Starship Stormtroopers - Michael Moorcock' Critique of Reactionary Sci-Fi and Fantasy

[Kiev Communard]

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

During the sixties, in common with many other periodicals, our New Worlds believed in revolution. Our emphasis was on fiction, the arts and sciences, because it was what we knew best. We attacked and were in turn attacked in the all-to-familiar rituals. Smiths refused to continue distributing the magazine unless we 'toned down' our contents. We refused. We were, they said, obscene, blasphemous, nihilistic etc., etc. The Daily Express attacked us. A Tory asked a question about us in the House of Commons -- why was public money (a small Arts Council grant) being spent on such filth. I recount all this not merely to establish what we were prepared to do to maintain our policies (we were eventually wiped out by Smiths and Menzies) but to point out that we were the only sf magazine to pursue what you might call a determinedly radical approach -- and sf buffs were the first to attack us with genuine vehemence. Our main serial running at the height of our troubles was called Bug Jack Barron written by Norman Spinrad, who had taken an active part in radical politics in the US and used his story to display the abuse of democracy and the media in America. He later went on to write a satirical sword-and-sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to display the fascist elements inherent to the form. The author of this novel existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf Hitler. The book was meant to point up the number of sf authors who were, in a sense, 'unsuccessful Hitlers'.

Many Americans came to use NW as a vehicle because they couldn't get their stories published in the US. Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs, Harlan Ellison and others published a good deal of their best and at the time most controversial work in NW -- and Heinlein fans actually attacked us for 'destroying' science fiction. Escapism this form might be, but it posed as a 'literature of ideas' and that, we contended, it wasn't -- unless The Green Berets was a profoundly philosophical movie.

Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed that ' this Organisation would buy advertising space in the sf magazines condemning the war in Vietnam. I was around when this was proposed. A good number of members agreed with alacrity -- including English members like myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and, to be fair, Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying that the SFWA 'shouldn't interfere in politics.' Okay, said Merril, then let's say 'The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in the Vietnam War etc.' Finally the sf magazines contained two ads -- one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MaCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer and as many other popular sf writers as were against the war. The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity -- but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of 'good leadership'; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) -- the answer is always leadership, 'decency', paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values...

What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc.) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc.) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be ,employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or 'genre' fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality and that, of course, is what propaganda does.

The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their 'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be; because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the charismatic heroes, if they are lucky, die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar has manipulated himself into the position of power and Terror has returned with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic lie. Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right: they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear. They are 'leaders'. Traditional sf is hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology (invented by the sf writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as 'radical' is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.

In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused for) a terror of the masses, the 'ugly' crowd. But this is so common to so much 'horror' fiction that it's hardly worth discussing. Lovecraft is morbid. His work equates to that negative romanticism found in much Nazi art. He was a confused anti-Semite and misanthrope, a promoter of anti-rationalist ideas about racial 'instinct' which have much in common with Mein Kampf. A dedicated supporter of 'Aryanism', a hater of women, he wound up marrying a Jewess (which might or might not have been a sign of hope -- we haven't her view of the matter)Lovecraft appeals to us primarily when we are ourselves feeling morbid. Apart from his offensively awful writing and a resultant inability to describe his horrors (leaving us to do the work -- the secret of his success -- we're all better writers than he is!) he is rarely as frightening, by implication, as most of the other highly popular writers whose concerns are not with 'meeping Things' but with idealised versions of society. It's not such a big step, for instance from Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum.

I must admit I'm not following a properly argued critical line. I'm arguing on the assumption that my readers are at least familiar with some of the books and authors I mention. I attack these books because they are the favourite reading of so many radicals. I attack the books not for their superficial fascination with quasi-medieval social systems (a la Frank Herbert). Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction. As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings and queens, lords and ladies, figure largely -- yet I am an avowed anti-monarchist. Catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favour of militarism. And just because many of Heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers I don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favour of war. It depends what use you make of such characters in a story and what, in the final analysis, you are saying.

Jules Verne in The Masterless Man put some pretty decent sentiments in the mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist and his best characters, like Captain Nemo, are embittered 'rebels' who have retreated from society. Even the aerial anarchists of The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffiths have something to be said for them, for all their inherent authoritarianism, but they are essentially romantic 'outlaws' and the views they express are not sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890s.

H.G. Wells was no more the 'father' of science fiction than Jules Verne. He inherited a tradition going back some thirty or forty years in the form he himself used and several centuries in the form of the Utopian romance. What was unusual about Wells, however, is that he was one of the first radicals of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them with powerful and telling images to make Bunyanesque allegories like The Time Machine or The Invisible Man. Wells didn't have his characters talking socialism. He showed the results of capitalism, authoritarianism, superstition and other evils and because he was a far better writer than most of those who have ever written sf before or since he made his points with considerable clarity. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking. Wells took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of socialism. Until Wells -- the most talented, original and intelligent writer of his kind -- almost all sf had devoted itself to attacks on 'decadence' and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral line and our armies to re-equip and get better officers. By and large this was the tone of much of the sf which followed Wells, from Kipling's effective but reactionary With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC (paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify 'the mob') to stories by John Buchan, Michael Arlen, William Le Quex, E. Phillips Oppenheim and hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning us of the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots, Zionist conspiracies, the yellow peril and so on and so on. Even Jack London wasn't what one might call an all-round libertarian any more than Wells was when he toyed with his ideas of an elite corps of 'samurai' who were actually not a great deal different to how Soviet Communist Party members saw themselves, or were described in official fiction and propaganda. The quasi-religious nature of sf (which I describe in a collection of pre-WWI sf Before Armageddon) was producing on the whole quasi-religious substitutes (a variety of authoritarian socialist and fascist theories). A few attacked the theories of the emerging dictators (Murray Constantine's Swastika Night, 1937, seemed to think Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future). By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the sf writers of the day hoped we would have -- 'strong leaders' reshaping nations. The reality of these hero-leaders was not, of course, entirely what had been visualised -- Nuremberg rallies and Strength Through Joy, perhaps -- but Kristellnacht and gas ovens seemed to go a bit too far.

At least the American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were not, by and large, offering us high-profile 'leadership': just the good old-fashioned mixture of implicit racialism/militarism/nationalism/paternalism carried a few hundred years into the future or a few million light years into space (E. E. Smith remains to this day one of the most popular writers of that era). John W. Campbell, who in the late thirties took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and created what many believe to be a major revolution in the development of sf, was the chief creator of the school known to buffs as 'Golden Age' sf and written by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists, whose work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting. They believed, in common with authoritarians everywhere, that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of 'workers' with themselves (the radicals) as commissars. They offered us such visions, when they attempted any overt discussion of politics at all. They were about as left-wing as The National Enquirer or The Saturday Evening Post (where their stories occasionally were to appear). They were xenophobic, smug and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe, though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of exploiters (no longer Jews but often still 'aliens'). Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage -- in the pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier, and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do...

The war helped. It provided character types and a good deal of authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly 'expert'. Those chaps had the tone of Vietnam twenty years earlier. Indeed, it's often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a 'Waldo' handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell's image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone's standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an 'alternative' that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as 'Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind'), a perpetual motion machine known as the 'Dean Drive', a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren't 'abused', and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all -- 'science-fiction' -- 'psychology' -- Jesus Christ!'- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last 'straight' sf serial for Campbell before he began his 'serious' books such as Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as 'radical' was easy enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it. Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkein and Heinlein? The clue could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth century -- it is Reaganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Maclean and The Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy -- at its most refined it is William F. Buckley Jr., who, already a long way more sophisticated than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.

Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier -- the chain of command is complex -- many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly enforced, rules from 'high up' are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A 'rebel', certainly, he or she does not assume 'rebellious charm' in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular Star Wars series which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious 'Force' which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian 'samurai' again?) and upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. Star Wars is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a compendium of other people's ideas) in its implicit structure -- quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around their necks.

Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. it raises 'instinct' above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.

