Moral Courage

Hemingway is an author who seems to attract equal parts love and hate. The hatred of Americans I can understand - schoolchildren of both Canada and the US are repeatedly and consistently bludgeoned with his Nobel Prize winning status, his tortured soul, the luminaries of the Parisian milieu with whom he associated, and, if they're really unlucky, with the technicalities of his theories on the art of writing.

For others, this ambivalence seems to arise from the atavistic masculinity which he projected without necessarily possessing. And it is this question - the conundrum of Hemingway's real character, which concerns me today. Let's leave aside the fact that his writing advice could be copied and pasted into a Lee Child or James Paterson style manual without causing a single comment. That his weird modernistic obsession with form and structure was so easily co-opted by cynical purveyors of trash. That the worshippers at his shrine are made up almost exclusively of people who struggle to conceive of a single original idea, or to construct the shortest of viable sentences. Or the fact that he, like Peter Carey, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and Graham Greene, smashed into my forming literary consciousness like a revelation of divine grace. Let's leave all that aside and focus on the myth of Hemingway and its feet of clay.

One of Hemingway's biographers pointed to an incident involving, if memory serves, Evelyn Waugh. If not him, then some other writer who saw actual war service, rather than receiving a medal for being randomly shelled at a politically expedient time. This writer, who I'm certain was British, penned an open letter to the great man asserting that, machismo aside, Hemingway lacked that most important of the types of bravery - moral courage. Hemingway, possibly drunk, or possibly simply not understanding, replied with a long letter listing multiple instances of his physical courage. And it's this which leads me to my point.

Moral courage does not consist in doing what is 'right'. Doing what is visibly, palpably, uncontroversially right, basically amounts to that tricky, vainglorious quality we call 'honour'. And honour is a doddle. All we need do to be honourable is to follow a course of publicly approved, widely popular external measures for rectitude, and then spend the rest of our days sneering superciliously at those lesser mortals who have had the misfortune to acquaint themselves with failure. This is emphatically not the essence of moral courage. Moral courage is about doing that which does not publicly or immediately seem to be right, but which we know to be anyway. It's about following through on abstract, and often counterintuitive principles. It's about seeing the picture which lies beyond our individual wants, vanities, and dignity, and doing what is best according to rules which have little or nothing to do with personal satisfaction in one's own virtue.

This is where the grand tourist Hemingway failed. He was incapable of separating real courage from the histrionics of his own personal code. There is a feeling, trembling on the edge of a theory, that the day he put that shotgun under his chin was the day he finally realised the hollowness - the cheap externality - of his own conception of honour. "I can't believe they fell for The Old Man and the Sea," he was reported to have said of his masterpiece. I don't believe there is anything particularly wrong with that book. Except, perhaps, for the self conscious bid for external moral approval which infests almost every sentence. That sense of a man laboriously doing good according to someone else's lights and not his own. The essence, in fact, of the opposite of moral courage.

I am reminded of a story about a sword master who, on being confronted by bandits, was forced to crawl through their legs while being pelted with stones to avoid being killed. After this incident, his students asked him why he had submitted to this humiliation and he said, "I gave them their lives." As a young and angry man, I had always dismissed this story as a tale of cowardice justified through sophistry. It's only recently that I've come to realise that what this story is about is the essence of exactly that kind of courage which Hemingway never managed to achieve.

Almost invariably, the appreciation of moral courage is retrospective. Because the essence of this kind of courage is not in the doing of what is acceptable, but of what is right in spite of all, including the popular, casual, or - most importantly - facile perception of 'right'.

Race, Representation, and White Saviours

This picture of Fagin is a silent comment on the 'progress' made in discussions about inclusion.

Inclusive writing appears to be all the rage these days. All sorts of advice is available to the aspiring or established author as to how to represent people from different races, sexual orientations, and socio-economic brackets, in a 'sensitive' and 'inclusive' manner. I suppose this reflects the recent discussions around cultural appropriation and controversies surrounding various authors presuming to write, with greater or lesser success, from within a skin colour which was not their own.

