg
The balance between liberal progressive ideals, and conservative calls for social stability, must be a constant negotiation. Neither position is right, they are forces that must be forever balanced and rebalanced. That negotiation has, in recent decades, collapsed into polarised, partisan name calling, around increasingly illogical positions on both left and right. This failure allows the worst aspects of both sides, the demagogues, racists, regressives, bigots and outright criminals, to flourish.
Fighting conservatives won’t re-establish that negotiation. And, let’s be honest here, liberal progress is not achieved through conflict. Activism, of course, plays a part. But it has never been the primary tool of social progress, because it so eaily becomse self-defeating, unleashing exactly the forces of anger and hopelessness that liberal progress must stand against. Instead, liberal progress has a much more powerful tool.
We create the future we want to live in, then we invite others to come and live there with us.
The great stride forwards in progress between 1950 – 2000 weren’t the product of a fight. Millions of creative people, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, writers, academics, executives, politicans and many more, just went ahead and CREATED a more interesting world, and the vast majority of people decided they would rather live in it. There was no single vote, no great battle, no president or CEO decided this. It evolved, and the engine of that evolution was creativity.
If you genuinely want to argue that the world of 1950 was a better place, you won’t get a serious answer from me. The world of post 2000 is riddled with problems. But a return to the past is an answer to none of them. Both the political right and left have fallen into a lazy disdain for modern society. Mindless hatred of state spending on one side is matched by mindless hatred of corporate innovation on the other. Again, these are forces to be balanced through negotiation, not absolutes to be won by force.
All of which is really a preamble to my simple point. Many of my very good liberal friends are preparing metaphorical (and perhaps a few literal) baseball bats, to combat the conservative enemy. A level of muscular resistance is useful. But. Please, please, please. Do not let your anger steal away your true power, which is and always has been your creativity. We can create a better world, but we can only fight our way to a worse one.
We may want to fight conservatives, but we don’t have to. Real victory will come from continuing to create a better world, for everybody, especially those who struggle most to see what we can all create together.
My new course on Creative Intelligence launches later in 2017. Join my writing school (entirely free) for updates, and get a taster with my free intro course on Storytelling for Writers.
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The only thing I’m going to say about Rogue One is this…it’s a perfect prequel to A New Hope. In every possible way. Any more than that would risk spoilers. Go and see it, you will argee that in many ways it’s the film the Star Wars prequels could have been.
“Anakin Skywalker is Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof all rolled into one archetype.”
I remember my excitement going to see Phantom Menace in ’99. And the sick disappoint at how very bad it was. It damaged my faith in Star Wars for a very long time, until Force Awakens…awakened my new hope (sorry).
Rogue One makes me even more excited for Star Wars. It shows Disney as a studio – arguably the only major studio – willing to take risks on darker, more nuanced storytelling on a major scifi franchise. And yes, also more political storytelling. For a story arc of the sheer size and epic grandeur as Star Wars to work, those things have to be there.
And of all their many failings, the Star Wars prequels worst sin was the absolute failure to convey the darkness of the story they were telling. If Star Wars begins with A New Hope, then the stories that preceede it are the destruction of hope. The prequel trilogy is about the triumph of tyranny over the republic…how can that not be a political story?!
Anakin Skywalker’s story arc is the darkest tale that can be told. He is the holder of power that can, literally, save the galaxy. Instead he is corrupted by an ideology of hate. His arc turns on a fascist terrorist attack where, with his own hands, he murders children he was sworn to protect. Anakin Skywalker is Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof all rolled into one archetype.
Disney has a history of understanding the long term value of great storytelling. For decades it only released it’s movies on special occaisions, and shunned video releases for years. It’s a very different company since Pixar’s reverse takeover, but it’s business commitment to storytelling is even greater.
Rogue One proves that Disney want future audiences to be able to watch Star Wars as one flowing, seamless saga. It wants to own one of the all time archetypal narrative arcs, the ultimate Heroes Journey, as told in every culture from Hunduism through the Norse myths, recast for the modren age. That’s a product it can sell to audiences for decades to come.
The Star Wars prequels just aren’t good enough to fulfill that ambition for Disney. It won’t happen soon, it won’t be announced until they are ready, but have no doubt that those films will be remade to fit Disney’s high standards of storytelling. I for one welcome it, because with Anakin’s story told in its true darkness, Star Wars will be greater than ever.
Regular readers will know that I’m more that a little bit passionate about the power of storytelling. Over the summer I’ve been creating a course in The Rhetoric of Story, filming a series of seven video lectures in locations including Bali, France and Italy. The full course is almost complete, with just one more lecture to record at my current location in Thailand.
Chiang Mai is my favourite city in the world, so I was very happy to get back here after a summer of wandering. And even happier to get an invite to talk to the cities fantastic writing group. Chiang Mai is a city of writers, so it’s an honour to be asked to share some of my teaching with them. The talk was really well attended, with about 70 fellow writers there to hear what I had to say.
The talk went so well that I’ve decided to offer it as a short course on the Writing Practice, my online school. It’s a brief introduction to some of the content from The Rhetoric of Story, presented in a conversational style, with comments and questions from the audience. Follow the link below to learn more.
PS – I just need THREE more patrons to hit my target of 40 for my SUPER-PATRON promotion. Go on…you know you want to… https://www.patreon.com/DamienWalter
