On the Writing of Conservative Science Fiction

Can sci fi be conservative?  

It's typically forward-thinking, after all, because of course it must be.  But does that mean that it must by necessity be progressive?

It does not.  Again, of course not.  Why should it be?

I understand conservatism, in its best sense, to be defined as "holding on to what is good."  Change is not always positive, and the embrace of change...for the conservative...comes only after it has been carefully considered.  Does it lessen the grace in the world?  Does it diminish us, or dominate us, or break us?  Then it is to be avoided.

Much of the greatest science fiction explores this theme.  

Fahrenheit 451, for example.  Or Brave New World.  Or Parable of the Sower.  Or A Clockwork Orange.  Or The Lathe of Heaven.  Or War of the Worlds.  In each of these seminal narratives, the world has changed, but in a way that threatens something fundamentally good about humankind.  Literature.  Liberty.  Not being gassed to death on the regular by Martians.  Those things.

In sci fi as dystopia, the assumption is that the timeline has arced in a maleficent direction, and these stories challenge both the present and the future against the creeping depredations of decay and decadence, of fascist brutality and mechanistic inhumanity.  It is a critique of both a possible future and the bitter seed of said future in the present.

As an author, many of my novels explore this.  My postapocalyptic Amish fiction, for example, explores the place of a deeply-held and authentic faith as a bulwark against the collapse of the saeculum.  My AI uprising narratives...those that haven't already been dated by the great onrush of AI these days...explore how a culture that does not provide purpose and meaning can prime us for totalitarianism.  My current work in progress, which fits neatly into the Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance genre?  Its core theme is the necessity of tradition and discipline for the maintenance of cultural and personal integrity.  

These are conservative things.

Ravens, Conservatism, and Neophobia

Coming to the realization that I am conservative hasn't been easy.  

Conservatism, after all, was always something culturally associated with oppression and reactionary tendencies.  Conservatism is fusty and drab and dull.  It's not young and vibrant and wild.

Then again, neither am I now.

But I feel like I must be the same person, because how could I not be?  I still harbor many of the same thoughts about life that I did when I was less creaky and wrinkled.  All of the things that delighted me or offended me when I was young still generate the same reaction.  How can I still think as I did when I was filled with life's running sap, and not be progressive?  

Yet I am not, as my wife and offspring so often remind me.

As I think about it, I suppose I have always been conservative.  Like, say, my spirit animal.  

I have, for years, felt the strongest affinity for the common raven, whose winged form ascendant adorns the battle flag of my Scottish ancestors.  Ravens are the largest of the songbirds, notable for their unusual intelligence, complex vocalizations, problem-solving ability, and tentative sociality.  Unlike their cousins the common crows, ravens are only quasi-social.  They form lifelong pairs, and move in small family groupings, but they don't gather in large murders, mobs, or hordes, as crows do.  They prefer to be alone, or together with only a few trusted intimates.  Groups of ravens are called "conspiracies," because they're just that kind of bird.  They croak and whirr at one another under their breath, and they often seem to be up to something.  They are creatures of deep woods and shadow, of deserts and great empty places.

Ravens, as I discovered the other day, are also what ornithologists call "neophobic."  Meaning: they don't really trust new things.  They're curious, resourceful, and adaptable, but if something arrives in their forest that is incongruous or unexpected, they steer clear of it, because...as the brightest of the birds...they know that new things require wariness.  Newness means possible trouble, and requires caution.  Sure, it might smell good, but why is it there?  Sure, it might be shiny, but what does that mean? 

It's an evolved behavior, but it's also a learned behavior of a corvid whose brain to body ratio is similar to our own.  

Ravens, in other words, are conservative in the way that I am conservative.  Or so I'd like to think.

Tortured Conservatism

I am a liberal.  When I encounter a reality, I only come to a determination of its worth after considering it for a while.  Which means, paradoxically enough, that I do not reflexively reject all things conservative.

For example, few things, in my experience, are more anathema to conservatives than the absence of a moral core.

If you claim to hold to a set of values, but seem willing to compromise on your values whenever it seems politically expedient or personally convenient, then--by the metric of conservatism--you are an immoral person.  

Untrustworthy.  Vacillating.  Weak of spirit.  Ignoble.  Unworthy of respect.

If, on that big test, you realize that you have an opportunity to pass it by cheating and you take that opportunity, you have failed morally.  If you beat out competitors and get a business contract by fudging numbers, that victory means nothing.  You are personally compromised.  If, in a committed relationship, you choose to engage in a secret tryst with someone else--and aren't caught--your getting away with it means nothing.  You have still fundamentally violated your commitment.

