Paul, may I ask: have you ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano or Cat's Cradle, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, or O'Brien's Voyage to Alpha Centauri? Just curious.
Like a lot of us here, I wrestle with my relationship with technology. Specifically, where my line needs to be drawn and how to disentangle myself in the areas of my life I've allowed to become too driven by it. One thing I won't use is A.I. technology, even though it's being incorporated in more and more of the daily things we use. This week, I've been rewatching The Matrix, and I took note of the scene where Morpheus describes to Neo how the matrix first started: At the beginning of the 21st century, man was united in celebration over creating A.I. that eventually turned on them and sparked a war. 1999 wasn't that long ago, but it still feels prescient and disheartening that we could go from being wisely leery of it to the level of acceptance (and even embrace) that we see now 25 years later.
I also do all I can to avoid it, futile as that may be. I feel about letting it into my mind it the way some people feel about taking GMOs into their bodies. The only part of it I have fooled with a little bit is DALL-e. (As a word person I don't take fooling around with pictures as seriously.) I found it stupid—a sidewise, wastefully indirect way of creating. Like trying to walk a straight line across a rotating turntable. You craft the prompt and then hope the thing will magically intuit and execute what you already see in your mind's eye. It almost never does. It'd be much less frustrating to draw it yourself, even lacking skills.
That touches on one of the reasons I find A.I. concerning: The lack of regard for one's own ability make things. For craft. For willingness to sustain the effort long enough to make something worthwhile.
To outsource to a machine the work of getting out into the shared world what you’ve envisioned in your inner world seems like an abdication of the whole point of being human. A shortcut to nowhere.
Goodness you’re so right about that. It’s an observation which is true to any degree - which is partly why it’s such an important observation - from composing a symphony to doing the washing up and everything in between.
The use of electronic devices to distract children – yes, “distract” – is so prevalent today, that my wife and I have gotten a fair bit of criticism for not allowing family to purchase tablets for our two children. Instead, we buy them books and crafts. Outdoor toys. Legos. Things that spur the imagination. And we take them to activities outside: the zoo, fall festivals, corn mazes, etc.
Paul, you mentioned just going outside to look at the moon. I was reminded of the simple pleasures of being outside with my family over a year ago, when we visited my parents in Kentucky to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. It was around Easter. Not quite her birthday, but close enough to bundle it into Spring break! We stayed at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, a lovely, restored Shaker community about 30 minutes away from Lexington, the state’s second largest city. Shaker Village is also a fully functioning sustainable farm, where they attempt to farm and raise livestock just as the Shakers did. Many of the residence halls have been converted into hotel rooms for guests to stay overnight. It really is a lovely experience! And there is almost no cell signal!
While there on this particular jaunt, we were pleasantly surprised to see that Shaker Village was celebrating “Baby Animal Days.” For her birthday, my daughter was able to ride horses, play with baby animals – in particular 2 lambs! – and just have an all-around fun time with her brother, mother, and I. And it was all outdoors! To this day, she still says that was the best birthday ever!
Wonderful memories to cultivate for your children, and Kentucky is full of such enchantments. I lived in Shelby County and Louisville/Jefferson County for my teen and young adult years, with a four year college term in Lexington at Transylvania, the oldest college west of the Alleghenies and once called the Harvard of the West. Shaker Village is delightful, and we also scouted out Bernheim Forest, Bardstown (with an actual dinner train), the beautiful horse farms of the Bluegrass, and the Kentucky Horse Park near Georgetown, all lively locales for tactile connections with flora and fauna, and the stuff good memories are made of. Like the old eco friendly ads from yesteryear would say, ‘take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.’ What a blessed childhood you are weaving for your younglings!
Who knew there were so many PK fans from/in Kentucky‽ I know well every place you’ve mentioned. Our little hobby farm is one of the only things that helps me keep my feet (and soul) grounded in the real. And Paul’s reflections are solace in an unsettling time.
My grandfather maintains his father's 400 acres of farmland in Kentucky. He and his 3 siblings inherited it from their dad, and all of his siblings died either without heirs or without heirs who cared. So, he made sure to buy all 400 acres. He has gotten so much flak from other family members for this . . . "Why don't you just sell some of it?" "Why do you need all that land?" His response is always the same: "It was my father's land, and now it's mine. And I'm not giving it up!" Of course, I am all for him keeping it in the family, as are both of my brothers. It's our heritage, and our roots!