It was Alfred Bester who first attracted me to science fiction. I'd read some fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs before that, but I thought that if The Stars My Destination (also called Tiger! Tiger!) was sf, then this was the fiction for me. It took me some years to realise that Bester was one of the few exceptions. At the ending of The Stars My Destination the self-educated, working class, 'scum of the spaceways', Gully Foyle, comes into possession of the substance known as PyrE, capable of detonating at a thought and probably destroying the solar system at very least. The plot has revolved around the attempts of various powerful people to get hold of the stuff. Foyle has it. Moral arguments or forceful persuasions are brought against him to make him give PyrE up to a 'responsible' agency. In the end he scatters the stuff to 'the mob' of the solar system. Here you are, he says, it's yours. Its your destiny. Do with it how you see fit.

This is one of the very, very few 'libertarian' sf novels I have ever read. If I hadn't read it, I very much doubt I should have read any more sf. It's a wonderful adventure story. It has a hero developing from a completely stupefied, illiterate hand on a spaceship to a brilliant and mature individual taking his revenge first on those who have harmed him and then gradually developing what you might call a 'political conscience.' I know of no other sf book which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism almost wholly acceptable to me. It is probably significant that it enjoys a relatively small success compared to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Leaving aside the very worthy but to my mind journalistic The Dispossessed by U.K. Le Guin, it is quite hard for me to find many other examples of sf books which, as it were, 'promote' libertarian ideas. M. John Harrison is an anarchist. His books are full of anarchists -- some of them very bizarre like the anarchist aesthetes of The Centauri Device. Typical of the New Worlds school he could be described as an existential anarchist. There is Brian Aldiss with his Barefoot in the Head vision of an LSD 'bombed' Europe almost totally liberated and developing bizarre new customs. There are J. G. Ballard's 'terminal ironies' such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash and so on, which have brought criticisms of 'nihilism' against him. There is Joanna Russ's marvellous The Female Man. So little sf has fundamental humanitarian values, let alone libertarian ideals, one is hard put to find other examples. My own taste, I suppose, is sometimes at odds with my political views. I admire Barrington J. Bayley, whose stories are often extremely abstract. One of his most enjoyable books recently published is The Soul of the Robot which discusses the nature of individual identity. Charles L. Harness is another favourite of mine. The Rose, in particular, lacks the simplifications of most sf, and The Paradox Men with its sense of the nature of Time, its thief hero, its ironic references to America Imperial, is highly entertaining. I also have a soft spot for C. M. Kornbluth who to my mind had a rather stronger political conscience than he allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favourites (though structurally it is a bit weak) is The Syndic (about a society where a rather benign Mafia is paramount). Fritz Leiber is probably the best of the older American sf writers for his prose-style, his wit and his humanity, as well as his abiding contempt for authoritarianism. His Gather, Darkness is one of the best sf books to relate political power to religious power (this was also serialised in Astounding during the forties . John Brunner, author of the CND marching song 'H-Bomb's Thunder', often writes from a distinctly socialist point of view. Harlan Ellison, who for some time had associations with a New York street gang and who has identified himself for many years with radicalism in the US, writes many short stories whose heroes have no truck with authority of any sort, though the conventions of the genre sometimes get in the way of the essential messages of his stories. This has to be true of most genre fiction. Ellison's best work is written outside the sf genre. Philip K. Dick, John Sladek, Thomas M.Disch, Joanna Russ...

To my mind one of the best examples of imaginative fiction to ear in England since the war is Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht, written in the forties and recently republished by John Conquest (available from him at Compendium Books). These 'Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman's Club' are superbly laconic pieces, concentrating more original invention into fewer words than almost any writer I can think of. They outshine, for me, almost anything else remotely like them, including the stories of Borges and other much admired imaginative writers. Richardson goes swiftly from one idea to the next, using a beautifully disciplined prose. He has the advantage of being a great ironist and I find that more palatable. Such a style can become one of the most convincing weapons in the literary arsenal and it often astonishes me how cleverly Kipling influenced generations of writers by disguising his authoritarian notions in that superb matter-of-fact, faintly ironic prose. Many writers, not necessarily of Kipling's views, have used it since. We find a debased version of it in the right-wing thrillers and sf novels of our own day. It is probably this 'tone' (employed to suggest the writer's basic decency and commonsense) which enables many people to accept ideas which, couched differently, would revolt them. Yet what Heinlein or Tolkein lack is any trace of real self-mockery. They are nature's urbane Tories. They'll put an arm round your shoulder and tell you their ideas are quite radical too, really; that they used to be fire-eaters in their youth; that there are different ways of achieving social change; that you must be realistic and pragmatic. Next time you pick up a Heinlein book think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower or, if that image isn't immediate enough, some chap in early middleage, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-pieced suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read.

Michael Moorcock, May 1977, Ladbroke Grove

http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html

Quite relevant article. His criticism of Tolkienesque fantasy, especially overhyped in modern consumerist mass culture, and "space opera" Heinlein-style nonsense is especially apt.

[IndependentCitizen]

I personally enjoyed the film, watching those giant bugs beat down on the earthlings was awe-inspiring!

[praxis1966]

I think the only failing (if there is any) is that this article predates the Star Wars prequels. From what I understand about the production of those movies, George Lucas had originally conceived of them in a nine part saga but could only get financed for one film with a contractual option for two more if the first did well financially. Therefore, he chose the story he thought would put the most asses in seats and went from there.

The prequels, however, are decidedly anti-authoritarian (even if genre convention does dictate things like monarchy). The quote by the Padme character, "So this is how democracy dies... To thunderous applause," is a pretty obvious clue in my mind. Less clear, but still apparent, is the near mirror image of Hitler's rise to the position of Chancellor of the Third Reich and consolidation of power with the consent of the Reichstag with that of the rise and consolidation of Chancellor Palpatine in Star Wars. Further, those prequels also sort of work in the idea that World War I (the Clone Wars) was essentially a trade war which was later an excuse for the imperialist aggression of World War II (the Rebel Alliance pretty obviously standing in for the Allies). It's essentially a re-imagining of what would've happened in World War II had the Nazis won, and that's all without saying anything about the fact that the Stormtroopers' helmets were modeled after those of the Waffen-SS.

If Lucas was guilty of anything, it was promoting mainstream Western values (not necessarily authoritarianism/fascism) and perhaps badly grafting sword and sorcerer style fantasy fiction onto sci-fi. Anyway, I'd be curious to know what the author, or you for that matter, think of the sci-fi of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury, particularly their works Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 respectively. Personally, I find them quite good (not to mention libertarian) even if they are a little moralistic in their attitudes toward sex.

EDIT: Incidentally, to answer the author's question in re Star Wars and The Force, "...are we back to Wellsian samurai again?" No, we are not. The concept of The Force comes from the Chinese concept of Qi (alternatively spelled in English Chi or Ch'i, a life force which permeates all living things), and "using your instinct" is supposed to be evocative of the practice of martial artists clearing their minds of all cognitive thought during both combat and meditation. If anything, this proves a little latent racism on the part of the author given that he can't tell one Asian from the next. Further, the style of swordsmanship used by the Jedi in the original trilogy was consciously designed to be similar of Medieval knights handling broadswords. In other words, light sabers are real fuckin' heavy so two hands are needed to control them. In the prequels, wushu, a modern derivative of Shaolin kung fu, techniques are employed. In neither case is the technique related to Japanese samurai. Nice try, better luck next time.

[Meridian]

Why does he write Tolkien as "Tolkein" throughout the article?

[praxis1966]

Because he's a douche. Mostly, this guy employs rather superficial analysis and then erroneously conflates (ie attempts to asses guilt by association) Lucas with other well known rightists like Heinlein, Wells, and Lewis hoping nobody will notice how thin his arguments are. Not particularly buying the criticism of Tolkien's writhing, though, considering that his conception of Lord of the Rings actually predated World War I and he was by all rights a political centrist (if bourgeois, still not an authoritarian rightist as the author accuses, though). Fuckin' silly, really.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Yeah, Tolkien was an anarcho-monarchist. LOL

No, but seriously, he was pretty much a centrist, and there little in the way of evidence to support the accusation that he was a racist. He was a fairly hardcore Catholic, though.

