30. Cosmic Horror

In which we confront the terrible “racism” of H. P. Lovecraft.

Table of Contents

1. Bad Company
2. Trial of the Century
3. Cosmic Perspective
4. Atheistic Traditionalism
5. Reality Check
6. Nordic Supremacy
7. Race Science
8. Jewish Questions
9. Here Comes Hitler
10. A Man of His Time
11. Science Fiction
12. Cosmic Horror
13. The Circle of Equity
14. Recommended Reading
15. Letters to the Editor

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1890–1937 (image)

Bad Company

The sweet remembrance of the just
Shall flourish when they sleep in dust.

Headstone

Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.

Eric Arthur Blair

The barren, bloody fields of postmodern “thought” (-policing) are pockmarked with the desecrated graves of Western history’s greatest minds — enemies of The People, dug up and strung up for thoughtcrimes against humanity, the post-Christian sins: reckless intolerance, receiving stolen privilege, grand theft human dignity… the list goes on.

Carlyle is convicted of “conscious and unconscious participations in the cultural evils of nineteenth-century Britain” (Duke Journals). Did he not deny the sacred “assumption that under the skin, people are all the same” (Econlib)? Worse still, “Carlyle supported hierarchy, a world view where the competent made decisions for the incompetent.” Screw you, Carlyle! This is America: where incompetents make all the decisions!

Haul in “troublesome” Chuck Darwin (The Independent): “no doubt about it,” the man believed in “racial inequality” — no, not as proof positive of the vast white conspiracy, but as “a natural condition that will frustrate any cultural efforts to mitigate it.” Obstruction of social justice! Stereotype threats! No wonder racial inequality has frustrated all cultural efforts to mitigate it. Will the defendant own up to his “legacy”?

Those who argue that some peoples are cleverer than others insist that theirs are scientific claims, to be judged by their content rather than their context, according to facts rather than values.

Round here, Mr. Darwin, we call that aiding and abetting an anthropologist.

Crazy old Aristotle, for some crazy reason, “believed that nature ordained not only physical differences between male and female but mental differences as well” (Women’s Studies Encyclopedia). What? Huh? Men and women are different?

The tenacity with which this key sexist concept has been held by historically acclaimed thinkers and writers testifies to the appalling ease with which ignorance can pose as knowledge and with which the self-aggrandizing prejudices of those who wield intellectual and social power can pass as rational judgment.

Only “the scrutiny of feminist scholars” could expose this so-called philosopher’s “great error of judgment” — a result, I’m sure you’ll all agree, “nothing short of momentous.” This “feminist critique,” we are assured (by feminist scholars), “is both informative and liberating.” For example: quoting a bit from Aristotle’s History of Animals (c. 350 BC) —

The female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young. […]

Woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike.

(which obviously bears no resemblance to reality) — then adding a sarcastic quip: “Fine examples of his observational powers.” Take that, dad! I mean, patriarchy!

No less an authority than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (branching out into “feminist history”) informs us that Aristotle’s “litany” is not only “false” (no evidence is necessary, and none is provided), but also hurtful to the delicate feelings of “women studying or teaching Aristotle,” being so “dispiriting” and “annoying.” Aww, baby.

“As briefs for racial supremacy go,” Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy “is eerily serene” — “its hatred rationalized” (The Atlantic). But don’t be fooled! According to one Hua Hsu, who definitely read past the title, Stoddard and his fellow “white men of comfort and privilege” were filled with “dread” at the “fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned,” as you can clearly see in The Rising Tide of Color (1920):

Whatever may be its ultimate goals, Japanese foreign policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemon of a Far East in which white influence shall have been reduced to a vanishing quantity. That is the bald truth of the matter — and no white man has any reason for getting indignant about it. Granted that Japanese aims endanger white vested interests in the Far East. Granted that this involves rivalry and perhaps war. That is no reason for striking a moral attitude and inveighing against Japanese “wickedness,” as many people are to-day doing.

These mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. Both outward thrust of expanding life and counter-thrust of threatened life are equally normal phenomena. To condemn the former as “criminal” and the latter as “selfish” is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect.

This is no mere plea for “sportsmanship”; it is a very practical matter. There are critical times ahead; times in which intense race-pressures will engender high tensions and perhaps wars. If men will keep open minds and will eschew the temptation to regard those opposing their desires to defend or possess respectively as impious fiends, the struggles will lose half their bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be) will be shorn of half their ferocity.

Instead we got the patented Roosevelt peace plan: provoke the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor (Tansill, 1952), then bomb the little yellow bastards into oblivion, so he and his good friend Stalin could carve up the world for themselves (Flynn, 1951).

Masses of panicked and terrified Japanese civilians scrambled to escape the inferno, most unsuccessfully. The human carnage was so great that the blood-red mists and stench of burning flesh that wafted up sickened the bomber pilots, forcing them to grab oxygen masks to keep from vomiting. [History.com]

“To meet Soviet needs” (PBS).

Oh, yeah, and George Orwell was “a reactionary, Imperialist racist” (The Exiled).

Trial of the Century

I’m a twentieth century man,
But I don’t want to die here.

The Kinks

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred

Which brings us to Howard Phillips Lovecraft — if that is his real name.

Claims to be over two hundred years old. Also claims to be Providence, Rhode Island. Never have I encountered a man with less respect for the sanctity of human life! There he sits, masked and manacled. I assure you it is for our own protection.

Is the prosecution prepared to make its opening statement?

Lovecraft is “widely considered today to have had unacceptable racist views,” writes David Barnett. “And yet, despite his prejudices,” “his work remains insanely popular.”

So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?

Why indeed. We find your reading habits suspicious, comrade, so take care.

Technically, “Lovecraft’s racism doesn’t negate his accomplishments,” according to Nicole Cushing (cited by the Atlantic, and Barnett in the Guardian). Mind you, “it would be too easy to point to Lovecraft’s racism” — in other words, his point of view on the observable patterns of biological variation in modern hominids, and how they might explain social and cultural variation in same — “and dismiss him as an undistinguished crackpot who deserved nothing better than publication in the pulps.” But really, you shouldn’t worry: she’s “not saying Lovecraft should be tossed from the canon.”

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I just think it’s time for the horror genre to take a good, long look at the tub and come to terms with the fact that there’s an awful lot of bath water.

To clarify: when Nicole says it’s time we had a “discussion about race in regard to H.P. Lovecraft,” she doesn’t actually mean a discussion about race (what it is, why it matters, and so on). What she has in mind is a denunciation of racists — white people, that is, who feel the wrong feelings and think the wrong thoughts. Go ahead: “discuss.”

Jeff VanderMeer is “moving past Lovecraft”: although “WeirdFictionReview.com loves traditional storytelling as much as edgy, transgressive fiction and nonfiction and art,” it has “no interest in promoting problematic past attitudes or prejudices,” particularly “non-progressive attitudes toward race and other cultures.” Jeff emphasizes that “WeirdFictionReview is devoted to all kinds of nuanced, difficult, experimental, and at times transgressive material.” It’s just that none of them include “racism” like Lovecraft’s, because that would be “straight-up stupid,” “nuance-less” “bullshit.” So write whatever you like! As long as it’s progressive. (Transgression has its limits.)

But Damien Walter isn’t ready to move on. Lovecraft was a “petty minded bigot and racist” who “encoded” his “fears in fiction,” and since, “of course, there are still a lot of unreformed bigots and petty racists out there doing exactly that,” the question we must (apparently) all ask ourselves is: ‘What do we do about Lovecraft?’

Imagine an average non-fandom type person encountering two facts. One; H P Lovecraft is hailed as a founding figure of weird fiction, thousands of fans still adore his work, hundreds of writers have worked in his Cthulhu mythos, dozens of anthologies are published in his name every year, and the World Fantasy Award goes so far as to give his head away as a trophy, all of which adds up to a remarkable kind of ancestor worship. Two; H P Lovecraft was a racist.

I don’t think it would be unreasonable of that average non-fandom type person to assume those fans are a bunch of racists as well.

On the other hand, Damien is not at all concerned (and really, why would he be?) about what the average non-fandom type person might deduce from his insight that “young white men often number among the most useless and deficient individuals in society.” And speaking of the first-person plural: “Let’s fight the white maleness of geek culture,” Damien urges us. “We demand a Doctor Who that isn’t a White British Male,” he insists, and it’s just awful that we “continue to laud the television show when we are ignored.”

This, of course, is anti-racism. Because “privilege.” Which is totally a real thing, and not at all made up (Issue 10). So shut up, whitey! Don’t ask stupid questions.

Damien’s solution to the Lovecraft problem is, of course, “to include the discussion of Lovecrafts [sic] racism whenever we talk about his life and writing” — and what a thoughtful discussion that will be. Also, take his face off the World Fantasy Award.

(Let’s dispense with “the conservative values of Golden Age SF” while we’re at it. We should no longer “pander to the bigotry of conservative readers” who, in their “predictably intractable ignorance,” continue to believe that sex is “biological.”)

But does the posthumous punishment fit the retroactive thoughtcrime? “Whoa doggy, the dude is racist,” Betsy Phillips notes with characteristic ThinkProgress gravitas.

And not just in the “oh, he had some unfortunate personal beliefs, but we can overlook them and still enjoy his art” way. […]

So what do you do with an author who is hugely influential and, in many ways, rightly so, whose work has some enormous problems?

What indeed is an appropriate sentence? Her answer is positively inspired: take whatever “Lovecraft stuff” is in the public domain — and politically correct it:

Lovecraft’s politics are right at the heart of his stories. You take the heart out, and I’m not sure how Lovecraftian what’s left is. But I’m also not sure that’s all that terrible. We seem to be doing all right with reanimating the heartless corpses of his work and putting them work [sic] to our own ends. That seems fitting.

I really can’t imagine a more elegant punishment. Or a crueler one.

Well, I think we’ve heard enough. Ladies and gentlemen, the facts are in; the witnesses, on record; the defendant’s guilt, clear beyond a hint of a trace of a shadow of a quibble of a doubt. For racist white racism in the first, second and third degrees, the court hereby sentences Howard Phillips Lovecraft — also known as H. von Liebkraft, also known as Henry Paget-Lowe, also known as H. Phylipse van Kasje, also known as L. P. Drawoh, also known as O’Howard McPhillips, son of Lovecraft, also known as Lewis Theobald, Junior, also known as Ludovicus Theobaldus, Secundas, also known as Theobaldus Fantasticus, also known as Theobaldus Anglissimus, also known as Theobaldus Ambulaus, Grand Titan of the KKK, also known as Theobaldus Perkins —

“Wait!”

— also known as Archibald Maynwaring, also known as Lothario Honeycomb, 13th Earl of Stonybroke, also known as Valentine Bolling Fitz-Randolph Byrd of Virginia, also known as Humphry Littlewit, also known as Epicurus Lackbrain, also known as Timon Coriolanus, Esquire, also known as Luis Randolfo Cartero y Teobaldo, also known as Páppos Nekrophilos, also known as Caelius Alhazred Moreton O’Casey —

“Stop!”

— also known as Tomeron the Accurst & Decayed, also known as Melmoth III of the Acropolis of Leng, also known as Luve-Keraph of the Windowless Steeple, also known as Abdul Alhazred of the brotherhood of djinns and afrits, c/o the Caverns of Khaf, also known as Eċh-Pi-El, Priest of Azathoth, Guardian of the Black Flame of Nng & Yeb, c/o the Temple of Azathoth, that which gibbers mindlessly in Darkness at the Centre of Ultimate Chaos, the Pulse-Beat of the Cosmic Fungus enveloping Yaddith in the Ætherless Gulf of Re-entrant Angles beyond the 8th Trans-Imaginational Ring of Finite Continua, from the Infra-Dimensional Abyss outside Time & Space, whence springs upward the Singing Flame of the Unknown City, also known as the Old Man Without a Beard, also known as Grandpa Cthulhu, also known by several other names which, despite the best & bravest efforts of top xenolinguists at Miskatonic University (now driven quite mad), apparently cannot be translated into any known tongue —

“STOP THE TRIAL!” Enter: a soft little stripy orange kitty.

“nooo not to punish, i like a lovecraf and he like me” (cat)

The kitty points out that we have not actually heard a single word from the defendant (on account of the mask, manacles, and I think someone put masking tape on his mouth too). It’s a fair point, especially coming from such a small cat. “Meow meow.”

I tell you what: bear with me, it might sound crazy, but — why don’t we try to understand what Lovecraft actually believed, and why he actually believed it? What the heck, right, guys? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to convince us. Of racism.

… Right?

“Meow meow.”

(Unless otherwise noted, all selections are from the 1976 Arkham House printing of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, and identified by volume and page number.)

Cosmic Perspective

If our goal is to understand how Lovecraft thinks — about anything, but especially race, culture and civilization — then we have to adopt his cosmic perspective (I.24):

Our human race is only a trivial incident in the history of creation. It is of no more importance in the annals of eternity and infinity than is the child’s snow-man in the annals of terrestrial tribes and nations. […] How arrogant of us, creatures of the moment, whose very species is but an experiment of the Deus Naturae, to arrogate to ourselves an immortal future and considerable status!

Lovecraft bases all of his fiction “on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” (II.150), for the universe is “a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity” (II.41).

Thus (I.334):

The values of mankind regarding “beauty” and “fineness” mean absolutely nothing to the blind gods of the ultimate abyss, to whom all things are alike; and those gods, in their brainless, sightless grinding of the eternal mill may sometimes accidentally favour and sometimes accidentally frustrate what we locally, arbitrarily, and accidentally happen to esteem as beauty and fineness.

On the plus side, the universe isn’t actively out to get us (V.195):

The truth is that the cosmos is blind & unconscious — not giving a hang about any of its denizens, nor even knowing that they exist. It doesn’t try to pain them any more than it tries to help or please them — & if any of them can manage to have a good time somehow, in spite of the chaotic jumble of conditions & emotions around & within them, that’s quite all right with the universal powers that be.

“Scientific indifferentism,” Lovecraft names his point of view (V.343): “the solar system is a meaningless drop in an unknown and purposeless cosmos, but what the hell of it?” If organic life is “trivial” in the grand scheme of things, and the universe is “indifferent & unconscious” — why, “that forms no occasion for sorrow on man’s part” (V.69):

Whether he has a fairly good time or a wretched time being alive depends greatly on his own skill & good sense in adapting himself to the environment within which accident has thrown him. Barring unusual external misfortunes, a man of sense can generally gain enough contentment to make existence at least no worse than non-existence. There is always pleasure in artistic expression, the acquisition of ideas, & the trace of vague expectancy inherent in any experience whose future stages are beyond fathoming.

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging, and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest” (I.335). What else is there? “We are conscious by accident, and during the unfortunate instant that we are so, it behooves us only to mitigate our pain and pass our time as agreeably as we may” (I.260). Oh, you “ephemeron of one cosmic moment” (I.284) — go find happiness on your own terms (III.20):

Is not emotional satisfaction the only supreme goal of any intelligent life? The cosmos contains nothing of greater importance for the negligible atoms called human beings than the condition of being elegantly amused. It is only mental laziness and artificial convention which can lead us to measure “accomplishment” by the approval of others. […] We can very logically say that the satisfaction of our own emotions is the one solid thing which we can ever get out of life.

Make the “transition from the idealism of youth to the realism of middle life” (I.111),

when the thinker realises that there is no such thing as ideal happiness and justice and ceases to strive after illusions so empty and unreal. Solid bourgeois contentment — with the settled conviction that wild pleasures are too rare, elusive, and transitory to be worth seeking — is the best state of mind to be in.

One should come to realize that all life is merely a comedy of vain desire, wherein those who strive are the clowns, and those who calmly and dispassionately watch are the fortunate ones who can laugh at the antics of the strivers. The utter emptiness of all recognised goals of human endeavour is to the detached spectator deliciously apparent — the tomb yawns and grins so ironically! Whatever bliss we can gain, is from watching the farce, removing ourselves from the strife by not expecting more than we receive, and revelling in that world of the unreal which our imagination creates for us.

To enjoy tranquillity, and to promote tranquillity in others, is the most enduring of delights. Such was the doctrine of Epicurus, the leading ethical philosopher of the world. If one’s interest in life wanes, let him turn to the succour of others in a like plight, and some grounds for interest will be observed to return.

About the time I joined the United I was none too fond of existence. I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt that I might well be erased. But later I realised that even success is empty. Failure though I be, I shall reach a level with the greatest — and the smallest — in the damp earth or on the final pure. And I saw that in the interim trivialities are not to be despised. Success is a relative thing — and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity.

So I turned to observe other mediocre and handicapped persons about me, and found pleasure in increasing the happiness of those who could be helped by such encouraging words or critical services as I am capable of furnishing. That I have been able to cheer here and there an aged man, an infirm old lady, a dull youth, or a person deprived by circumstances of education, affords to me a sense of being not altogether useless, which almost forms a substitute for the real success I shall never know. What matter if none hear of my labours, or if those labours touch only the afflicted and the mediocre?

Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient, with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge and civilisation of mankind. Thus no man of philosophical cast, however circumscribed by poverty or retarded by ailment, need feel himself superfluous so long as he holds the power to improve the spirits of others.

As for misanthropy — you must be joking! “Anti-humanism, in its extreme phases, becomes exceedingly ridiculous, since it assumes as many values of purely arbitrary unreality as does pro-humanism” (II.165). In the end, both are just “silly and unscientific” to Lovecraft: “Why men are any more essentially offensive — apart from one’s personal taste — than trees, is something I can’t possibly see.”

Does he sometimes seem to hate mankind? “Honestly,” he writes, “my hatred of the human animal mounts by leaps and bounds the more I see of the damned vermin” and “the workings of their spiteful, shabby, and sadistic psychological processes” (I.211). But he’s suffering from one of his terrible migraines (ever had one?) at the time, and afterwards explains: “I’m really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing.” It is just that one is bound to become a bit of a cynic “when one thinks.”

At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to the ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life — the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homiletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. … I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody.

If you’re wondering how to reconcile all this happy-talk with Lovecraft’s choice of subject matter, well illustrated by the opening of The Call of Cthulhu (1926) —

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

— just know that to Lovecraft, there will always be “a giddy exhilaration in looking beyond the known world into unfathomable deeps, and a haunting thrill in thoughts of the cryptically horrible” (I.116). And he will never understand “how your imagination can fail to react to these mysterious abysses; how you can escape the burning curiosity of a child at a nearly-closed door through whose crevice come sounds of strange and unearthly wonder, and fragments of sights that suggest unthinkable things.”

Ah, the simple joys of cosmic horror.

Atheistic Traditionalism

Lovecraft is “an absolute sceptic and materialist” (II.41), it’s true. On the other hand, if “nothing really matters,” then logically “the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.” Call him an absolute relativist (II.356):

In a cosmos without absolute values, we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, & emotional satisfaction. What gives us relative painlessness & contentment we may arbitrarily call “good,” & vice versa. This local nomenclature is necessary to give us that benign illusion of placement, direction, & stable background on which the still more important illusions of “worthwhileness,” dramatic significance in events, & interest in life depend. Now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness & contentment often disagrees sharply on the psychological side from what gives these same boons to another person or race or age. Therefore “good” is a relative & variable quality, depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, & individual temperament. Amidst this variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of “values” which we need in order to feel settled & contented — & that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of “lostness” in endless time & space.

To attack tradition as arbitrary or artificial would be missing the point (I.262):

All the life we can ever imagine is the artificial and arbitrary network of illusions with which we may happen to surround ourselves. We know that all are the mere result of accident and perspective, but we gain nothing by tearing them down. ’Tis indeed uncommon senseless to tear down with a rusty dung-fork a mirage which never really existed. I think it best becomes a man of sense to chuse whatever sort of agreeable fancies best amuse him, and thenceforward to revel innocently in them; sensible that they are not real, but equally aware that since reality does not exist, he can gain nothing and lose much by brushing them away.

From a cosmic perspective, Lovecraft’s traditionalism makes a lot of sense (II.125):

It is because I am a complete sceptic & cynic, recognising no such qualities as good or evil, beauty or ugliness, in the ultimate structure of the universe, that I insist on the artificial & traditional values of each particular cultural stream — proximate values which grew out of the special instincts, associations, environment, & experiences of the race in question, & which are the sole available criteria for the members of that race & culture, though of course having no validity outside it. These backgrounds of tradition against which to scale the objects & events of experience are all that lend such objects & events the illusion of meaning, value, or dramatic interest in an ultimately purposeless cosmos — hence I preach & practice an extreme conservatism in art forms, society, & politics, as the only means of averting the ennui, despair, & confusion of a guideless & standardless struggle with unveiled chaos.

You see, “there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social” in his cosmicism (V.241):

Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities.

This is, quite simply, Lovecraft’s definition of civilization: “the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying” our “complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs” (II.290); for “the greater our philosophic & aesthetic expansion, the more sources of contentment we shall generally be able to find in life” (IV.417).

