The Mating Cries Of The Social-Justice Warriors

     Isn’t that what the nearly continuous ejaculations of “Racist!” “Sexist!” “Homophobe!” “Fascist!” and the like are about? I mean, they usually have no impact on their target, who laughs gaily and goes on with his day. So it has to be some sort of mating signal, like the yowls of a female cat in “heat.” Right?

     All kidding aside, the air is thick with denunciations of those awful, retrograde, women-and-minorities-hating “Sad Puppies.” Their offense, of course, is that they dared to do what the SJWs had been doing for about twenty years now: slate voting for the Hugo Award nominations. Having invaded the Hugo process with their insistence that Sf and fantasy should be entertaining, rather than merely politically correct, they’ve polluted what the SJWs had decided was territory duly conquered and occupied. And as is always the case with the Left and its many annexes – wait a second, shouldn’t the plural of annex be annicies? Index, indices; vertex, vertices; apex, apices; Tampax, Tampices...but I digress – the SJWs are apoplectic about it.

     Here’s a recent bile sample:

     The clock is ticking for the public vote in this year’s Hugo awards, which celebrate excellence in science fiction. Sixteen categories are up for grabs, from best novel to short fiction, fan writing, art and dramatic presentation, and the deadline is 31 July. But this year the prizes are not just about celebrating science-fiction – it’s political war.

     There’s usually a kerfuffle of one kind or another – popular authors habitually campaign for fans to vote them on to the list, but 2015 has proved the biggest drama the award has ever seen. That’s because two linked online campaign groups, known as the “Sad Puppies” and their more politically extreme running mates, the “Rabid Puppies”, have been campaigning hard to register supporters and bump their preferred titles on to the shortlists. They have managed it, too: this year’s Hugos are packed with Puppies titles. There’s no avoiding the politically partisan nature of this campaign. Its leading lights range from respectable rightwingers such as US authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson, through to those with more outlandish views such as John C Wright and Vox Day (also known as Theodore Beale). It’s the Tea Party of contemporary US sci-fi.

     The Puppies are complaining that recent Hugo winners have been too highbrow, and argue that winners such as Anne Leckie’s smart gender-deconstruction of space opera Ancillary Justice, or John Scalzi’s witty Star-Trek-inspired metafiction Redshirts are too experimental and literary.

     More importantly, as Sarah Lotz says, they’re also suggesting SF has been hijacked by a conspiracy of “social justice warriors” or “SJWs”, intent on filling the genre with progressive ideological propaganda.

     The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices. Anti-SJW rhetoric, most of it proceeding from angry straight white men, has flooded online discussions. It’s been ugly. It’s also proving self-defeating. George RR Martin’s intervention, urging people to register and vote in order to defeat the plans of people he call “assholes”, has galvanised the counter-vote.

     Well, we’ll see about that “self-defeating” bit. The important thing here is the hypocrisy: the slate of works promoted by the Sad Puppies does not discriminate in any detectable way. It contains books and stories by men and women; by conservatives and liberals; by theists and atheists; and by persons of all three recognized races. The SJWs are merely furious at having their tactics used against them – successfully.

     That’s the Left for you. They always proclaim their victories final, so it really frosts their buns to have ground taken back from them.

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     I find myself remembering another SJW-driven contretemps of a few years ago: the claim, made at the time Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were popular, that those movies, and the Tolkien trilogy itself, were racist. The SJWs argument? There are no nice Orcs!

     I highly doubt that any of those making that absurd claim were familiar with the genesis of the Orcs: the Great Enemy, Morgoth, derived them from captured Elves that he tortured and modified. Tolkien mentions it in the “Old Testament” of his saga, The Silmarillion. There were Elves of corrupt and vicious character from the very first, which I would imagine gave Morgoth his “seed material.” In any case, when the One Ring is destroyed at the conclusion of the trilogy, Tolkien describes the effects upon Sauron’s Orc army thus:

     “The realm of Sauron is ended!” said Gandalf. “The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his quest.” And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out toward them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.

     The Captains bowed their heads; and when they looked up again, behold! Their enemies were flying and the power of Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind. As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.

     The creatures of evil genesis fell when their Maker fell. Sauron had allowed no speck of rightness or justice to remain in them; therefore, without him they could not live. How could it be otherwise?

     But you can’t say that to an SJW. His premises don’t include the possibility of absolute evil. The very idea! It might disturb his carefully cultivated moral relativism.