In the midst of all of the madness of the world and wrestling with what to do about it, thought I’d share one of my favorite blog posts from the inimitable Fr. Stephen Freeman. I’ve come back to this more often than any other thing I’ve read, short of the Scriptures.
The best thing I ever did during 2020 was to camp our way across the US for 2 months. National Parks were close to empty, filled instead with that most delicious of all atmospheres—quiet, and wildlife was in abundance as humans huddled in their houses. Though we didn't see a badger, with did see a coatimundi and plenty of cougar tracks.
The sky even seemed darker, though I'm not sure why that would be. One night we watched the moon and stars from our tent in the desert, top open-screened with no fly covering it. The next morning we woke to the music of an ephemeral stream which had appeared overnight beside our tent.
One day while out hiking on desert rocks in Arizona, a desert storm—complete with lightning—rolled up towards us. Noting that we were both the highest elements on the landscape and quickly getting drenched, we ran and hid, literally, in the cleft of a rock. A shelter from the storm that pounded our hiding place for a good ten minutes.
Later, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we took shelter from the fierce noon sun in the cool, shaded space created by a crack in a great rock. I kid you not. It was as if our entire experience was designed to be a living tableau of the passage from Isaiah:
Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,
and princes will rule in justice.
2 Each will be like a hiding place from the wind,
a shelter from the storm,
like streams of water in a dry place,
like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
The Book of Creation speaks loudest of all, if you'll nurture the internal stillness to hear it.
Paul thank you for that beautiful image and the words that go with it. It cheers me here in the heart of London. Reminds me of the world out there I seldom get to see.
The train to perdition has most definitely left the station. We’ve all been reading these very good if disturbing posts concerning earthly disasters and their demonic progenitors (kooks, spooks, et al who lord over us) and the bottom line is that only prayer will get us through. That and helping who we can help, and by not contributing to this modern hellscape born of wars, interventions, and hedonistic greed. What Paul said at the close of one of his presentations: “what we need are saints” carries so much more weight even just a few scant months after he said it. What we got though, are demons- the shark eyed deceivers who serve the father of lies. Pray, pray, pray and look at natural beauty on the earth and in the heavens-“gaze at the sky, and picture a memory of days in your life when you knew what it meant to be happy and free, with time on your side...” Maybe that child-like belief is where we are supposed to dwell, as the Alan Parsons lyric suggests.
I have a large number of books I've read over time. Sometimes, I enjoy picking one up and revisiting it. I did that this morning with John Gray's book Straw Dogs. The first chapter begins with a quote from Jacques Monod, the 1965 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology: "All religions, all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency." I agree with this even though I find it unsettling to think about it.
Peehap that view itself results from the mechanistic world view that has come to overwhelm us since the rise of science? We are just things pushed up by random causal processes.
Yes, it is a view derived from science. I am a scientist myself, but I don't agree with an entirely mechanistic world view since the true nature of "matter" and the origins of the cosmos itself are both quite mysterious.
I used to think that way. Gray is an atheist of course, though a thoughtful one. I don't see that now. I have been rewired, somehow. That worldview comes from seeing only the material world, as measured by modern science. There are a lot of dimensions beyond that, which I think pre-modern people found it much easier to see, not being entangled and blinded by the electric lights and the test tubes. This is my feeling now.
There is another quote at the beginning of Gray's book that I also find meaningful: "Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs." Lao Tzu
It is 11h30 at night at my place, and I just found this in my in box. As much as I would love to hang around and comment, (but I did like this introduction Paul, and agree 200% about electricity), I am going to bed after turning out the lights. Times have been hard recently, and I am very discouraged by all our ranting madness. Gotta go to bed and sleep.
I'm reading "The Wake" and something caught my eye on page 157:
>> thu is worthy only be triewe
> to this land
>> to its folc
> to the eald hus
>> the sunne gan down the sunne rises
> we will rise
The land, its folk, and the old house--sounds like people, place, and prayer!