Remember: to Lovecraft, “the paramount end, aim, and object of life is contentment or tranquil pleasure” (I.215). This, he believes, “can be gained only by the worship and creation of beauty, and by the adoption of an imaginative and detached life which may enable us to appreciate the world as a beautiful object […] without feeling too keenly the pain which inevitably results from reflecting on its relation to ourselves.” And so:

We advocate the preservation of conditions favourable to the growth of beautiful things — imposing palaces, beautiful cities, elegant literature, reposeful art and music, and a physically select human type. [I.207]

Lovecraft is ready to go way beyond conservatism to achieve these things. “We are proud to be definitely reactionary, since only by a bold repudiation of the ‘liberal’ pose and the ‘progress’ illusion can we get the sort of authoritative social and political control which alone produces things which make life worth living” — not this “modern worship of empty ideals,” like the “false idol” of democracy. “Ludicrous,” says Lovecraft:

What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. “Equality” is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. It is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled towns, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings, and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields… these are all there is of life; take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. […]

What we must do is to shake off our encumbering illusions and false values — banishing sonorous platitudes in a civilised realisation that the only things of value in the world are those which promote beauty, colour, interest, and heightened sensation. The one great crusade worthy of an enlightened man is that directed against whatever impoverishes imagination, wonder, sensation, dramatic life, and the appreciation of beauty. Nothing else matters. And not even this really matters in the great void, but it is amusing to play a little in the sun before the blind universe dispassionately pulverises us again into that primordial nothingness from whence it moulded us for a second’s sport.

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo (image)

Now, Lovecraft is certainly an atheistic traditionalist (I.17):

I am not an orthodox disciple of religion, but I deem it dangerous to tamper with any system so manifestly beneficial to morality. Whatever may be the faults of the church, it has never yet been surpassed or nearly equalled as an agent for the promotion of virtue. And the same thing applies to our present social system. It has its defects, but is evidently a natural growth, and better fitted to preserve an approximate civilization than any Utopian scheme conjured up over night by some artificially thinking radical.

And so, while “the younger generation cannot regard the old theistic teaching as anything but out-and-out mythology” given “the enormous strides of contemporary science,” Lovecraft “cannot sympathise with the violent anti-Christian agitators and ‘debunkers,’” for apart from its “excellent sociological value,” religion “will always have a retrospective beauty which no impersonal aesthete can fail to respect” (II.227).

Lovecraft, self-identifying as “an atheist of Protestant ancestry,” singles out Catholicism in particular as “really an admirable faith,” especially for artists (II.104):

It is the inheritor of ancient and beautiful rhythms of thought, cadence, and gesture which thousands of years of human feeling have woven symbolically and expressively around the various significant points of mortal experience; and as such it cannot help having a profound and genuine artistic importance and satisfyingness. It is the oldest continuously surviving poem of life that the races of Western Europe possess, and as such has an authority — which no other one system of symbolic expression can claim.

It seems to me that if one is to have anything so extra-rational as religion of any sort the Catholic and Episcopal systems are the only two sects with enough roots and anchors in the past to make them worthy of the affiliation of an artist. The life which they express is the natural, simple life of elder times, before the spread of industrialism and scientific discovery began its present transformation and destruction of society. No religion could express more, because all religion is a traditional art form dependent on a simple and continuous heritage.

Unfortunately, “the future civilisation of mechanical invention, urban concentration, and scientific standardisation of life and thought is a monstrous and artificial thing which can never find embodiment either in art or in religion.” Tradition is in decline (II.228):

Spengler is right, I feel sure, in classifying the present phase of Western civilisation as a decadent one; for racial-cultural stamina shines more brightly in art, war, and prideful magnificence than in the arid intellectualism, engulfing commercialism, and pointless material luxury of an age of standardisation and mechanical invention like the one now well on its course.

It would be better if we could still be naive, beauty-loving, and ignorant — yet we cannot turn the clock back. Memphis and Nineveh, Babylon and Persepolis, Carthage and Ctesiphon, Athens and Lacedaemon, Rome and Alexandria, Antioch and Tyre — all these have had their day and their sunset; their grandeur and their fall. In the face of such a pageant of history it would be folly to expect anything else of the existing civilisation. This age in America corresponds quite startlingly to the luxurious and disillusioned age of Antonines in the Roman Empire — when Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens and New Carthage blazed in the sunset that was to mark the death of the ancient world. A gradual death, of course, which took many centuries in dragging itself out.

If I were at all a mundane person — at all disposed to identify myself with one age any more than with any other — I would probably be greatly depressed by the existing phase of European culture; since I have no respect whatever for the hectic mechanical world which is supplanting the simpler, tradition-anchored world into which I was born. Fortunately for me, though, I am not greatly engrossed in external reality; so that my imagination is as free to live in another age as in this. It is only these broad, historic sweeps of life which interest me.

Reality Check

We set out to understand how Lovecraft thinks, and so far we’ve identified two major components: what I call the cosmic perspective and atheistic traditionalism. The final piece is a “profound respect for pure intellect” (II.124); in other words, for reason.

I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups — (a) Love of the strange and the fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities. [I.110]

Just a few examples of strain (b): “My object in all arguments is not to make any preconceived opinion of mine seem right, but merely to discover and establish the truth, whatever the truth may be” (V.13). “My objectivity, always marked, is now paramount and unopposed; so that there is nothing I am not willing to believe” (I.302). “I take keen delight in using my mind to study out some problem in science, philosophy, or history which really puzzles me” (IV.77). “To emerge from the artificial fog of empty, resonant, mystical words without a single real idea behind them, into the clear light of minds with actual conceptions, is a tonic to the intellect” (I.134), etc.

Now, tradition certainly gives life meaning — but it’s no substitute for thought (III.267):

Tradition is virtually the only standard, or value, or criterion of interest and direction-purpose illusion, that we have in the world of feeling, action, and art. There it is supreme. But in the world of thought and reality it is a perfectly meaningless thing; and has no effect except to place obstacles in the way of the discovery of truth. When we wish to obtain any actual knowledge of the cosmos and its properties, we must at once put out of our heads all the accumulated notions concerning such things which miscellaneous experience and slipshod inheritance have blindly saddled upon us.

“Good,” “evil,” “duty,” “direction,” “purpose,” “dignity” — applesauce! We must cease to be parts of any system of preconceived bias — Christian, moral, humane, or anything like that — and become simple free inquiring agents, each alone and fearless, facing the varied phenomena of the external world with such processes of cognition and such stores of correlative background-data as repeated former tests may have shewn to be authentick. If then we find any of the old traditions verify’d, well and good. But we must not accept anything on any authority save the actual present evidence of the cosmos as judged by the tested information of contemporary science.

He reasoned his way into traditionalism, and so is willing to be reasoned out of it:

My own views of social organisation change constantly as new evidence and fresh trends appear from year to year — the only persistent factor being my settled conviction that the best civilisation is that which gives the freest play and greatest encouragement to the highest (i.e., most evolved) attributes of mankind. [IV.223]

And what is the highest, the “most exalted attribute of our species”? Why, “the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW” — “a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger — as potent as thirst or greed” (I.61). “For evolved man — the apex of organic progress on the Earth — what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties” (I.106)?

Remember: to Lovecraft, at times “the herd seems a bit disgusting” (I.211).

Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to the ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life.

But we may be able to “overcome” this “natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast” through reason: “by a transference of interests to abstract spheres.” Since reason is universal, we have an interesting corollary: Lovecraft can extend humanity to star-spawned vegetable monsters — At the Mountains of Madness (1931):

And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage […] we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others — for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them — as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste — and this was their tragic homecoming.

They had not been even savages — for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch — perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia… poor Lake, poor Gedney… and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last — what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!

Anyway, given this exalted attribute, “the absolutely first requirement of any mature or genuine civilisation is complete intellectual and artistic freedom; so that no restriction whatever would be placed upon any sort of individual thought or tastes” (V.12).

An opinion changed by force is an opinion not really changed at all. No real civilisation wishes to change anyone’s opinion except through rational arguments.

Lovecraft is setting quite a high standard for a civilized society (V.117):

It is really a crime against a child to attempt to influence his intellectual belief in any way. Anything like bias or indoctrination should be confined to such broad concepts as have been universally found expedient & harmonious through racial experience — concepts like honesty, order, non-encroachment, &c., which relate to practical conduct & not to matters of opinion. So far as points of theory & belief are concerned, the only decent & honourable thing to do with a child is to teach him strict open-mindedness & intellectual integrity — urging him to accept nothing through mere hearsay or blind tradition, but to judge everything honestly himself on the basis of existing evidence. […]

All attempts to mould belief on emotional, non-rational grounds are to be condemned without qualification as unworthy of any organism as highly evolved as man. This applies to non-religous and anti-religious propaganda as much as to religious propaganda. The Russian soviets are just as reprehensible in warping popular emotions in favour of religion. What really ought to be taught people is how to think. Nine-tenths of the people in the world never really think on any topic of large scope. They imagine they have “opinions” — but these “opinions” are so completely the product of irrational emotion, blind heritage, & sheer mental indolence, as to be unworthy of the name. And this applies to most atheists as well as to most religious people. We would be a lot better off if our preceptors would stop trying to teach us special attitudes, & buckle down to the vital business of teaching us accurate thought & strict intellectual honesty.

His standard is not being met. See if any of this sounds familiar (V.283):

The more I observe the abysmal, inspissated ignorance of the bulk of allegedly cultivated people — folks who think a lot of themselves and their position, and who include a vast quota of university graduates — the more I believe that something is radically wrong with conventional education and tradition. These pompous, self-complacent “best people” with their blind spots, delusions, prejudices, and callousness — poor devils who have no conception of their orientation to human history and to the cosmos — are the victims of some ingrained fallacy regarding the development and direction of cerebral energy.

They don’t lack brains, but have never been taught how to get the full benefit of what they have. They squander energy on the vapid and meaningless intricacies of bridge whist, yet gape like bewildered yokels at the historical and sociological changes taking place around them. They potter around with crossword and jigsaw puzzles, yet look upon the vestigia of the past with no more comprehension than that provided by flashy guidebooks and superficial (and biassed) history courses. They mull over the technicalities of football, yet lay aside only half-understood the Harper’s to which they ostentatiously subscribe. They memorise useless gossip about people and families as commonplace as themselves, yet know no more about atoms, nebulae, and genes than a stevedore — and no more about minerals than I do!

They grope blindly through a world whose landmarks are hidden from them — throwing the beams of their lanthorns on some trivial object or objects pulled out of their pockets, instead of letting those beams shine on the terrain around, behind, and ahead. They are more ridiculous than the peasants and coal-heavers they despise — for instead of merely pure ignorance they possess the hypocritical combination of ignorance plus baseless pride and complacency.

It’s the ignorance and complacency that irk him, you see — not that they’ve failed to accept some theory of Lovecraft’s. “Of course, I respect equally the opinions of anyone who, from the same realistic data, builds up different conclusions” (III.54). “As for arguments — I can’t afford to detest them since they are all that ever bring out the truth about anything” (IV.57). Lovecraft is nothing if not open minded (IV.102):

I never take offence at any genuine effort to wrest the truth or deduce a rational set of values from the confused phenomena of the external world. It never occurs to me to look for personal factors in the age-long battle for truth. I assume that all hands are really trying to achieve the same main object — the discovery of sound facts and the rejection of fallacies — and it strikes me as only a minor matter that different strivers may happen to see a different perspective now and then. And in matters of mere preference, as distinguished from those involving the question of truth versus fallacy, I do not see any ground whatever for acrimonious feeling. Knowing the capriciousness and complexity of the various biological and psychological factors determining likes, dislikes, interests, indifferences, and so on, one can only be astonished that any two persons have even approximately similar tastes. To resent another’s different likes and interests is the summit of illogical absurdity.

It is very easy to distinguish a sincere, impersonal difference of opinion and tastes from the arbitrary, ill-motivated, and irrational belittlement which springs from a hostile desire to push another down and which constitutes real offensiveness. I have no tolerance for such real offensiveness — but I greatly enjoy debating questions of truth and value with persons as sincere and devoid of malice as I am. Such debate is really a highly valuable — almost indispensable — ingredient of life; because it enables us to test our own opinions and amend them if we find them in any way erroneous or unjustified.

One who never debates lacks a valuable chart or compass in his voyage for truth — for he is likely to cherish many false opinions along with sounds ones for want of an opportunity to see each opinion viewed from every possible angle. I have modified many opinions of mine in the course of debate, and have been intensely grateful for the chance of so doing.

Bayesians take note: Lovecraft could be quite the rationalist (III.267).

Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.

Still, we should remember the “rusty dung-fork,” and ask ourselves if a truth is “of sufficient importance to warrant the shattering of a beautiful illusion” (II.226).

I really wish this generation did know less, so that it might return to the unperplexed tranquility of former times — the tranquility of simple loyalty to King and Church, amidst which those idyllic figures, the country ’squire and the parish vicar, could regain something of their olden significance. Certainly, the acquiescent, dogmatic, and well-ordered life of simple ages had, with all its glaring defects, a fundamental harmony and good taste that we seek in vain amidst the excesses of that “jazz period” to which the invention of complex machinery and the spread of democratic fallacies have jointly given birth.

Thus I am, whilst utterly radical in such departments of sheer intellect as science and philosophy, thoroughly and cynically conservative — even reactionary — in social and political matters; a Tory, Czarist, Junker, patrician, Fascist, oligarchist, nationalist, militarist, and whatever else of the sort you can find in Webster’s Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus!

Which reminds me: isn’t this guy supposed to be some sort of racist?

Nordic Supremacy

Trigger warning for common sense: it is an “obvious fact,” to Lovecraft at least, “that different lands, races, & conditions naturally develop & demand different cultural standards & usages & different ethical & social codes” (II.26). Moreover, different cultures, past and present, can be ranked according to (what seems to Lovecraft) a rather natural criterion — given that “mankind must be regulated by customs which shall ensure the full development of its various accidental potentialities” (V.241).

There are high cultures, which utilise a great many possibilities of the human brain-structure, & low cultures, which utilise relatively few. It isn’t hard to tell them apart when our eyes aren’t blinded by modern theorising — we know that Greece & China & France & Italy have built up marvellously fine edifices, & that our own Anglo-Saxon edifice isn’t much below them in many ways — & we also know that the Arabs, Hindoos, Mayans, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, etc., built up edifices with greater crudities & limitations, which left more or less extensive tracts of human thought & feeling unutilised & wasted. [III.64]

Note that Lovecraft, according to his own criterion, ranks his culture below several others. On the other hand, he really is an Anglo-Saxon supremacist (III.79):

It is my one dominant wish that an Anglo-Saxon culture exist, that it be paramount in the world, & that it be so organised as to retreat as far as possible from the primitive toward the fullest utilisation of the manifold & delicate cosmos-exploring & pleasure-experiencing capacities of the human species.

Is this a contradiction, in light of his fundamental “principle that one’s view of the cosmos should be objective, uncoloured, & impartial”? Not really (III.78):

Have I ever objected to personal bias so long as it does not colour one’s perception of the external world? Haven’t I confessed to strong prejudices & enthusiasms in a dozen odd directions here & there? Didn’t I freely say that I think Anglo-Saxon culture is worth fighting for, that I’m intensely fond of cats, that ancient Rome arouses my enthusiasm, that India gives me a pain in the neck, & so on, & so on? Hell! Everybody has his personal likes & dislikes — but the point is, that a man of sense doesn’t let these things make him believe what ain’t so, & disbelieve what is so! There’s where I try to be impartial.

And so, from his impartial cosmic perspective, Lovecraft is able to examine his own personal enthusiasms, including cultural chauvinism. Remember (II.125):

I insist on the artificial & traditional values of each particular cultural stream — proximate values which grew out of the special instincts, associations, environment, & experiences of the race in question, & which are the sole available criteria for the members of that race & culture, though of course having no validity outside it. These backgrounds of tradition against which to scale the objects & events of experience are all that lend such objects & events the illusion of meaning, value, or dramatic interest in an ultimately purposeless cosmos.

Thus Lovecraft’s Anglo-Saxon supremacism must be seen as a special case of his multicultural traditionalism. In short: benevolent chauvinism for everyone (III.207).

No one thinks or feels or appreciates or lives a mental-emotional-imaginative life at all, except in terms of the artificial reference-points supply’d him by the enveloping body of race-tradition and heritage into which he is born. We form an emotionally realisable picture of the external world, and an emotionally endurable set of illusions as to values and direction in existence, solely and exclusively through the arbitrary concepts and folkways bequeathed to us through our traditional culture-stream. Without this stream around us we are absolutely adrift in a meaningless and irrelevant chaos which has not the least capacity to give us any satisfaction apart from the trifling animal ones. […]

Therefore a native culture-heritage is the most priceless and indispensable thing any person has — and he who weakens the grasp of a people upon their inheritance is most nefariously a traitor to the human species.

Mount Fuji (image)

Lovecraft invites us to consider how “a normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese” — “his mental and aesthetic superiors” (III.254).

No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. […]

We can all visit exotic scenes and like it — and when we are young and unsophisticated we usually think we might continue to like it as a regular thing. But as years pass, the need of old things and usual influences — home faces and home voices — grows stronger and stronger; and we come to see that mongrelism won’t work. We require the environing influence of a set of ways and physical types like our own, and will sacrifice anything to get them. […]

That is all there is to life — the preservation of a framework which will render the experience of the individual apparently relevant and significant, and therefore reasonably satisfying. Here we have the normal phenomenon of race-prejudice in a nutshell — the legitimate fight of every virile personality to live in a world where life shall seem to mean something.

Biological superiority really doesn’t enter into it (II.71):

Only a damn fool can expect the people of one tradition to feel at ease when their country is flooded with hordes of foreigners who — whether equal, superior, or inferior biologically — are so antipodal in physical, emotional, and intellectual makeup that harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. Such an immigration is death to all endurable existence, and pollution and decay to all art and culture. To permit or encourage it is suicide. […]

Biologically, the Nordic is probably not superior to the best Mediterranean stock; or the unbroken and now almost extinct Semitic white stock; but just as the Chinese culture ought to be preserved where it is once entrenched, where the Nordic culture is once entrenched, it must be preserved.

As long as we’re talking about the Chinese (V.78):

Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman — heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world — an “inferior” of any sort… & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences — & even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer’s physical aspect forms a constant reminder of his outside origin.

This is Lovecraft’s racial and cultural supremacism (III.276):

No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive, and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellection. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment.

What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this — that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don’t despise the French in France or Quebeck, but we don’t want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River.

The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream — this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race — is too obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists. […]

What we mean by Nordic “superiority” is simply conformity to those character-expectations which are natural and ineradicable among us. […]

We know perfectly well that the Italians excel us in the capacity to savour life and beauty — that their centres of taste are better developed than ours — but they annoy us and fail to fit into our group because their gland-functionings and nerve-reactions do not correspond to what our own heritage has made us expect. We do not call them inferior, but simply admit that they are different beyond the limits of easy mutual understanding and cultural compatibility. […]

Living side by side with people whose natural impulses and criteria differ widely from ours, gets in time to be an unendurable nightmare. We may continue to respect them in the abstract, but what are we to do when they continue to fail to fulfil our natural conception of personality, meanwhile placing all their own preferential stresses on matters and ideals largely irrelevant and sometimes even repugnant to us? And don’t forget that we affect alien groups just as they affect us. Chinamen think our manners are bad, our voices raucous, our odour nauseous, and our white skins and our long noses leprously repulsive. Spaniards think us vulgar, brutal, and gauche. Jews titter and gesture at our mental simplicity, and honestly think we are savage, sadistick, and childishly hypocritical. […] What’s the answer? Simply keep the bulk of all these approximately equal and highly developed races as far apart as possible.

Let them study one another as deeply as possible, in the interest of that intellectual understanding which makes for appreciation and tolerance. But don’t let them mix too freely, lest the clash of deep and intellectually unreachable emotions upset all the appreciation and tolerance which mental understanding has produced. Above all, don’t get led off on a false trail through observing the easy camaraderie of a few cosmopolitan intellectuals and aristocrats in whom similar manners or special interests have temporarily overridden the deep wells of natural feeling ineradicable from the bulk of each of the divergent race or culture groups represented.

I think that bears repeating (III.272):

Nothing but mischief can be caused by the sentimentalists who try to pretend that different cultures can understand and like one another, or that leaders in different nations will ever coöperate through a common love of mystical (and mythical) cosmic obligations. […] Actually, as Spengler shews, cultures are profoundly rooted, prodigiously unique, and externally hostile things — whose differences are far greater than is commonly suspected.

We cannot judge cultures, and their deep instinctive attitudes toward one another, by the unctuous amenities of the few internationally-minded aristocrats, intellectuals, and aesthetes who form a cosmopolitan and friendly group because of the common pull of surface manners or special interests. Of course these exotic specimens get on well enough together — but the real peoples as a whole are another matter!

Race Science

Before we continue, I strongly recommend that you read the following articles:

• Jeremy Gray and Paul Thompson: ‘Neurobiology of intelligence: science and ethics’ in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2004);
• Neven Sesardic: ‘Race: a social destruction of a biological concept’ in Biology and Philosophy (2010), with follow-up ‘Confusions about race: a new installment’ in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2013);
• J. P. Rushton and Arthur Jensen: ‘Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability’ in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (2005); and
• Jason Malloy: ‘James Watson tells the inconvenient truth: faces the consequences’ at Gene Expression (2007).

Topics covered:

• genetics of intelligence;
• genetics of race;
• race differences in intelligence; and
• what will happen to you if you try to talk about them.