[bcbm]

In neither case is the technique related to Japanese samurai. Nice try, better luck next time.

a forgivable mistake, i think, given how totally the original star wars ripped off japanese samurai flicks, especially 'the hidden fortress'

[ContrarianLemming]

Anarchism is.."philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs." _ Tolkien

gotta love him for that at least

[praxis1966]

a forgivable mistake, i think, given how totally the original star wars ripped off japanese samurai flicks, especially 'the hidden fortress'

If you're referring to the Death Star, you're probably out of line there, too. Continuing with the World War II theme, my guess (given the supposed invincibility and awesome destructive power of it) was that it was symbolic of the battleship Bismarck.

[Invincible Summer]

Further, the style of swordsmanship used by the Jedi in the original trilogy was consciously designed to be similar of Medieval knights handling broadswords. In other words, light sabers are real fuckin' heavy so two hands are needed to control them.

I always made the connection between lightsaber duelling (at least in the original trilogy):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hsAybFZgdk


and kendo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2TNO5CGXQ


but you're right on the money with the later movies being influenced by Wushu... all that spinning and fancy shit

[praxis1966]

There is a certain amount of kendo involved, especially in the way they square off with the tips of their swords touching, and kendo is the art that the samurai practiced. But, the code of the Jedi (masterless [unlike the samurai who were subservient to the local shogun], following an internal moral compass in line with the Force/Qi [a very Taoist/Chinese concept]) as well as their dress much more closely follows that of the Shaolin warrior monks. Besides, I've seen documentaries on the Star Wars movies that deal with their influences, and while there is some discussion of kendo in terms of stance and the "en garde" position, a lot of the actual movements were supposed to resemble the handling of a broadsword (hence the heaving, circular motions the actors used in Star Wars versus the more direct, linear motions in kendo [or pretty much any Japanese martial art for that matter]). Then of course there's all that leaping superhuman heights and telekinesis which comes from Hong Kong cinema and "wire fu." And Vader almost doesn't count, lol, since he's a frickin' cyborg which is supposed to give him superhuman strength.


No, but seriously, he was pretty much a centrist, and there little in the way of evidence to support the accusation that he was a racist. He was a fairly hardcore Catholic, though.

There is actually some evidence to suggest that he was anti-racist. He wrote some pretty stinging criticisms of the South African apartheid government as well as of Nazi antisemitism. He was also critical of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, but that had more to do with the hardcore Catholicism you mentioned. He arrived at that position once he was informed that Stalinite death squads were razing churches and raping nuns (which we all know is an exaggeration, but he had no way of knowing any better).

[bcbm]

If you're referring to the Death Star, you're probably out of line there, too. Continuing with the World War II theme, my guess (given the supposed invincibility and awesome destructive power of it) was that it was symbolic of the battleship Bismarck.

no, i'm referring to the entire plot. seriously go watch "hidden fortress," its like a 1:1 rip off, even lucas admits it- he considered buying the rights to that film. :rolleyes: its on the dvd commentary track to "a new hope" or just google "star wars and the hidden fortress."

[praxis1966]

no, i'm referring to the entire plot. seriously go watch "hidden fortress," its like a 1:1 rip off, even lucas admits it- he considered buying the rights to that film. :rolleyes: its on the dvd commentary track to "a new hope" or just google "star wars and the hidden fortress."

Ah, Ok. In that case, I'll take your word for it. Anyway, I'm not saying Lucas was completely original (hell, C-3PO was more or less a direct copy of Maria in Metropolis [Lang, 1927]). I'm just saying that calling the Jedi Wellsian samurai and leaving it at that is simplistic, if not completely erroneous.

[Invincible Summer]

I think there's a fine line between ripping off and making a really elaborate homage to things

[x359594]

Of course Kuroswa's The Hidden Fortress (1959) was a major influence on the 1977 Star Wars movie as acknowledged by Lucas himself; the robots were based on the two peasants who open the movie much as the two robots open Star Wars; the princess deprived of her kingdom, etc.; not to mention transitions using wipes and other familiar Kuroswa tropes. In fact, Lucas sponsored the 1979 re-release of the movie in the US and arranged financing and US distribution of Kuroswa's Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) through his studio 20th Century-Fox.

Lucas also acknowledged the influence of Howard Hawks' Air Force (1944) on the aerial combat scenes and John Ford's The Searchers (1956) on the massacre of Luke's family. Another notable influence on the series was Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) with its revelation of true paternity, imperial intrigue and last but not least Alec Guiness (Obi Wan) as Marcus Aurelius.

Michael Moorcock was one of the creators of 1960s New Wave science fiction and was editor of the seminal British New Wave sci-fi magazine New Worlds. In the immediate aftermath of Star Wars' release, the avant garde science fiction community was dismayed by this throw back to the puerile space opera of the 1920s and '30s. Once again there are princesses, dashing heroes armed with sabers and comic side kicks, neo-monarchies, not to mention the regressive physics (open ports, sound in the vacuum of space, gravity in place of weightlessness, etc.) characteristic of old Hollywood space movies thought to have been laid to rest by Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969.) Clearly the simple narrative and stereotyped characters, the New Age metaphysics, the abandonment of physics and privileging of the nobility as the true defenders of democracy will not go down well with a left-leaning avant garde.

As to the politics of the Star Wars series, they're various and inconsistent: free world vs. Evil Empire, the nobility as the defenders of democracy, the recognition that the good guys are are related to the bad guys, etc. It's less a question of the series having a determinate political meaning but rather of allowing for a multitude of inconsistent, even mutually exclusive meanings that contain any ideology the viewer wishes to impute to it. That certainly accounts for its popularity across the political spectrum.

To be fair to Moorcock, he was writing during the Reagan era phase of the Cold War, when the Stars Wars universe was enlisted by US Cold Warriors in the service of attacking the Soviet enemy. Does anyone remember Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech followed by the editorial cartoons showing Reagan as a Jedi Knight and Gorbachev as Darth Vadar? And how about the Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly renamed the "Star Wars Defense" by the US media? It seems to me that within the context of the historical moment, Moorcock was right to point out the regressive elements of contemporary popular science fiction as it was perceived by many of its fans at the time.

[praxis1966]

I think there's a fine line between ripping off and making a really elaborate homage to things

Of course. And if it weren't already obvious, no amount of criticism is gonna stop me being a gigantic Star Wars nerd anyway. :laugh:

[praxis1966]

Of course Kuroswa's The Hidden Fortress (1959) was a major influence on the 1977 Star Wars movie as acknowledged by Lucas himself; the robots were based on the two peasants who open the movie much as the two robots open Star Wars; the princess deprived of her kingdom, etc.; not to mention transitions using wipes and other familiar Kuroswa tropes. In fact, Lucas sponsored the 1979 re-release of the movie in the US and arranged financing and US distribution of Kuroswa's Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) through his studio 20th Century-Fox.

Lucas also acknowledged the influence of Howard Hawks' Air Force (1944) on the aerial combat scenes and John Ford's The Searchers (1956) on the massacre of Luke's family. Another notable influence on the series was Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) with its revelation of true paternity, imperial intrigue and last but not least Alec Guiness (Obi Wan) as Marcus Aurelius.

All of which kind of proves my point, which is that the influences, homages, and touchstones involved in the Star Wars franchise are so wide and varied that I think it deserves better than the superficial analysis Moorcock gave it. He seized on one or two items he thought proved his point and disregarded the rest.


Michael Moorcock was one of the creators of 1960s New Wave science fiction and was editor of the seminal British New Wave sci-fi magazine New Worlds. In the immediate aftermath of Star Wars' release, the avant garde science fiction community was dismayed by this throw back to the puerile space opera of the 1920s and '30s. Once again there are princesses, dashing heroes armed with sabers and comic side kicks, neo-monarchies, not to mention the regressive physics (open ports, sound in the vacuum of space, gravity in place of weightlessness, etc.) characteristic of old Hollywood space movies thought to have been laid to rest by Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969.)

When viewed from this perspective I suppose it is a fair accusation that Star Wars is formulaic and a little infantile. However, it's also fair to say that the reason I continue to watch those films is nostalgia from my childhood. I mean, I haven't stopped cheering for the Atlanta Braves and I'm not going to stop liking Star Wars either. Further, there is a case to be made that it's called science fiction for a reason. The rules of physics getting tossed out the window isn't necessarily a reason to call it a failure. Nevermind that I doubt seriously that Lucas was trying to make any kind of political statement in praise of monarchy; that seems to me a case of letting politics cloud one's better judgment.