The sun going down and the sun rising is also a timely reminder, both for winter and for this historical time. May the sun rise again. (I haven't finished the book yet; hopefully the ending doesn't render this comment ironically sad.)
Every time I try to start wintering well, with fires and tea and yarn, the damn seed catalogs show up. I dumped them all, and am trying to stay in the season over here a little longer. Last year after a week without power and cooking on the wood stove, my kids decided we were not going back. This summer they are planning a big project-- living in a cabin on a friends’ property with just water, fire and some supplies-- but they all have to be old fashioned-- no plastic, no coolers, etc. Their excitement, the long lists, passionate discussions over food prep and laundry and fishing for dinner is magic.
I have been a lifelong fan of Lovecraft, as are my husband and sons. His was a truly original vision, and I agree that the times we are entering would make him something of a prophet. His universe is cold, forbidding, and uncaring, and his demons are realistic and terrifying.
Anyone with the most basic understanding of his life would realize that calling him a racist is to completely miss the point. He was agoraphobic, afraid of people, and definitely guilty of name calling. But when a man includes Poles in his dreaded “swarthy peoples” how seriously should his “racism” be taken? He was never in a position to deny someone a job or a home because of his prejudices. His cat’s name is unfortunate, and certainly hurtful, and it is a shame that he publicized it in several stories. He deserves to be remembered for his brilliant ability to terrify.
Few people know, unless they read his biography, that he was actually married for a time to a Jewish woman, which does show how shallow his prejudices were. They amicably divorced when her career required a move and he couldn’t cope with the change.
Lovecrafts' racism is interesting. I don't know if you've read the piece I linked to, but it talks about it well (including the story of his wife.) He was a genuine racist, in the classical sense (not in the modern reworking of the word, which essentially means 'not progressive.') He wrote a lot in his letters about how anyone who was not a WASP was essentially polluting the American gene pool. He used to physically shake when he saw a black person in the street, and he was virulently anti-semitic. And yet his actual life does not reflect his internal prejudices. He married a Jewish woman, as you say, and by all accounts on a personal level he was kind to everyone, regardless of their colour. To me it seems that his racism was part of his more all-encompassing fear of people - and the world in general. He was shy and an oddball and the world scared him. He retreated into a very particular vision of a WASPy New England and he didn't like anything to disturb it. His general terror of existence, and his difficulty with it, is what created the world of his fiction. None of it would have happened without that fear.
An excellent analysis of the facts about him. Actually I missed the link, which is paywalled, but read the Houellebecq book on him, as well as a lot of the work he did with other people, rewriting their stories in many cases, devoting much of his short life to helping fellow writers, pouring out literary advice in thousands of letters. Also, people forget that while his views were expressed from a position of extreme neuroticism, they were the views of many if not most educated people of his day. Eugenics had all the scientific support we have come to expect from trendy, hasty science in the hands of an elite who “know better”. In fact the scientific climate of our day has a lot in common with his.
The convenient forgetting of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood’s role in the vanguard of the eugenics movement as a way to prevent undesirable births ( more specifically the birth of undesirables) has been hushed up while other historical figures are treated to a daily scourging the the public square.
As I've gotten older, I've come to see racism or bigotry as something that flows downstream from a larger defect. People who are considered racists are usually nasty people, even hateful, and their bigotry is just one feature of the nastiness. Or, sometimes it's a product of a larger anti-social mental illness where bigotry is but only one symptom.
But in the Western mind, we've been conditioned to see bigotry as the ultimate evil, maybe the only genuine evil, which causes us to miss the larger perspective of who that person is, warts and all.
I tend to think that fear is a big part of it. Racism tends to stem, often anyway, from fear of 'the other' and this fear is hardwired into us by our history and evolution. In many ways it is a rational fear, given that, at most times in human history, 'the other' may indeed have been a threat to tribe, culture or even life. In a time like ours though, with a lot of mixing, racism becomes the ultimate sin. We swerve to the other extreme and represent all and any discrimination as bigotry and hatred. I think there is a balance to be struck between too much openness and too little. It's hard.