Figure 2a from Tishkoff et al., Science (2009):
principal components analysis of individual genotypes

Now, the reader with a keen eye for thoughtcrime and a well developed sense of outrage will have picked up on a key bit of racial heresy already (III.276):

No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races.

Yes, Lovecraft believes in evolution. Gasps all ’round! He has deduced that culture is rooted not only in the accidents of history, but in biology as well (IV.247):

Of course Hitler is an unscientific extremist in fancying that any racial strain can be reduced to theoretical purity, that the Nordic stock is intellectually & aesthetically superior to all others, & that even a trace of non-Nordic blood — or non-Aryan blood — is enough to alter the psychology & citizenly potentialities of an individual. These assumptions, most certainly, are crude & ignorant — but the anti-Hitlerites are too cocksure when they maintain that the fallacy of these points justifies a precisely opposite extremism. As a matter of fact — all apart from social & political prejudice — there indisputably is such a thing as a Nordic subdivision of the white race, as evolved by a strenuous & migratory life in Northern Asia & Europe. Of course, very little of it remains Simon-pure at this date — after all the mixtures resulting from its contacts with other stocks — but anyone would be a damn fool to deny that certain modern racial or cultural units remain predominantly & determinantly Nordic in blood, so that their instincts & reactions generally follow the Nordic pattern, & differ basically from those of the groups which are predominantly non-Nordic.

Anybody can see for himself the difference between a tall, straight-nosed, fine-haired dolichocephalic Teuton or Celt (be he blond or dark) on the one hand, & a squat, swarthy Latin, aquiline Semite, or brachycephalic Slav on the other hand. And even if a Teutonic or Celtic group happens to pick up & assimilate substantial numbers of Latins, Semites, or Slavs, it will continue to think & feel & act in a characteristic Nordic fashion as long as the old blood remains predominant, & the culture-stream remains unbroken. It is of course true that the cultural heritage is more influential than the biological, but only a freakish extremist would reduce the biological to negligibility. Separate lines of evolution have certainly developed typically differing responses to given environmental stimuli.

As for the question of superiority & inferiority — when we observe the whole animal kingdom & note the vast differences in capacity betwixt different species & sub-species within various genera, we see how utterly asinine & hysterically sentimental is the blanket assumption of idealists & other fools that all the sub-species of Homo sapiens must necessarily be equal. The truth is, that we cannot lay down any general rule in this matter at the outset. We must simply study each variety with the perfect detachment of the zoölogist & abide by the results of honest investigation whether we relish them or not.

And what does such a study tell us? Largely this — that the australoid & negro races are basically & structurally primitive — possessing definite morphological & psychological variations in the direction of lower stages of organisation — whilst all others average about the same so far as the best classes of each are concerned. The same, that is, in total capacity — though each has its own special aptitudes & deficiencies.

This is the sort of thing his critics have in mind when they talk about his “racism.”

Sunand Tryambak Joshi is a leading expert on Lovecraft and “weird fiction” in general. He is also, by the way, an Indian immigrant to America, and a bit of an activist: author of The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong and God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; compiler of Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke and In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice Against Women.

From his 2001 biography, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time:

The one area of Lovecraft’s thought that has — justifiably — aroused the greatest outrage among later commentators is his attitude on race. […]

Lovecraft retained to the end of his days a belief in the biological inferiority of blacks and also of Australian aborigines, although it is not clear why he singled out this latter group.

Yes, why indeed would Lovecraft single out aboriginal Australians — with their dismal average intelligence, spectacular crime and general social dysfunction — along with sub-Saharan Africans? Why these two? Quite the mystery we have on our hands…

I will remind you that Lovecraft believes that “mankind must be regulated by customs which shall ensure the full development of its various accidental potentialities” (V.241); the development, that is, “of all the powers latent within man” (V.13), as opposed to

human degradation or retardation in any form — violence, ugliness, ignorance, sensuality, brutality, cruelty, abnormality, filth, cloddishness, rapacity, egotism, encroachment, violations of physical or spiritual integrity, and everything that goes with a dull acquiescence in the animal patterns of the lower part of creation.

Those who would drag us down can be considered the “‘enemy of humanity’” (V.244):

While not all of this minority would care to lower the prevailing life-level to the wholly savage state, it is undeniable that they would like to see it pulled down to an intolerable degree of mediocrity. This actual hostility to the best human achievements is found in many proletarian groups and peasantries, and was markedly manifest in the earlier stages of both French and Russian revolutions. It also exists in the theories of many “back-to-nature” cults which stem from Lord Monboddo and Rousseau — and is of course strong among a good many of the backward races themselves, who hate the white man and all his works.

Or maybe Lovecraft just hates everyone with dark skin. Because that makes sense.

Mr. Joshi continues:

In my view, Lovecraft leaves himself most open to criticism on the issue of race not by the mere espousal of such views but by his lack of openmindedness on the issue, and more particularly his resolute unwillingness to study the most up-to-date findings on the subject from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority who were, through the early decades of the century, systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories. In every other aspect of his thought — metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics — Lovecraft was constantly digesting new information (even if only through newspaper reports, magazine articles, and other informal sources) and readjusting his views accordingly. Only on the issue of race did his thinking remain relatively static. He never realized that his beliefs had been largely shaped by parental and societal influence, early reading, and outmoded late nineteenth-century science. The mere fact that he had to defend his views so vigorously and argumentatively in letters — especially to younger correspondents like Frank Long and J. Vernon Shea — should have encouraged him to rethink his position; but he never did so in any significant way.

Really? He “never realized”? We’re talking about H. P. Lovecraft, right? This is the same guy who warned us that “any belief or emotional bias, no matter how untrue or absurd, can be implanted in the brain & nervous system of a human being with tremendous force & firmness if the victim be inoculated with it in infancy” (V.117); who noted that “real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos can be reach’d only by weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe” (III.267); who boasted: “I can change my theories as often as valid evidence is changed, or as my judgment improves through exercise in the province of philosophical reflection” (I.135); and so on and so forth. I just want to be clear: that guy needs to be encouraged to rethink his position on anthropology?

For the record, Lovecraft did rethink his position on race at least once, experiencing “a sense of mortification at a slight scientific error — an error whereby I had estimated too large a gap betwixt the species homo sapiens and homo niger vel Africannus” (that would be, um, black people). “I now saw that these species, together with the extinct pithecanthropus erectus of Java, represent less evolutional separation than I had before calculated” (I.118). You see? We’re not so different after all!

Now may be a good time to point out that non-Africans, and only non-Africans, actually share Neanderthal DNA. Hey, Neanderthal DNA — could this be a thing? That explains other things? I feel like it might be. It used to be okay to think about such things:

“The genes for red hair and pale skin didn’t match well enough to show a correlation, but I found a correlation for genes linked to other traits. There’s a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession-compulsion and Asperger’s syndrome. That cluster correlates very strongly. I can trace some genes back to the interglacial around 450,000 years ago, and others back to another burst of evolutionary innovation during the Eemian interglacial about 130,000 years ago.” She rambled on with endless details.

Something wasn’t right. She was linking genes for advanced mental skills to Neanderthals. “I’m confused,” I said when she paused for a breath. “You’re correlating genes linked to modern human intelligence with Neanderthal populations. What am I missing?”

“You didn’t want to hear me, I knew that.”

“No, I want to hear you. I just asked a question.”

“You don’t, because I already told you.”

I looked at Beth blankly, realizing I was missing a key part of the puzzle. “You said these were Neanderthal genes?”

“Yes, they were,” she said. “They weren’t in the modern human genome until Neanderthals interbred with Cro-Magnons between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago.”

“Advanced mathematical processing? Shouldn’t that have been missing from the Neanderthal genome?”

“No, I found that Neanderthals lacked genes linked to successful socialization and management skills. They could count perfectly well, but they couldn’t deal with groups. Socialization genes came from Sapiens.”

(Speculative fiction by a science journalist, Jeff Hecht — written before we found out who does and who doesn’t have Neanderthal DNA.)

Oh, and it also turns out that aboriginal Australians and Melanesians (for example, Papua New Guineans) also share some of their DNA with another extinct type of hominid, called the Denisovans. Which is pretty neat (is all I’m saying).

The evolution and spread of the Denisovans (image)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled social constructs. Mr. Joshi, as you may recall, cites “the most up-to-date findings from biologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of unquestioned authority” — up-to-date in “the early decades of the century,” that is. The twentieth century. I worry a little when scientists go “unquestioned” for any length of time. Doesn’t that tend to undermine the reliability of science? In any case:

The brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished. The spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1857–1942), but I find virtually no mention of him in any of Lovecraft’s letters or essays. The intelligentsia — among whom Lovecraft surely would have wished to number himself — had also largely repudiated racist assumptions in their political and social thought. Indeed, such things as the classification of skulls by size or shape — which Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard waste much time debating in their letters of the 1930s — had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century.

Why, just look at Lovecraft’s preposterous and unscientific ideas (V.77):

Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question — he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates. Moreover, he has never developed a civilisation of his own, despite ample contact with the very earliest white civilisations. Compare the way the Gauls took on the highest refinements of Roman culture the moment they were absorbed into the empire, with the way the negroes remained utterly unaffected by the Egyptian culture which impinged on them continuously for thousands of years. Equally inferior — & perhaps even more so — is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro. This race has other stigmata of primitiveness — such as great Neanderthaloid eyebrow-ridges. And it is likewise incapable of absorbing civilisation.

“Neanderthaloid eyebrow-ridges”? Lovecraft, you so crazy!

“Australian Aborigines have a prominent brow ridge, a fact that helped
lead Thomas Huxley to argue that Neanderthals were indeed human” (PBS)

Compare Franz Boas (1894), spearhead of the scientific opposition to racism:

We find that the face of the negro as compared to the skull is larger than that of the American, whose face is in turn larger than that of the white. The lower portion of the face assumes larger dimensions. The alveolar arch is pushed forward and thus gains an appearance which reminds us of the higher apes. There is no denying that this feature is a most constant character of the black races and that it represents a type slightly nearer the animal than the European type. […] We find here at least a few indications which tend to show that the white race differs more from the higher apes than the negro.

Oh…

But does this anatomical difference prove that their mental capacity is lower than that of the white? The probability that this may be the case is suggested by the anatomical facts, but they by themselves are no proof that such is the case. I shall revert to this subject later on.

When Mr. Joshi declares that “the classification of skulls by size or shape had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late nineteenth century,” I suspect he’s thinking of phrenology: assessment of personality traits from the contours of the skull — which doesn’t work, and was discredited in the nineteenth century. But phrenology is not the same as physical anthropology, like examining skulls from different races and observing differences, which you can see for yourself right here:

“Although the concept of race assessment is controversial, certain features of the skull may be of use in differentiating ancestral groups.” In this case: European, Asian, African, and Australian (images)

If Mr. Joshi is, in fact, mixing up the two (he wouldn’t be the first), it is particularly regrettable in this case because Lovecraft actually names phrenology, along with psychoanalysis, among the “false arts” — the cognitive pseudosciences — which “must necessarily fail because of the essential complexity of the human mind” (II.93).

Mr. Joshi’s anti-racialist hero Boas continues:

We will now turn to the important subject of the size of the brain, which seems to be the one anatomical feature which bears directly upon the question at issue. It would seem that the greater the central nervous system, the higher the faculty of the race and the greater its aptitude to mental achievements. Let us review the known facts. Two methods are open for ascertaining the size of the central nervous system: the determination of the weight of the brain and that of the capacity of the cranial cavity. The first of these methods is the one which promises the most accurate results.

Naturally, the number of Europeans whose brain weights have been taken is much larger than that of individuals of other races. There are, however, sufficient data available to establish beyond a doubt the fact that the brain-weight of the whites is larger than that of most other races, particularly larger than that of the negroes. That of the white male is about 1370 grammes. The investigations of cranial capacities are quite in accord with these results. According to Topinard the capacity of the skull of males of the neolithic period of Europe is about 1560 cc.; that of modern Europeans is the same; of the Mongoloid race 1510 cc.; of African negroes 1405 cc.; and of negroes of the Pacific ocean [e.g., aboriginal Australians] 1460 cc. Here we have, therefore, a decided difference in favor of the white race. These differences cannot be explained as the effect of difference in stature, the negroes being at least as tall as the Europeans.

Which brings me to a fundamental problem with modern Lovecraft criticism. To your typical literary critic circa 2014 AD, if someone chooses to say something like “black people have smaller brains than white people” — well, that person is obviously a racist; in other words, stupid, ignorant, crazy, evil, or otherwise mentally defective (Issue 28). The problem is: in the actual world we actually live in, black people actually do have smaller brains than white people. You may not have heard about it, but it’s still true.

In interpreting these facts we must ask, Does the increase in the size of the brain prove an increase in faculty? This would seem highly probable and facts may be adduced which speak in favor of this assumption. […]

Boas, of course, did not have access to an MRI or even an IQ test — but we do.

We have now gone over the field of anatomical differences between races so far as they have a bearing upon our question. Our conclusion is, that there are differences between the physical characters of races which make it probable that there may be differences in faculty. No unquestionable fact, however, has been found yet which would prove beyond a doubt that it will be impossible for certain races to attain a higher civilization.

As an exercise, the reader can update this 120-year-old conclusion.

It was in his later work that Boas really set about (as Mr. Joshi put it) systematically destroying each and every pseudoscientific ‘proof’ of racialist theories (PBS; sic):

ALAN KRAUT: There were voices like that of Franz Boas, the anthropologist from Columbia University, who argued that immigrants weren’t of an inferior genetic type; they were simply people whose life experiences, had been different. […]

And, in fact, Boas conducted a study which demonstrated that in the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of newcomers in their bodily type tended to resemble more native-born youngsters than youngsters coming as new immigrants to the United States. Those findings were very, very significant because they told those Americans who were sort of on the fence, not completely opposed to immigration but not quite in favor completely either, that they really had less to fear than perhaps they thought about these newcomers and what their bodies would mean to the American population.

A politically valuable study indeed — and not just for immigration reform:

LEE D. BAKER: The scope of the study was just awesome. [Boas] measured thousands upon thousands of New York schoolchildren to demonstrate one thing: he stated that immigrants in the United States after one generation look nothing like their parents in terms of whatever people were measuring in terms of head size before. So, immigrant children, their measurements were indistinguishable with their American counterparts that had been here for years.
[…]
Remember when [the eighteenth century French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck had said that [when] giraffes hold their neck higher and higher, they get higher necks? Well, Boas is almost making a Lamarckian argument that just by being in America, you look more American.

In many respects Franz Boas was demonstrating the plasticity of human potential in terms of in the right environment: individuals can look very much different than in different environments.

It’s almost intuitive now. […]

In some respects Franz Boas had a master plan in terms [of] trying to unseat this notion that there [are] real hierarchies in terms of culture, races and language.
[…]
Organizations like the NAACP involved Franz Boas in their publications [and] symposiums — as well as [in] their efforts to organize and lobby Congress [on] behalf of this idea of equality. [They wanted] to demonstrate that America needs to live up to its creed, this notion of equality for all Americans. The pillars of democracy should stand for all. That was their argument. But they didn’t have any scientific data to back that up. So they turned in many respect to Franz Boas.
[…]
What happened after that was a long and fruitful relationship between Franz Boas, W. E. B. DuBois and many other scholars in the African community. Even though Franz Boas was not embraced heartily during this first decade of the twentieth century by other scientists, he was embraced heartily by African Americans and other reform-minded folks arguing for equality. And it was his research that provided the initial scientific underpinning for their claims for equality.

During Brown v. Board of Education, one of the important briefs that was used was a social science statement on race. [The] important brief that convinced Earl Warren to bring a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court forward on the Brown decision was based on Franz Boas’ earlier work. One could argue you found Changes in Bodily Form — in this notion that races are not necessarily static, and races cannot be seen as superior or inferior — in that 1954 statement. So in many respects it was Franz Boas’ work on Changes in Bodily Form that enabled the social science statement in Brown to move forward.

It really was a radical finding:

MATTHEW JACOBSON: He’s saying, “You know, you’re saying that Hebrews or Mediterraneans or Celts, or whoever they are, are so innately Hebrew, Mediterranean or Celtic that they’re never going to change; they’ll never be anything else. And yet, right here in front of our very eyes, right here on American soil, just looking from one generation to the next, we can see all kinds of bodily changes and facial changes that point to something else in the development of these peoples than the hereditarians are willing to take into consideration.”
[…]
Boas does a study of his own. He does very precise measurements of bodily form in various ways to determine that while the hereditarians are arguing that so innate are racial differences that they will never change — once a Celt, always a Celt. Boas is now saying, “Well, if we measure a difference from one generation to the next, right here on American soil we have proof that that hereditarian argument is mistaken. In fact, we see tremendous changes, and we can measure them between the Celts of yesteryear and the American-born Celt.”
[…]
The real contribution of Changes in Bodily Form is as the most radical kind of critique of the hereditarian argument and the most radical kind of advancement of a truly environmentalist kind of approach. [He was saying:] “we can measure as a way of finding out the truth about humanity and all its diversity.” And what he is finding goes right at the heart of the hereditarian argument, because in his measurement of body shape and body form and body type and the like, he finds that in fact there’s a tremendous change between the pure types from the old world and the pure types from the new world, that in fact immigrants over even just a short span of time, over one generation, might change quite a bit in a physical, measurable way. And what that implies is that the hereditarians have it completely wrong. I mean, they are talking about immutable types. They are talking about unshakable characterology. They are talking about a kind of being, a racial being that is etched in stone that will never change anything. Right before your eyes, right here among these throngs that you are so worried about, if you are in the new world, we can see changes, and quite rapid ones at that.

Yeah, about that…

Just one year after Mr. Joshi published A Dreamer and a Visionary, and two years after PBS took on “scientific racism” in The First Measured Century, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences released ‘A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited’ by Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz, covered by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times (2002): ‘A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race.’

Two physical anthropologists have reanalyzed data gathered by Franz Boas, a founder of American anthropology, and report that he erred in saying environment influenced human head shape. Boas’s data, the two scientists say, show almost no such effect.

The reanalysis bears on whether craniometrics, the measurement of skull shape, can validly identify ethnic origin. […]

“I have used Boas’s study to fight what I guess could be considered racist approaches to anthropology,” said Dr. David Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “I have to say I am shocked at the findings.”

Forensic anthropologists believe that by taking some 90 measurements of a skull they can correctly assign its owner’s continent of origin — broadly speaking, its race, though many anthropologists prefer not to use that term — with 80 percent accuracy.

Opponents of the technique, who cite Boas’s data, say the technique is useless, in part because environmental influences, like nutrition or the chewiness of food, would overwhelm genetic effects.

Boas measured the heads of 13,000 European-born immigrants and their American-born children in 1909 and 1910 and reported striking effects on cranial form, depending on the length of exposure to the American environment.

But in re-examining his published data, Dr. Corey S. Sparks of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. Richard L. Jantz of the University of Tennessee find that the effects of the new environment were “insignificant” and that the differences between parents and children and between European- and American-born children were “negligible in comparison to the differentiation between ethnic groups,” they are reporting today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The groups that Boas studied were Bohemians, Hungarians, central Italians, Jews, Poles, Sicilians and Scots. As to why he drew the wrong conclusion, Drs. Sparks and Jantz note that he was much involved in disputing contemporary belief that many different racial types could be reliably distinguished.

Boas’s motives, they write, “could have been entwined in his view that the racist and typological nature of early anthropology should end, and his argument for dramatic changes in head form would provide evidence sufficient to cull the typological thinking.”

Dr. Jantz said that Boas “was intent on showing that the scientific racism of the day had no basis, but he did have to shade his data some to make it work that way.”
[…]
The new report raises the issue of whether an earlier generation’s efforts to play down the role of genetics in fields like behavior and racial variation may not have been carried to extremes. […]

Dr. Thomas said that “once we anthropologists said race doesn’t exist, we have ignored it since then.” In that context, the reanalysis of Boas’s data “really does have far-reaching ramifications,” he said.

No kidding: the actual, historical reason why people today believe things like “race is only skin deep” or “race is a social construct” is because a German anthropologist fudged his numbers to claim that living in America changes the shape of your skull.

Consider those far-reaching ramifications lost on literary critics. In a 2012 roundtable discussion at RevolutionSF, for example, Dave Farnell refuses to “make excuses” for Lovecraft being a “great big racist” — excuses like being right about everything.

He was a highly intelligent and educated person, well read in the scientific literature which was quickly toppling pseudo-scientific claims that supported racism one after another.

It is disturbing that a guy who was open-minded in so many ways, able to be persuaded to take very different positions on so many subjects over his lifetime, was so inflexible and closed-minded about race.
[…]
My recommendation is to concede the point and take it as a lesson that even the most brilliant people — indeed often the most brilliant people — are complete idiots in one way.

Stupid Lovecraft! Doesn’t he realize that moving to America will warp your bones?

Jewish Questions

May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth.

Stephen Jay Gould

How can one trust a person so prejudiced as to neglect overwhelming evidence?

Hans Eysenck

Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek,
but don’t trust an Armenian.