As an ethnic Chinese in a majority white country, I have personal experience of the impact of representation and inclusion, having been brought up in the long, long shadow of Bruce Lee, Fu Man Chu, and Charlie Chan. So why is it, then, that the idea of creators making deliberate efforts to include me makes me so uncomfortable? Sticking with the idea of the representation of ethnic Chinese, there are a few aspects of this whole culture of affirmative action which are highly distasteful.

First of all, the whole idea underpinning the concept is fundamentally racist. The assumption that my skin colour dictates the shape and nature of my mind is no different, in essence, to the kind of social Darwinism which informed much of the racial hatred and prejudice of the twentieth century. The idea that Chinese people exist in some kind of ethno-cultural quarantine zone which can only be explored with special sensitivity training strikes me as a rather stupid and counter-productive inversion of the whole concept of pluralism. The point of a pluralistic society is that difference of any kind, while interesting and potentially productive of corporate advantage, should be largely irrelevant. For difference to be elevated to the status of some kind of sacred cow is simply moronic - it misses the entire point and purpose of key liberal values.

I'm aware that much of the model for 'sensitivity' and 'inclusiveness' is driven by ethnic minorities themselves, but this is, if anything, even more offensive. The belief in some sort of yellow, black, orange, or rainbow privilege speaks to a belief in the fundamental difference of these people, which is all kinds of wrong. Common courtesy dictates that we not deliberately offend each other, but common sense equally dictates that packing a given segment of society in victim grade cotton wool is offensive in itself.

And then there's the whole idea of patronage. The strong implication of all of this effort is that I should be somehow grateful. Look at all the effort those lovely white people are making to ensure that I feel included. Which is also deeply unintelligent - whether it's positive or negative, division is division. Also, anyone who's ever been picked for a team because the teacher has insisted that the fat and the uncoordinated should also be given a go, understands exactly what this kind of treatment feels like. My ethnicity is not a disability, and even if it were, simple courtesy demands that I not have it thrown in my face in a patronising manner.

I was once asked whether I included 'diverse' characters in my writing, and whether I thought this was a good thing to do. My response was that people, and types of people, occur in my work for the simple reason that they occur in the real world. Because all fiction, regardless of the height of its brow, depends for its validity in the reflection of some sort of truth. If any author is unable to understand a person as a person, regardless of their ethnicity or their walk of life, they simply have no business writing them. This isn't political, it's a fundamental principle of art.

Pericles and the Loneliness of Logic

Roughly two and a half thousand years ago, the Aegean and Mediterranean worlds were wracked by the Peloponnesian wars. Arguably, the long term effects of these wars ripple down to us today. Without the defeat of Athens and the depletion of Sparta, Philip of Macedon could not have conquered the Greek world, thus paving the way for his mercurial son Alexander to Hellenise the Persian Empire, creating routes for the flow of ideas, merchandise, disease, and conflict which continue to shape the world we live in today.

It makes sense, then, that the causes of these wars are hotly contested in the mainstream of historical discourse to this day. Thucydides and the war he chronicled are justly taken as the fons et origo of modern historical inquiry, and we devote as much time to unpicking his methodologies and motives as we do to understanding the events he chronicled.

There are many theories of the root cause, but possibly one of the most disturbing is Kagan's. He contends (very convincingly) that the fundamental error on the part of Pericles, official and de facto first citizen of Athens, was to overestimate the rationality of his opponents. Faced with a complex and existentially perilous set of circumstances, Pericles conducted a linear and cool-headed appraisal of the situation and, largely through the force of his personality, embarked Athens on a policy exactly rationally matched to his circumstances. Kagan's contention is that if Sparta, Corinth and Corcyra had been equally rational, they would have seen Pericles' plan for minimal deterrence for what it was, and maintained the balance of power and the peace, thus avoiding the war that arguably destroyed the classical Greek world. Unsurprisingly, however, Pericles was alone in his rationality, and his policies were sadly out of place and ineffective in the face of the reactionary fear and anger manifested by the other great powers.