That balance requires honest terms, and as you allude to above, racism is no longer an honest (or even useful) term. In the 90s psychologists distinguished between stereotypes and racism. Everyone has stereotypes of groups (even the in-group members). But they are not racist. Now, with Kendi and his fellow travelers, having a stereotype is considered racist. Kendi calls his own parents racist when they really just have the same stereotypes of African Americans that everyone else has.
Nothing like the moon...if its not raining and not too many clouds, I often stand outside for a while before going to bed. It's comforting and calming. Even if the weather's foul I still poke my nose out of the back door every night, even if just for a few seconds. My father used to do it, when he was mobile before the dementia really kicked in. It used to make me smile. I'd ask him why he always did it and he'd reply "just checking it's still all there" then go off to bed. I understand now what he got from it...peace and reassurance.
Thanks for this article with it's very interesting links. I hadn't known about the CJ Hopkins prosecution and appreciated the material in the link. His statement was so powerful, so convincing..... I've been reading other material about the creeping authoritarianism in the West, and Hopkins' definitions absolutely rang bells..... so familiar here in NZ where I live. It's heartening here that the majority of the population voted out our "new Left" authoritarian government late last year, but we do have to wait and see with the new crowd.
Paul, may I ask: have you ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano or Cat's Cradle, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, or O'Brien's Voyage to Alpha Centauri? Just curious.
Michael O'Brien's Voyage to Alpha Centauri is a science fiction masterpiece!
That’s one of the few of his I haven’t read yet! Thanks for the reminder!
It's quite possibly one of the best books I've ever read. And that's not hyperbole!
Yes, most of them. I went through a Vonnegut phase years ago and still have them on my shelf. I'm an admirer.
Thanks Paul, shit is hitting the fan over here
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1750152783028740314?t=z1iSAGfqmrerNMfPBLa3Rg&s=19
Like a lot of us here, I wrestle with my relationship with technology. Specifically, where my line needs to be drawn and how to disentangle myself in the areas of my life I've allowed to become too driven by it. One thing I won't use is A.I. technology, even though it's being incorporated in more and more of the daily things we use. This week, I've been rewatching The Matrix, and I took note of the scene where Morpheus describes to Neo how the matrix first started: At the beginning of the 21st century, man was united in celebration over creating A.I. that eventually turned on them and sparked a war. 1999 wasn't that long ago, but it still feels prescient and disheartening that we could go from being wisely leery of it to the level of acceptance (and even embrace) that we see now 25 years later.
I also do all I can to avoid it, futile as that may be. I feel about letting it into my mind it the way some people feel about taking GMOs into their bodies. The only part of it I have fooled with a little bit is DALL-e. (As a word person I don't take fooling around with pictures as seriously.) I found it stupid—a sidewise, wastefully indirect way of creating. Like trying to walk a straight line across a rotating turntable. You craft the prompt and then hope the thing will magically intuit and execute what you already see in your mind's eye. It almost never does. It'd be much less frustrating to draw it yourself, even lacking skills.
That touches on one of the reasons I find A.I. concerning: The lack of regard for one's own ability make things. For craft. For willingness to sustain the effort long enough to make something worthwhile.
To outsource to a machine the work of getting out into the shared world what you’ve envisioned in your inner world seems like an abdication of the whole point of being human. A shortcut to nowhere.
Wow, this is a wonderfully worded and succinct comment!
Exactly, beautifully said...what then would be the point....
Goodness you’re so right about that. It’s an observation which is true to any degree - which is partly why it’s such an important observation - from composing a symphony to doing the washing up and everything in between.
The use of electronic devices to distract children – yes, “distract” – is so prevalent today, that my wife and I have gotten a fair bit of criticism for not allowing family to purchase tablets for our two children. Instead, we buy them books and crafts. Outdoor toys. Legos. Things that spur the imagination. And we take them to activities outside: the zoo, fall festivals, corn mazes, etc.
Paul, you mentioned just going outside to look at the moon. I was reminded of the simple pleasures of being outside with my family over a year ago, when we visited my parents in Kentucky to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. It was around Easter. Not quite her birthday, but close enough to bundle it into Spring break! We stayed at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, a lovely, restored Shaker community about 30 minutes away from Lexington, the state’s second largest city. Shaker Village is also a fully functioning sustainable farm, where they attempt to farm and raise livestock just as the Shakers did. Many of the residence halls have been converted into hotel rooms for guests to stay overnight. It really is a lovely experience! And there is almost no cell signal!