George Orwell

Franz Boas, activist anthropologist and “spearhead,” as S. T. Joshi put it, “of the scientific opposition to racism,” is hard at work, demolishing race science:

the most radical kind of critique of the hereditarian argument and the most radical kind of advancement of a truly environmentalist kind of approach…

Pushing immigration reform on an unwilling electorate:

they told those Americans who were sort of on the fence… that they really had less to fear than perhaps they thought about these newcomers…

Supplying the federal government with the “evidence” it needs to legislate for equality:

he was embraced heartily by African Americans and other reform-minded folks arguing for equality… provided the initial scientific underpinning…

All for a good cause!

In some respects Franz Boas had a master plan in terms [of] trying to unseat this notion that there [are] real hierarchies in terms of culture, races and language.

Franz, the man with the master plan.

Meanwhile, the House Committee on Un-American Activities under J. Parnell Thomas issues its Report on Civil Rights Congress as a Communist Front Organization (1947):

The ink was scarcely dry on the Stalin-Hitler pact presaging the disastrous Communist-led strikes in North American Aviation and Allis-Chalmers, the peace strikes in universities, and the fulminations against President Roosevelt as an “imperialist warmonger,” when Earl Browder, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States and passport forger, sounded the usual warnings about the imminent menace to our civil liberties. Speaking at the National Conference for Civil Liberties in New York City on October 14, 1939, he declared:

The forces which are moving against American civil liberties are the same forces which want this war to go on as long as possible for the sake of the profits they expect to make out of it, and which are preparing to take this country into the war at an opportune moment… the forces involving America in the senseless destruction and slaughter of the imperialist war strike first of all against the Communist Party because they see in it the leader and the symbol of all the deepest antiwar and peace sentiments of the masses, which they wish to silence and to crush.

Thereafter, a maze of organizations was spawned for the alleged purpose of defending civil liberties in general but actually intended to protect Communist subversion from any penalties under the law. Among these organizations were the Committee for Citizenship Rights, the Committee for Civil Rights for Communists, Detroit Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Greater New York Emergency Conference on Inalienable Rights, Michigan Civil Rights Federation, Minneapolis Civil Rights Committee, National Committee for People’s Rights, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, and numerous other special committees under various guises. Former Attorney General Francis A. Biddle characterized the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, the chief national organization on this list, as follows:

The program of the federation parallels closely the Communist Party line of 1940… One of the tactics which they use to attack the (national defense) program was the emphasis on the threat to civil liberties and the rights of labor and of minority groups… The defenses of Communist leaders such as Sam Darcy and Robert Wood, party secretaries for Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, have been major efforts of the federation.

And what is this “National Federation for Constitutional Liberties,” exactly? The House Committee on Un-American Activities, this time under Martin Dies, can fill us in with its Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States (1944):

Out of 77 top-ranking sponsors and leaders of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties we find at least 45 who represent what is probably the most impressive aggregation of Communist talent ever assembled in a single organization throughout the long history of the Communist Party’s transmission belts in this country. By that we do not mean that all of them have been publicly avowed, card-holding members of the Communist Party. Many of them are members of the Communist Party, but by Communist talent we mean that they have occupied prominent positions of leadership in the numerous fronts which have been set up by the Communist Party, occupied in addition to their affiliation with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. These persons are not the mere rank-and-filers of the party’s transmission belts; they are the leaders of the Communist Party’s front movement in the United States. Among the more prominent of these leaders, we list the following together with some of their other positions in Communist or Communist front organizations:

Coming in at number three:

Franz Boas, national chairman of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom.

Quite a tricky fellow, you see, this Boas — but not unique.

Richard Lewontin (more on whom later) eulogizes his colleague Stephen Jay Gould in the communist — I mean, um, “socialist” — magazine Monthly Review (2002):

At the level of actual political struggles, his most important activities were in the fight against creationism and in the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of biological determinism including sociobiology and racism. […] He was one of the authors of the original manifesto challenging the claim of sociobiology that there is an evolutionarily derived and hard-wired human nature that guarantees the perpetuation of war, racism, the inequality of the sexes, and entrepreneurial capitalism. He continued throughout his career to attack this ideology and show the shallowness of its supposed roots in genetics and evolution. His most significant contribution to the delegitimation of biological determinism, however, was his widely read exposure of the racism and dishonesty of prominent scientists, The Mismeasure of Man. Here again, Gould showed the value of going back to square one.

Why, thank you, Dr. Lewontin! Yes, the value of going back to square one.

Not content simply to show the evident class prejudice and racism expressed by American, English, and European biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists prior to the Second World War, he actually examined the primary data on which they based their claims of the larger brains and superior minds of northern Europeans. In every case the samples had been deliberately biased, or the data misrepresented, or even invented, or the conclusions misstated.

“He actually examined the primary data,” you see. Although, technically… he didn’t.

In 2011, PLoS Biology published a remarkable paper: ‘The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias.’

Stephen Jay Gould, the prominent evolutionary biologist and science historian, argued that “unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm” because “scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth,” a view now popular in social studies of science. In support of his argument Gould presented the case of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century physician and physical anthropologist famous for his measurements of human skulls. Morton was considered the objectivist of his era, but Gould reanalyzed Morton’s data and in his prize-winning book The Mismeasure of Man argued that Morton skewed his data to fit his preconceptions about human variation. Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data? Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted? We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton’s skulls and reexamining both Morton’s and Gould’s analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould. In fact, the Morton case provides an example of how the scientific method can shield results from cultural biases.

Gould could be quite the storyteller:

Gould famously suggested that Morton’s measurements may have been subject to bias: “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.” While Gould offers this as only a “plausible scenario,” and did not remeasure any crania, subsequent authors have generally (and incorrectly) cited Gould as demonstrating that Morton physically mismeasured crania. [My emphasis.]

But he wasn’t much of a paleontologist:

Our analysis of Gould’s claims reveals that most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified. […]

Of the substantive criticisms Gould made of Morton’s work, only two are supported here. First, Morton indeed believed in the concept of race and assigned a plethora of different attributes to various groups, often in highly racist fashion. This, however, is readily apparent to anyone reading the opening pages of Morton’s Crania Americana. Second, the summary table of Morton’s final 1849 catalog has multiple errors. However, had Morton not made those errors his results would have more closely matched his presumed a priori bias. Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results.
[…]
Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that “unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth.” This view has since achieved substantial popularity in “science studies.” But our results falsify Gould’s hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton’s initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.

So much for the relativist. This was covered by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times (2011), as ‘Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim.’

Dr. Gould did not measure any of the skulls himself but merely did a paper reanalysis of Morton’s results. He accused Morton of various subterfuges, like leaving out subgroups to manipulate a group’s overall score. When these errors were corrected, Dr. Gould said, “there are no differences to speak of among Morton’s races.”

But Dr. Gould himself omitted subgroups in his own reanalysis, and made various errors in his calculations. When these are corrected, the differences between the racial categories recognized by Morton are as he assigned them. […]

Dr. Lewis, the lead author, said that on checking the references for some of Dr. Gould’s accusations he found that Morton had not made the errors attributed to him. “Those elements of Gould’s work were surprising,” he said. “I can’t say if they were deliberate.”

But he did have to shade his data some to make it work that way…

Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia and a co-author of the new study, was less willing to give Dr. Gould benefit of the doubt.

“I just didn’t trust Gould,” he said. “I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ came and he never even bothered to mention [undergraduate researcher John S.] Michael’s study, I just felt he was a charlatan.”

“As a reader,” adds anthropologist John Hawks (2011), “I can’t see how they managed to keep their cool. Some of Gould’s mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.”

Gould used the well-documented work of a long-dead man to make an argument that unconscious bias is widespread in science. He posed as a concerned critic, but thereby cast doubt on the validity of the scientific enterprise. He picked volume measurement and tabulation of averages as his target, making it seem as if the simplest and most objective observations — the Junior High-level science methods — were themselves subject to all-encompassing cultural biases. His paper and book are very widely read and cited by people who will never examine the primary evidence. Gould owed us a responsible reading and trustworthy reporting on that evidence. In its place, he made up fictional stories, never directly examined the evidence himself, and misreported Morton’s numbers.

This stuff really ticks me off. I don’t think that Gould’s errors can be written off as “unconscious bias.” Reading back over his 1978 article, I cannot believe that Science published it.

But I think you can see why an egalitarian would find those skulls inconvenient.

So Gould, the great anti-racialist paleontologist, like Boas, the great anti-racialist anthropologist, was a bit of a fibber on the subject of race. Gould, like Boas, was also a communist (e.g., Socialist Worker, 2002). Finally, Gould, like Boas and almost every other member of his ascendant “Boasian” school (MacDonald, 1998), was Jewish.

Now, perhaps this is not a representative sample.

Then again, perhaps it is.

From a booklet entitled ‘Including Diverse Women in the Undergraduate Curriculum,’ by the “Task Force on Representation in the Curriculum” of the “Division of the Psychology of Women” of the American Psychological Association (1995): an example, they claim, of “research based on a biased perspective” (I happen to agree), illustrating the necessity of promoting unqualified women and minorities (I happen to disagree).

A massive amount of work has been dedicated to finding a genetic basis for the IQ differences found between Black and White populations (Eysenck, 1973; Herrnstein, 1971; Jensen, 1969; Murray & Herrnstein, 1994). An equally committed group of researchers has been occupied with fighting an apparently never-ending battle to expose the ideological, methodological, and statistical flaws of this research (Kamin, 1974; Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984; Montague [sic], 1975; Samudi [sic], 1975; Scarr & Weinberg, 1976).

This impeccably progressive source has just provided us with two lists: a group of honest, capable researchers, including Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray; and — another group. The anti-racialists.

Let’s meet them!

Leon Kamin, a radical psychologist, kicked off the “Burt Affair” with his 1974 book The Science and Politics of IQ, in which he essentially accused the English psychologist Cyril Burt of fabricating data on the heritability of IQ. To make a long, sordid story short: the case against Burt, by Kamin and other egalitarians, was itself largely fabricated; and Burt’s findings are consistent with later studies on the heritability of IQ (e.g., Fletcher, 2013; Rushton, 1994 and 2002). Kamin’s book was found “to suffer from a number of statistical and logical problems” (Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler, 1975); his critique “does not… constitute an unbiased survey of the data.” In a review of The Bell Curve, Kamin, hilariously, accused Richard Lynn of a “scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity,” and agreed with black journalist Bob Herbert that the entire book “is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger” (1995). Leon Kamin happens to be Jewish.

Richard Lewontin, a Marxist geneticist, “engaged in a high-profile attempt to fuse science, leftist politics, and opposition to evolutionary and biological theorizing about human behavior” (MacDonald, 1998). Among his more psychotic claims: that “no one has ever found a correlation between cognitive ability and brain size” (1994). Lewontin also gave us Lewontin’s Fallacy: the notion that there is, in some sense, more genetic “variation” within races than between races, and therefore something something we’re all exactly the same except white people are evil and keeping everyone else down. As the name suggests, Lewontin’s Fallacy is not a valid line of reasoning (e.g., Edwards, 2003; Sesardic, 2010). Richard Lewontin also happens to be Jewish. Who knew?

Steven Rose, a radical Marxist biologist (e.g., The Guardian, 2001), co-authored the socialist screed Not in Our Genes (1984) with his fellow champions of “radical science,” Kamin and Lewontin. The book, which praises Mao, kicks off with this promise:

We share a commitment to the prospect of the creation of a more socially just — a socialist — society. And we recognize that a critical science is an integral part of the struggle to create that society, just as we also believe that the social function of much of today’s science is to hinder the creation of that society by acting to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race.

Rose condemns the entire field of evolutionary psychology as a “right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity” (2000). Here he is on James Watson (The Guardian, 2007):

As for freedom of speech, these freedoms are and must be constrained. We don’t have the right to casually cry fire in a crowded theatre, or to use hate speech — at least in Europe, as opposed to the US. Watson’s now retracted remarks came into these unacceptable categories. So the repercussions are to be welcomed.

Charming. If we believe Volkmar Weiss, Rose practiced what he preached (1991):

In 1980, the manuscript of the monograph “Psychogenetik” (Weiss 1982a) was complete. Now some fierce dogmatists were discovering that a cuckoo’s egg had been laid in the nest of socialism. One example: S. Rose asked his East German colleague, the professor of neurochemistry D. Biesold at the Karl-Marx-University of Leipzig (personal communication by Biesold), whether there was no means of stopping further publications by Weiss, because such publications printed in a socialist country were particularly disadvantageous to the progaganda of the Radical Left in the Western world. […]

Because Friedrich and his security service co-worker Harri Schulze (see 1986) were unable to stop the publication of “Psychogenetik”, they accused their subordinate Weiss (as was fashionable in the wake of the Burt affair) of forgery of data and with the intention of fleeing East Germany for the West. With the aid of such calumnies, at the end of the year 1982 Friedrich sought and obtained the backing of high-ranking officials of the Communist Party and all further research in psychogenetics in East Germany came to an end. […]

At the very time [1982] the cited author was under the threat of arrest and had already lost all possibility of doing further empirical work of defending his field of research. After 1984, Weiss was forced to work in a quite different field (for results, see Weiss 1990b). What follows is the usual story of life and resistance under totalitarian conditions. In order to be published abroad, any new theoretical contributions had to be smuggled out of the GDR.

Need I go on? Steven “Crowded Theatre” Rose also happens to be Jewish.

Ashley Montagu, a student of Boas, gave us Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), in which he declared that “the very word ‘race’ is itself racist,” and managed to muddy the waters of race science so thoroughly that although the book explicitly affirms the existence of biological races, a philosophy professor’s letter to the editor of the New York Times cites Montagu as proving that “those who study genetics have found no biological evidence to support the idea that humans consist of different ‘races’” (2013). Montagu also contributed a bizarre propaganda piece, The Race Question, to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (1950). Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg, also happened to be — take a guess.

That accounts for the core of our “committed group of researchers” out to “expose the ideological, methodological, and statistical flaws” of race science. All of them are (a) liars; (b) communists; and, for whatever reason, (c) Jewish. As for the rest:

Ronald Samuda isn’t a major figure, but for what it’s worth, his Psychological Testing of American Minorities (1998) claims that “testing continues to be the primary method for injecting pseudoscientific arguments to bolster discrimination, prejudice, and social injustice,” and — I guess “Samuda” might be an old Jewish name? Whatever.

Richard Weinberg and Sandra Scarr conducted the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (1976). Later, in her defense of Arthur Jensen, Scarr wrote (1998):

My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one. […] We should have been agnostic on the conclusions; Art would have been.

She also described the climate in psychology created by Lewontin, Kamin, etc:

Few can claim to be, or to have been, as sorely tested as Art has been in defense of psychology as a science. I have witnessed his steadfastness in the face of a screaming, unruly mob who disrupted his lecture on learning and intelligence and threatened his personal safety. I learned what it was like to be spat upon and to put my body on the line to get Art out of a University of Minnesota auditorium. It was shocking and frightening, as surely the radicals intended, but it was most of all infuriating, because no disciplinary actions were taken against those who assaulted us. Those were the wonderful 1970s.

As he mentions in his essay (this issue), his automobile tires were slashed, police had to open his mail, and his office at the University of California-Berkeley was stripped bare to protect him from a potential bomb. Art’s office at Berkeley was more like a San Quentin cell than a typically cluttered faculty office. His family was threatened, and his personal freedoms seriously compromised — all because he reported his conclusions about genetics and IQ, based on a serious scientific review of the research literature.

Plus, Edward O. Wilson, “the father of sociobiology,” was physically attacked by the International Committee Against Racism, a Marxist group, in 1978. Wilson, a primary target of Not in Our Genes, identifies Gould as a “charlatan… seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer… consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion” (The Atlantic, 2011).

Lewontin and Gould, among many others, ganged up on Wilson in the philippic ‘Against “Sociobiology”’ (1975), which managed to cram in “sterilization laws,” “restrictive immigration laws,” “eugenics policies,” “gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” “genocide,” and “slavery.” Convincing! Except, as Steven Pinker pointed out in The Blank Slate (2002), all the criticisms in this fascinating document are “demonstrably false.”

Within two years, the Harvard Crimson had informed us, firstly, that Wilson’s Sociobiology is “dangerously racist” and “unscientific,” “laying the foundation for a racist synthesis” (Rosenthal, 1977); and, secondly, that the “new government of Cambodia,” the Khmer Rouge, which “we support,” “may have to resort to strong measures against a few to gain democratic socialism for all Cambodians” (1975).

As for the climate in anthropology, here again is Ralph Holloway (2008):

Simply put, this research area [ethnic differences in the brain] remains an intensely political and near-suicidal enterprise. (Indeed, one colleague suggested I should incinerate the data; another suggested this kind of study had led to his relatives perishing in the Nazi concentration camps.) The continuing gap in African American and European-descent test scores on various cognitive tests (particularly IQ) throughout the United States and the world is a source of tremendous concern and acrimonious debate. Indeed, Jon Marks claimed he “outed” me as a “racist” in his biological section of the American Anthropologist Newsletter because I had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen against Loring Brace’s assertion that Jensen was a bigot.

(Sounds like a bit of a fibber. Jonathan Marks has also written for, um, “socialist” journals including Social Anthropology and Dialectical Anthropology.)

I had read much of this literature including Jensen’s infamous 1969 piece in the Harvard Law Review and did not find him a racist. I remain appalled at our discipline, which regards him as such and which invented the appellation “Jensenism” to tar and feather him. I remain interested in the possibility that different populations have variation both in their brains and their behavior, but the issue is so politically incorrect that one cannot even approach such a study with anything but trepidation. (For example, the Annual Review article by Freedman & DeBoer 1979 was declared by sociocultural students at Columbia as racist and therefore not to be read!)

In any case, Scarr really doesn’t belong on a list of anti-racialists (1998):

By his own account, he [Jensen] is no extravert. Nor, I may add, did warmth and humor soften the acrimonious exchanges he had with hostile audiences. One might also observe that insight into his violent, enraged opponents was lacking. The logical, unemotional Dr. Jensen would never behave in such an uncivilized manner, nor comprehend those who do.

Art has also endured abuse from thugs with pens instead of megaphones. Personally, I have no empathy for politically driven liars, who distort scientific facts in a misguided and condescending effort to protect an impossible myth about human equality (= identity). Art believes he understands the motives of the Marcus Feldmans, Steven Jay Goulds, and Leon Kamins of the intellectual world. They seem to speak his language, albeit with forked tongues. I find them despicable, because they have the knowledge and intellect to know that they deliberately corrupt science. To deny falsely the scientific evidence that nearly all measurable human traits are moderately to highly heritable is to deny parents and policy makers essential knowledge to run their own lives and the society as a whole. Self-appointed saviors of the equality myth are far more dangerous to an honest psychological science than a hundred outraged groupies who don’t know [what] the lecture was supposed to be about, anyway.

If you’re interested in the history of intelligence research, here are a few more names provided by our friends on the Task Force on Representation in the Curriculum (1995):

Theory and research attempting to corroborate the inferiority of people of Color has a long history (Gould, 1981; McDougall, 1921; Whitten, 1993).

Gould we already know. Lisa Whitten is black. Oh, by the way, Alan Kraut and Matthew Jacobson, from the PBS special The First Measured Century, are both Jewish; Lee D. Baker is black. As for William McDougall, the English psychologist (Cyril Burt was one of his students), we are referred to his lectures at the Lowell Institute (1921):

Of the many critics of the race-dogmatists, I will cite only the names of M. J. Finot, author of “The Prejudices of Race,” of Mr. J. M. Robertson, the vindicator of Buckle, and of Mr. J. Oakesmith. Mr. Oakesmith’s book on “Race and Nationality” (1919) is the latest important work on this side of the argument and well represents the rest. These authors, who deny all importance to racial composition and differences of innate endowment, may conveniently be classed over against their opponents, the race-dogmatists, as the “race-slumpers.”

The Jews do seem to thin out as we go back in time. Worth noting.

It is characteristic of them that they in the main avoid the straight issue and content themselves with exposing the errors of the race-dogmatists. They make much of the undeniable truth that none of the civilized peoples of the world are of pure race, but rather are all alike the products of repeated blendings of races and peoples. They point out that, if any racial peculiarities of mental constitution exist, they are so obscure that no one has been able to define them and measure them, as the physical anthropologists have succeeded in defining and measuring certain physical qualities as indicators of race. They point to the fact that in many instances men born of primitive and even savage parents have shown themselves capable of acquiring all the elements of culture of the most highly civilized communities, and of playing an honorable part in the complex life of such a community. They delight in telling us how the native children in this or that missionary school excel their white fellows in learning the A B C, or even in acquiring the three R’s. Especially they avoid the direct issue by demonstrating at length the obvious truth that race and nationality are not coincident. This is merely a red herring drawn across the track, to put us off the scent.

The “race-slumpers” have shown, it must be admitted, that the facile generalizations of many historians upon race and national character have been of the most flimsy nature, often erroneous and sometimes absurd. We must recognize with them that these flimsy assumptions have worked harm; and we must agree with them in condemning in the most outspoken way the evil work of the more extreme race-dogmatists.