Clearly the simple narrative and stereotyped characters, the New Age metaphysics, the abandonment of physics and privileging of the nobility as the true defenders of democracy will not go down well with a left-leaning avant garde.

This might be a case of throwing the rattle out of the pram. There are plenty of leftists who are fully aware of what's going on in the Star Wars films and genuinely like them. Incidentally, this is why people say leftists aren't any damned fun, lulz...


As to the politics of the Star Wars series, they're various and inconsistent: free world vs. Evil Empire, the nobility as the defenders of democracy, the recognition that the good guys are are related to the bad guys, etc. It's less a question of the series having a determinate political meaning but rather of allowing for a multitude of inconsistent, even mutually exclusive meanings that contain any ideology the viewer wishes to impute to it. That certainly accounts for its popularity across the political spectrum.

Agreed, which is why if I were pressed I'd have to characterize it as centrist.


To be fair to Moorcock, he was writing during the Reagan era phase of the Cold War, when the Stars Wars universe was enlisted by US Cold Warriors in the service of attacking the Soviet enemy. Does anyone remember Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech followed by the editorial cartoons showing Reagan as a Jedi Knight and Gorbachev as Darth Vadar? And how about the Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly renamed the "Star Wars Defense" by the US media? It seems to me that within the context of the historical moment, Moorcock was right to point out the regressive elements of contemporary popular science fiction as it was perceived by many of its fans at the time.

None of that excuses Moorcock in what amounts to an analysis as piss poor as all the other politicos you mentioned trying to co-opt the films for their own purposes. That's like saying Seabiscuit is to be blamed for all the references douchey politicians like John Kerry, George W. Bush, and John McCain made during the 2004 presidential campaign. It's just a fuckin' horse, man, lol. The reality is that Star Wars, like Seabiscuit, was wildly popular and politicians, being what they are, have always tried to glom onto that kind of shit, "Hey if you like that, you're gonna love me!"

Frankly, I find Moorcock's technique here just as shameful and dishonest as the political cartoons of Reagan as a Jedi fighting a Gorbachev Vader. Like those cartoons, he's clutched at one or two elements which out of context suit his purposes and manipulated them into something which I don't think was ever intended by the filmmaker. Besides, just because you're a good writer doesn't make you a good literary critic and vice versa, so listing his credentials as a writer of science fiction doesn't really convince me of much.

EDIT: To characterize it another way, I was recently made aware of a paper Judi Bari of Earth First! fame wrote on a philosophy she called biocentrism. In it, she claimed biocentrism contradicted Marxism because... Wait for it... if we were abiding by the tenets of biocentrism, a disaster like Chernobyl never would've happened. Therefore, because the Soviet state was self-avowedly communist, she conflated all that with Marxism and claimed biocentrism was it's contradiction. Nevermind that Marxism and the Soviet Union hadn't had anything to do with each other since Stalin, or perhaps even Lenin (depending on who you talk to). It's a propaganda technique which assumes that the reader is too stupid or ignorant to see through a grossly superficial analysis, something I find rather insulting as well as comparable.

[x359594]

...there is a case to be made that it's called science fiction for a reason. The rules of physics getting tossed out the window isn't necessarily a reason to call it a failure...

It's not that this particular segment of science fiction writers (which included Harlan Ellison as well as the other New Wave writers Moorcock mentions) considered the movie a failure because of its physics, rather they considered it a throw back to the bad old days of space opera, and space opera was not authentic science fiction, just science fiction in drag, something like The Prisoner of Zenda with ray guns or light sabers instead of swords and pistols, a galaxy far, far away instead of Ruritania or Mittel Europe.


...if I were pressed I'd have to characterize it [Star Wars] as centrist...

Well, it seems to me that centrism is a definable and definite ideological position, and the Star Wars series has no ideological position as such; it's an empty container that the viewer can fill with whatever ideology appeals to her.


...None of that excuses Moorcock in what amounts to an analysis as piss poor as all the other politicos you mentioned trying to co-opt the films for their own purposes...

If you're talking about his analysis of Star Wars, it's entirely superficial and made in passing, but the rest of the article, the characterizations of Hubbard, Heinlien, Asimov, Campbell the analysis of the themes they use and the way they treat social issues, Moorcock is spot on. I've read them all since I was 13 years old (and even enjoyed many of their stories, and still enjoy some of them) but they are as reactionary a crew as you'll find anywhere. By the time I was 17 I much preferred Moorcock, Disch, Ballard, Ellison, Aldiss, Brunner, Delaney, Dick, Russ, Le Guin to the Golden Age writers (only Fritz Lieber remained high in my affection.) So these remarks about Star Wars can be excised from the essay without weakening the overall argument at all in my view.


...just because you're a good writer doesn't make you a good literary critic and vice versa, so listing his credentials as a writer of science fiction doesn't really convince me of much...

I mentioned Moorcock's credentials as a science fiction writer to explain his passionate interest in and dedication to the genre, his familiarity with its history, his knowledge of its development and his commitment to it as literature. At the very least, these qualities are essential for good genre criticism, and as I've tried to show, Moorcock has them. And Moorcock is articulating more than his own particular views here; anyone who's familiar with the sf sub-culture knows that he's speaking for many of his New Wave conferes.

[praxis1966]

It's not that this particular segment of science fiction writers (which included Harlan Ellison as well as the other New Wave writers Moorcock mentions) considered the movie a failure because of its physics, rather they considered it a throw back to the bad old days of space opera, and space opera was not authentic science fiction, just science fiction in drag, something like The Prisoner of Zenda with ray guns or light sabers instead of swords and pistols, a galaxy far, far away instead of Ruritania or Mittel Europe.

It's with this sentiment that I think we're getting closer to the heart of the matter. Characterize Star Wars as a "space opera" if you like, but forgive me when I say that to me, this sounds a bit like punk rock fans trying to characterize any band they personally find distasteful as either emo or pop music. Now you very well may be right in your characterization, but that's not the way it feels like the terminology is being employed here. Rather, it feels like Star Wars didn't happen to suit your personal tastes so you've attempted it to tar it with an epithetic label: space opera. Anyway, even if I assume that it is space opera rather than hard science fiction, that doesn't make it inherently reactionary. Neither does the mere presence of divine right nobility, which Moorcock so much as says himself.

At the end of the day, though, I point back to my first post. Moorcock, at time of writing, wasn't privy to the Star Wars prequels. In those films, we learn that the Queen of Naboo is actually an elected position. Hence, the Padme character only serves as Queen in the first film. I suppose, of course, that this could be interpreted as backpedaling on the part of Lucas to satiate critics like Moorcock, but I imagine that any speculation to that end would be just that, speculation.

Incidentally, it feels like he did the same thing with Tolkien. Frankly, I can't for the life of me figure out why he was included at all in Moorcock's article. The guy was neither a science fiction writer nor a right wing extremist, yet, we find him mentioned in a discussion about right wing extremist science fiction writers. It's baffling to me. Say what you want about the guy, but he certainly doesn't deserve to be chucked under the proverbial bus alongside the likes of Heinlein and fucking Hubbard of all people. Again, this leads me to believe that Moorcock simply included Lucas and Tolkien in the discussion because he personally finds their writing distasteful.


Well, it seems to me that centrism is a definable and definite ideological position, and the Star Wars series has no ideological position as such; it's an empty container that the viewer can fill with whatever ideology appeals to her.

Actually, I'd argue that centrism is about as much a cogent, consistent doctrine as revolutionary leftism (this site is a perfect example, if tendencies were ice cream, this place would have at least 37 flavors). In other words, the terms imply widely varying beliefs and lack any sort of cohesive paradigm. Put simply, centrism isn't neatly definable. Rather, it's an amalgamation of beliefs that encompass both left and right of center ideas which vary from centrist to centrist. In my estimation, if Star Wars does have any politics, they're all over the map and therefore centrist.


If you're talking about his analysis of Star Wars, it's entirely superficial and made in passing, but the rest of the article, the characterizations of Hubbard, Heinlien, Asimov, Campbell the analysis of the themes they use and the way they treat social issues, Moorcock is spot on.