While there on this particular jaunt, we were pleasantly surprised to see that Shaker Village was celebrating “Baby Animal Days.” For her birthday, my daughter was able to ride horses, play with baby animals – in particular 2 lambs! – and just have an all-around fun time with her brother, mother, and I. And it was all outdoors! To this day, she still says that was the best birthday ever!
I went to college very close to Shaker Village and we visited a handful of times. Beautiful place.
Yes it is! Always a highlight of visiting my family.
We lived in Wilmore and visited Shaker Village every chance we got!
Not sure I'm familiar with Wilmore . . . I hail from over in Hardin County, around Elizabethtown.
It’s south of Lexington. Home of Asbury College. Mayberry! 😊
Now I remember where it is! I love that area of Kentucky. If I'm ever able to move back home, that's the area I'd like to put down roots!
sounds like much of vermont..
I have heard this comparison before!
Wonderful memories to cultivate for your children, and Kentucky is full of such enchantments. I lived in Shelby County and Louisville/Jefferson County for my teen and young adult years, with a four year college term in Lexington at Transylvania, the oldest college west of the Alleghenies and once called the Harvard of the West. Shaker Village is delightful, and we also scouted out Bernheim Forest, Bardstown (with an actual dinner train), the beautiful horse farms of the Bluegrass, and the Kentucky Horse Park near Georgetown, all lively locales for tactile connections with flora and fauna, and the stuff good memories are made of. Like the old eco friendly ads from yesteryear would say, ‘take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.’ What a blessed childhood you are weaving for your younglings!
I can still remember going to Bernheim Forest with my family when I was a child. Good memories!
Who knew there were so many PK fans from/in Kentucky‽ I know well every place you’ve mentioned. Our little hobby farm is one of the only things that helps me keep my feet (and soul) grounded in the real. And Paul’s reflections are solace in an unsettling time.
My grandfather maintains his father's 400 acres of farmland in Kentucky. He and his 3 siblings inherited it from their dad, and all of his siblings died either without heirs or without heirs who cared. So, he made sure to buy all 400 acres. He has gotten so much flak from other family members for this . . . "Why don't you just sell some of it?" "Why do you need all that land?" His response is always the same: "It was my father's land, and now it's mine. And I'm not giving it up!" Of course, I am all for him keeping it in the family, as are both of my brothers. It's our heritage, and our roots!
In the midst of all of the madness of the world and wrestling with what to do about it, thought I’d share one of my favorite blog posts from the inimitable Fr. Stephen Freeman. I’ve come back to this more often than any other thing I’ve read, short of the Scriptures.
https://glory2godforallthings.com/2021/01/20/doing-the-good-you-can-do-2/
Really nice piece, thanks for sharing. Just living like that would dissolve a huge number of problems
Fantastic! Thanks for the share. 🙏
Wonderful! Love Fr. Stephen so much. Thanks for sharing this post I hadn't read.
Boy, did I need to read that. Thank you, F_S!
Thank you. I too enjoyed this article.
Thank you for this. Here's to doing the good at hand.
I'll talk about moons and badgers *and* storms.
The best thing I ever did during 2020 was to camp our way across the US for 2 months. National Parks were close to empty, filled instead with that most delicious of all atmospheres—quiet, and wildlife was in abundance as humans huddled in their houses. Though we didn't see a badger, with did see a coatimundi and plenty of cougar tracks.
The sky even seemed darker, though I'm not sure why that would be. One night we watched the moon and stars from our tent in the desert, top open-screened with no fly covering it. The next morning we woke to the music of an ephemeral stream which had appeared overnight beside our tent.
One day while out hiking on desert rocks in Arizona, a desert storm—complete with lightning—rolled up towards us. Noting that we were both the highest elements on the landscape and quickly getting drenched, we ran and hid, literally, in the cleft of a rock. A shelter from the storm that pounded our hiding place for a good ten minutes.
Later, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we took shelter from the fierce noon sun in the cool, shaded space created by a crack in a great rock. I kid you not. It was as if our entire experience was designed to be a living tableau of the passage from Isaiah:
Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,
and princes will rule in justice.