What matters is not your desire, or your success.  What matters is your integrity, your commitment, your honor.  If you fail to fulfill that duty to your values, you have failed as a conservative.

Our nation's willingness to torture represents just such a failure.  

It is a failure because it violates our honor as a nation.  What makes America great, and a country worthy of respect, is that it stands on principles of liberty that transcend even our own identity as a nation.  The freedoms we so vigorously defend aren't just ours.  They are self-evident truths for all people, written into the nature of existence by our Creator.  We value human beings, and the integrity of individual liberty.  It is what makes us different from our enemies.

When we allow ourselves to act in ways that are monstrous and ignoble for the purposes of expediency, we fail.  When we view any means to an end as acceptable, we have ceased to be moral persons, and a moral nation.

"It's not torture.  It's enhanced interrogation techniques," say the lawyers and the politicians and the apparatchiks, spinning and obfuscating and equivocating.  Language, however, is less important than reality.  The Chinese call their vast network of slave-labor prisons laogai, or "Reform through Labor" camps.  The Soviet gulags were called "corrective labor camps."  The language does not matter.  It is the action that matters.  "Enhanced interrogation techniques" include drowning, beatings, exposure to extreme cold, forced standing, "stress positions," and mock executions.  Those techniques are torture, as we would rightly call them if inflicted on an American soldier in the hands of an enemy.

"To say this disrespects our war fighters and intelligence community," cry some.  This is falsehood, a perversion of patriotism, wrapping excrement in the flag.  What matters, if you care about the values espoused by our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, is that you live them out.  That we have soldiers and spies is meaningless.  So does North Korea.  So does Iran.  What matters are the values and principles they are defending.  It is what makes us different.  We treat human beings differently from our enemies, or we are no different.

"It gets results," cry others.  This has truth in it, the sort of truth that makes for the most pernicious lies.  Human creatures, subjected to intense pain, will do whatever it takes to end that pain.  When ISIS beats, abuses, and tortures a captive into "converting" to their perverse and monstrous faith, is that a "result?"  Or is that a lie, told to end the suffering?

"It kept us safe," say still others, stirring our fears, appealing to our craven self-interest.  Bad things would have happened, we are told, ominously.  Bad things did happen.  We stepped away from what makes us a nation worth living in, and worth fighting for.  We dishonored ourselves.  Our founding fathers held such moral cowardice in contempt.

Conservatism, in its most gracious form, is a worthy thing. It is about integrity, about having clear morals and ethics, which you pursue even if you yourself do not benefit from them.

What the warped ethic of the right-wing would have us believe is that America can never be dishonored, no matter what she does.  Such a belief not only betrays the dignity of our republic, but also the essence of what it means to be both honorable and conservative.

Because What the Blogosphere Really Needs is Another Manifesto

On my day off, just because, it was editing day.

I cranked out another 5,000 words of that old novel I'm editing and typing up for Kindle publication, which I'm enjoying, as will maybe a half-dozen other people, my mother included.  OK, maybe not my mom.  She's not really the eBook sort.

And then I went back and reworked a bit of online theological musing I'd done several years ago.  The impetus for that was a probing conversation in a Sunday Bible study, in which a young member of my congregation asked about how and in what way the Bible had authority.

It was...well...a bit more of a dialogue than a group discussion, but as we'd already finished up examining the deeply challenging text from Genesis, and I'd asked for general questions, it was cool. 

The issue was coming to understand how our sacred texts can have authority if they are not literally inerrant, perfect and without contradiction or flaw.  This is a non-trivial issue, so obviously, it's taken some of my processor time over the years.  Long of short of it:  I view scriptural inerrancy as spiritually analogous to ecclesiastical inerrancy.  Both represent human failures to understand the nature of the relationship to God that Jesus calls us to live out.

And so the Neoreformationist Theses returns to the web, tightened up and ready to sit there and look pretty.   

It's particularly entertaining, given that a quick run through Google indicates that I'm the only homo sapiens sapiens who actually uses that word.  That renders the odds of another person searching for it...oh, gosh, let's see...essentially nil.

Ah well.  

How to Play Tea Party

Over the past year, the peculiar rise of the "tea party" "movement" has drawn a tremendous amount of attention from the nation's media. As a thousand or so tea partiers arrived here in DC to protest ObambimateurminationCare, or whatever it is they've attempted to rename health care reform, I've been again struck by some of the defining characteristics of the movement. Let me lay some of those out there:

1) Signs Made By Preschoolers. I can't not notice this. Whenever Tea Partiers get out there, they have signs made with magic marker. They are clumsy and roughly done, and stand in stark contrast to the well-printed and designed signs of those who often oppose them. It is a defining feature of the movement.