But when Mr. Oakesmith concludes that the practical value of “race” is purely subjective; that “race” is merely an emotion, like that of the soldier who is proud of his regiment’s history; when the “race-slumpers” assert or imply, as they do, that all men are born with the same mental endowments, that all human stocks are of equal value, and that the anthropologic composition of a people is of no influence upon the course of its history, then we must part company from them. These writers have shown that the training of the pure historian does not qualify him to propound sweeping generalizations about racial qualities; and that, when he undertakes to do so, in entire ignorance of the findings of anthropology and equipped only with the fallacious psychology which is embodied in common speech, he cannot hope to arrive at the truth. […]

It will, I think, help us to define our problem more exactly, if we state it concretely in the following way. Let us imagine that in some one of the great well-defined nations — say the British — every infant, throughout a period of fifty years, could be exchanged without the knowledge of its parents for an infant of another people. If this were done, at the close of the period of fifty years the anthropologic constitution of the nation would have been completely changed or exchanged. Would that affect the future course of its national life? If so, in what manner and degree? If we suppose the exchange to have been made with some other nation of similar composition and level of culture, the race-slumpers — Messrs. Finot, Oakesmith, Robertson — would confidently reply: “No, it would make no difference.” Would they give the same reply if the exchange were made with some remoter people, say the Japanese, or Armenians, or Italians; or with a still remoter people, say the Hottentots or the Bushmen of southern Africa, or the Malays of the Far East? Their principles logically would compel them to give the same reply; but I fancy that, when confronted with the issue in this concrete form, the most extreme of them would hesitate to do so. They would probably put us off with some reference to physical incompatibility of climate, and so forth. For these writers do not and cannot deny important physical peculiarities of race; negation applies only to differences of mental endowments, in respect of which the establishment of the facts is so much more difficult.

(Perhaps, Dr. McDougall, you give them too much credit.)

Let us see, then, what evidence we have bearing on this great question of differences of innate mental endowment. And we will begin with the problem of intellectual endowment, or innate capacity for the development of intellect or intelligence. For though the moral factors may be more important, intelligence is a valuable quality and not to be despised; and it is more easily measurable than the moral qualities.
[…]
An important step in mental anthropology has recently [in 1921] been made. The method of intelligence-tests (or mental testing) has been devised, and in the army and elsewhere has been assiduously applied. The methods have been proved on a scale which shows that the results achieved are “statistically” valid, though errors may and do occur in individual cases. […]

There are many interesting features about this table. We see that each class taken by itself gives approximately an asymmetrical curve of distribution of intelligence. The curves for the white illiterates and the colored literates run pretty closely together indicating, that these two classes show approximately the same degree of intelligence “statistically”; while the white literates’ curve shows considerable shift to the left, and that of the colored illiterates a shift to the right.

(Left, of course, representing higher intelligence.)

You may be disposed at first sight to attribute the differences of intelligence disclosed to differences of degree of education, of schooling; but reflection shows that the assumption will not fit the facts.
[…]
All these facts point to the one conclusion, namely, that innate capacity for intellectual growth is the predominant factor in determining the distribution of intelligence in adults, and that the amount and kind of education is a factor of subordinate importance.

The superiority of the white literates to the white illiterates is due, then, not wholly or mainly to their schooling, but rather to an inborn greater capacity for intellectual growth. […]

When all the white recruits of the whole army are thrown into a single table, they give a curve conforming very closely to a normal curve of distribution.
[…]
I have put before you evidence that in the population of this country innate intellectual capacity (or the capacity to develop intelligence) is continuously distributed, in much the same fashion as a physical quality such as stature. […] Physical stature (or the capacity to attain a certain stature) is a resultant of many factors (lengths of many bones), yet it is an inborn or innate quality; though affected by environment, yet it is determined by heredity; it is inborn in various degrees in individuals and in races, some having more and others less of it; and the same is true of intellectual capacity.
[…]
We have a few studies which suggest that when, two races of different intellectual capacity are crossed, the offspring are (statistically) intermediate, and that they approximate to the superior race according to the proportion of their blood derived from it.

(See: the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.)

This conclusion is, I think, in harmony with the indications afforded by the whole history of the Negro race — not only in Africa and America, but in Oceania and especially in such regions as Haiti and Liberia. It is not in the least invalidated by the statistics we so often see, showing the progress of the colored people since emancipation, and by the acknowledged fact that some men of color have shown themselves to be truly great men.
[…]
These differences of intellectual capacity are inborn; but are they hereditary? We have already noted certain facts which imply the positive answer. If the differences are racial, they are hereditary in the race. […]

We have, then, pretty good evidence that capacity for intellectual growth is inborn in different degrees, that it is hereditary, and also that it is closely correlated with social status. Further, we have good evidence that different races possess it in widely different degrees; that races differ in intellectual stature, just as they differ in physical stature.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh, right: picking on the Jews. And why are we doing that? Well, I just thought it might be fun to see if Lovecraft can answer any of our “Jewish questions.” Because you’d expect him to have some thoughts on the subject!

As indeed he does. From S. T. Joshi’s biography A Dreamer and a Visionary (2001):

If Lovecraft’s racism is the one aspect of his thought that has been subject to the greatest censure, then within that aspect it is his qualified support of Hitler and his corresponding suspicion of Jewish influence in America that has — again justifiably — caused even greater outrage.

All right, it’s not ideal, but I guess we’ll start with…

Here Comes Hitler

This is the essence of tragedy,
To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate,
All stone, approach.

Robinson Jeffers

The year is 1933. The dictator Adolf Hitler takes power in Germany; the dictator Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes power in America. Roosevelt promptly recognizes the Soviet Union, and establishes diplomatic relations with Stalin’s government. The Soviet Union has already murdered millions of people. The Soviet Union under Stalin has already murdered millions of people. The Holocaust is ten years into the future.

So let me get this straight: Lovecraft’s personal correspondence expressing “qualified support of Hitler” is supposed to fill us all with tremendous outrage. Fine. How are we supposed to feel about Henry Wallace and Premier Molotov — Owen Lattimore and Chairman Mao — Harry Dexter White and Agent Sound? And who the heck is this guy?

Prior to his departure in May 1943, Davies brought a fresh print of Mission to Moscow to the White House for a sneak preview. After its viewing, he secured FDR’s permission to take a copy with him to Moscow, along with a sealed envelope that the President had prepared for Stalin.

When Davies arrived in Moscow, Amb. Standley, not informed of the mission in advance, resigned in disgust. Davies met Stalin in the Kremlin and read him the letter. He emphasized the US government’s disapproval of British imperialism and broadly hinted that the USA and the USSR, without the British, could rule the world together. Having betrayed British allies and destroyed the incumbent Ambassador, Davies then retired with Stalin to the Kremlin screening room to watch Mission to Moscow, where his cinematic glorification of the dictator, to his disappointment, did not win a rave review, but only a grunt or two. [CIA.gov]

“Owen who?” Never mind. Go back to watching Band of Brothers.

The first National Socialist book burnings took place in May of that year, beginning with the works of the radical Jewish “sexologist” Magnus Hirschfeld — who, if I’m being perfectly frank, probably should have been considered degenerate. Hirschfeld, by the way, helped popularize the term “racist,” and is an excellent example of what the British psychologist William McDougall called a “race-slumper” (Francis, 1999).

In any case, books are burning — which obviously wouldn’t sit well with Lovecraft, who has long believed that “the absolutely first requirement of any mature or genuine civilisation is complete intellectual and artistic freedom; so that no restriction whatever would be placed upon any sort of individual thought or tastes” (V.12).

Hitler’s “attempt to banish arbitrarily all literature he does not like” is “essentially uncivilised”; indeed, his entire program is “extreme, grotesque, & occasionally barbarous” (IV.235). Lovecraft sees no reason whatsoever “to ban Jewish books, to impose disabilities on Germanically cultured Jews, or to assume that — biologically speaking — a dash of Semitic blood unfits one for Aryan citizenship” (IV.193).

And yet, to Lovecraft, “there is a certain basis behind some phases of the attitude [Hitler] represents” (IV.235). In fact, there is even “something to be said for one phase” of “his much-advertised & hysterically condemned Jew policy” (IV.193):

There is a very real & very grave problem in the presence of an intellectually powerful minority springing from a profoundly alien & emotionally repulsive culture-stream, defying assimilation as a whole, & using its keen mentality & ruthless enterprise to secure a disproportionate hold on the mental & aesthetic life of a nation. In such a case it is foolish to quibble about ‘rights’ & ‘principles.’ The question is whether an enormous Aryan nation, with all the innate feelings & perspectives of Aryan culture, is going to allow its formulated expression (literary models, art, music, &c.) to bely & embarrass it by reflecting an altogether different & sometimes hostile set of feelings & perspectives through a gradual & imperceptible Semitic control of all the avenues of utterance.

It is needless to point out that a nation’s literary & artistic utterance depends very largely on those who control the periodicals, schools, colleges, publishing houses, galleries, theatres, & so forth — this control largely determining what works & types of art shall receive preference in presentation to the public & in treatment by critics, & what attitudes shall receive official recommendation.

If such control be gradually seized by a culture-group profoundly foreign to the natural culture-stream of the nation, the result is bound to be tense, awkward, & finally intolerable. […] If a minority-overriden culture has any vitality at all, it will revolt in the end — & of course crudely at first.

It is precisely this crudeness that Lovecraft hopes to avoid:

In my opinion, all nations ought to take quiet & moderate steps to get such pivotal forces as education, large-scale publishing, legal interpretation, criticism, dramatic management, artistic control, &c. into the hands of those who inherit the respective mainstreams of thought & feeling of those nations. Chinamen ought not to let American missionaries dictate & interpret their policies — & by the same token Aryans ought not to leave their guidance & interpretation to persons of an irreconcilable Semitic culture.

Therefore, Lovecraft concludes, although Hitler’s “ethnological theories (as distinguished from any defence of a purely Aryan culture) are contrary to the maturest beliefs of science” (IV.235), “just this much […] is perfectly & irrefutably sound” (IV.249):

namely, that no settled & homogeneous nation ought (a) to admit enough of a decidedly alien race-stock to bring about an actual alteration in the dominant ethnic composition, or (b) tolerate the dilution of the culture-stream with emotional & intellectual elements alien to the original cultural impulse.

Both of these perils lead to the most undesirable results — i.e., the metamorphosis of the population away from the original institutions, & the twisting of the institutions away from the original people…… all these things being aspects of one underlying & disastrous condition — the destruction of cultural stability, & the creation of a hopeless disparity between a social group & the institutions under which it lives.

That goes for all nations: Germany, China, and “if the Jews had a nation of their own,” Lovecraft would “be the first to insist that it be kept free of Aryan influences” (IV.206).

As it is, I honestly regret the Aryan taint (any infusion is a “taint” if it’s where it doesn’t belong) in the noble and ancient culture of Japan.

The issue, Lovecraft emphasizes, is not biological: an “absolute colour-line […] against Jews (though attempted by Hitler) is ridiculous,” because “the trouble with the Jew is not his blood — which can mix with ours without disastrous results — but his persistent & antagonistic culture-tradition” (IV.194). Lovecraft is “well aware that a large amount of the race-stock included within the nominal bounds of Jewry is excellent and quite assimilable by a Nordic majority” — consider those “keen, gray-eyed, white-skinned German Jews like the first August Belmont, or ascetic Portugese-Jewish types like those whose blood has already tinctured to a great extent the body of the Spanish people” (II.65). No, “the real, impassible barrier is cultural,” not biological, in that “our whole system of values differs utterly and irreconcilably from the Jewish system” (IV.205).

It remains a fact that many modern nations need to take steps to preserve the integrity of their own native cultures against shrewd and pushing alien influences. One must view such problems realistically — without patriotic sentimentality like Hitler’s on the one hand, and without idealistic sentimentality on the other hand. Certainly, a dash of alien blood of a superior race (among which a large section of Jews as well as Mongols must be included) does not harm another superior stock so long as the culture is unimpaired. But that’s where the rub comes. When the alien element is strong or shrewd enough to menace the purity of the culture amidst which it parasitically lodges, it is time to do something. So far as Jews are concerned, it wouldn’t hurt a nation to absorb a few thousand provided they were not a physiognomically aberrant type and provided they left their culture and folkways behind them so that the new generation would hold no memories except of the dominant racial tradition. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury is no less golden because the anthropologist’s old man was an ex-Cohen.

Whereas Lovecraft is “not prepared to admit that the essentially exotic and Oriental culture-stream of the Hebraic tradition has any legitimate place in a Western and Aryan civilisation.” (II.64). Any “absorption” of Jews into such a civilization, then,

absolutely postulates a complete cultural surrender on their part — an acceptance of our own Aryan point of view, loyalties, religion, and heritage. In other words, they must throw themselves wholly into the main stream and utterly forget their own individual past; else they will engender unpleasant cross-currents of taste and feeling which will continue to make them socially distasteful. […]

So I say that, whilst it is eminently desirable to salvage good Jewish race-stock by very gradual absorption into the Aryan and dominating body, it is absolutely necessary that this salvaging be accompanied by a total effacement of the newcomers’ traditions. They must suffer a complete intellectual and aesthetic amnesia, and join us as Aryans when they do join.

As for the Semitic culture — it is not for us to say one word either for or against it in an absolute sense. We do not feel its impulses, and can never know its essence. Certainly, it has produced a powerful set of ideas and standards, and who are we to say that these are any less important, intrinsically, than our own? As with Chinese culture, whose absolute greatness we freely acknowledge, we may say that Jewish culture is doubtless highly excellent in its proper place. But that place is not among us, for those points of view which are eminently harmonious when working with other Hebraic ideas, become utterly discordant, hostile, and injurious when brought in contact with points of view whose source and directions are wholly distinct and opposite.

To choose one relevant national example (IV.206):

A man brought up in the real German tradition, with early impressions confirming the virile pagan and Protestant psychology which belongs to the nation and excluding any of the hereditary teachings peculiar to another culture, ought certainly to be a full citizen and potential officeholder even if 1/4, 1/2 or fully Jewish in genealogy. But no man who inherits Jewish feelings and perspectives ought to hold a pivotal post in any Aryan nation. That’s no insult to intellectual Jews — it’s simply common-sense. […]

The test ought to be cultural — depending on each individual’s personal history and natural reactions, as determined by proper psychological and other investigations. If any undoubted Caucasian thinks and feels like an Aryan, then let him hold office in an Aryan nation. This would not only cut down the unpleasant foreign percentage in power, but would speed up the assimilation of the whole alien element. (Of course, no new members of an alien culture ought to be admitted to a nation except in small quantity.) […]

Good Jew-Aryan relations can come only after these plain truths are recognized on both sides. In the end, there will have to be a separation of the cultural Jew from the body politic, plus a complete absorption — with abandonment of hereditary traditions — of thousands of other Jews. That will call for concessions on both sides — the Jews will have to realise that they can’t drag their folkways into our national patterns, while we will have to abandon the tight race-lines of the Hitlerites. That ought not to be a hardship either way. The Jews are used to subordinate positions, and good governments need impose no hardships on their unassimilable faction. And on the other side — Aryan nations have taken on varying doses of Semitic blood in the past (Spain has oceans of it; England and America since Cromwell’s time have absorbed a trickle) without any unfavourable results whatsoever. Give and take.

“What, then, shall we do with our Jews?” Lovecraft sums it up (II.67):

Well — as with the negro, there is only one thing we can do as an immediate expedient to save ourselves; Keep them out of our national and racial life. With the negro the fight is wholly biological, whilst with the Jew it is mainly spiritual; but the principle is the same. We are Aryans, and our only future as a self-respecting stock lies in our resistance to anything like an Alexandrian mental hybridisation. Let us preserve and glory in our own inherited Western life and impulses and standards, and let us resist to the death any attempt at fastening to our body of national custom any feeling or feature aside from that which we legitimately derive from the tall, fair Aryans who begat us and who founded our English civilisation and Anglo-American nation. If a certain number of outlanders desire to dwell separately among us, it may be politic to let them — at least, for a time. But let us swear by the living God, as we respect ourselves as free Northern white men, that they shall lay not a hand on our institutions, and inject not an ideal of theirs into the massed inheritance which is ours.

To the Jew we must say, ‘live your own life, here or elsewhere; but remember that you live among Aryans, who are not to be disturbed.’ When the interloper seeks a voice in our councils, and subtly endeavours to mould the national feeling in accordance with his own standards — among which latter is a cynical disregard of our sentiments and cherished loyalties, visible in bolshevistic Trotzkys and iconoclastic Ben Hechts — there is only one possible answer from the unemasculated sons of the honest roast-beef Englishmen and rawboned Yankees who made this nation; and that answer is just this — ‘You go to hell.’

The outcome Lovecraft wishes to avoid is exemplified by New York City, which “is virtually lost to the national fabric” (IV.194).

Our literature & drama, selected by Jewish producers & great Jewish publishing houses like Knopf, & feeling the pressure of Jewish finance & mercantile advertising, are daily getting farther & farther from the real feelings of the plain American in New England or Virginia or Kansas; whilst the profound Semitism of New York is affecting the ‘intellectuals’ who flock there & creating a flimsy & synthetic body of culture & ideology radically hostile to the virile American attitude.

At this point — that is, in 1933 — “there is no question” that New York’s “overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream” (IV.230).

Regarding its influence on literary & dramatic expression — it is not so much that the country is flooded directly with Jewish authors, as that Jewish publishers determine just which of our Aryan writers shall achieve print & position. That means that those of us who least express our own people have the preference. Taste is insidiously moulded along non-Aryan lines — so that, no matter how intrinsically good the resulting body of literature may be, it is a special, rootless literature which does not represent us.

To be clear, it is not that “Jews own all the papers” (IV.306),

but merely that they control their policies through economic channels. The one great lever, of course, is advertising. Virtually all the great department stores of New York (except Wanamaker’s) are solidly Jewish even when they deceptively retain the names of earlier Aryan owners; & a clear majority of the large shops of other sorts are, as well. These Semitic merchants are clannish & touchy to the very limit, & will arrange to withdraw all their advertising at once whenever a newspaper displeases them. And, as Mencken has pointed out, their grounds of displeasure are limitless. They even resent the frequent use of the word “Jew” in the news, so that papers speak of “East Side agitators,” “Bronx merchants,” “Russian immigrants” &c.

Let any N. Y. paper try to refer to these people in the frank, impartial, objective way a Providence or Pittsburgh or Richmond paper would, & the whole pack of synagogue-hounds is after it — calling down the vengeance of heaven, withdrawing advertising, & cancelling subscriptions — the latter a big item in a town where 1/3 of the population is Semitic in origin & feelings. The result is, that not a paper in New York dares to call its soul its own in dealing with the Jews & with social & political questions affecting them.

(For a concrete example of a “social & political” question: Lovecraft is of the opinion that “no jury of New York Jewish radicals ought to try a man accused of labour crimes against law & order,” “for those bastards would acquit a brute who had shot up dozens of innocent people if they thought he did it ‘for the social revolution’” (IV.368).)

The whole press is absolutely enslaved in that direction, so that on the whole length & breadth of the city it is impossible to secure any public American utterance — any frank expression of the typical mind & opinions of the actual American people — on a fairly wide & potentially important range of topics. Only by reading the outside press & the national magazines can New Yorkers get any idea of how Americans feel regarding such things as Nazism, the Palestine question (in which, by every decent standard, the Arabs are dead right & both England & the Jews intolerably wrong), the American immigration policy, & so on.

This is what I mean by Jewish control, & I’m damned if it doesn’t make me see red — in a city which was once a part of the real American fabric, & which still exerts a disproportionately large influence on that fabric through its psychologically impressive size & its dominance both in finance & in various opinion-forming channels (drama, publishing, criticism &c.). Gawd knows I have no wish to injure any race under the sun, but I do think that something ought to be done to free American expression from the control of any element which seeks to curtail it, distort it, or remodel it in any direction other than its natural course. As a matter of fact, I don’t blame the Jews at all. Hell, what can we expect after letting them in & telling them they can do as they please? It is perfectly natural for them to make everything as favourable for themselves as they can, & to feel as they do. […] I criticize not Mr. Bernard Kopp-Davis — nor Sig. Giambattista Scagnamiglio nor M. Napoleon-Francois Laliberté — but merely the condition brought about by a reductio ad absurdum of the flabby idealism of the “melting-pot” fallacy. […] I’d hardly advocate Nazi tactics, but I certainly would welcome a greater assertiveness & independence among the native stock.

That’s the dream, anyway (IV.194):

Some day I hope that a reasonably civilised way of getting America’s voice uppermost again can be devised. Not that I would advocate violence — but certainly, I can’t regard the Nazis with that complete lack of sympathy shewn by those who take popular newspaper sentiment at face value.

S. T. Joshi singles out one of Lovecraft’s letters as “acutely embarrassing” (1936):

[Hitler’s] vision is of course romantic & immature, & colored with a fact-ignoring emotionalism … There surely is an actual Hitler peril — yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man’s basic urge … I repeat that there is a great & pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism — racial-cultural continuity, conservative cultural ideals, & an escape from the absurdities of Versailles. The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it & starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!

Fine. Wonderful! Be embarrassed. You can have Albert Jay Nock instead (1933):

The wretched state of things in Germany continues. It is a manifestation of a nation-wide sentiment that any honest-minded person must sympathize with, but its expression, under the direction of a lunatic adventurer, takes shape in the most revolting enormities.

A Man of His Time

The “good” old days are gone. The world has changed, and professionalism is now incompatible with bigotry.

N. K. Jemisin

Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being.