2 Each will be like a hiding place from the wind,
a shelter from the storm,
like streams of water in a dry place,
like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
The Book of Creation speaks loudest of all, if you'll nurture the internal stillness to hear it.
Paul thank you for that beautiful image and the words that go with it. It cheers me here in the heart of London. Reminds me of the world out there I seldom get to see.
The train to perdition has most definitely left the station. We’ve all been reading these very good if disturbing posts concerning earthly disasters and their demonic progenitors (kooks, spooks, et al who lord over us) and the bottom line is that only prayer will get us through. That and helping who we can help, and by not contributing to this modern hellscape born of wars, interventions, and hedonistic greed. What Paul said at the close of one of his presentations: “what we need are saints” carries so much more weight even just a few scant months after he said it. What we got though, are demons- the shark eyed deceivers who serve the father of lies. Pray, pray, pray and look at natural beauty on the earth and in the heavens-“gaze at the sky, and picture a memory of days in your life when you knew what it meant to be happy and free, with time on your side...” Maybe that child-like belief is where we are supposed to dwell, as the Alan Parsons lyric suggests.
I have a large number of books I've read over time. Sometimes, I enjoy picking one up and revisiting it. I did that this morning with John Gray's book Straw Dogs. The first chapter begins with a quote from Jacques Monod, the 1965 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology: "All religions, all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency." I agree with this even though I find it unsettling to think about it.
Peehap that view itself results from the mechanistic world view that has come to overwhelm us since the rise of science? We are just things pushed up by random causal processes.
Yes, it is a view derived from science. I am a scientist myself, but I don't agree with an entirely mechanistic world view since the true nature of "matter" and the origins of the cosmos itself are both quite mysterious.
I used to think that way. Gray is an atheist of course, though a thoughtful one. I don't see that now. I have been rewired, somehow. That worldview comes from seeing only the material world, as measured by modern science. There are a lot of dimensions beyond that, which I think pre-modern people found it much easier to see, not being entangled and blinded by the electric lights and the test tubes. This is my feeling now.
There is another quote at the beginning of Gray's book that I also find meaningful: "Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs." Lao Tzu
I don't think Heaven is ruthless. I have real dogs and one cat. No need for straw ones.
Lao Tzu is esoteric and silly.
It is 11h30 at night at my place, and I just found this in my in box. As much as I would love to hang around and comment, (but I did like this introduction Paul, and agree 200% about electricity), I am going to bed after turning out the lights. Times have been hard recently, and I am very discouraged by all our ranting madness. Gotta go to bed and sleep.
See you tomorrow, folks.
I'm reading "The Wake" and something caught my eye on page 157:
>> thu is worthy only be triewe
> to this land
>> to its folc
> to the eald hus
>> the sunne gan down the sunne rises
> we will rise
The land, its folk, and the old house--sounds like people, place, and prayer!
The sun going down and the sun rising is also a timely reminder, both for winter and for this historical time. May the sun rise again. (I haven't finished the book yet; hopefully the ending doesn't render this comment ironically sad.)
Every time I try to start wintering well, with fires and tea and yarn, the damn seed catalogs show up. I dumped them all, and am trying to stay in the season over here a little longer. Last year after a week without power and cooking on the wood stove, my kids decided we were not going back. This summer they are planning a big project-- living in a cabin on a friends’ property with just water, fire and some supplies-- but they all have to be old fashioned-- no plastic, no coolers, etc. Their excitement, the long lists, passionate discussions over food prep and laundry and fishing for dinner is magic.
I have been a lifelong fan of Lovecraft, as are my husband and sons. His was a truly original vision, and I agree that the times we are entering would make him something of a prophet. His universe is cold, forbidding, and uncaring, and his demons are realistic and terrifying.
Anyone with the most basic understanding of his life would realize that calling him a racist is to completely miss the point. He was agoraphobic, afraid of people, and definitely guilty of name calling. But when a man includes Poles in his dreaded “swarthy peoples” how seriously should his “racism” be taken? He was never in a position to deny someone a job or a home because of his prejudices. His cat’s name is unfortunate, and certainly hurtful, and it is a shame that he publicized it in several stories. He deserves to be remembered for his brilliant ability to terrify.
