Isegoria

If you’re feeling complacent, may I suggest watching Nicholas Jasenovec’s portrait of Dr. Richard J. Bing on his hundredth birthday, Para Fuera:

Beowulf, in his old age, faces the dragon and suffers through its fire before the great serpent buries its fangs in his neck. The great warrior, sword broken, lives just long enough to slay the dragon with his knife. Fortunately, the manuscript was never bit in the neck:

When the heirs of Sir Robert Cotton selected a spot to stash the rare-book collector’s priceless library, they probably should have known better than to pick a place called Ashburnham House. In 1731, a fire swept through that ill-named residence in London and forever impoverished our literary heritage.

One manuscript that escaped the blaze — just barely — contained an untitled poem of more than 3,000 lines. The flames actually singed its pages and destroyed bits of its unique content. In the centuries to follow, gradual deterioration consumed even more. It’s a small miracle that “Beowulf,” as the poem came to be called, survived at all.

Eric S. Raymond has a scholarly interest in the historical roots of science fiction, which has led him to read — or re-read — the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs — famous for Tarzan, of course, but also for John Carter of Mars — Rudyard Kipling — famous for Kim, but also for As Easy As A.B.C. — and Harold Lamb — famous for his Cossack stories, which, he doesn’t mention, influenced Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan.

This leads him to discuss reading racism into pulp fiction:

The skepticism I’m now developing about ascriptions of racism in pulp fiction really began, I think, when I learned that it had become fashionable to denigrate Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and other India stories as racist. This is clearly sloppy thinking at work. Kim was deeply respectful of its non-European characters, especially the Pathan swashbuckler Mahbub Ali and Teshoo Lama. Indeed, the wisdom and compassion of Kipling’s lama impressed me so greatly as a child that I think it founded my lifelong interest in and sympathy with Buddhism.

But I didn’t begin thinking really critically about race in pulp fiction until I read Tarzan and the Castaways a few years ago and noticed something curious about the way Burroughs and his characters used the adjective “white” (applied to people). That is: while it appeared on the surface to be a racial distinction, it was actually a culturist one. In Burroughs’s terms of reference (at least as of 1939), “white” is actually code for “civilized”; the distinction between “civilized” and “savage” is actually more important than white/nonwhite, and non-Europeans can become constructively “white” by exhibiting civilized virtues.

Realizing this caused me to review my assumptions about racial attitudes in Burroughs’s time. I found myself asking whether the use of “white” as code for “civilized” was prejudice or pragmatism. Because there was this about Burrough’s European characters: (1) in their normal environments, the correlation between “civilized” and “white” would have been pretty strong, and (2) none of them seemed to have any trouble treating nonwhite but civilized characters with respect. In fact, in Burroughs’s fiction, fair dealing with characters who are black, brown, green, red, or gorilla-furred is the most consistent virtue of the white gentleman.

I concluded that, given the information available to a typical European in 1939, it might very well be that using “white” as code for “civilized” was pragmatically reasonable, and that the reflex we have today of ascribing all racially-correlated labels to actually racist beliefs is actually unfair to Burroughs and his characters!

It’s almost comical to see the programmer-libertarian argument play out against an imagined intellectual-progressive audience: You see, Burroughs doesn’t mean white when he says “white” — he means civilized! Therefore, he’s not racist.

Raymond’s defense of Lamb is similarly unlikely to convert anyone on the Left:

The “brushes with anti-Semitism” lie in Lamb’s portrayal of the Jewish merchants of the time. They sell the Cossacks clothes, weapons, food, and gunpowder and turn the freebooters’ loot into cash. They are depicted as avaricious, cowardly, mean, and quite willing to toady to the warriors and princes they serve. How are we to interpret this in light of Lamb’s sympathetic portrayals of a dozen other races and cultures?

Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that Burroughs was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!

Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.

Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?

Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.

Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable.

The premise of James Cameron’s Avatar — a wheel-chair-bound man controlling a genetically engineered creature — comes from Poul Anderson’s classic novella, Call Me Joe, while the trite story of a white messiah going native comes from any number of movies, Dances with Wolves most notably. What I did not realize was that the names of the lush planet and its inhabitants both come from a Russian science-fiction series, The World of Noon:

Cinema audiences in Russia have been quick to point out that Avatar has elements in common with The World of Noon, or Noon Universe, a cycle of 10 bestselling science fiction novels written by the Strugatskys in the mid-1960s.

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora — the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

And while there are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids — the Na’vi in Cameron’s epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys’ novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

I have never watched the post-apocalyptic cult-classic, Zardoz — which is infamous, more than anything, for putting Sean Connery in a truly terrible costume — but I was intrigued to find out that Denzel Washington’s Book Of Eli “reboots” Zardoz — and arguably misses the point, by changing the “zinger” ending, which the original title hints at.