H. P. Lovecraft

I think that’s a fair sample of the racial and cultural heresies of H. P. Lovecraft: Nordic supremacy, race science, the Jewish question — what he actually believed, and why he actually believed it. Hopefully, by now, it makes at least a little sense to you.

Of course, to an egalitarian, these heresies are axiomatically wrong: ethically, scientifically, hopefully legally, and in any other way you’d care to name.

“For who can change the opinion of these people!” as the sage Antoninus notes. It is indeed strange how prepossessions and delusions seize upon whole communities of men; no basis in the notion they have formed, yet everybody adopting it, everybody finding the whole world agree with him in it, and accept it as an axiom of Euclid; and, in the universal repetition and reverberation, taking all contradiction of it as insult, and a sign of malicious insanity, hardly to be borne with patience. “For who can change the opinion of these people?” as our Divus Imperator says. No wisest of mortals.

If the facts are morally wrong, so much worse for the facts — that’s the only position that could possibly be adopted, even if it’s based upon a mixture of wishful thinking, deliberate ignorance, and insultingly childish lies.

So it doesn’t matter that when Lovecraft talks about race, he sounds rather more sensible than almost anyone talking about race today. Nope, Lovecraft was a racist.

But — wasn’t everyone? In the bad old days, before we built Jerusalem — and a tower of ten million Teutonic skulls — in England’s green and pleasant land, ascending to post-racial paradise on the wings of a B-17 bomber — wasn’t everyone a “racist”? Can we truly blame Lovecraft for not realizing he was on the wrong side of Whig history?

Lovecraft’s “racism” was “typical of its age,” according to Roger Luckhurst — albeit, in this one particular case, “driven towards pathological intensity.” Crazy Lovecraft!

Jeff VanderMeer exhorts us not to “gloss over the truth” that “one reason” Lovecraft and other writers of weird fiction “aren’t better known now is that their work” was positively “steeped” in “non-progressive attitudes toward race and other cultures.”

As Damien Walter observes, “these were such widely held opinions in the early 20th Century that an authoritative source such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica repeated them.” How insidious, these racist lies — even the experts believed them! Today we know better than to listen to nuts like Walter Francis Willcox, LL.B., Ph.D., chief statistician for the Census Bureau, professor of social science and statistics at Cornell University, and secretary of the American Economical Association (1910):

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. […] His environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum.

Dr. Willcox, you big stupid-head! Anyway, it’s not Lovecraft’s fault.

Or is it? Nicole Cushing is all too familiar with “the ‘man of his time’ defense,” the “most commonly trotted-out argument against the allegation of racism.” Although, “at first glance, the argument seems to have merit,” the whole thing “falls apart” when we “dig a tiny bit deeper,” for Lovecraft “seems positively obsessed with the theme of white supremacy.” Even “his private letters” are “littered with racist references.”

Lovecraft wasn’t just “a man of his time,” because the sheer volume and magnitude of racism and antisemitism in his fiction implies an obsession with white supremacy unmatched by other authors.

Y’know, since it couldn’t possibly imply a careful consideration of the issues.

(By the way, “white supremacy”? A Chinese gentleman — heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world… A crowd of cultivated Japanese… his mental and aesthetic superiors… If the Jews had a nation of their own… Okay then.)

No, “the ‘product of its time’ defense” is “no excuse for sexism and racism,” according to Noah Berlatsky (who in turn cites Nicole Cushing).

H.P. Lovecraft’s racism was certainly of its time in many ways — he lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, a period many historians have described as the nadir of American race relations. Yet, Langston Hughes also lived and wrote in the same period, proving that it was in fact possible to write in the early 20th century and not be a racist ass. Saying that Lovecraft was “of his time” erases all the folks (not least black people) who were not racist, or held different views. And it erases Lovecraft himself, turning him into a blank slate, devoid of free will, simply regurgitating accepted wisdom, as if he had no other choice (though the example of Langston Hughes and of, say, Stephen Crane, shows that he did.)

Whereas Noah Berlatsky merely wants to erase the observable patterns of biological variation in modern hominids; to sacrifice anthropology and evolutionary biology for the lie of equality; to condemn anyone, anywhere, at any point in time and space who dares to hold different views from an early 21st century progressive; and to obsess over “racism” — the evils of white people — instead of thinking about race.

The “product of its time” line, then, makes a hard divide between past and present, assuming that the past was completely benighted and that we are completely enlightened. It does this in the name of defending past literature: of morally exculpating Lovecraft, or Orwell, or whoever, on the grounds that they couldn’t be expected to help themselves, living as they did in such a dim and corrupt age.

It’s strange, though, how many lies were essential to this “enlightenment” process.

politically driven liars, who distort scientific facts in a misguided and condescending effort to protect an impossible myth about human equality…

The quality of anti-racialist criticism has declined markedly over the years. Compare “Golden Age” science fiction and fantasy writer L. Sprague de Camp (1975):

We live at a time when a racist is deemed, among advanced thinkers, worse than a murderer. “Racist” has become an all-purpose pejorative, as “Red” and “Fascist” have also been. Yet ethnocentrism (to give racism its technical name) is one of the oldest and most universal of human traits. People have always tended to like and to trust those most like themselves. Only in recent decades has disapproval of ethnocentrism become widespread, and such disapproval is anything but universal.
[…]
Now the pendulum has swung the other way, largely under the influence of Marxism, which for political, non-scientific reasons is dogmatically egalitarian and environmentalist. A scientist who tries to find out whether the races do in fact differ in ability is persecuted. He gets anonymous threats and is howled down when he lectures. The howlers may be ethnics who fear that his tests may make them look bad or Marxists to whom the absolute equality of races is an article of faith.

It is obvious that the races differ physically. Some are larger and stronger than others. The Nilotic Negroes are the world’s best high jumpers because of their great stature. Eskimos and Fuegian Indians can withstand cold, and Tibetans and Quechuas altitude, better than other men. Races differ in susceptibility of various diseases.

Nobody, however, yet knows whether the races also differ in mental ability. Perhaps they do; perhaps not. The evidence is inconclusive and contradictory. Some inherent mental differences among the races, like those between the sexes, probably exist, but nobody yet knows for sure what they are.

Since such differences, if they exist, are heavily masked by wide variations among individuals and by the effects of social environments, and since no tests now known can distinguish between the hereditary and the environmental differences among populations, there is no present way to settle the question. Hence everybody feels free to issue self-serving dogmata on the subject.

Clearly an ignorant racist.

Meanwhile, the debate rages on over at RevolutionSF. Lovecraft was obviously “a great big racist, even over and above what was normal for his era,” Dave Farnell explains.

What counter points can you bring up when you’ve read some of the really vile shit he wrote in his letters? […] You can say racism was the norm at the time, which is true, but he was as strident in his racism as a KKK member.

“I am not a Lovecraft scholar,” Deanna Toxopeus concedes, “but I am a historian and I have issue with applying standards of today against historical figures.”

I do not condone the behavior, but when you think of the greater context in which they group up pretty much EVERYONE was racist, sexist, and homophobic, you would have to be extraordinarily enlightened not to be. And brave. And perhaps crazy, because you would be ostracized too.
[…]
We didn’t live in HPL’s world. We have only an academic idea of how people were indoctrinated with what we now consider intolerance. We didn’t live it, and we have no understanding of how hard it would be to break out of that mindset.

And if someone argues that racists change their minds all the time now: Yes, but they are living in a society where their ideas are seen as out of step. They are in the minority. It is a much easier transition than the other way.

(By the way, where’s my “FascistSF”?)

“Context is so important,” Jason Myers agrees:

To realize that, as much we might try, for almost all of us, there will be many times when our children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews will look at us with the same flustered mortification I do when my grandfather calls Brazil nuts “nigger toes.” That there will be turns of phrase or attitudes we take for granted that our progeny will consider, at best, passe. And that their progeny will do the very same thing to them, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads.

Like how the unenlightened still frown upon dolphin sex (2011): “What is repulsive about a relationship where both partners feel and express love for each other?” And it seems like only yesterday that a boy, raised by lesbians, who likes to play with dolls, would be forced to go through puberty (2011): “When children insist that their gender doesn’t match their body, it can trigger a confusing, painful odyssey for the family.”

Laura Eldred splits the difference:

I am wary of both the “He was a rabid racist! Everyone (quick!) reject him!” and the “Everyone was racist back then, so what does it matter?” camps.

He had some racist sentiments, as did many in his time, so we need to see him in his historical context, but if we suggest that everyone is solely the product of their context, this seems to imply that no one can rise above it. If that were true, we would still have slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, no vote for women: in short, change would be impossible. So let’s consider him as, in some ways, a product of his times, but let’s also call a (racist) spade a spade.

Take us through your thought process, Laura.

Was Lovecraft’s time period generally incredibly racist? Yes.

Does that mean it would have been harder for him to demonstrate racial tolerance? Yes.

Does historical context significantly impact your mores and beliefs? Yes.

If any of us were born in that time, would we be more likely to be racist? Yes.

However: Were there some Americans in the period disturbed by the racism in the culture? Yes.

Were some Americans of varied races acting against that racism? Yes.

So: Did Lovecraft have a choice in his racism? YES.

Hence Lovecraft’s “choice is not equivalent to ours.”

As has been pointed out, to be racially tolerant in the period might have been a minority position. It would have been harder for him. BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. Let’s all hope that sometimes it is possible to make the right call even against the pull of historical context and peer pressure, that sometimes people in the middle of the Bible Belt realize gays deserve rights, that people in Iran stand up against honor killings, that people in Nazi Germany occasionally hid Jews from those who would send them to concentration camps.

No one seems particularly interested in how exactly we made all this “progress” — presumably because progress is obviously (indeed, tautologically) good. Still, it’s remarkable how quickly we got to where we are now, from “pretty much EVERYONE” being so incredibly “racist, sexist, and homophobic” (having been “indoctrinated with intolerance”) until the 1930s at least. And where are we now? Well, in June 2013:

• the attorney general of Colorado charged a bakery with the crime of “discrimination” for not baking a cake to celebrate a homosexual wedding;
• something called the “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” pledged to fight a non-existent “wage gap” between the sexes, and sued a car company for not hiring criminals, since blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be criminals;
• a 911 operator lost her job for criticizing black behaviour;
• a cooking show host was disgraced and humiliated for having said “nigger” thirty years ago after being robbed at gunpoint by a — gentleman of colour;
• an evolutionary psychologist was roundly criticized for “fat-shaming” fatties;
• seven “British” Muslims received hilariously light sentences for raping, torturing and trafficking, with “extreme depravity,” white girls as young as eleven; and
• the US Supreme Court barred the border state of Arizona from checking to see if its voters are actually US citizens.

Not to mention many more signs of the times. For brevity’s sake (hah), let us restrict our attention to the issue of homosexual “marriage,” which, as you may have noticed, it is fast becoming mandatory to support politically (e.g., The Blaze, 2014).

Orson Scott Card won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award in two consecutive years, for Ender’s Game (1985) and Speaker for the Dead (1986). Unfortunately, he is also one of those poor, “benighted” souls from “a dim and corrupt age” (2004):

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody’s. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual “marriage,” every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

(“A victory for American democracy,” to some.)

And we all know the course this thing will follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot; any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual marriage will be expelled for “hate speech.” The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a “homophobe” and therefore mentally ill.

Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent of crying, “Off with their heads!”

We will once again be performing a potentially devastating social experiment on ourselves without any attempt to predict the consequences and find out if the American people actually want them.

Progress marches on, though, leaving Mr. Card behind (2013):

As my politics diverged from the political correctness that has captured the left — I mean, (in) 1976 I was a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal Democrat — and without changing any of my principles, I’ve now become quite a right-winger in the eyes of the left. And I’m a little baffled by it because I’m a liberal and they’re not. They’re repressive, punishing, intolerant of the slightest variation, absolutely the opposite of what it means to be a liberal. But that’s the way it goes. They still get the label. I am the fact of what it meant to be a liberal. I find the most liberals who feel like I do among people who are labeled as conservatives. It’s a very odd thing.

But that political thing has affected the criticism of my work. And it would just make me crazy to read asinine, irrelevant comments by critics who think they’re saying something intelligent.

You see, what happens is, if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. And that’s all I get from science fiction literary elite. If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing since they’ve never actually formed the kind of community bonds that my fiction always depends on. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They couldn’t produce that fiction if they tried because they don’t share those values. But readers do.

The stormtroopers of tolerance arrive on the scene. The Gawker hydra writhes (2014):

Yeah. Ender’s Game. Here’s the thing about Ender’s Game. It is a deeply felt, beautifully imagined story that has spoken to a couple generations of people who found real compassion and acceptance and even the beginnings of love in this amazing, gorgeous, tragic adventure. It shows what’s best about science fiction, but only if you only read the text. Card himself has gone so septic, it’s poisoned the novel. So Ender’s Game — but borrow it from a library or get it from a used bookstore — and don’t google Orson Scott Card once you’re done.

Salon emits the usual communist noises (2013):

Orson Scott Card’s gradual descent into a poisonous brand of politics has been nothing short of tragic to anyone who has read the masterpiece of Ender’s Game. His main focus has been on homosexuality, though he has ranged across the entire landscape of small-minded and hateful political issues over the last decade. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the vicious dreck Card has blathered onto the Internet over the last decade ended up being a performance art demonstration of the hateful populism that Demosthenes used to great effect in Ender’s Game.

(The author, Steven Lloyd Wilson, describes himself as “a hopeless romantic and the last scion of Norse warriors and the forbidden elder gods” (2013). No comment.)

“Naturally, in light of Card’s homophobia, many have taken to boycotting the upcoming [Ender’s Game] movie” (2013). Actually, rather a boycott, “what Geeks Out has in mind is closer to blacklisting,” according to, um, the New York Times (2013):

If Mr. Card belongs in quarantine, who’s next? His views were fairly mainstream when the Sunstone article appeared and, unfortunately, are not unusual today.

Who indeed will follow Mr. Card to the scaffold?

“It is scary how quickly gay marriage became dogma,” writes Brendan O’Neill, formerly of Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party (2014).

How did this all happen so quickly? How did we go at such speed from a situation where gay marriage was a rather eccentric concern of small numbers of professional activists and lawyers to a situation where to oppose gay marriage is treated as an eccentricity, and a wicked one at that? How did saying ‘Let gays get hitched’ go from being fairly outré to utterly orthodox in about the same amount of time — I’m saying around five years — that it takes most modern campaign groups to design their headed paper?

It isn’t surprising people are reluctant to ask this question. For to do so, to give this conundrum some serious consideration, might just reveal that our society is not quite as tolerant, or as free, as the gay-marriage campaigners and their influential backers would have us believe. It might just show that the true driver of gay marriage up the political agenda, at a pace unprecedented in the modern social-issues arena, has been less a new civil-rights vibe and more a kind of soft authoritarianism — a largely media-driven momentum that has turned gay marriage into social demarcator par excellence, where those who accept it are Good, and those who oppose it are Bad, bigoted, ripe for being mauled and ideally silenced by the strangely intolerant promoters of tolerance for same-sex unions.
[…]
There has been extraordinary cultural pressure on people to conform to the notion that gay marriage is not only a good idea but the good idea of our era. This pressure has taken the form of demonising dissent, where those who criticise gay marriage are instantly written off as homophobes and bigots. As Damon Linker at The Week says, those who don’t bend the knee at the altar of gay unions risk ‘ostracism from public life.’ Gay-marriage advocates seem determined to ‘stamp out rival visions,’ he says, ‘hurl(ing) insults as a means of bullying (opponents) into submission.’ As a result, many who feel morally uncomfortable with gay marriage are likely to hide their true views, for fear of being cast out or publicly branded with the ‘phobe’ tag.

The pressure to conform is increasingly taking a legal form, too, particularly in America. As Jonah Goldberg points out in his piece ‘Celebrate gay marriage — or else,’ there are more and more cases where private businesses that refuse to work on gay weddings, notably florists and photographers, run the risk of being had up for committing a kind of ‘hate speech.’ There is almost a ‘mandatory celebration’ of gay marriage, says Goldberg, which is ‘so intense’ that ‘refusal is now considered tantamount to a crime.’ Meanwhile, actual scientific journals advise readers on how to use social-networking sites to send out the message that supporting gay marriage is ‘acceptable, appropriate (and) normal,’ reminding us that everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure.’ Whether it’s through cultural pressure, legal pressure or peer pressure, you will celebrate gay marriage.
[…]
So in a stunningly short period of time, not only has gay marriage been normalised, but opposition to it, traditionalism itself, has been denormalised. This reveals the extent of the corrosion of the old conservative values of long-term commitment and family life, whose one-time proponents in the church and elsewhere have effectively vacated the moral battlefield and stood back as marriage has been redefined. (‘The terms of our surrender’ was the fitting headline to a recent sad article by one such conservative.) And it also reveals the ability of newer cultural elites, especially the media classes, to impose new narratives on public life and to set political and social agendas.

The media have been key to the gay-marriage crusade, playing a leading role in promoting it, defining it, and demonising those who question it. As a consequence of an historic emptying-out of political life in recent years, of the decline and fall of the classes and interests whose tussles were once the lifeblood of politics, the media have come to be an increasingly important political actor, their concerns and prejudices often taking centre stage in public life. The unstoppable rise of gay marriage really speaks to the replacement of older, conservative elites with a new elite, one that is, remarkably, less tolerant of dissent and more demanding of psychological affirmation of its every idea, whim and campaign than its predecessors were.

Mr. O’Neill directs us to conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell (2014):

The argument for gay marriage is almost always made in the name of history—not the history we have lived but the history we are yet to live. Articles about gay marriage frequently cite an abolitionist quotation that Martin Luther King used in a 1965 speech and that President Obama has often used since: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” A Sacramento Bee writer warns gay marriage opponents that “history generally is unkind to extremists and suppressors.” This is a theological argument, similar to ones made by the Koran, Calvin, and Communism. It has always seemed odd that people who believe the names of tomorrow’s winners and losers are already written in the book of eternity should run around fighting and proselytizing. But they do. Theologies of this sort, as Leszek Kolakowski has written, are “a source of belligerence and self-confidence.”
[…]
It is not a civil rights movement, even if its leaders present it as one. Civil rights movements are about liberation. The old campaigns for repeal of sodomy laws, while they hardly won majority approval, fit that description. They were at least intelligible to mainstream Americans who view the history of their country as a steady progress towards liberty. The gay-marriage movement works in the opposite direction. Marriage is a regulation. It recognizes one aspect of people’s sexual lives as so important that authorities must monitor it. That aspect is the bearing of the next generation, a task to which homosexual relations are irrelevant. Marriage has plenty of mystical, communal, and spiritual associations. It may be a means to offer homosexuals recognition, or validation, from the wider society. But not liberation.
[…]
The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement is that, more than any social movement in living memory, more than feminism at its bra-burning peak in the 1970s, it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America [actually Miss USA] judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a “dumb bitch” for it on the judge’s website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes no sense at all to extol the gay marriage movement as a moral advance.
[…]
In a decade, gay marriage has gone from joke to dogma. It is certainly worth asking why, if this is a liberation movement, it should be happening now, in an age not otherwise gaining a reputation as freedom’s heyday. Since 2009, if Klarman’s estimates are correct, support for gay marriage has been increasing by 4 points a year. Public opinion does not change this fast in free societies. Either opinion is not changing as fast as it appears to be, or society is not as free.

Well, you see, the thing about that…

It is needless to point out that a nation’s literary & artistic utterance depends very largely on those who control the periodicals, schools, colleges, publishing houses, galleries, theatres, & so forth — this control largely determining what works & types of art shall receive preference in presentation to the public & in treatment by critics, & what attitudes shall receive official recommendation.

And who exercises this control? Why, the Jews, of course! Just kidding:

When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” [Codevilla, 2010]

Perhaps we should consider the possibility that America’s intellectual elite has become radically out of touch with the visceral sensibility of a large chunk of their nation’s population. [Harris, 2010]

The culture war is an ongoing liberal rout. Hollywood is as liberal as ever, and conservatives have simply despaired of changing it. [Chait, 2012]

An ideological tribal war is going on, and all the facts were rounded up, marched into the forest, and shot in the back of the head years ago. [Goad, 2010]

Look, I know it sounds crazy, but maybe, just maybe, the people whose job it is to tell everyone else what to think — have been telling everyone else… what to think.

So progress marches on. I wonder what’s in store for us (2014)…

Post-binary gender in SF is the acknowledgement that gender is more complex than the Western cultural norm of two genders (female and male): that there are more genders than two, that gender can be fluid, that gender exists in many forms.

Take it away, Damien Walter — no, really, take it away (2014):

I spent most of my youth being told to get a haircut. As a boy of slight build who usually had hair down around my shoulders, I looked a bit too much like a girl for the comfort of the home counties. Society gets angry when gender roles are blurred, precisely because those roles are a fragile act put on with clothes, hairstyles and makeup. If they weren’t enforced, clearly defined gender roles would not exist.

If hairstyles are “enforced,” how would you describe sexual dimorphism?

“Society gets angry when gender roles are blurred” (image)

Damien’s mother should really have a word with those mean boys at school.

