{"id":1371,"date":"2014-10-22T19:43:25","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T19:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/?p=1371"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:10:54","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T11:10:54","slug":"david-brin-h-g-wells-and-the-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/2014\/10\/22\/david-brin-h-g-wells-and-the-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"David Brin, H.G. Wells and the Hero – Updated"},"content":{"rendered":"

[UPDATE: \u00a0And I told you so. \u00a0Brin’s been running a series on the ‘unstable world’, and said he was going to cover ISIS – but mysterious abandoned it before he got that far. \u00a0As predicted, there’s a certain kind of mind that just can’t dealt with the existence of the enemy.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure whether to be annoyed or amused by David Brin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I first stumbled across his work, I wanted to like him and he obviously wants to be liked.\u00a0 I like his admonition to libertarians that they cannot so easily forget that their liberty is the result of centuries of work.\u00a0 Similarly, his criticism of the lack of truly optimistic science fiction is well placed.\u00a0 I applauded when he wrote that the key thing about 9\/11 was the response of the citizenry, not the government.\u00a0 I even thought his comment on how libertarians failed to see that oligarchy was historically the worst enemy of the free market was more insightful than it was.<\/p>\n

The trouble is \u2013 well, where does one begin?\u00a0 He has a style of prose that tends to be both overwrought and pompous.\u00a0 No one has ever told him that praise of your work only counts when it is being made by someone else<\/em>.\u00a0 He keeps using words with multiple meanings as though they had only one, and it\u2019s the one that suits him (e.g. using \u2018liberalism\u2019 while failing to distinguish between American liberalism and liberalism in the rest of the world, using \u2018romanticism\u2019 while failing to distinguish between romantic art and romantic philosophy, and so on).\u00a0 He even has the cringeworthy habit of signing his stuff \u201cDavid Brin, Ph.D.\u201d, recalling Francis Wheen:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cNon-medical \u2018doctors\u2019 who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification \u2013 Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland \u2013 always bring disaster in their wake: it\u2019s tantamount to having the warning \u2018This Man is Dangerous\u2019 tattooed on one\u2019s forehead\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

That\u2019s all secondary to his unfortunate habit of misrepresenting pretty much anything.\u00a0 Here<\/a> he shares his wisdom on American patriotism:\u201cManiacal flag-waving is a well-known symptom of decline in great nations, from Rome in 400 AD to Britain in 1910.\u201d\u00a0 In point of fact, \u2018flag-waving\u2019 was far more pronounced at the nations\u2019 genesis than at their close \u2013 it was the citizens of the Roman republic<\/em> who lionized Brutus the Elder for executing his two sons when he discovered that they were plotting to destroy\u00a0revive monarchism.<\/p>\n

This glib misrepresentation is everywhere in his web stuff, like holes in a Swiss cheese.\u00a0 Whether the subject is Adam Smith<\/a>, Robert Heinlein<\/a>, the Austrian school<\/a>, the neoconservatives, Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien \u2013 Brin\u2019s representation can be counted on to be highly distorted at best.\u00a0 I\u2019ll go through each case at a later date, but the key thing is that these errors don\u2019t appear randomly.\u00a0 In other words they are not the errors of sloppy scholarship.\u00a0 They all follow a consistent line, and that line is the denial of heroism, and even human individualism.<\/p>\n

Brin\u2019s argument against<\/em> the romantic hero goes like this: only a minority are heroes, and these tend to be in some sense supernatural and super human \u2013 whether these are Achilles in the Iliad<\/em> or Anakin in Lucas\u2019 unwatchable film.\u00a0 Since that status is divinely granted, it cannot be imitated or approached by the ordinary folk, so it leads to a view where the ordinary ones can get sent to the wall with no concern, since only the blessed ones matter.<\/p>\n

Well, fair enough.\u00a0 I honestly don\u2019t have that much time for superhero comic books myself.\u00a0 There is, however, another tradition when it comes to showing heroism \u2013 one captured by Sir Edmund Hillary\u2019s remark: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be a hero to accomplish great things \u2013 to compete.\u00a0 You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Brin\u2019s having none of that<\/em> either<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[Tolkien]\u2019s elves and hobbits and uber-human warriors performed the same role that Lancelot and Merlin and Odysseus did in older fables, and that superheroes still do in comic books.\u00a0 Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance \u2013 above nations and civilizations \u2013 of the indomitable Romantic hero\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is just about possible to miss that Aragorn is a torn soul who is notably reluctant to accept his duty.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t at all possible to miss the the hobbits in the book, far from being \u2018uber-human\u2019 are very much everymen, or every-hobbits anyway.\u00a0 Frodo, not to mention Sam, Pippin and Merry are people who would infinitely prefer the quiet life back home, but find themselves having to step forward when circumstances force them to.\u00a0 Nor are they notably \u2018above nations and civilizations\u2019 \u2013 while Frodo does save the Shire, he is so wrecked by his experiences that he comes to realize that he has saved it, but not for himself.<\/p>\n