Well, I suppose that's the end of any disagreement between you and I then. I've read those guys, if only in brief, and I'd agree with both you and he in that sentiment. Trouble is, I feel the inclusion of his Tolkien and Lucas dilutes his argument and therefore might discredit his otherwise valid criticisms.


So these remarks about Star Wars can be excised from the essay without weakening the overall argument at all in my view.

I would add simply that excising them could only strengthen his overall thesis.


mentioned Moorcock's credentials as a science fiction writer to explain his passionate interest in and dedication to the genre, his familiarity with its history, his knowledge of its development and his commitment to it as literature. At the very least, these qualities are essential for good genre criticism, and as I've tried to show, Moorcock has them. And Moorcock is articulating more than his own particular views here; anyone who's familiar with the sf sub-culture knows that he's speaking for many of his New Wave conferes.

Admittedly, I'm probably not as familiar with the sci-fi sub-culture as you and he are. I do have a fair bit of knowledge about certain areas, but frankly I'd never heard of most of the New Wave writers mentioned, apart from Philip K. Dick and U.K. Le Guin. I think that has more to do with the fact that I rarely read fiction of any kind, though. The last fiction work I read was del Toro and Hogan's The Strain, before that it had probably been a decade since I'd picked up any fiction (unless you count poetry, I suppose). Anyhow, my gripe was, simply stated, that it was hard for me to take him seriously based upon the aforementioned Lucas and Tolkien's inclusion. In any case, I'm much more likely to take your word for it than Moorcock's when you claim the rest of his argument holds water, you know, since I can actually cross examine you. :lol:

[x359594]

It's with this sentiment that I think we're getting closer to the heart of the matter...it feels like Star Wars didn't happen to suit your personal tastes so you've attempted it to tar it with an epithetic label: space opera. Anyway, even if I assume that it is space opera rather than hard science fiction, that doesn't make it inherently reactionary...

You've hit the nail on the head. But first, let me seperate myself from Moorcock and his New Wave cohorts by saying that I personally have no problem with space opera, a worthy sub-genre in my opinion, but for the science fiction professionals who were trying to gain respect for science fiction as a genre at that time (little did they know that Star Wars would immeasurably advance the whole cause of science fiction and turn it into the most fruitful of all fiction genres) space opera was a backward step and fuel for mainstream critics of sf.


...I can't for the life of me figure out why he was included at all in Moorcock's article. The guy was neither a science fiction writer nor a right wing extremist, yet, we find him mentioned in a discussion about right wing extremist science fiction writers...Again, this leads me to believe that Moorcock simply included Lucas and Tolkien in the discussion because he personally finds their writing distasteful...

Apparently Moorcock's swipe at Tolkien was directed at LOTR's fans who in those days tended to be regressive in their politics, especially the UK fans. So Moorcock was not really being fair to Tolkien.

Another New Wave writer inspired by LOTR's popularity was Norman Spinrad who wrote an alternate history novel called The Iron Dream in which the fantasy writer Adolf Hitler writes a best seller called Lord of the Swastika. This satire was directed at the fans and not at Tolkien or LOTR as Spinrad made clear in subsequent interviews. And by fans, I mean the fan(atic) sf sub-culture who dress up as characters and live for fandom and sf conventions


...In my estimation, if Star Wars does have any politics, they're all over the map and therefore centrist...

Put that way I agree.


...my gripe was, simply stated, that it was hard for me to take him seriously based upon the aforementioned Lucas and Tolkien's inclusion. In any case, I'm much more likely to take your word for it than Moorcock's when you claim the rest of his argument holds water, you know, since I can actually cross examine you. :lol:

Fair enough. By the way, it's been a friendly and informative discussion.

[ComradeOm]

Apparently Moorcock's swipe at Tolkien was directed at LOTR's fans who in those days tended to be regressive in their politics, especially the UK fans. So Moorcock was not really being fair to TolkienHmmm? Moorcock very famously devoted a blistering essay (http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953) to savaging Tolkien and his contemporaries


Frankly, I can't for the life of me figure out why he was included at all in Moorcock's article. The guy was neither a science fiction writer nor a right wing extremist, yet, we find him mentioned in a discussion about right wing extremist science fiction writersFirst of all, Tolkien was most certainly a deeply reactionary character. Not in the sense of being a hardline militant or a closet fascist (akin to Heinlein) but in the true meaning of the term. That is, an almost Legitimist fear of progress and romanticisation of some idyllic countryside. This was most vividly demonstrated of course with the 'The Harrowing of the Shire' in which the evil smoke belching workshops must be torn down so everyone can return to their happy peasant lives. Not that Tolkien wastes much time writing about the latter of course

Secondly, science-fiction is only fantasy that tries to explain away its magic

[praxis1966]

Apparently Moorcock's swipe at Tolkien was directed at LOTR's fans who in those days tended to be regressive in their politics, especially the UK fans. So Moorcock was not really being fair to Tolkien.

Interesting. The irony is that at least in certain pockets of the US, Tolkien experienced something of a revival amongst counterculturists in the 1960s. I recall having a discussion with my father about LOTR, and he made the remark that when he was at Miami (OH) University in the late 60s, all of his friends were reading the series. Without exception those folks were anti-war and to one degree or another anti-establishment. The funny thing was, he said he never particularly cared for LOTR. He claimed he tried to read it once, found it too depressing, and gave up without finishing.


By the way, it's been a friendly and informative discussion.

Agreed.:)


Hmmm? Moorcock very famously devoted a blistering essay (http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953) to savaging Tolkien and his contemporaries

That's funny. Once again, it seems as though Moorcock's guilty of grave misinterpretation. He discusses the warmth and safety with which Tolkien characterizes the Shire, but completely ignores the fact that those who venture out of it, Bilbo and Frodo, are socially ostracized by its inhabitants for wanting to ever leave the village or gain knowledge of the outside world. True, Tolkien does exhibit some middle class snobbery in the guise of Bilbo, but that hardly makes him a fascist. At any rate, these are Tolkien's ipso facto heroes, not those narrow minded individuals who loathe anything which takes place or comes from outside the borders of their small village. Tolkien in this way is also critical of anti-immigrant nativism so pervasive in English society (which to one extent or another still exists) in his less than flattering discussion of how visitors to the Shire are viewed with suspicion and contempt. Further, it seems to me that Tolkien issues a stern warning against the isolationist attitude the average Briton had toward continental European geopolitics, a warning which we know know a lot of countries would have done well to heed given the developments in interwar Germany and the disaster of Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

Apart from that, Moorcock's other primary criticisms are, "I think his writing sucks so he must be a fascist," and, "Escapism is counterrevolutionary." To Moorcock, I would say in respective order, A) "Who died and made you Grand Inquisitor? Just because you don't happen to like someone's writing doesn't mean anything in terms of that author's politics," and B) "Do I need to remind you of your job description? You're a fiction writer, asshole, and as such by definition a purveyor of escapism. If you want realism so badly, write a biography or history or something."


First of all, Tolkien was most certainly a deeply reactionary character. Not in the sense of being a hardline militant or a closet fascist (akin to Heinlein) but in the true meaning of the term. That is, an almost Legitimist fear of progress and romanticisation of some idyllic countryside. This was most vividly demonstrated of course with the 'The Harrowing of the Shire' in which the evil smoke belching workshops must be torn down so everyone can return to their happy peasant lives. Not that Tolkien wastes much time writing about the latter of course

I suppose that's one way to interpret it. Another is that Tolkien was a proto-environmentalist. You don't have to be a reactionary to like nature, after all. Anyway, nobody's saying he wasn't bourgeois. We're just saying it's not as bad as all that.


Secondly, science-fiction is only fantasy that tries to explain away its magic

That's a pretty subjective definition, I'd say.

[Diello]

I do want to go on record saying that I like H.P. Lovecraft's writing. I also like The Lord of the Rings, but I'd prefer to assert my appreciation of Lovecraft because he's far more egregiously xenophobic.