I take comfort in the idea that most of the young men telling others to get a haircut today are rushing home to play at being buxom dark elf warrior maidens in World of Warcraft. Gamer culture has gained a bad reputation for misogyny, but it seems male gamers are more than a little curious about playing out female gender roles. It makes perfect sense. The real world enforces gender roles, but virtual worlds let gamers express the feminine parts of themselves that don’t fit in with their masculine identity.

Sure! Makes perfect sense. “Female gender roles.” Definitely: “I spend so much time staring at my character on screen, I’d rather enjoy what I’m looking at…”

The best science fiction literature explores a future of fluid gender identity that is much closer than many imagine. Genetic researchers have already discovered the two genes that battle to determine the sex of every human, opening the possibility of biological sex change in adult humans at the genetic level. Combine these scientific advances with the changing structure of our society and the gender shifts of virtual worlds and, far from being the lifestyle of a minority, queerness looks very much like the mainstream culture of the future. If science fiction has a role at all, it’s to reflect that reality, not deny it.

Boy, I can’t wait.

Science Fiction

He had a very specific mindset. No minorities, no women. But there’s no reason why you have to adhere to those constraints. Who says you can’t have Lovecraft set in Africa? Or with an all female cast of characters?

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

Theodore Dalrymple

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

Václav Havel

Nnedi Okorafor is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University who describes herself as an “international award-winning author of science fiction, juju fantasy, mystical realism and whatever,” prefers to be known as “Nnedi Okorafor, Phd,” and also happens to be a black woman. Dr. Okorafor’s first novel for adults, Who Fears Death, was awarded the World Fantasy Award in 2011 and nominated for the Nebula in 2010: two of the most prestigious awards in science fiction and fantasy.

Damien Walter points out that “we have seen a marked increase in both women and black authors being nominated for the sector’s top awards” — obviously, a “hugely positive” development. Thank goodness the patriarchal white-supremacist conspiracy is finally (if only slightly) loosening its grip on the science fiction and fantasy genres!

Unfortunately, the World Fantasy Award happens to be modeled on H. P. Lovecraft:

The World Fantasy Award (image)

And so it was that Doctor Professor Okorafor found herself face to face with a horrifying eight-line joke poem (1912) Lovecraft wrote when he was 22 years old:

I knew of Lovecraft’s racial issues, anti-Semitism, etc., but I never knew it was this serious. How strong the sentiment must have been within his soul for him to sit down and write that poem. This wasn’t racism metaphorically or abstractly rearing its ugly head within a piece of fiction, this was specific and focused.

Sure. And David Simmons, in Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction (2013), notes that the poem “exemplifies the writer’s already strongly held white supremacist beliefs” — except, of course, that it doesn’t, because (a) Lovecraft was explicitly not a “white supremacist,” (b) the poem itself is in no sense “white supremacist,” and (c) it is an eight-line joke poem he wrote when he was 22 years old. Well, anyway:

Who does that? Even in the early 1900s? That excuse of “that was just how most whites were back then” has never flown with me. The fact that a lot of people back then were racists does not change the fact that Lovecraft was a racist.

Anyway, a statuette of this racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer. A statuette of this racist man’s head sits beside my Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and my Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award (an award given to the best speculative fiction by a person of color). I’m conflicted.
[…]
Do I want “The Howard” […] replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not. […]

I too am deeply honored to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It feels so so so right and so so good. The award’s jury was clearly progressive and looking in a new direction. I am the first black person to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel since its inception in 1975. Lovecraft is probably rolling in his grave. Or maybe, having become spirit, his mind has cleared of the poisons and now understands the err [sic] of his ways. Maybe he is pleased that a book set [sic] and about Africa in the future has won an award crafted in his honor. Yeah, I’ll go with that image.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more about Dr. Nnedi Okorafor’s award-winning fantasy novel. Don’t you? We can start with a review — the number four search hit:

“Calling this novel complicated is an understatement,” according to the Bookslut, as “this is much more than a quest story.” The book is “incredibly meaningful, thought-provoking, and exciting.” The author “does an outstanding job.” She “writes simply, her carefully chosen words creating a rhythm and steady pace,” and the resulting prose is simply “gorgeous, adopting the tone of an African folktale while braiding the disparate elements of her story together,” creating a tale “so forward-thinking that it becomes legendary,” incorporating “forthright descriptions of subtle, complicated emotions,” and providing “provocative glimpses of the possible future of Africa and, in turn, of all people.” Her portrayal of “eleven-year-old girls losing a portion of their clitoris to a knife” is singled out as being particularly “beautifully written.” Truly a great work:

This is an important novel, both in its superb writing, and in its refreshing, nuanced portrayal of a strong woman of color in a fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy have long neglected those outside of the white male majority, and Okorafor’s work is a welcome departure from the norm. […]

I can only hope that other authors that aren’t straight white men (not that there’s anything wrong with straight white men or the books they write; I just think they have it a little too easy much of the time) are inspired and encouraged by the beauty of this book, and that publishers will also take note of its success. It’s rare to find a novel that can be described as literary, science fiction and/or fantasy, and a “page-turner” (loath as I am to resort to this cliche, I can’t think of a better way to describe how engrossing the book is) all at once, and when I find one, I can’t stop talking about it. I’ll be recommending this book to anyone who will listen for quite some time. [My emphasis.]

This review is certainly consistent with Tor Books (a major science fiction and fantasy publisher): “The story is emotionally powerful, so much so that this reviewer often had to put down the book to deal with the emotions that Okorafor had so achingly evoked.” Make no mistake, Who Fears Death is “worth every moment of the tears it brings.”

Okorafor writes with emotional impact, not allowing the reader to simply slip into easy familiarity with the story, instead always challenging, always probing. Who Fears Death is fantasy like you have never read it before. Sure to be an award winner, Who Fears Death is the face of modern fantasy — topical, stunning, and perception altering.

On the other hand, I find it difficult to reconcile them with Barnes and Noble:

Despite Okorafor’s track record in crafting YA stories such as The Shadow Speaker, Who Fears Death really does read like a “first novel,” exhibiting some of the inevitable kinks of that inescapably fledgling enterprise. […]

In essence, this book is a pure bildungsroman. Call it Portrait of the Sorceress as a Young Girl. As such, it’s more about prelude than climax. The rushed battle and victory/defeat at the end seem almost tacked on. […]

Who Fears Death is, beneath its “adult” trappings, very much still a YA book. […]

Very occasionally, in fact, yet indisputably, the book reads like some Sisterhood of the Traveling Chastity Girdle.

Or Strange Horizons Reviews:

Who Fears Death is written in an almost classic “YA first person introspective-retrospective” style. […] The result is curiously flat. […]

It is very unclear whether Who Fears Death is intended to be a science fiction novel with a quest narrative of preventing genocide and saving the world, or whether it is intended to be a YA story of girls’ bonding, friendship, bullying, and their courtship problems.

It’s also puzzling that SF Reviews should adopt such an apologetic tone:

If there are flaws in Who Fears Death, they are the exhilarating misses of a writer shooting for the moon and almost scoring a bullseye. One should be very forgiving of a novel whose writer is bursting with an abundance of creative passion, channeling all of that passion into the pursuit of a vision, even if the route taken is occasionally meandering. I’ve never read anything quite like the haunting and dreamlike Who Fears Death. I mean, on the one hand, I have. […]

But Nnedi Okorafor rises above her archetypes through the exceptional development of her heroine, Onyesonwu, and the vivid sense of realism she brings to a world that — I believe intentionally — remains hazily defined. […] In other words, the story’s bleak near-future isn’t sufficiently explained. Yet I thought this made sense in context. […] If the people through whose eyes we receive the tale don’t know much about the world before, or the crisis that transformed it, why should we expect any better an understanding? […]

Structurally, the book is far from perfect. […]

These are not slight problems.

Nevertheless! “Brave readers should count themselves lucky to be guided through this journey by such an extraordinary and visionary talent as Nnedi Okorafor.”

While conceding that “it’s not a perfect book — it’s not always clear what’s going on in the interlocking plots, and some of the characters come across a bit flat” — our friends at ThinkProgress emphasize its profound importance. They also provide a sample:

In the climax of the novel, women on both sides of the genocidal conflict that has marked Onyesonwu’s life find themselves possessed of magical powers that allow them to do many other things that to [sic] control and dominate others. “All the women, Okeke and Nuru, found that something had changed about them. Some could turn wine to fresh sweet drinking water, others glowed in the dark at night, some could hear the dead. Others remembered the past, before the Great Book. Others could peruse the spirit world and still live in the physical. Thousands of abilities. All bestowed upon women. There it was,” Okorafor writes. “This place will never be the same. Slavery here is over.”

Incredibly meaningful, thought-provoking, and exciting. “Thousands of abilities.” Outstanding… gorgeous… subtle… superb… “Others glowed in the dark at night.” Her carefully chosen words creating a rhythm and steady pace… “There it was. This place will never be the same. Slavery here is over.” I must admit, I’m a little confused.

I mean, how am I supposed to describe — I don’t know, let’s say A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. Were these words more or less “carefully chosen”?

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Or The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde:

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

What kind of prose is this? (I have a thesaurus standing by.)

Look, there’s only one way to settle this. We turn to the book itself — which, I remind you, was awarded the World Fantasy Award and nominated for the Nebula. Here are the first ten sentences of Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor, PhD:

My life fell apart when I was sixteen. Papa died. He had such a strong heart, yet he died. Was it the heat and smoke from his blacksmithing shop? It’s true that nothing could take him from his work, his art. He loved to make the metal bend, to obey him. But his work only seemed to strengthen him; he was so happy in his shop. So what was it that killed him? To this day I can’t be sure. I hope it had nothing to do with me or what I did back then.

We might compare the first ten sentences of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, which was awarded the World Fantasy Award in 1981:

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun my account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

“The guard has gone.” Thus my friend Roche spoke to Drotte, who had already seen it for himself.

Doubtfully, the boy Eata suggested that we go around. A lift of his thin, freckled arm indicated the thousands of paces of wall stretching across the slum and sweeping up the hill until at last they met the high curtain wall of the Citadel. It was a walk I would take, much later.

“And try to get through the barbican without a safe-contact? They’d send to Master Gurloes.”

Or the first ten sentences of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides (set in the West Indies), which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1988, but didn’t win:

Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn’t yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island’s clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood’s face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle. Hurwood hefted the machete that he gripped in his left — and only — hand, and peered uneasily into the darkness that seemed to crowd up behind the torchlit vegetation around them and overhead, for the stories he’d heard of cannibals and giant snakes seemed entirely plausible now, and it was difficult, despite recent experiences, to rely for safety on the collection of ox-tails and cloth bags and little statues that dangled from the other man’s belt. In this primeval rain forest it didn’t help to think of them as gardes and arrets and drogues rather than fetishes, or of his companion as a bocor rather than a witch doctor or shaman.

The black man gestured with the torch and looked back at him. “Left now,” he said carefully in English, and then added rapidly in one of the debased French dialects of Haiti, “and step carefully — little streams have undercut the path in many places.”

“Walk more slowly then, so I can see where you put your feet,” replied Hurwood irritably in his fluent textbook French. He wondered how badly his hitherto perfect accent had suffered from the past month’s exposure to so many odd variations of the language.

The path became steeper, and soon he had to sheathe his machete in order to have his hand free to grab branches and pull himself along, and for a while his heart was pounding so alarmingly that he thought it would burst, despite the protective drogue the black man had given him — then they had got above the level of the surrounding jungle and the sea breeze found them and he called to his companion to stop so that he could catch his breath in the fresh air and enjoy the coolness of it in his sopping white hair and damp shirt.

The breeze clattered and rustled in the palm branches below, and through a gap in the sparser trunks around him he could see water — a moonlight-speckled segment of the Tongue of the Ocean, across which the two of them had sailed from New Providence Island that afternoon. He remembered noticing the prominence they now stood on, and wondering about it, as he’d struggled to keep the sheet trimmed to his bad-tempered guide’s satisfaction.

But this is hardly fair! Dr. Okorafor’s opening paragraph uses much shorter sentences — surely a legitimate stylistic choice. So let’s take a look at her next five sentences:

Immediately after he died, my mother came running out of their bedroom sobbing and throwing herself against the wall.

Presumably, this should have been sequential, not simultaneous: she wasn’t “throwing herself against the wall” while she was “running out of their bedroom,” right?

I knew then that I would be different. I knew in that moment that I would never again be able to fully control the fire inside me.

A bit redundant, don’t you think? No, actually, a lot redundant:

I became a different creature that day, not so human. Everything that happened later, I now understand, started then.

So far, in the first fifteen sentences, we’ve been informed that our nameless, faceless, sexless, ageless narrator’s “life fell apart” in some unspecified way when her father died; that “everything that happened later,” which we haven’t been told, “started then”; that she hopes his death “had nothing to do with” some unspecified thing she “did back then”; that when he died, she instantly “knew then that” she “would be different,” in that she “would never again be able to fully control” an unexplained “fire inside” her; and that she, in some sense, “became a different creature,” which was or is, in some unspecified way, “not so human.” Could this be improved? It could be improved:

Here are five common first chapter “mistakes” I’ve noticed over the years:

1. Not opening with a strong enough hook.

The first line. The first paragraph. Even more than that, the first scene. Each one is extremely critical and should be crafted to bait the reader into needing to find out more. I might be able to forgive a mediocre first line, but the first scene must draw me in to the story.

2. Waiting to begin the “real” tension and conflict.

First chapters should contain very little if any static. We should very rarely have the main characters reflecting on life, thinking about their current or past situation, or contemplating doing certain activities. That includes conversations, meetings, or meals between characters simply for the purpose of conveying story information. It would be like writing a phone conversation and asking our reader to “watch” the characters talk to each other. How exciting is that?

Instead, find the first major conflict of the external & internal plot lines and start in the middle of them.

3. Too much setting up of the story.

Readers don’t need to know how our characters got to the point they’re at. Throw our characters into the story and for the first chapter pretend the reader already knows as much as we do.

Readers want to piece the story together on their own. We’ll give them a more fulfilling reading experience if we let them take our small hints and finally put the character’s past together in their own time. And if we need to explain anything, we can always slide it in little by little later.
[…]
Summary: When writing for the modern reader, the first chapter is critical. We have to captivate them in the opening pages or we might lose them altogether.

What else happens in the first chapter of this award-winning novel?

I looked down at his face one last time. I’ll never see you again, I thought. I wasn’t ready. I blinked and touched my chest. That’s when it happened… when I touched my chest. At first, it felt like an itchy tingle. It quickly swelled into something greater.

With her forthright descriptions of subtle, complicated emotions…

The more I tried to get up, the more intense it got and the more my grief expanded. They can’t take him, I thought frantically. There is still so much metal left in his shop. He hasn’t finished his work! The sensation spread through my chest and radiated out to the rest of my body. I rounded my shoulders to hold it in. Then I started pulling it from the people around me.

I’m not sure what that means. Maybe the problem is me.

I shuddered and gnashed my teeth. I was filling with rage. Oh no, not here! I thought. Not at Papa’s ceremony! Life wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to even mourn my dead father.

Her carefully chosen words creating a rhythm and steady pace…

“Onyesonwu,” Aro said into my ear, quickly taking his hands from my wrists. Oh, how I hated him. But I listened. “He’s gone,” he said. “Let go, so we can all be free of it.”

Somehow… I did. I let go of Papa.

Everything went dead silent again.

As if the world, for a moment, were submerged in water.

Then the power that had built up inside of me burst. My veil was blown off my head and my freed braids whipped back. Everyone and everything was thrown back — Aro, my mother, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, the table of food, the fifty yams, the thirteen large monkeybread fruits, the five cows, the ten goats, the thirty hens, and much sand. Back in town the power went off for thirty seconds; houses would need to be swept of sand and computers would be taken in for dust damage.

“Oh, how I hated him,” she narrated. But we must be free, free of — something. So acquaintances, strangers, and fifty yams go flying through the air, not to mention thirteen large monkeybread fruits — that’s large, mind you. Five enormous cows and ten massive goats go tumbling into the sky, never to be seen again. How will we ever feed all these acquaintances? Meanwhile, back in town: minor household tasks! Won’t someone get this dust out of my hard drive? The narrator may not be able to see any of this, but it’s a welcome respite from the intense action at the funeral buffet line.

“Not one hectare of unsown land!” (image)

Compare this passage, from the first chapter of The Shadow of the Torturer:

It is my nature, my joy and my curse, to forget nothing. Every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell, and taste, remains changeless in my mind, and though I know it is not so with everyone, I cannot imagine what it can mean to be otherwise, as if one had slept when in fact an experience is merely remote. Those few steps we took upon the whited path rise before me now: It was cold and growing colder; we had no light, and fog had begun to roll in from Gyoll in earnest. A few birds had come to roost in the pines and cypresses, and flapped uneasily from tree to tree. I remember the feel of my own hands as I rubbed my arms, and the lantern bobbing among the steles some distance off, and how the fog brought out the smell of the river water in my shirt, and the pungency of the new-turned earth. I had almost died that day, choking in the netted roots; the night was to mark the beginning of my manhood.

There was a shot, a thing I had never seen before, the bolt of violet energy splitting the darkness like a wedge, so that it closed with a thunderclap. Somewhere a monument fell with a crash. Silence then… in which everything around me seemed to dissolve. We began to run. Men were shouting, far off. I heard the ring of steel on stone, as if someone had struck one of the grave markers with a badelaire. I dashed along a path that was (or at least then seemed) completely unfamiliar, a ribbon of broken bone just wide enough for two to walk abreast that wound down into a little dale. In the fog I could see nothing but the dark bulk of the memorials to either side. Then, as suddenly as if it had been snatched away, the path was no longer beneath my feet — I suppose I must have failed to notice some turning. I swerved to dodge an oblesque that appeared to shoot up before me, and collided full tilt with a man in a black coat.

In the second chapter of Dr. Nnedi Okorafor’s widely acclaimed, World Fantasy Award-winning novel Who Fears Death, we learn about the narrator’s troubled childhood:

My mother and I had recently arrived from Jwahir. Before that, we were desert nomads. One day, as we’d roamed the desert, she stopped, as if hearing another voice. She was often strange like that, seeming to converse with someone other than me. Then she said, “It’s time for you to go to school.” I was far too young to understand her real reasons. I was quite happy in the desert, but after we arrived in the town of Jwahir, the market quickly became my playground.

Those first few days, to make some fast money, my mother sold most of the cactus candy she had. Cactus candy was more valuable than currency in Jwahir. It was a delicious delicacy. My mother had taught herself how to cultivate it. She must always have had the intention of returning to civilization.

Over the weeks, she planted the cactus cutlets [?] she’d kept and set up a booth. I helped out the best I could. I carried and arranged things and called over customers. In turn, she allowed me an hour of free time each day to roam. In the desert, I used to venture over a mile away from my mother on clear days. I never got lost. So the market was small to me. Nonetheless, there was much to see and the potential for trouble was around every corner.

Gorgeous prose, I’m sure we can all agree. Skipping ahead a bit:

In the market, men had tried to grab me but I was always quicker and I knew how to scratch. I’d learned from the desert cats. All this confused my six-year-old mind. Now, as I stood before the blacksmith, I feared that he might find my ugly features strangely delightful too.

Wait, a six-year-old nomad roaming the desert? Whatever. Skip:

At first my mother was afraid and angry with him. When he told her about the friendship he had with me, she slapped my bottom so hard that I ran off and cried for hours. Still, within a month, Papa and my mama were married. The day after the wedding, my mother and I moved into his house. It should have all been perfect after that. It was good for five years. Then the weirdness started.

Spooky! So ends Chapter 2. I think you see why the critics (most of them, at least) are raving. Okorafor writes with emotional impact, not allowing the reader to simply slip into easy familiarity with the story, instead always challenging, always probing.

Elsewhere, the “weirdness,” or plot, is well underway. On Stranger Tides, Chapter 1:

“Cutlasses hold ready.”

A sailor shoved Chandagnac aside to get at one of the swivel guns, and he hurried back to the relative shelter of the jammed table, feeling wildly disoriented. Damn me, he thought bewilderedly as he crouched behind it, is this seagoing warfare? The enemy dancing and blowing horns, men in blackface rushing up from belowdecks like extras in a London stage comedy, the only serious shot fired by our captain to kill one of his own crew?

There were now —

But I’m sure you’re eager to get back to a World Fantasy Award winner. Attack of the evil, light-skinned (but I repeat myself) rapists! Who Fears Death, Chapter 3:

The Nuru militants waited for the retreat, when the Okeke women walked into the desert and stayed for seven days to give respect to the goddess Ani. “Okeke” means “the created ones.” The Okeke people have skin the color of the night because they were created before the day. They were the first. Later, after much had happened, the Nuru arrived. They came from the stars and that’s why their skin is the color of the sun.

These names must have been agreed upon during peaceful times, for it was well known that the Okeke were born to be slaves of the Nuru. […]

Most abided by the old saying, “A snake is foolish if it dreams of being a lizard.” But one day, thirty years earlier, a group of Okeke men and women in the city of Zin rejected it. They’d had enough.

“By golly, I’ve had enough of this slavery!”

They rose up rioting and demanding and refusing. Their passion spread to neighboring Seven Rivers towns and villages. These Okeke paid dearly for having ambition. Everyone did, as is always the case with genocide. On and off this had been happening since.