This argument is particularly well evidenced, but the most compelling factor for me is its familiarity. Its plausibility is rooted in its deep resonance with that we already know about how people work. The age of the internet is an eavesdropper's paradise in that the vast majority of online material consists essentially of conversations overheard, usually in the form of dispute. An analysis of the progress of these 'arguments' makes it very clear that the vast majority of people simply do not know how to think in a linear fashion, and those few who do, seem incapable of pointing that line in any reasonable direction.

Mental acrobats like Edward De Bono contend that we naturally think in a linear fashion, but I would argue that this is a thought only possible for someone who lives in an academic and intellectual bubble. It is painfully obvious to me that the default mode of thinking for the bulk of humanity is free association. We see something, it reminds us of something else, which reminds us of another thing, ad infinitum. And this woolly and unreliable process really only serves for the rationalisation of emotion. Or, put more simply, our natural mode of thinking is highly effective for justifying our knee-jerk reactions to ourselves and others - a vital evolutionary development, but also a highly specialised one. This kind of thinking allows us to very effectively understand social dynamics and short range, simple, or repetitive phenomena, but what it is emphatically not useful for is the parsing of large scale and abstract complexity.

What is required for the understanding of such complexity, or the balancing of non-binary and potentially perpetual problems, is a kind of thinking which can only be developed through rigorous mental exercise and ceaselessly vigilant metacognition. It's important to remember, however, that anyone who embarks on such a process is likely to be quite the rara avis, adrift and alone in a sea of muddle-headed sentimentality and reactionary outrage. I'm willing to bet everyone reading this is inwardly nodding and congratulating themselves on being exactly such an island of rationality, but I'd suggest that this reaction is an indication of peril. The essence of this kind of thinking is in the constant doubt of one's own thought processes, and vigilant attention to the processes of others - precisely the two areas in which Pericles, rational as he was, failed.

The simplest test of rationality runs thusly:

Qaere: 'Am I utterly convinced my thinking is rational?'

If the answer is 'yes', it's time to rip down the entire framework and start again.

Revelation and the New Catholicism

In my capacity as a tutor, I meet quite a few attendees of religious schools, especially Catholic ones. I assumed, when I started, that these kids would have an advantage when dealing with certain material, given that so much of western literature draws heavily on biblical imagery and language and, especially amongst the modernists, Catholic conceptual frameworks.

This assumption was proven incorrect the very first time I mentioned Revelation. I should point out that I also went to a Catholic school - a Jesuit institution, in fact - and that our primary method of subverting Catholic dogma was to flip to The Song of Solomon in order to snicker at descriptions of breasts and thighs, and then head straight to the back pages and drink in the crazy apocalyptic code talking of John of Patmos. While the more spiritual aspects of Catholicism held no real appeal, our compulsory engagement with the bible kindled an interest, in some of us, in the arcana of literature and ancient history.

Fast forward to today, and I find myself confronted with students of Catholic institutions who have actually never heard of Revelation. Or The Song of Solomon. While I'm not necessarily heartbroken about this, it strikes me as a bit of a shame that kids being forced to undergo religious education are missing out on the two strongest opportunities for comedy contained in the corpus. These gaps, of course, led me to ask what, in actual fact, they do during their religious indoctrination... I mean, education. What they report is deeply worrying to me.

Students describe sessions where they are given verses from the bible, without context or discussion, and instructed to translate the 'moral message' of each verse. From an intellectual point of view, this is an exercise in absurdity. Let's take an example:

Matthew 16:19: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

From this enigmatic fragment, students are supposed to derive the doctrine of papal infallibility, god (haha) only knows how. Not a word is said about the fact that Matthew's gospel is a standout as a persuasive effort grounded in a framework of Old Testament prophecy. No explanation is given of the fact that the entire book should be viewed as an argumentative attempt to legitimise the messianic status of Jesus by manipulating his life to parallel Israel's history, or of the highly flexible attitude to fact and sequence prevalent amongst contemporary authors at the time. All things, I should point out, which were pointed out to me by my school's more scholarly lay brothers and priests. The verse is presented as monolithic, authoritative and unquestionable. And most importantly, incomprehensible. The implication is that all meaning must needs be received from competent authority, as the text is demonstrably opaque. Which is cheap trickery, of course - the text is child's play to understand, so long as one is presented with the relevant facts. Deliberately obscuring these is the kind of cheap trick I expect from televangelists and crazy fundamentalists.