Tolkien was a devout Christian, and this is a profoundly Christain way of looking at things.\u00a0 It is saying that even the least can make a difference.\u00a0 It is also the exact opposite of what Brin claims Tolkien is saying. \u00a0 Divine or ordinary, Brin has a real thing against heroes (N.B.: He also has a habit of negatively referencing Niezsche while showing no sign of having understood him).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do you need heroes?\u201d I\u2019m sure he\u2019d say.\u00a0 \u201cYou want giants who stand out and above from the ordinary people?\u00a0 You know where that leads don\u2019t you?\u00a0 To Hitler, that\u2019s where!\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m exaggerating his rhetoric a bit, and stripping it of its customary ornament, but I am certain that something like this would be his response.<\/p>\n

Brin just will not shut up about the Nazis.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the film 300<\/em> he writes<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cLeni Riefenstahl would be proud\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the American right<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are the viewers of Fox and Beck\/Limbaugh so cosmically stupid that they never \u2013 any <\/em>of them \u2013 ask enough questions to notice the tsumani of ironies and contradictions and outright lies at their Nuremberg Rally\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

On climate change politics<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[Ocean acidification] cannot be armwaved away with Fox-nuremberg-style sieg-incantations.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

On the neoconservatives:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c[Neoconservatives\u201d] base their dogmas on an \u00e9migr\u00e9 philoshper named Leo Strauss, sharing their core calues with Plato, Hebel Marx, Goebbels and \u2013 ultimately \u2013 Muslim fundamentalists\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here Brin is repeating verbatim the charge originated by the crackpot conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite Lyndon LaRouche.\u00a0 I append no comment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What the devil is going on here?\u00a0 Brin\u2019s clearly not a stupid man despite the inanity of his writing.\u00a0 That\u2019s significant \u2013 he is possessed of a strong intellect that is strictly limited.\u00a0 How can a clever man argue like this?<\/p>\n

A clue is that he has written almost nothing on the subject of Islam.\u00a0 He repeatedly defends the vision of the progressive, scientific West against the forces of reaction \u2013 whether they are found in Tolkien, Star Wars, or FOX news.\u00a0 Yet he is silent on the most reactionary force in the world today.\u00a0 He praises the importance and necessity of criticism, and is silent about those who are abolishing criticism with the knife and bomb.<\/p>\n

Here we have to go back a way, about seventy years, to arguably the greatest science fiction writer of all time, H.G. Wells.\u00a0 People forget this, but Wells was not \u2018just\u2019 a novelist, he was a power that inspired confidence in science and scientific progress.\u00a0 Orwell wrote at the time \u201cThe minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.\u201d\u00a0 However, Orwell continues: \u201cOnly, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s Orwell\u2019s Hitler, Wells and the World State<\/em>, published in 1941.\u00a0 Orwell begins it by quoting a Wells\u2019 article, written at the start of 1941, please note, that dismisses Hitler as nothing more than \u2018a screaming little defective\u2019, argues that the threat from Germany was overstated, and that the Nazi empire was about to implode of its own accord.\u00a0 How on earth could an intelligent man be so far off Orwell wondered?<\/p>\n

The answer was that Wells, like most English intellectuals of his age, lacked the intellectual faculty to understand a phenomenon like fascism \u2013 or Bolshevism.\u00a0 Modern students of human intelligence realize that it is wrong to speak of intelligence as just one thing \u2013 there are many different types, and it is possible for someone to be unable to \u2018get\u2019 mathematics, and be a first rate archaeologist or carpenter.\u00a0 Something similar applies here \u2013 some people are, for whatever reason, just insensitive to the emotions and energies that have guided most human conduct for most human history.<\/p>\n

Worse is that such people tend to think of themselves as naturally more enlightened for that absence.\u00a0 They don\u2019t understand the Old Ways, they don\u2019t see any reason to even try to do so.\u00a0 That leads to a paradox \u2013 the more such intellectuals dismiss the old ways, the less they are able to resist their return.\u00a0 In response to Wells demand \u2013 again, in 1941 \u2013 for a World State overseen by a technocratic government, Orwell pointed out the following:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to \u201cenlightened\u201d and hedonistic people.\u00a0 What has kept England on its feet during the past year?\u00a0 In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that hey are superior to foreigners\u00a0 For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

