I frequently see articles like this discussing these community explosions as self-evidently harmful patterns of behaviour. I've never seen an article like this as a discussion of a certain amount of necessary pain, confusion, and difficulty while things get worked out. It seems obvious to me that untangling systemic problems and their legacies will always involve some clashing. Sooner started, sooner done.
If you run an anti-harassment office and you get rid of harassment, you are out of a job and out of power. If you keep finding more and more harassment, you are set for life. Plus if you try to tone it down there's 50 juniors behind you with dubious degrees that will gladly denounce you for being too old fashioned and take your juicy position for themselves.
I don't think getting more middle-managers will ever get this issues any better because it's in their interests to increase their power as much as possible, not solve anything.
At best, it's racists projecting their discomfort onto other people, making others responsible for their own guilt. But more likely, it's sadistic bullies. A sadistic bully cannot say "Destroying a life gets me excited!" but they can say "I fight for social justice!"
They look a lot as though they're profiting from re-entangling as much as possible. This isn't automatically equivalent to reconciliation or equality, and it often looks like the complete opposite.
Agreed, but these are communities of interest, without governance of any kind. There's no one to police bad behaviour, to refocus on constructive efforts, to maintain an agenda or to call timeouts when it gets overheated.
Given that, what's the alternative to a messy communal brawl that hopefully doesn't destroy the community? The author of the essay speaks about the ratchet dynamics as if it's obviously to be avoided; an alternative read is that his take is descriptive of what's actually the way that these things get worked out, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
The various "racefail" episodes over the last decade in science fiction, for one. They were definitely as acrimonious and sprawling as the knitting blowup, but after several of them, they've settled down, no one's been cancelled, and the community seems healthier for it.
As the article's author notes, the knitting community has mostly healed as well. My wife is a knitter so I've followed it more closely than others. Some prominent voices aren't so much anymore; others are more prominent. As the author notes, Nathan Taylor came back and made more money than before, covering his losses and then some.
Contrast that to the "new athiest" collapse that led to two distinct communities. Whether that's for better or worse probably depends on perspective. It only seems bad if you feel a need for there to be a monolithic community. I think the split (which I also witnessed at the time) really did reveal a deep schism in the community, so I'm not sure it isn't better to be two factions divided.
As a peer comment has noted, the sci-fi scene isn’t healthier, the woke-guard just succeeded in silencing all dissenting voices.
A few years ago — when I was totally unaware of the ideological take-over of sci-fi — I set a goal to read all Hugo award winners over the lifetime of the award, in chronological order of the awards. Many early books were out of print, and I ordered and read used physical copies.
I abandoned the effort when I hit the modern era of woke sci-fi culture.
The books were just bad. It was then I actually looked up what had happened in sci-fi culture — these books were being promoted because they promoted Right Thinking and were written by the people of the right race/gender/thought - not because they were good books.
These days I use popular sci-fi awards as an anti-recommendation; a popular mainstream award (e.g. a Hugo) is strong indicator of a poorly written book.
> I abandoned the effort when I hit the modern era of woke sci-fi culture.
When? Which books?
> These days I use popular sci-fi awards as an anti-recommendation; a popular mainstream award (e.g. a Hugo) is strong indicator of a poorly written book.
Strong disagree. Boring, preachy, not meaningfully science fiction, sure, but poorly written, nah. Lots of technically competent MFA crap by people who don’t read out care about SF for sure.
Lolita is wonderfully written but I did not care at all about a single character or event in the entire book. “Not my thing” and bad writing are different qualities.
> The various "racefail" episodes over the last decade in science fiction, for one. They were definitely as acrimonious and sprawling as the knitting blowup, but after several of them, they've settled down, no one's been cancelled, and the community seems healthier for it.
To describe the North American SF convention scene as healthier after casting out the right wing[1] and normalizing the use of censorship[2] seems a bit rich.
[1] Sad Puppies and aftermath
[2] Sensitivity readers and other freelance commissars
The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile and member of NAMBLA. I'm not sure we want to pine for the return of those days.
> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley cruising for teenage boys, as a procurer for her husband Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile and member of NAMBLA. I'm not sure we want to pine for the return of those days.
This is on the face of it a bit silly. It's confusing a bad thing with the entire scene, which is not appropriate. Hundreds of years ago we thought "don't tar everyone with the same brush" would be a nice clear way to correct silly thinking like this; I bet we never thought it would still be happening today.
You like the ideology that won. That’s fine. Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires. Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees. Everyone agrees because of coalition politics where some people won and others were told to bend the knee or get out.
Politics is about winning and crushing your enemies and their aspirations in favor of your own desires.
This is a childish sort of cynicism that's really about nursing your feeling of grievance with promises of justified retribution to come. I actually have a philosophy degree, and studied in detail the political philosophers of the last five centuries. Politics is not about crushing your enemies, it's about figuring out durable institutions and social pacts that maximize freedom and human flourishing while sufficiently limiting our self-destructive tendencies. It's about figuring out how to live together. If it comforts you to believe that "my victory" is as cynically appreciated as your own, you're doing yourself a disfavour.
Just don’t pretend that everything’s nice and happy because everyone agrees
I don't. But I also don't fool myself that the sort of big tent moral relativism that allows for indivisible differences to coexist side-by-side is some sort of victory, or commitment to rights for all. It's just a matter of using high-minded rhetoric to avoid hard choices in who you're willing offend.
If your education in history is so concentrated in political philosophy I suggest broadening it. You might see that the idea of justified retribution or usually illusory and always cold comfort. If you think maximizing freedom and social flourishing has been a pressing concern you might look to the Mongols, Confucian philosophy or any of the great Muslim empires. Human flourishing they believed in but in an extremely different form to anyone who’s an intellectual descendant of Enlightenment thinkers. Flourishing their way. Freedom, certainly not. There’s a right way to be and we should follow it.
If your first and second paragraphs are consistent I don’t see how. Should you feel like continuing this my email is in my profile.
>> The scifi convention scene used to feature Marian Zimmer Bradley...
> This is a childish sort of cynicism ...
I do note that you engaged in the rhetorical trick of smearing those with whom you disagree by associating the entire movement with the literal worst person possible, which is itself childish cynicism.
A: "As a sufferer of a severe anxiety disorder, the prospect of a trip to India was to me as scary and unlikely as a flight to Mars."
B: "Whoa! Wow! White supremacy much?"
In fact, rhetorically, this is how that side gains any victory at all. Certainly not through principled advocacy and reasoned debate.
