Old Ideas, New Visions

By Benny Donalds

This is going to require a careful balance, because we do need groups and categories. What we need to ask ourselves is when inclusion or exclusion makes sense.

Let’s say we want to form a RPG campaign.  First, we all have to agree to which system we’re going to use. We can’t have half the players going by DnD rules and the other half using the I.C.E. system. But that’s not a big deal, because there are enough players in the world to form plenty of groups for everyone. But let’s also admit the immaturity of boys who won’t let a girl have fun pretending to be a paladin or wizard, too. At the very least, if boys won’t let a girl play the game because they don’t know how to be around girls, they are condemning themselves to a vicious cycle of ignorance begetting ignorance.

Let’s say we want to express our opinions about Star Trek and form an online discussion group.  It makes sense to have the computer ask some preliminary questions to weed out bots and trolls and ensure the person has actually seen enough episodes to form a reasonable opinion. But apparently it was a thing for Star Trek fanatics to “refute” feminist interpretations by saying “women don’t get Star Trek,” which certainly came as a surprise to me given the contributions of women writers to scripts and novels.

In the battles over academia, some conservatives have protested the addition of more novels by women and people of color to the canon, fearing the displacement of the white male authors they argue created our literary world. Justifying this requires forgetting that most great novels were written by outsiders critiquing their society at that time, which is probably the real reason conservatives don’t want new voices heard. The creation of the present has always required some replacement of the past, which is something else conservatives don’t want. They want status quo because it benefits and comforts them, even if built on the sweat and blood of others. A lot of conservatives say quality should be the only thing that matters in art, but James Baldwin was one of the great essayists of his time and Octavia Bulter one of the great SF writers of ours. If we tend to prefer art that speaks to our own experiences, how do we judge art that speaks of people’s lives?

For most people, what they like is more of what they already like. Lots of readers get into ruts, and will read worse and worse books to get their fix. Hence the profitable proliferation of crime shows, action movies, and romance novels, all with a wide range of quality (I think it was Raymond Chandler, but it might have been Dashell Hammett, who pointed out the more popular a genre the deeper editors had to mine the slush pile creating the illusion that the average romance writer was worse than the average literary writer). The only way to maintain the average quality of the books you read, is to not read more of the same, but the best of a wide and diverse range, which is why as I get older, my bookshelves have become more diverse.

I would argue that to have a pluralistic democracy, everyone should be reading novels by people not like them. Men should read more novels by women. White people should read more novels by people of color. I would say the reverse is true as well, but I’ve never met a person of color who hasn’t read Euro-American literature or a woman who hasn’t read male authors.  From what I’ve seen on the news, the people who don’t want diverse voices in our literature departments don’t want pluralistic democracy either.    

Old Ideas, New Visions