The parallel between David Brin and H.G. Wells is eerie.\u00a0 Note the term \u2018enlightened\u2019, kept between two sets of inverted commas.\u00a0 Another of Brin\u2019s literary ticks is referencing the Enlightenment and placing himself as its heir.\u00a0 Similarly, I first came across him while looking up material on global warming \u2013 Brin proposes that the rest of society just get behind what the eggheads decree as a sensible solution, and just can\u2019t<\/em> understand why people might not be okay with such a sensible proposition (\u2018an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious\u2019 \u2013 Orwell).<\/p>\n

Another dead giveaway is the relexive attack by such intellectuals on precisley the people who are best able to resist the menace<\/em>.\u00a0 Wells sharply criticised Churchill.\u00a0 Brin doesn\u2019t care for the neoconservatives \u2013 note his comparison of neoconservatism with Islam.\u00a0 To those accustomed to peace and quiet, the guard dog looks too much like the wolf.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is the similarity in backgrounds.\u00a0 Finally, both Wells and Brin come from backgrounds sheltered from the hard realities of the world.\u00a0\u00a0 Wells came from the non-military British middle class.\u00a0 Brin comes from the most fortunate population in history \u2013 those white Americans who were born immediately after the Second World War.\u00a0 While the rest of the West lived in the shadow of communism, and rebuilt their societies from scratch, the United States enjoyed sixty years of summer.<\/p>\n

Good for Brin.\u00a0 Yet that background can make you miss that some of us do not have that kind of security.\u00a0 Orwell was glum about the state of English anti-totalitarian literature.\u00a0 \u201cOne development of the last ten years has been the apprearance of the \u2018political book\u2019, a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as an important literary form\u00a0 But the best writers in this line \u2013 Trotsky, Rauschning, Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others \u2013 have\u00a0 none of them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been renegades from one or other extremist party, who have seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution.\u201d\u00a0 For my own part, I have found that the closest comrades I have in the matter of Islam, those most clear about its nature and threat, have come from outside of the West, and certainly almost none of them are Americans.<\/p>\n

American good fortune can tempt one to \u00a0forget that for the rest of the world, history has not been so rosy.\u00a0\u00a0 The ways of thinking and living that the \u2018progressive\u2019 intellectual dismisses didn\u2019t just arise because people decided to be mean, or for a laugh.\u00a0 Those old ways were, and in many places still are, the price of survival.\u00a0 Please reread the Orwell quote where he says that if the Wells\/Brin intellectuals had succeeded, you\u2019d have seen the SS patrolling London.\u00a0 Orwell again:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions \u2013 racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war\u00a0 – which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018Lost all power of action\u2019 is good and precise.\u00a0 So is his description of the Wellsian and Brinsian worldview as \u2018essentially hedonistic\u2019.\u00a0 The modern liberal, and above of the American liberal intellectual offers a world of limitless fornication, drugs, plenty of toys and the hard edges of life rendered soft by statism.\u00a0 Against that, Islam\u2019s fanatics offer a sacred struggle, an uncompromising book, and a black flag flapping in the wind, writ with the name of God \u2013 and liberal intellectuals are dumbfounded when the latter attract men in their millions.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to be too mean about the liberal intellectual intelligence.\u00a0 It is very good for organising companies and meetings, planning, conducting research, manning school boards, resolving conflicts and all the rest of the things that make our lives so bearable.\u00a0 What it, however, is completely incapable of, by definition, is heroism.\u00a0 It cannot make a man organise a beleaguered safety zone, saving a quarter million lives<\/a>.\u00a0 Or brew bombs to strike down the God Emperor<\/a>.\u00a0 Or lead a raid into the slavelands<\/a>, buying freedom for others with your own death.\u00a0 Or saying that you have nothing to offer but \u2018Blood, sweat and tears\u2019 and inspire a finest hour. Or lead a small band against those who almost annihilated your people<\/a>, and win.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an irony in Brin\u2019s hatred of the neoconservatives.\u00a0 The liberal utopia he espouses is most closely described in Francis Fukuyama\u2019s The End of History<\/em>, or, to give it its full title, The End of History and the Last Man<\/em>.\u00a0 That last part is crucial \u2013 in the vision put forward, the great struggles of history have been won.\u00a0 What further need for heroes?\u00a0 What need for testosterone?\u00a0 Away with them, the world has outgrown them.<\/p>\n

Ah, but has it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UPDATE: \u00a0And I told you so. \u00a0Brin’s been running a series on the ‘unstable world’, and said he was going…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-and-reason","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/prussian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}