For me, there are two ways to read Lovecraft: you can take the world presented by Lovecraft at face value, or you can take it as having been somewhat distorted by an unreliable narrator. Consider, for instance, "Cool Air" in which the narrator *****es unremittingly about the Hispanics with whom he's forced to share a lodging house, but praises his upstairs neighbor, a doctor, for his "striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding." The interpretation that comes naturally to me (though it surely wasn't what Lovecraft intended) is simply that the narrator's a bigot. Consequently, I'm no more offended by the racist jags from the protagonist of "Cool Air" than I am by the rationalizations of child rape from Humbert Humbert.

It's hard to say why Lovecraft appeals to me when most pulpy horror does not. His writing is just so gleefully turgid-- "Inside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable." It's a bit like watching an Ed Wood film-- everything is so incredibly overwrought. I love it.

Anyway, if someone shuns Lovecraft because his obvious xenophobia makes them uncomfortable, or because they find his unbelievably florid writing style tiresome, I'd hardly judge. Lovecraft does have definite talent, though-- I found the chase scene in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" exceptionally tense and engaging. "The Colour From Out Of Space" and "Cool Air" are also examples of the author at his best, in my opinion.

I do puzzle over why Lovecraft's xenophobia doesn't bother me so much. Whereas other books with racist, homophobic, or misogynistic overtones usually turn me off so badly I abandon them immediately, (most recently, Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed) watching Lovecraft screech in horror at anyone who's not a straight, white male just makes me laugh.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Lovecraft really does have some passages that are shocking to modern sensibilities, but in my experience they are not as common as people seem to think.

The ironic thing? Lovecraft was married to a jew.

As for Heinlein, I think Moorcock is being unfair. Starship Troopers was a work that was quickly hacked out by a younger and presumably more foolish Heinlein, and my word does it show! Moorcock briefly mentions Stranger in a Strange Land but in my opinion does not give the work the attention it deserves. Also he did not even consider works such as Time Enough for Love.

As for other science fiction authors that I have read, I know that Iain M Banks is a strident socialist, but I've been finding it difficult to gauge the politics of one of my other favourites, Stephen Baxter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter).

[Diello]

The ironic thing? Lovecraft was married to a jew.

Out of curiosity, where does the conception that Lovecraft was an antisemite come from? I'm well aware that he displayed a host of other prejudices, but the only sourced thing I've ever read about his attitude toward Jews was that he was an opponent of Nazi anti-Jewish violence.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Out of curiosity, where does the conception that Lovecraft was an antisemite come from? I'm well aware that he displayed a host of other prejudices, but the only sourced thing I've ever read about his attitude toward Jews was that he was an opponent of Nazi anti-Jewish violence.

I'm afraid I can't remember the source, so you can take this with a suitably sized grain of salt, but I remember reading that Lovecraft would make anti-semitic comments and his wife would remind him who she was, or something. But I also remember that despite this, he wasn't a fan of anti-semitic violence like you stated.

[Diello]

I'm afraid I can't remember the source, so you can take this with a suitably sized grain of salt, but I remember reading that Lovecraft would make anti-semitic comments and his wife would remind him who she was, or something.

Actually, that sounds very faintly familiar. I think I might have read that in the intro to one of my Lovecraft collections. However, I don't have access to them right now, so I can't verify this one way or the other.

[Kiev Communard]

As for other science fiction authors that I have read, I know that Iain M Banks is a strident socialist, but I've been finding it difficult to gauge the politics of one of my other favourites, Stephen Baxter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter).

Stephen Baxter seems to be (quite pessimistic) left-leaning liberal democrat.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Stephen Baxter seems to be (quite pessimistic) left-leaning liberal democrat.

Have you read any of his stuff?

[Kiev Communard]

Have you read any of his stuff?

Yes. I've read Manifold trilogy and Titan. Both struck me as excessively pessimistic.

[x359594]

...Starship Troopers was a work that was quickly hacked out by a younger and presumably more foolish Heinlein...

No, Starship Troopers was the work of the mature Heinlein. He was 50 when he wrote Straship Troopers and had been a writer for over 20 years.

In his "foolish" youth Heinlein was a socialist as was his first wife; his early stories from the late 1930s and 1940s show his commitment to the socialist aspects of the New Deal. He turned right in the mid-1950s and grew increasingly right wing as he got older.

For something genuinely racist read Franham's Freehold (1964.) Heinlein gained the antipathy of the left-liberal segment of science fiction writers with his opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and support of the Vietnam War, and no doubt Moorcock was thinking of those acrimonious days when he wrote about Heinlein.

[x359594]

Out of curiosity, where does the conception that Lovecraft was an antisemite come from?...

The evidence for Lovecraft's antisemitism comes from his letters as found in the early volumes of Selected Letters published by Arkham House in the mid-1960s, and from L. Spargue de Camp's biography of HPL published in 1975.

But as a matter of fact he outgrew his antisemitism and his conservatism and ended a New Deal liberal. This is apparent from the last volume of his Selected Letters. Check out this excerpt:

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exulting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes, and revel in mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or
that rational planning of resource-distribution contravenes some vague and mystical "American heritage") utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one reserves for the dead."

H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume V, pp. 293-294.

[Diello]

But as a matter of fact he outgrew his antisemitism and his conservatism and ended a New Deal liberal.

I suppose that explains the mixed impressions I'd been getting.


"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exulting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes, and revel in mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or
that rational planning of resource-distribution contravenes some vague and mystical "American heritage") utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one reserves for the dead."

H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume V, pp. 293-294.

HAH! Some truths are universal, I guess.

[praxis1966]

Why does moorcock keep mentioning libertarian. is he a libertarian?

He means it in the classical sense of the word which is more or less the equivalent of anti-authoritarian, not the right wing paleoconservatism that's commonly associated with the American Libertarian Party. Left-libertarians, or libertarian socialists if you will, generally fall within the various sects or sub-sects of anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism.

[R.K.D.N]

Jesus, Praxis!

It's with this sentiment that I think ...

to satiate critics...

The guy was ... a ... proverbial ...

amalgamation of beliefs... In my estimation, ...

... that's the end of any disagreement...


I would add simply...


I'm probably not... familiar with... a ... bit of knowledge

To every place a thing...

[praxis1966]

Jesus, Praxis!


To every place a thing...

So let me get this straight, you opened an account for the sole purpose of necroing this thread to what, make yourself look like an ass in a troll post? A rather inglorious start I'd say. If you don't have constructive to add, how about keeping your fucking mouth shut?

[Yazman]

Lovecraft was not so much just an anti-semite as he was racist in general though there was an anti-semitic component.These views were heavily moderated as he got older and eventually he was said to have reconsidered his racist ideas completely later on in life.

In regards to his actual works, it should be noted that none of them were written in an attempt to actually convey these ideals - in some of his works when he believed in racist crap it only actually came through in his descriptions of people of mixed race as usually being involved in the occult or worship of mythos deities and cults associated.

However, none of his works were actually written in an attempt to convey racist ideals. The racism in his works was generally small and only incidental - i.e. it can be completely omitted without any impact on the literature itself.

[x359594]

...The racism in his works was generally small and only incidental - i.e. it can be completely omitted without any impact on the literature itself.

That's by and large true, but for some tales such as "The Horror at Red Hook" racism is a major component. A recent collection of his stories from Hippocampus Press titled In the Pest Zone has several "racist" stories. I would also say that "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" are displaced stories of his horror of miscegenation.

The evidence for Lovecraft's racism is to be found in the early volumes of Selected Letters published by Arkham House as I noted in post #32 above. More recently, Night Shade Books has published Letters From New York where many of his most virulent racist rants are to be found.

There is no question that for most of his 47 years Lovecraft was a racist and a reactionary; it was only during the last 10 years of his life that he dropped those views and came to a humanistic socialism as the guiding principle of his social views.

[Diello]

I just have to quote this. From Herbert West: Reanimator--


The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world holds many ugly things.

[R.K.D.N]

Uhm, I really think his inclusion of JRR Tolkien's work and George Lucas as centrist is a bit far streched.
Let me dispute this for a second since the definition of egocentric to take the ego as the starting point in philosophy per Marianne Webster.
For example, the force is not blind or useless, it is the curtain between the eternal forces of good and evil. I think what the original author was stabbing at was his own discomfort of his more deeply ingrained right-wing, republican, whatever- ideologies that he hold sacred.
So The force, being "centric" is complete biased bullshit.