Other sessions involve writing (read: 'paraphrasing') long and highly prescriptive essays on various points of Catholic ethics, and, most weirdly, turning one's chair to face the wall and having an imaginary (or not) conversation with God. Now, any members of evangelical churches reading this will probably look at these practices and nod sagely, these being core activities for many evangelical Christians, but to someone more familiar with high Catholicism, all of this looks strange and disturbing.

I can only speculate as to why this shift has occurred. It may be a part of the global membership crisis being faced by many churches worldwide, or possibly an effect of the shifting nature of the Catholic church's core membership. Either way, I think it's an innovation to be greatly deplored. Given that sending a child to a Catholic school is going to result in attempted Catholic indoctrination, there is a core reason for accepting this regardless of one's faith or lack thereof. Simply put, the Catholic church is old and learned, and the kind of engagement my generation was exposed to was largely scholarly in bent. This meant that even though I'd never in a million years decide to believe in God and Jesus and all that jazz, I was exposed, in a valid and constructive way, to something which forms a central pillar of our history and culture. Academic knowledge of the bible is key to understanding all sorts of aspects of western and world culture, and encourages, depending on the individual, either healthy skepticism or sophisticated and moderate faith. Reducing this kind of instruction to the level of Sunday School, fairy tales, and new age 'communing with spirits' garbage breeds ignorance, and destroys what is conceivably the only advantage of Catholic education for the non-Catholic, i.e., high quality education.

The Real Whitewashing Is Not In Casting

To my mind, the whole issue of 'whitewashing' misses the point. I honestly don't give a flying toss what colour actor is cast in the role of Othello, Major Kusanagi, or whatever - a faint whiff of racism seems to me inherent in the idea that skin colour is the only reliable indicator of culture. What does bother me, however, is the whitewashing of meaning.

Let's take Mulan as an example. Mulan, in either of its original forms, is a fable about self sacrifice for communal or family goals, as well as the absolute requirement to preserve both male and female honour. In both versions of the original story, there is a strong ethic of service - the obligation to serve their lord is never questioned, and much more is at stake than just her aged father's welfare. Mulan risks her future and person to preserve not just her father's head, but the honour of her family and community, the idea being that failure to fulfil their obligation of service would be shameful. And then there's the question of marriage - there are two variants of the story, but both involve Mulan refusing marriage as the specific offers (one from an enemy, the other as part of a more or less financial transaction) would be dishonourable.

Now let's compare this with the Disney version. As far as I can make out, what passes for deep messaging in this inane mash-up is the idea that feminism means proving you can do whatever boys do, and then ending up in a princess gown anyway. The other values which come through most strongly are those of individual liberty, individualism just generally, and the absolute comitment to make snide comments about anything that isn't an exact analogue of western parliamentary democracy. In short, the story of Mulan has been deliberately warped in order to deliver unmistakably western values. Whitewashed, in fact, in the only way that really matters.

This leads to me to ask several questions. Firstly, is this a conscious process? Are these people deliberately appropriating an alien culture in order to peddle their own values in an annoyingly superficial way, or is it possible that they just haven't understood - couldn't understand - the tale's more alien elements? A quick reading of the promotional bumf answers that question - it's deliberate. Which then leads to the next question, which is: If the intention was to deliver a western message to a western audience, why then was it necessary to piss all over a Chinese cultural product?

Surely, if the message one wishes to deliver is so inconsistent with the material, the sensible thing to do is to just use other material, right? Wrong. The fundamental factor at play here is deep racism. It's my impression that adaptors like Disney actually believe they're making stories like Mulan and Alladin and so forth better by ignoring the cultures from which they originate, and warping them into carriers of western values; western values presumably being the only valid values around.