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     It’s been said many times, and by writers far better known than I, that no end can redeem an evil means. A means must be judged by the same moral standard as all other things. Therefore, a tactic, regardless of the end in view, will be either morally acceptable or morally unacceptable. If it was acceptable for the SJWs to promote the works they favored, then it was acceptable for the Sad Puppies to do the same. Inversely, if the Sad Puppies’ campaign for its slate must be condemned, then so must the use of that tactic by the SJWs. The difference between the two is the degree of concealment applied, and nothing else: the Sad Puppies did what they did in full view of everyone involved, whereas the SJWs preferred sotto voce consensus-building among the like-minded and whispering campaigns against works they despised.

     Ultimately, what will matter most will be whether F&SF is at all improved by the contretemps. Second to that will be whether the Sad Puppies’ campaign widens the field of F&SF fandom, specifically that portion enthusiastic enough about it to participate actively in the Hugos and similar things. The theory of democratic processes holds that the results will improve as participation increases. The Sad Puppies hope to draw more F&SF readers into the Hugo processes. The SJWs hope to limit participation in those processes to themselves and the like-minded. To me that says it all, though your mileage may vary.

Awards, Campaigning, And “The Hamlet Question”

     Recently, the world of science fiction was profoundly and righteously shaken by the so-called “Sad Puppies” affair. (It was “so called” because that’s what the organizers called it, so....) I wrote a little about it over at Liberty’s Torch, my op-ed site, here, here, and here. To my way of thinking, it was all to the good, both because it involved a larger number of SF readers in the fan-awarded Hugo nominations, and because the aftermath revealed the hypocrisy, venality, and mean-spiritedness of the “social-justice warriors” who had contrived to dominate the nominations process in recent years.

     I thought I was done with the subject, but it rebounded on me. My readers started asking me why I hadn’t taken part in the Sad Puppies campaign. After all, I write science fiction...kinda-sorta, anyway...so why not lend a hand? It might result in one of my books being selected for such an honor in the future.

     I appreciated the enthusiasm and admiration of those readers. However, I could never take part in such a campaign -- not because I have any moral qualms about it, but because I avoid any involvement with groups, regardless of their nature or agendas, with a fervor some have characterized as “religious” and others have deemed “psychotic.”

     “To be or not to be a joiner?” Hamlet would have cried...if he were a kinda-sorta SF writer named Francis W. Porretto. Yes, that is the question...and the answer is a resounding Hell, no! Allow me a quote from a favorite book: Clarence Carson’s The American Tradition:

     In a conversation with one other person, you have discovered that person to be sympathetic, polite, and thoughtful You may go away from such an experience concluding that you have met and are coming to know a genuine human being. Your next meeting, however, may take place in a group. Here the person who was congenial when alone with you may make cutting remarks and align himself with the others of the group against you on matters upon which you were sure you would agree. A little reflection should convince us, if we are not entirely unusual, that we have done the same thing ourselves....

     Anyone who has worked with aggregates of people should have noted some differences between groups and individuals. Groups do not think or reason; that is solely a function of the individual. On the other hand, individuals, feeling the strength of numbers, are emboldened to do things which they would be afraid to do alone. Children in a classroom will become defiant if they sense the class is with them, and one may observe them darting their eyes about over the room to assure themselves that the others are behind them. At a more serious level, anyone who has endured the abuse of massed pickets when he crossed the line can testify to the loss of inhibition which accompanies the merging with a group. People tend to lose their sense of individual responsibility when they become part of a crowd.

     Now, Dr. Carson was mainly concerned with the sociopolitical importance of groups, and the proper measures by which to civilize them. But the essence of group campaigns, regardless of the cause involved, is the submission of the individual will to the predominant will: at some times the will of a powerful or charismatic leader figure, at other times the will of a majority.

     I cannot subordinate my will to that of another person, even theoretically. How, then, should I ally myself with a group substantially more likely to do so and more capable of doing so?

     Perhaps it’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. All the same, the inhibition is a strong one, erected over the decades by youthful involvements and mature interactions with groups and evangelists for groups. I consider it a protection for my integrity, and I will not work to dismantle it.

     Besides, who needs awards? I want readers first and foremost, and a modest amount of revenue after that. True, an award widely recognized as a mark of excellence would help me to get those things. But now that such awards have become prime targets for politically oriented groups – especially left-liberal groups – they are no longer reliable indicators of quality, being more an emblem of the writer’s endorsement for some common political viewpoint.

     So I tend to dismiss literary awards as significant signs of quality fiction, and eschew campaigns such as Sad Puppies. As healthful for the SF field as “Sad Puppies 3” could be, it has already elicited a counter-campaign by “social-justice warriors” determined to re-establish their hegemony over the Hugos. Thus, future Hugo nominations and awards will be more about political alignments and less about good storytelling than ever. That’s the sort of contretemps I prefer to watch from a distance...preferably with a Daiquiri or Fuzzy Navel at hand. (They go great with a good book.)