I think it's supposed to be a mark of authenticity. But honestly, it's just sloppy. If you look back to the populist movements of the early 20th century, you do see hand-made signs. But they used stencils. They looked neat. Organized. Focused. They commanded respect. Surely, surely, amongst all of the folks in that movement, someone must be an assistant manager of a Kinkos. Find that guy. Do a better job.

That may be a highly visible feature of the movement, but it's just surface level. Let's move on.

2) Race: Everyone sees this. In the multihued America in which we live, it is astoundingly obvious. The Tea Party makes the Republican National Convention look like Showtime at the Apollo. Yeah, some of the tea partiers will tell you they have lots of black friends, and their granddaughter is biracial. That's real nice, but honey, y'all are still one big Honkeypalooza.

That doesn't mean they're racists. Not at all. In fact, I think that only a fringe of that fringe harbor nasty ethic hatreds. But it does mean there's a rather impressive monoculture going on...and monocultures have a tendency to fall deep into uncritical groupthink.

3) Class: This is more important. Most tea party folks are working class. They're the folks who used to make things in factories and grow things on farms. They're people with rough hands, with oil and dirt under their fingernails. Though they'd blanch at the very thought, they are the proletariat. They were the flesh-and-blood engine of America's industrial and agricultural might. Now, of course, there's not a thing for them to do besides an eight hour shift at Dennys, followed by two nights a week behind the register at the Gas'N'Go. They are tired, overworked, and underpaid, and their backs hurt.

4) Rage: These are angry, angry people. They are angry because the America they thought they knew is gone. The jobs are gone. The sense of America as a shining city on a hill? Gone. They're on the front line of the collapse of our industrial might.

Why? Well, there's the rub. The reason for that collapse is...well...them. Tea partier's aggressive independence and rugged individualism meant that for decades, they voted for the party of the unfettered and free market. Freedom! Business! America!

That brought about globalization, as capitalism did what capitalism does. The ethic of profit maximization heartily endorsed by American conservatism drove manufacturing to places where it was less expensive. So tea partiers lost their jobs. The ethic of unfettered markets meant that big corporations and agribusinesses flourished, crushing uncompetitive small businesses and small farms under their low, low prices. So more tea partiers lost their jobs. It's the nature of the market, folks. When you voted for Reagan, and then Bush, and then Dubya, that's what you voted for.

But when you exist in a monoculture, which lacks the capacity to critically consider it's own presumptions, you aren't going to be able to make that connection. You just know that EVERYTHING IS GETTING WORSE. Your anger is inchoate, formless, and can't seem to find it's mark...because you can't see that you are responsible for your own downfall. Aimlessly angry people are easily manipulated, and so deeper they go, lost in a trap of their own making. It's hubris in it's most classical form, writ across the broken lives of the common people of our republic.

Allahu Akbar

One of the best ways to twist the knickers of an ultraconservative Christian is to use the name Allah in a way that seems to imply that the God of Muslims is the same as the God of Christians and two/thirds of the God of Jews.

When progressive and moderate Christians seek that monotheistic commonality, it's taken as either syncretistic or naive. Allah is, like, so not the same, say those on the right. Some point out the variances between the nature of Allah as expressed in the Qu'ran and the YHWH described in the Torah...and there are, certainly, some differences. Others point out differences in ethical emphasis between the God Jesus articulated and the Allah that Mohammed proclaimed. There are certainly some significant distinctives, although ultraconservatives tend to highlight them in ways that are more polemic and intentionally negative.

But many seem...well...less sane. Allah is a pagan Moon God, or so Jack Chick's little psychotronic komiks would have us believe. Allah is an evil demon, say glazed-eye folks who unsurprisingly TEND TO WRITE IN ALL CAPS. There can be no use of that name by Christians!

What I've found interesting here is that once again, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists seem to have ended up on the same side of an issue. An interesting snippet of faith news out of Malaysia recently involved efforts on the part of Muslim conservatives to forbid Christians from using the name Allah to describe God in their speech and in their writing. A law there forbidding that action was recently repealed on the basis of personal religious liberty, and that repeal has the Islamic right-wingers up in arms. It might...cause confusion. Syncretism. Muslims deciding of their own free will that they might want to be Christian. Or worse yet, a sense of mutual understanding and monotheistic commonality. That this is a perfect mirror image of the perspective of Christian ultraconservatives is unsurprising. The extremes always, always, end up looking functionally identical to that thing they claim to hate the most.