[Xenophiliac]

But as a matter of fact he outgrew his antisemitism and his conservatism and ended a New Deal liberal. This is apparent from the last volume of his Selected Letters.


Ẋ[/FONT]îöʼn;1890553]
The ironic thing? Lovecraft was married to a jew.



Lovecraft was not so much just an anti-semite as he was racist in general though there was an anti-semitic component.These views were heavily moderated as he got older and eventually he was said to have reconsidered his racist ideas completely later on in life.


There is no question that for most of his 47 years Lovecraft was a racist and a reactionary; it was only during the last 10 years of his life that he dropped those views and came to a humanistic socialism as the guiding principle of his social views.

I apologize for the technomancy, and the massive first post.

I adore the tales of HP Lovecraft but think many of you are being pretty charitable when you say that he abandoned his racism. It is true that he embraced socialism in the latter years of his life (he went from being a monarchist to a socialist via his own unique brand of fascism), but his racial views remained essentially unchanged, as can be easily seen in his correspondence even as late as 1934, less than three years before his death. These ideas may not have pervaded his tales as frequently as in his earlier years, but that does not necessarily mean that he had embraced a new egalitarian ideal.

Here is a brief biographical sketch in which Lovecraft sums up his racial ideas.



February 13, 1934
I dislike to see great cultural fabrics split up, & am a sincere Tory in my regret for America’s separation from the British Empire. I think the differences of 1775 ought to have been settled within the empire. I admire Mussolini, but think Hitler is a very inferior copy—led astray by romantic conceptions & pseudo-science. At that, though, Hitler may have formed a necessary evil—saving his country from disintegration. In general, I think any nation ought to keep close to its original dominant race-stock—remaining largely Nordic if it started that way; largely Latin if it started that way, & so on. Only in this manner can comfortable cultural homogeneity & continuity be secured. But Hitler’s extremes of pure racialism are absurd & grotesque. Various race-stocks differ in inclinations & aptitudes, but of all of them I consider only the negro & australoid biologically inferior. Against these two a rigid colour-line ought to exist.
He went to his grave regarding blacks as biologically inferior (he once opined in a very early letter that he considered them a link between ape and man) to every other race of human beings. He was vehemently opposed to miscegenation and was adamant that a “color-line” be in place to prevent the dilution of quality blood with that of what he considered to be subhuman.

Here he discusses eugenics, blacks, and Jews.



November 22, 1934
Wiggam, like Prof. J. B. S. Haldane, believes that much will be done in future toward the artificial development of Homo sapiens; but I doubt very much whether such development can ever reach more than a tiny fraction of the extremes they postulate. In the first place, the complexity of the laws governing organic growth is enormous—so enormous that the number of unknown factors must always remain hopelessly great. We can discover & apply a few biological principles—but the limit of effectiveness is soon reached. For example—despite all the advances in endocrinology & all the experiments in glandular rejuvenation, there is no such thing as a permanent or well-balanced staving-off of senescence & dissolution. And in the second place, the fact that human beings live by emotion & caprice rather than by reason will probably prevent the widespread application of any unified plan of eugenics. Resistance to organised effort will be tremendous--& can be overcome only in a few instances….mainly in strongly centralised fascist nations. In the United States, for example, the silly & criminal sentimentality arrayed against any rational racial discrimination is of appalling magnitude. What is more—there really is no one idea of racial excellence. Even if the principle of eugenic control were accepted by a nation, there would remain a constant struggle among various factions advocating different goals of development. One group would advocate the cultivation of this or that group of emotions, or the establishment of this or that blood mixture, while another would campaign ceaselessly for a directly opposite result. Thus the Nazis in Germany want to get rid of every trace of Jewish blood, while other groups believe that the highest intellectual qualities in all races come through prehistoric & forgotten infusions of Semitic blood! Amid such a confusion of objects, what single policy could ever gain an effective ascendancy? However—this is not to say that eugenics will remain utterly neglected. There are, of course, certain lines of action where virtual unanimity exists; & along those lines considerable progress may be expected. It is, for example, agreed that hereditary physical disease & mental inferiority ought not to be transmitted—hence within the next half-century the sterilisation of certain biologically defective types will probably become universal throughout the western world, thus cutting down on the prevalence of idiocy, epilepsy, haemophilia, & kindred inherited plagues. The Nazis have already put such a policy into effect. There may, too, be local efforts (like the present anti-Semitism of the Nazis) to direct the ethnic strain…in cases where a certain approximation of unanimousness exists within single nations. The rise of the inferior stocks at the expense of the superior is becoming so obvious & alarming, that some countries may be veritably scared out of their mawkish equalitarian idealism. Some way of checking the increase of alien elements within nations ought to be devised, & the multiplication of the sound stock ought to be encouraged through a planned economy making it practicable for persons with civilised living standards to rear larger families. As it is, the only persons who can rear large families are either a negligible sprinkling of millionaires, or—at the other end of the scale—low grade proletarians (in America, mainly negroes & foreigners) who do not care what squalor they live in. Under unsupervised capitalism, it is absolutely impossible for the average citizen of good stock to rear more than one or two children with the social & educational advantages which he himself enjoyed, & which are necessary for the maintenance of the great tradition of civilisation. The result in four or five generations is obvious—a complete engulfing of the high-grade stock by the fertile & squalid masses. Regarding the negro—I don’t know what the outcome will be. But I greatly doubt whether any general assimilation will occur in the United States. Fortunately the American people seem to have no wavering in their determination to keep African blood out of their veins, so that nothing could precipitate such a mongrelisation as occurred in Egypt, & and in later years in Brazil & the Caribbean nations. It is no novelty for Aryans to dwell as a minority amidst a larger black population—such has been the case in Alabama & Mississippi for decades, & the upper part of South Africa is having a similar experience. But the effect of this condition is generally to heighten rather than relax the colour-line. The white minority adopt desperate & ingenious means to preserve their Caucasian integrity—resorting to extra-legal measures such as lynching & intimidation when the legal machinery does not sufficiently protect them. Of course it is unfortunate that such a state of sullen tension has to exist—but anything is better than the mongrelisation which would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation. Naturally, the negro resents his relegation to inferiority—but I doubt if he can do anything dangerous about it. Much as he may increase in the United States, his numbers will never be enough to give him a military advantage over the united white population. And his intelligence could never be equal to a contest with the strategic skill & experience of a massed Caucasian nation. Tragic overturns like that of Haiti could occur only in isolated & ill-protected colonies. All that could make a negro uprising succeed, would be the ardent cooperation of a large faction of the white population itself--& in America there is no white element aside from the numerically insignificant fringe of Marxian communists which advocates complete racial equality. The second generation of European immigrants seem to share the anti-negro attitude, while substantial sections of the Indian population—such as the Osage nation—are beginning to put up the bars against the black blood which has measurably tainted the so-called “civilised” tribes of Oklahoma—Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, &c.--& the pitiful aboriginal remnants (like the Seminoles of Florida, or our handful of Niantics & Narragansetts in southern Rhode Island) of the Atlantic coast. The Osages inflict the most drastic penalties on all members of the tribe forming alliances with Africans. Even if some desperate social crisis were to sweep America into communism, I doubt if the racial-equality plank of the Marxist programme would survive. Blood is thicker than doctrine—the reason the Russians can accept an equality programme with equanimity is that they are already largely mongrelised with Mongol blood, & also that they are not faced with the practical problem of dealing with vast hordes of beings as widely & utterly aberrant as the negro. 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 his 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 for 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. In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take--& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point, & it will be found that most Northerners react similarly when it comes to a practical showdown, no matter how much abstract equalitarian nonsense they may spout as a result of the abolitionist tradition inherited from the 1850’s. If a Russian-inspired communist dictatorship ever tried to force negro equality on the U. S., there is scant question but that the descendants of Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, & William Lloyd Garrison would stand side by side with those of Jefferson Davis & John C. Calhoun in fighting its ultimate implications to the death. Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophical 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. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the colour-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically. John Randolph of Roanoke was none the worse off for having the blood of Pocahontas in his veins, nor does any Finn or Hungarian feel like a mongrel because his stock has a remote & now almost forgotten Mongoloid strain. With the high-grade alien races we can adopt a policy of flexible common-sense—discouraging mixture whenever we can, but not clamping down the bars so ruthlessly against every individual of slightly mixed ancestry. As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they could not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn’t hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has. (However, that wouldn’t work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.) His anti-Semitism, though based on cultural differences rather than biological, stayed with him as well. He did not believe that Jews were an inferior race, but that they tenaciously retained their own culture and were difficult to assimilate into his Anglo-centric ideal; that if they could be assimilated, as he considered his bride to be, they were of sufficiently good “racial stock” to be accepted. The fact that he married a Jew only proves that he practiced what he preached, not that he had reconsidered his anti-Semitism. He was critical of the Nazi’s methods and their racial fallacies (at least the ones that he did not share ), but was sympathetic to their desire to eliminate the Jewish cultural influence from Germany.