It’s always the way, isn’t it? Always with the genocide.

The white — I mean, the Nuru — rape gangs prowl the dunes on “scooters”:

The purr of scooters. She looked up. There was a parade of them, each with an orange flag on the back of the seat. There must have been at least forty. […]

On each scooter rode a man and on several a woman accompanied the man. They wore orange veils of their sunny faces. Their expensive military attire — sand-colored pants and tops and leather boots — were probably treated with weather gel to keep them cool in the sun. […]

Subject-verb agreement: was probably treated.

The Okeke women screamed and ran in all directions. […] But the Nurus made a wide circle around them, herding them back together like wild camels. As the Okeke women cowered, their long periwinkle garments fluttered in the breeze. The Nuru men got off their scooters, the Nuru women behind them. They closed in. And that was when the raping began.

All of the Okeke women, young, prime, and old, were raped. Repeatedly.

Sounds like these Okeke women paid dearly for having ambition! Everyone got raped, as is always the case with genocide. On and off this had been happening since:

Those men didn’t tire; it was as if they were bewitched. […] They sang as they raped. The Nuru women who’d come along laughed, pointed, and sang, too.

Scooter rapists are the worst.

Her village was burning. Homes smoldered, gardens were destroyed, scooters were aflame… the burning houses and scooters… their scooter was on fire…

Scooters on flame/With rock and roll…

If she stood up, all the semen that had been pumped into her —

Okay! We get it. That’s enough.

Images of lying in the sand with semen seeping out of her —

I SAID STOP

Do please compare The Shadow of the Torturer — this is still the first chapter:

Vodalus did not reply, but the point of his sword looked from one to another like an eye.

The leader grated, “All together now and we’ll have him.” But they advanced hesitantly, and before they could close Vodalus sprang forward. I saw his blade flash in the faint light and heard it scrape the head of the pike — a metallic slithering, as though a steel serpent glided across a log of iron. The pikeman yelled and jumped back; Vodalus leaped backward too (I think for fear the other two would get behind him), then seemed to lose his balance and fell.

All this took place in dark and fog. I saw it, but for the most part the men were no more than ambient shadows — as the woman with the heart-shaped face had been. Yet something touched me. Perhaps it was Vodalus’s willingness to die to protect her that made the woman seem precious to me; certainly it was that willingness that kindled my admiration for him. Many times since then, when I have stood upon a shaky platform in some marketplace square with Terminus Est at rest before me and a miserable vagrant kneeling at my feet, when I have heard in hissing whispers the hate of the crowd and sensed what was far less welcome, the admiration of those who find an unclean joy in pains and deaths not their own, I have recalled Vodalus at the graveside, and raised my own blade half pretending that when it fell I would be striking for him.

He stumbled, as I have said. In that instant I believe my whole life teetered in the scales with his.

Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish, the Damned never won a damned thing, but I enjoyed reading it when I was a kid. (Actually, it was nominated for the Locus Award in 1982; Who Fears Death was nominated for the same award in 2011.) From a random page:

Dilvish heard a cry from behind him as he strove to rise. At the same time the door was drawn shut, and he heard a key slipped into the lock.

“A victim! He sends me a victim when what I want is release!” There followed a sigh. “Very well…”

Dilvish turned as soon as he heard the voice, his memory instantly drawing him back to another place.

Bright red body, long, thin limbs, a claw upon each digits, it had pointed ears, backward-curving horns, and slitted yellow eyes. It crouched at the center of a pentacle, constantly shuffling its feet this way and that, reaching for him…

“Stupid wight!” he snapped, lapsing into another tongue. “Would you destroy your deliverer?”

The demon drew back its arms, and the pupils of its eyes expanded.

“Brother! I did not know you in human form!” it answered in Mabrahoring, the language of demons. “Forgive me!”

Dilvish climbed slowly to his feet.

“I’ve a mind to let you rot there, for such a reception!”

That’s one demon who’ll pay dearly for having ambition.

Anyway. Obviously you should not trust the literary judgment of a fanatical racist, i.e., me. But it turns out that lots of other readers (sensible ones, not even slightly racist) have had similar experiences with Dr. Okorafor’s award-winning novel. For your consideration, excerpting liberally from reader reviews at Goodreads (2010–2014):

“I found myself unsatisfied with the character development, which effectively ceased halfway through the book, and the plot resolution.” Two out of five stars.

The romance “was pretty much the breaking point for me,” as the reader “felt like I was constantly being told they were passionately in love, and then shown a couple that was, at best, passionately in lust and violently abusive toward one another.” The plot “was fairly standard prophecized quest fantasy until the end, when it veered off into metaphysics that seemed unsupported by anything that came before.” Two stars.

Was the story “meant to be simple, straightforward, despite the complexity of the character’s destiny?” Or “(as often seemed the case) was it just laziness on the part of the author, impatient and eager to get on with the plot?” Two stars.

“These are not the terse sentences of Ernest Hemingway, but a rhetorical simplicity that seldom yields imagery or insight into personality, and never raises tension between a chat or a fight to the death. Most often it reads as purely amateurish prose, from word choice to structure.” The novel earns three stars for “combining important and uncomfortable politics of our world with cloyingly common tropes and narration.”

The author is “committed to the use of science fiction as a dialectical examination of our own present,” which unfortunately “left some scenes of the book excruciatingly difficult to read.” The prose is “rather plodding and simplistic,” and “it was hard not to laugh” at the dialogue,” leaving the reader “pretty disappointed” overall. “Outside of the on-point politics, this was a pretty standard coming-of-age/quest novel.” Three stars.

“Beyond the social commentary,” the reader “found little else to enjoy.” The “editing and proofing” were “very poor,” as well: “errors riddled the text.” Two stars.

The reader “couldn’t enjoy this as a post-apocalyptic dystopia, because it wasn’t one,” “could not enjoy this as a work of fiction because I hated the characters, the pacing was terrible and the narrative infuriated me,” and finally “couldn’t enjoy this as a commentary on important issues,” like “sexism” and “racism,” as “there were so many different themes present that were never fully resolved.” The novel’s anti-religious message “was just the icing on the shitty topping of a crapcake.” Two stars.

A bewildering three-star review:

All of the men in the book were either 100% evil with no redeeming qualities, or similarly two dimensional and unlikable. Not just the men, actually. The Nuru (who I interpret as being the non-black people of some sort) were also depicted as being basically evil with no redeeming qualities. I kept picking up a strong “us vs. them” mentality (with the favored/oppressed class clearly being Okeke [i.e., black] women) that I didn’t really care for. […]

I can’t explain it exactly, but I didn’t get the feeling that the “us vs. them” mentality was put in there to teach us all a lesson about why that sort of thing is wrong. […]

However, my real problem with fully enjoying this book was that a) it was written with simple language that reads like the books I enjoyed in 3rd grade, and b) the plot wasn’t very deep.

“We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!” (image)

“This is an ambitious but frustrating work” — “ambitious because it tackles head-on issues of rape, child abuse, child soldiers,” etc, etc, “but frustrating because the main character is pretty unlikable, the plot is your classic bildungsroman, and the pacing is terrible.” “Disappointed, because I expected to really like this book,” the reader assigns it three stars “only out of respect for the breadth and depth of issues and world-building Okorafor attempts here, and not for any engaging writing or story.”

“I wanted to love this book,” “but the pacing was so off, felt so mired and so distracted by extraneous description and the story took so long to actually reach all its salient points that I wanted to put the book down.” Which is “a crying shame, because I have so much good to say about this book, so much praise, but I can’t get past how hard it was to read, how not fun it was and the most wonderful messages in the world can’t redeem a book that we just found boring.” One star. So much praise, but…

“By all accounts I should have liked this book. I really tried to.” After all, it’s “set in Africa, and it’s a feminist work at heart. But in the end, I resigned myself to abandoning it midway,” as “the flatness of the story’s structure makes the themes explored hollow and unsatisfying.”

Still, two stars for a fantasy novel set elsewhere than a tired Western world, with a strong female protagonist.

“Set in post-apocalyptic Africa” — “totally my thing” — this “should have been a book I loved,” but the reader was “consistently annoyed by it.” The “feminist message” was “overbearing,” “like I was being hit over the head with an entire semester of a women’s studies curriculum,” and overall “it was like a disjointed combo of coming-of-age YA, mixed with wizarding type fantasy, with a whole lotta graphic rape, copious amounts of hate-filled semen, multiple head bashings and all encompassing indignant female rage thrown in for a good measure.” Oh, well: three stars for copious hate-filled semen.

“I’d heard good things about this book,” but “its poor structure, its infuriating outdated tropes, its overpowered heroine and its all-too-easy magical solutions to real-life problems” left the reader “wondering why so many people like it.” “While I was initially excited to read some non-European, feminist fantasy, I really can’t recommend this book,” whose popularity “seems to speak more to the dearth of African fantasy available in the English-speaking world than anything else.” Two stars.

A rather revealing two-star review:

Throughout, I never felt a sense of wonder or awe when I read this book. I fail to think of a single sentence, image, or paragraph that stopped me cold with its eloquence, or sent shivers up my spine with its beauty. This, perhaps more than anything else, is the single most damning thing I can say in this review.

I really wanted to like Who Fears Death. For one, it’s written by a woman of colour featuring a female protagonist who is also of colour. I’m aware of the ways in which speculative fiction has marginalized non-white, non-male voices, so I’ve been making an effort to counteract that in my reading choices. Besides that, it tackles a variety of topics that our society either doesn’t talk about or tries hard to avoid discussing, including female genital cutting, genocide, and rape as a weapon of war.

Ultimately, though, I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy Who Fears Death, and read it mainly because I wanted to be a Good Feminist and assuage some of my White Liberal Guilt by reading about something depressing but politically important. Depressing as the subject matter was, I still hoped for at least a little bit of grace, but never found it.

One impeccably anti-racist reader, who “really enjoyed” “the lack of white characters,” was nevertheless left feeling “dissatisfied” and “annoyed.” Three stars.

“Having read dozens of fantasy books set in quasi-European worlds, I appreciated finding one set in Africa.” Unfortunately, “the storytelling could have used better editing in places” and “the setting never entirely made sense to me.” Three stars.

A disappointed black woman’s two-star review:

I have never abandoned a book with only 40 pages left to read. But, as I got closer to the end I discovered that I didn’t really care what happened to Onyesonwu. Though Onye is a fierce heroine — young, Black, powerful, strong, woman — I was bored by Okorafor’s writing. The novel was laborious to get through and the plot was slow & redundant.

The novel “earns a place high on the list” of “black women’s sci fi” — at three stars.

The book “draws its geography, social world and magical laws from the folklore of African, rather than European, cultural tradition,” which in this racist, fascist world we live in constitutes “a bracing and courageous approach to genre fiction, and the results are largely spectacular.” Except… well, “unfortunately, while the content of Who Fears Death is epic in scope and adult in content, the emotional world of its main characters reads like subpar YA lit” — particularly the “characterization and dialogue.” Three stars.

“The characterization was more like something found in uninspired YA” — “shallow and juvenile” characters, “very little in the way of character growth,” and “way too much focus on who was sleeping with who and their subsequent tantrums over it.” Which is “too bad,” really: “This had all the makings an an epic story that was something other than just Another Faux European Fantasy, but it got drowned out by the tedious teenage drama and the disappointing ending.” Three stars for not being European.

A regretful two-star review:

In theory, I should have given this book four or five stars. It has all the ingredients for one of my favorite books: an ass-kicking heroine with magical powers subverts the patriarchy while learning about her past, her destiny, and the future of her people. Set in a possible-future Africa, a setting I don’t read about nearly enough.

The problem lies in the execution. There’s just no there, there for me. Okorafor uses two of my big pet peeves in her writing: exclamation points and the use of any word other than “said” to describe dialogue (screamed, moaned, laughed etc). This is just personal preference, but it kept pulling me out of the story. Beyond that, the world-building reads like a first draft. I had no reason to think this was a post-apocalyptic story other than the copy on the dust jacket. Onyesonwe’s [sic] powers grow without any rhyme or reason other than the story’s needs. The ending is awesome, but further reminds me of how much better the rest of the story could have been. I can see why other people love this book, but it didn’t work for me.

“Considering the popularity of this book, I expected much more.” Two stars.

“I expected much better from all the reviews.” Two stars.

“Greetings to a Congress of Soviet writers!” (image)

“Hard to believe Okorafor is a professor of creative writing when this book obviously needs the advice of a good editor!” Three stars.

This one is just plain weird:

A 2010 Nebula award nominee. I’m willing to believe it deserves it, but I’m unlikely to know, since I’ve stopped reading it.
[…]
Edit 4/2/11: I’ve since discovered the author has retweeted my review. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

I think that’s enough. Oh, gentle reader: have you solved the mystery yet? Well, as David Hume wrote in his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1742):

Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.

Or as David Horowitz wrote of Cornel West in ‘No Light in His Attic’ (Salon, 1999):

West’s plight is that of a paradigmatic affirmative-action baby, whom the good wishes of his “oppressors” have elevated so far beyond his merits that he has lost sight of terra firma below. As a result, he has been condemned to a life of suspended animation, his entire being addressed to the impossible task of proving that he is someone he can never be.

Or as Edward B. Reuter wrote in The American Race Problem (1927):

The contribution made by Negroes to American literature is slight and contains very little of any permanent value. It is only very recently that there has been any contribution at all. There were from time to time efforts in this direction which attracted popular attention. But the public interest was excited by the unexpected fact that a Negro could write a book rather than because the production had merit. The output was small and the quality low, but since nothing worth while was expected the early efforts often received lavish praise.

And as our pal William McDougall wrote in The Group Mind (1920):

Although the greater part of Africa, perhaps the richest continent of the globe, has been in the possession of the negro races during all the ages in which the European, Asiatic, and American civilisations were being developed, those races have never founded a nation. Nevertheless many, perhaps most, negroes are capable of acquiring European culture and of turning it to good account. And, when brought under the influence of Arabs or men of other races, they have formed rudimentary nations. The incapacity to form a nation must be connected with the fact that the race has never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments, even when brought under foreign influences; and it would seem that it is incapable of producing such individuals; the few distinguished negroes, so called, of America — such as Douglass, Booker Washington, Du Bois — have been, I believe, in all cases mulattoes or had some proportion of white blood. We may fairly ascribe the incapacity of the negro race to form a nation to the lack of men endowed with the qualities of great leaders, even more than to the lower level of average capacity.

As for Doctor Professor Okorafor and her World Fantasy Award:

I loved China’s way of dealing with his “Howard.” He said:

So where does that leave the World Fantasy Award? Well, in my case, I have always done something very specific and simple. I consider the award inextricable from but not reducible to Lovecraft himself. Therefore, I was very honoured to receive the award as representative of a particular field of literature. And the award itself, the statuette of the man himself? I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing the little fucker like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back.

“China?” China Miéville, award-winning English author of Lovecraft-influenced weird fiction — and an outspoken communist (although of course he prefers euphemisms like Marxist and socialist). I think it’s always important to know who we’re dealing with, so please consider Mr. Miéville’s ‘Marxist guide to monsters’ in Socialist Worker (2005):

I think that on our side there has always been a sneaking sympathy for the monster. The notion of the monster as mere social pathology is put about by people whose ideal is the social status quo.

But there are those of us who, because of our class positions, realise that the status quo is all about violence. So it’s not surprising that we wouldn’t completely buy into the idea that “pathologies” are a bad thing.

I very much want to preserve this critical view of monsters. If we go down the route that they are just “about” social pathology, then it follows that we should just get rid of them. But if there are no monsters after the revolution, I don’t want to play!

Right… Speaking of malevolent clowns, let me show you basically what Mr. Miéville is talking about. From The Red Terror in Russia, by Sergei Melgunov (1926):

In time the Che-Ka began to add moral tortures to physical: executions began to be carried out in such close proximity to the cells that the other prisoners could plainly hear the rifle shots as they issued from the small, dark kitchen which Saenko had converted into a torture and execution chamber. And when later, in June of the year in question, Denikin’s searchers inspected the room, they found there two pood-weights [35 lbs. each] so tied together with an arshin-long [28-inch] section of rubber piping as to form a kind of flail, with the straw covering of the floor sodden with the blood of the slaughtered, and the wall facing the door seamed and scarred with bullet marks, and the other walls bespattered with blood and fragments of scalp, and hair, and particles of brain, and the floor littered with similar fragments. And when 107 corpses were disinterred in the adjacent concentration camp the most horrible atrocities became revealed — terrible traces of flogging, shattered ribs and leg bones, fractured skulls, amputated hands and feet, heads attached to the trunk only with a strip of cartilage, patches where the skin had been burnt off with red-hot instruments, stripes branded upon the back, and general mutilations.

This goes on for hundreds of pages.

And with that Nilostonsky goes on to describe the appearance of a “human slaughter-house” (he asserts that that had come actually to be the official appellation of such places) when, later, the Denikin Commission inspected one.

The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated with blood — blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of skull — bone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp, as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide, and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood. The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls, as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument as a heavy block. And there were corpses the heads of which were altogether missing. But in these cases the missing heads cannot possibly have been cut off. They must have been wrenched off.

“I don’t want to play!” Again, I think it’s important to know who we’re dealing with.

“We will destroy the kulaks as a class” (image)

In Mr. Miéville’s introduction to At the Mountains of Madness, he writes (2005):

Lovecraft was notoriously not only an elitist and a reactionary, but a bilious lifelong racist. His idiot and disgraceful pronouncements on racial themes range from pompous pseudoscience — “The Negro is fundamentally the biologically inferior of all White and even Mongolian races” — to monstrous endorsements — “[Hitler’s] vision is … romantic and immature … yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man’s basic urge … I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!” This was written before the Holocaust, but Hitler’s attitudes were no secret, and the terrible threat he represented was stressed by many. […]

Including Lovecraft.

While Lovecraft is not here overtly supporting genocide, he is hardly off the hook.

Hardly! Interestingly, on the next page, Mr. Miéville quotes approvingly from Leon Trotsky. You know, this guy (Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1997):

Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war, and for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent. As a Jacobin in spirit, he was he was not frightened by the smell of freshly spilled blood. He was an ideologist and practician of the Red Terror. He despised ‘bourgeois democracy’; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory ‘labour armies’ and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which were to become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions.

“I don’t want to play!” Yeah, neither do we, asshole.

Cosmic Horror

Infinitely far from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their principle are for him inevitably concealed in an impenetrable secret; equally incapable of seeing the nothingness whence he is derived, and the infinity in which he is swallowed up.

Blaise Pascal

“You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?” I heard him scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred.

H. P. Lovecraft

You see me now: a veteran of a thousand psychic wars.
My energy is spent at last, and my armor is destroyed.

Did I hear you say that this is victory?

Blue Öyster Cult

Lovecraft “offers up… that creeping sense of horror,” Daniel José Older writes; “this intense, creeping claustrophobia and slow-gathering terror” growing out of his “masterful commitment to the sinister crossroads of imagination and the modern world.” “His characters, confronted with the slow-building horrors of supernatural mayhem, routinely call into question their own sanity as dream world and real world intermingle deliriously.” But “the monsters are real; another world is not only possible, it’s alive and tentacled, breathing menacingly in our neighbor’s basement.” So “the mythos endures”; “its legacy reaches into the heart of modern speculative fiction.” On the other hand, Lovecraft was a “racist.” So… there’s that. Read him, if you dare.

The communists love to use The Street (1920) as an example of how awful that mean old Lovecraft was, in that he declined to worship their god of hatred and murder:

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
[…]
With the years worse fortune came to The Street. Its trees were all gone now, and its rose-gardens were displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on parallel streets. Yet the houses remained, despite the ravages of the years and the storms and worms, for they had been made to serve many a generation. New kinds of faces appeared in The Street; swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.
[…]
Over the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men returned. Those who had lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and hatred and ignorance still brood over The Street; for many had stayed behind, and many strangers had come from distant places to the ancient houses. And the young men who had returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned The Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in The Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime.
[…]
Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills and papers printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In these writings the people were urged to tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted, to stamp out the soul of the old America — the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation. It was said that the swart men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in its rotting edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many millions of brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more.
[…]
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of The Street.

In the words of Samuel T. Francis, the great paleoconservative (1997):

In the course of his brief existence, he saw the traditions of his class and his people vanishing before his eyes, and with them the civilization they had created, and no one seemed to care or even grasp the nature of the forces that were destroying it. The measures conventionally invoked to preserve it — traditional Christianity, traditional art forms, conventional ethics and political theory — were useless against the ineluctable cosmic sweep of the Old Ones and the new anarchic powers they symbolized.

Perhaps now we are prepared to understand this, from The Call of Cthulhu (1928):

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

Thank you for reading. Until next time…

The Circle of Equity

While we’re on the subject of tradition, here’s an illustrated Circle of Equity, the central concept of Ottoman Imperial political theory. (Click for the full-size version.)

(images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Recommended Reading

Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We recommend the following resources. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)

Selected Lovecraft

• The Call of Cthulhu
• At the Mountains of Madness
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth
• Dagon
• The Colour Out of Space

On Lovecraft

• Jonathan Bowden (video)

Assorted, Tangential & Miscellaneous

• ‘Politics don’t belong in science fiction’
• ‘Mercy!’
• ‘A Reader’s Manifesto’