Few people know, unless they read his biography, that he was actually married for a time to a Jewish woman, which does show how shallow his prejudices were. They amicably divorced when her career required a move and he couldn’t cope with the change.
My favorite story is “The Color Out of Space”.
Lovecrafts' racism is interesting. I don't know if you've read the piece I linked to, but it talks about it well (including the story of his wife.) He was a genuine racist, in the classical sense (not in the modern reworking of the word, which essentially means 'not progressive.') He wrote a lot in his letters about how anyone who was not a WASP was essentially polluting the American gene pool. He used to physically shake when he saw a black person in the street, and he was virulently anti-semitic. And yet his actual life does not reflect his internal prejudices. He married a Jewish woman, as you say, and by all accounts on a personal level he was kind to everyone, regardless of their colour. To me it seems that his racism was part of his more all-encompassing fear of people - and the world in general. He was shy and an oddball and the world scared him. He retreated into a very particular vision of a WASPy New England and he didn't like anything to disturb it. His general terror of existence, and his difficulty with it, is what created the world of his fiction. None of it would have happened without that fear.
An excellent analysis of the facts about him. Actually I missed the link, which is paywalled, but read the Houellebecq book on him, as well as a lot of the work he did with other people, rewriting their stories in many cases, devoting much of his short life to helping fellow writers, pouring out literary advice in thousands of letters. Also, people forget that while his views were expressed from a position of extreme neuroticism, they were the views of many if not most educated people of his day. Eugenics had all the scientific support we have come to expect from trendy, hasty science in the hands of an elite who “know better”. In fact the scientific climate of our day has a lot in common with his.
The convenient forgetting of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood’s role in the vanguard of the eugenics movement as a way to prevent undesirable births ( more specifically the birth of undesirables) has been hushed up while other historical figures are treated to a daily scourging the the public square.
As I've gotten older, I've come to see racism or bigotry as something that flows downstream from a larger defect. People who are considered racists are usually nasty people, even hateful, and their bigotry is just one feature of the nastiness. Or, sometimes it's a product of a larger anti-social mental illness where bigotry is but only one symptom.
But in the Western mind, we've been conditioned to see bigotry as the ultimate evil, maybe the only genuine evil, which causes us to miss the larger perspective of who that person is, warts and all.
I tend to think that fear is a big part of it. Racism tends to stem, often anyway, from fear of 'the other' and this fear is hardwired into us by our history and evolution. In many ways it is a rational fear, given that, at most times in human history, 'the other' may indeed have been a threat to tribe, culture or even life. In a time like ours though, with a lot of mixing, racism becomes the ultimate sin. We swerve to the other extreme and represent all and any discrimination as bigotry and hatred. I think there is a balance to be struck between too much openness and too little. It's hard.
That balance requires honest terms, and as you allude to above, racism is no longer an honest (or even useful) term. In the 90s psychologists distinguished between stereotypes and racism. Everyone has stereotypes of groups (even the in-group members). But they are not racist. Now, with Kendi and his fellow travelers, having a stereotype is considered racist. Kendi calls his own parents racist when they really just have the same stereotypes of African Americans that everyone else has.
In honor of your photo, though it's the wrong changing of seasons
https://youtu.be/kAA75ZoZaPk?si=bok83UrdN7QITAnb
Nothing like the moon...if its not raining and not too many clouds, I often stand outside for a while before going to bed. It's comforting and calming. Even if the weather's foul I still poke my nose out of the back door every night, even if just for a few seconds. My father used to do it, when he was mobile before the dementia really kicked in. It used to make me smile. I'd ask him why he always did it and he'd reply "just checking it's still all there" then go off to bed. I understand now what he got from it...peace and reassurance.
Thanks for this article with it's very interesting links. I hadn't known about the CJ Hopkins prosecution and appreciated the material in the link. His statement was so powerful, so convincing..... I've been reading other material about the creeping authoritarianism in the West, and Hopkins' definitions absolutely rang bells..... so familiar here in NZ where I live. It's heartening here that the majority of the population voted out our "new Left" authoritarian government late last year, but we do have to wait and see with the new crowd.