I tend not to use the name Allah meself, for the same reason I don't drop into an overblown Latino accent whenever I pronounce a word with Spanish origins. Like, say, "I recently vacationed in "Ghhwaah-tay-Maaal-Ah." It seems a bit forced, a bit too "golly-look-at-me-I'm-so-open-minded-and-progressive." But I'm also not willing to preclude any overlap at all between my faith and that of those who approach the Creator in ways that...while they differ...are not inherently evil.

Defending the Bible from Conservatives

Just when you thought American conservatism could not jump the shark further than it already has, it has come across my desk that a group of ultraconservatives lead by the spawn of Phyllis Schlafly has decided it needs to correct the Bible. The Bible, you see, is too liberal. The Conservative Bible Project aims to fix that.

No, really. I can't believe it either. In fact, I was initially sure this was some sort of subversive performance art project undertaken by a mischievous progressive pastor. Heck, I wish I'd come up with the idea. But best I can tell, it isn't a joke.

On the Conservative Bible Project website, we hear that much of Scripture has been translated by "professors" and people who are "higher educated." They have a point there. If you spend your days studying koine Greek, ancient Hebrew, and Aramaic, there just isn't time enough to spend getting your daily requirement of talk radio.

These "Biblical Scholars" have rendered the Bible dangerously liberal. The language they used reflects liberal values which must now be replaced with proper conservative language. There are also sections of the Bible that are troubling to conservatism...so those sections will be deleted.

Three examples:

Number One: The project is deeply troubled by the use of socialist language. One example was the term "labor" and it's related term "laborer." Labor is another way to describe unions, which are opposed to free market values. It's clear evidence of liberal influence. I checked in the Bible to see if this was true. Lo and behold, it is. In the King James Version, the term "labor" is used one hundred and six times. Clearly, the team of liberal academics convened by King James I in 1604 were under the influence of the AFL-CIO. I'm not sure what word will be used in the Conservative Bible, but I'll guess "independent contractor" and "consultant" are in the running. I look forward to reading their version of the Parable of the Independent Contractors in the Vineyard.

Number Two: The language used is unclear. It needs to be refined. Take, for instance, the terms "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit." That could mean anything. So those terms are out. Instead, the Conservative Bible Project uses the term "Divine Guide." And no, this isn't Oprah coming up with this. It's the far right. Really.

Number Three: Some of what Jesus said was too liberal. The project in particular targets Luke 23:34, which I defended here in terms of language and context just a few weeks ago. The idea that a) Jesus would forgive people and b) that he seems to forgive them based on their ignorance of His True Nature flies in the face of conservative teachings about personal responsibility. The Conservative Bible Project condemns these words of Jesus as a "Liberal Falsehood." So out they go.

Curiouser and curiouser...

The Little Boy Who Cried Socialist

Having read the text of Obama's controversial pep-talk to school kids yesterday, one of the most striking things about it is that it was total, down-the-line, unrelenting partisan propaganda. At no point did it vary from the party line. Every talking point, every rhetorical flourish, every turn of phrase...all of it...presented a particular ideology. The speech was a flagrant effort to embed that ideology into the hearts and minds of our young people.

That ideology is, of course, the ideology of American conservatism. Work hard. Study hard. No one owes you anything. To succeed, you have to put in effort. You are responsible for your own success. Listen to and respect your elders.

The intense resistance to this fundamentally conservative speech among conservative ideologues may, I think, be part of a turning point for the American right. Conservative parents, panicked by the fear-mongering of their own media, bombarded schools with calls of outrage. Some opted their kids out of the speech, concerned that the message amounted to the indoctrination one might receive from the Dear Leader in a totalitarian state. While this is certainly consistent with the view of Obama that some folks have been pitching, it poses a problem for the right. Here, with crystal clarity, American conservatives have taught a lesson to the children of America about the current nature of their movement.

It has gone mad.

For the vast majority of kids who listened to or dozed their way through this speech, the idea that there was anything evil or socialist about it will be obviously, basically wrong. Not just a little off. Way off. Paranoid schizophrenic off. "Your mom wouldn't let you watch that? What a whackjob."

That's not to say that one can't disagree with the current administration. I do on a range of fronts, particularly in terms of fiscal responsibility. But the reflexive roaring of the right-leaning media and blogosphere increasingly seems less like legitimate opposition, and more like raving. And if conservatives allow themselves to be painted into that corner, the legitimate critiques they have will no longer seem legitimate.

I think Obama knows this. I think some Republicans are realizing this, which is why the Florida GOP chair publicly recanted his accusations of socialist propaganda after he saw the text of the speech. He even went so far as to say he was going to be sure his kids listened to it.

But the damage is done. If you keep shouting the same thing, over and over again, no matter what, you aren't being consistent. You're being that little boy who cried socialist, and eventually, no one will believe you.