And now I hear that the ABC is producing a re-telling of 'Journey to the West', the seminal tale of Buddhist sacrifice and self-denial, for kids. 

"The 10-part half hour series follows a teenage girl and a trio of fallen gods on a perilous journey as they attempt to bring an end to a demonic reign of chaos and restore balance to their world."

Seriously? A teenage girl in the Tripitaka role? And this nonsense:

"The Legend of Monkey is big budget fantasy drama series that will surprise and delight family viewers globally and locally. We’re a business built on highly original content and this ticks all the boxes: it’s a tremendous tale, visually imaginative and made by talented people. Kids are going to love it."

I believe that I can translate this. It would read:

"We have ripped out the deep messaging of the key foundation story of an entire religion and culture in order to make a sort of mediaeval cross between 'Kung Fu' and 'Power Rangers'." 

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I can't help but think that if all you're trying to achieve is the creation of an entertaining kids' fantasy series, it would be eminently possible to do this while simultaneously leaving the deep fables of my culture the hell alone.

Dickens and the Lesson of History

It's very difficult to say anything about the Victorian era without suddenly becoming intolerably smug. To our sophisticated, post modern minds, that entire period seems to be characterised by a prudish self righteousness and political naivety we tend to find laughable. There seems to be a general consensus that 'progress' has opened a yawning, unbridgeable gulf between the Victorians and ourselves, despite the irony of 'progress' being an archetypically Victorian idea.

Like most popular conceptions, this one doesn't really stand up to proper scrutiny. Closer examination of the period reveals its general aura of quaint stuffiness as little more than a veneer - a difference in mode of expression, rather than any fundamental intellectual or moral separation. I suspect this anomaly is directly attributable to Charles Dickens. Dickens is arguably the only well known voice of the period, which makes it natural for us to assume that Dickensian tropes are somehow representative of the entire age. They're not, of course. They're not even really representative of Dickens. 

There is no doubt whatsoever that Dickens was keenly aware of the political role and impact of his books. His private correspondence makes it very clear that he deliberately set out to use his platform to effect political change, targeting poor relief, private schools, and Chancery, in quick succession. Far from being an uncomplicated spinner of middlebrow pop culture, Dickens was the Change.org of his day, deliberately leveraging the mass distribution of pity and outrage in an effort to improve society. In context, then, Dickens is actually much more reliable as a record of sociopolitical controversy than as an accurate representation of the past.

An examination of the Victorians on these terms tends to turn up more similarities than differences. The 19th century was a time in which the world was shrinking with unprecedented rapidity as a result of revolutionary breakthroughs in transport and communications technology. The rapid pace of mechanisation and automation were shaking the foundations of global power, as coal seams and gas pipelines suddenly displaced forests and arable fields as prime strategic resources. These and other fundamental shifts caused a crisis of faith in prevailing systems of political power, with the rise of anarchism recognisable as a near exact parallel for the resurgence of libertarianism we see today. Looked at more closely, the preoccupations of the Victorian period seem eerily similar to our own. The potential for technology to redefine humanity and society, for automation to devastate employment and re-write the social contract, fear of the impacts of rapid increases in the pace of life, fear of a man-made environmental apocalypse - all these were the hot button issues of the Victorian age. Which makes it difficult to see how we can believe ourselves to be all that different.

This leads me to wonder how historians of the future will see us. To my mind, our increasing inability to express ourselves by any means other than polemic, the devolution of our public discourse into a binary contest between fierce moral and political revanchism and meaningless progressive rhetoric, our growing inability to engage rationally with events and ideas - all of this is basically a carbon copy of the bewildered, reactionary ferment of the Victorian age. As far as I can tell, there isn't any real reason to doubt that we're going to sound at least as foolish to our descendants, as our recent ancestors do to us. Unless, of course, we suddenly break with millennia of tradition and actually do something differently instead of merely re-branding and repeating the idiocies of the past. I'd like to say that's likely to happen but unfortunately, being a student of history, I can't.

The Lamentable Death of Doctor Who

As I went to watch the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, a large portion of what I was feeling was dread. I realised that this feeling had been with me for a while, and that it was there as a result of my subconsciously drawing a line in the sand - just a couple more disappointments, and that would be it: the sad end of one of my favourite interactions with television of any kind.

I'm pleased to say that the episode started very well indeed. The opening scenes were quiet, muted and awkward, in a good way, and I found myself daring to hope that this might signal some kind of refresh - a separation from the mindless formulaism of recent efforts, in order to re-engage with the core of what makes the show truly great. This hope was bolstered by Capaldi's excellent turn as a kind of grumpy version of a Dickensian deus ex machina, his excellent performance well served, no doubt, by some very deft and enjoyable scripting.

And then it all came crashing down. The first hint of disquiet came when I noticed just how late in the episode the setup of the central antagonist occurred. So late, in fact, that there was little reason to hope that the writers might have checked their growing disregard for the niceties of coherent story telling. And then doubt turned to certainty as it became apparent that the opening villain of their 'fresh start' season was a recycled composite of imagery and concepts from 'The Black Spot', 'The Waters of Mars', and 'The Lodger'. 

While it's possible that this depressingly unoriginal mash-up has been created in the service of some epic surprise in an overarching plot line, I find this difficult to believe, especially given the scant, borderline contemptuous attitude to plot which is emerging in even single episode story lines. A part of me really wants to believe the jury's still out on this one, but my critical sense tells me that what we are witnessing is the fatal commercialisation of The Doctor.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not foolish enough to mistake Doctor Who for high art, so I'm certainly not a victim of unrealistic expectations here. I expect significant levels of kitsch and fan service in The Doctor's adventures. In fact, I revel in all that stuff. But I don't think that's what's happening here. What I think is happening is that the show's phenomenal success has created a set of conditions conducive to ripping the heart and soul out of the series, in the interest of serving up a consistent 'product'.

As a long time and loyal fan of the show, I think you can trust me not to say this lightly. The thing is, though, that it's no longer possible to ignore the shift in focus. What has always elevated the show into greatness has been its invincible moral core. Minor things like lore and continuity would be joyfully warped to breaking point in service of the premise that non violence, curiosity and wonder are more important than all of humanity's arsenals combined. This, more than anything, was the central thematic burden - the show's soul. Doctor Who, at heart, is a joyous paean to the adventure which can be made of a life informed by genuine intellectual curiosity. Or at least, that's what it was.

I would struggle, now, to identify any coherent sense of mission behind the creation of the last four episodes. On a purely superficial level, all the 'best' (read 'popular') aspects of the show have been turned up to eleven - thrills and spills, classic lines, iconic villains and sassy alien culture clash humour is practically bursting from the groaning seams of each overpacked, underplotted episode. The thing is, none of that stuff has anything to do with what makes Doctor Who worth watching. 

For a start, tolerating frankly ludicrous story construction is a very different matter when dealing with a purely commercial endeavour. Without that sense of higher purpose, the show ceases to be joyfully uninhibited - it sinks to being nothing more than a lazy, half-chewed mess. For reasons which beggar understanding, the creators seem to be ditching a conceptual core which has remained steadily appealing for more than half a century, in favour of elements which have never been more than clever window dressing. And now, it seems, they've even stopped bothering being imaginative about the shallow flim-flam on which they have inexplicably chosen to hang the entire enterprise.

I gather that there has been much soul searching and seeking of feedback with regard to the steadily plunging ratings with which they have been afflicted. I would suggest that this is largely due to their insistence on producing crowd-pleasers, whilst ignoring or failing to understand the essential substance upon which The Doctor depends. Put simply, the soul of The Doctor has been steadily crowded out by mindless bling. And without that soul, Doctor Who is nothing more than watchable fluff, and fluff which will never be quite as well executed as those shows which were specifically conceived to deliver cheap, mindless thrills.

One more episode, I think, and then it may very well be a sad vale to my Doctor Who fandom.