Lovecraft on blacks and Jews



July 30, 1933

As for the negro question—I think that intermarriage ought to be banned in view of the vast number of blacks in the country. Illicit miscegenation by the white male is bad enough, heaven knows—but at least the hybrid offspring is kept below a definite colour-line & kept from vitiating the main stock. Nothing but pain and disaster can come from the mingling of black & white, & the law ought to aid in checking this criminal folly. Granting the negro his full due, he is not the sort of material which can mix successfully into the fabric of a civilised Caucasian nation. Isolated cases of high-grade hybrids prove nothing. It is easy to see the ultimate result of the wholesale pollution of highly evolved blood by definitely inferior strains. It happened in ancient Egypt--& made a race of supine fellaheen out of what was once a noble stock…
As for New York—there is no question but that its overwhelming Semitism has totally removed it from the American stream. 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. The feelings & ideals presented are not our feelings & ideals—so that today our newest authors are as exotic to us as the French symbolists or Japanese hokku-writers. This, of course, applies to literature as a whole. Naturally, a good deal of representative stuff manages to get published. It is not difficult to point out what is meant by this insidious exoticism. What is happening is that books are preferred when they reflect an emotional attitude toward life which is profoundly foreign to the race as a whole. The preferred writers are detailedly interested in things which do not interest us, & are callous to the real impulses & aspirations which move us most. Anderson & Faulkner, delving in certain restricted strata, seldom touch on any chord to which the reader personally responds. We recognise their art, but admire them at a distance—as we admire Turgeniev & Baudelaire. Whether our own representative authors do as well in their art as their foreign-influenced types is beside the question. If they do not—as is entirely possible—then the thing to do is to stimulate better & freer expression among them; not to turn away from them & encourage expression in exotic fields. This can be done without injustice to the admitted intrinsic excellence of the exotics & decadents.The only xenophobic ideas that seem to have diminished somewhat were those that had prejudiced him against “lesser European” immigrants like the Italians and the Irish, though even they do not completely escape his racial wrath in late era letters to acquaintances.

Lovecraft on Jews and lesser white races



November 8, 1933

As for his (Kopp-Davis) criticism of my allusion to Jewish newspaper control in New York—he missed the whole point. I didn’t say that Jews own all the papers, 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 Jew & with social & political questions affecting them. 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. The Italians & French Canadians in Rhode Island try the same thing (with less success, though the Dagoes are making alarming gains in Providence, where they must form nearly half the population despite their deceptive isolation in one vast quarter), & I blame them just as little. I criticise not Mr. Bernard Kopp-Davis—nor Sig. Giambattista Scagnamiglio nor M. Napoleon-Francois Laliberte—but merely the condition brought about by a reductio ad absurdum of the flabby idealism of the “melting pot” fallacy. Within the lifetime of people now middle-aged, the general tone of our northern cities has so changed that they no longer seem like home to their own inhabitants. Providence is something of an exception because of the continued pure-Yankeedom of the residence section atop the hill—but the downtown business section shews all the stigmata of Latin mongrelisation….Italian & Portuguese faces everywhere. One has to get down to Richmond to find a town which really feels like home—where the average person one meets looks like one, has the same type of feelings & recollections, & reacts approximately the same to the same stimuli. The loss of a collective life—of a sharing of common traditions & memories & experiences—is the curse of the heterogeneous northeast today. There is no real solution--& all the American can do is to forget about the foreigners as much as he can, be on guard against alienation from his own tradition (apart from which he is lost & deprived of that normal adjustment to a coherent fabric & continuous historic stream which is everyone’s right), & do his part toward cutting off further unassimilable immigration. I’d hardly advocate Nazi tactics, but I certainly would welcome a greater assertiveness & independence among the native stock. I think the (probable) 100,000 Yankees in Providence ought to be able to say what they choose about Italy without making apologies to Federal Hill (our local Nuova Napoli), & that the (perhaps) 1,000,000 Americans in New York ought to be able to discuss Hitler & Palestine & pork chops without glancing fearfully over their shoulders at a horde of fortune-seeking Yiddish newcomers. I have to hand it to the French-Canadians for putting up a fight for their language & institutions. While naturally I oppose their cultural encroachments outside their own Quebec province—their fights to make all Canada bi-lingual, & all that—I admire them down to the bottom line—as Gen. Murray & Sir Guy Carleton did at the very outset—for their staunch resolution to keep up the fabric of their forefathers. They were on the ground first, & by the time we licked them in 1759-60 their land was normally a French one—a spacious area with a thoroughly adjusted population, cultivated French towns, & a century & a half of local traditions. Clearly, they had every aesthetic right to demand the perpetuation of their own folkways instead of ours—yet how few have shewn any real guts in similar situations! Where is the spoken French of Louisiana, the spoken Dutch of New-Netherland, or the spoken Spanish of Texas, today? But the Canucks, by god, did have the guts! They kept an unbroken front, used every dignified in Parliament, & finally secured the passage of the Quebec Act of 1774, securing them an inviolate perpetuation of their laws, language, & religion. We respected their rights as the Romans respected the rights of the conquered Greeks--& today Quebec is still the cultivated French city it was in 1750…..just as Athens & Alexandria were still cultivated Greek cities after centuries of Roman rule. Of course, there are troublesome connotations. When the French overflow into other regions like Ontario & New England they carry their solidarity & unassimilability with them, remaining aloof & cohesive, & refusing to adopt the English speech they have so long fought on their own soil. They cannot understand why the tolerance & protection of French in Quebec Province cannot be duplicated in places only a few hours ride from Quebec—like Vermont or Ontario or Rhode Island. In this state they have overrun certain cities & villages & made them just as French as anything in Quebec or Normandy. When I first visited Quebec in 1930 I saw nothing I had not known all my life from travels in my own state. Here, as there, one can strike towns dominated by ornate French steeples; containing statues Erice par Societe Jacques-Cartier; sporting shop signs such as Elphege Carou, Epicier, or Hormisdas Bilodeau, Cardonnier; having Maison a vendre, Chambres a louer & Salle a louer window cards; displaying Gallic posters of some such cinema as Sous la Lune du Maroc; adapte de la Nouvelle par Andre Reuze. Les Cinq Gentlemen Mandite at Le Theatre Laurier; & harbouring crowds of black-clad parochial school children led by hooded nuns or shovel-hatted cures & jabbering in the French of their forefathers……all the hereditary things of France undiluted by transplantation & expansion. These Rhode Island French fight like hell whenever any attempt is made to deracinate them or to substitute English for French in their parochial schools. In other local foreign colonies one sees a gradual Americanisation—a younger generation speaking English, & a falling off of ancestral ways—but nothing of that pervades these French centres. The French newspapers continue to flourish, & every parent strives to keep his children true to La Tradition. It is really ironic to reflect that—despite all the utterly alien blood which has been dumped on New England—the one really persistent foreign challenge should come from none other than our oldest & most historic rival—the Frenchman of the North against whose menace old Cotton Mather thundered his Catonian invectives from Boston pulpits in the 1680’s. Did Wolfe fall in vain? Today, just as old Cotton feared, the spires & syllables of France rise thickly from the banks of New England’s rivers! But much as I hate any foreign influence, I’m damned if I don’t admire those tough little frog-eaters for their unbreakable tenacity! You can’t make a dent in them!......They’ll probably still be French, albeit on alien soil, years after we are hopelessly Italianated or Portuguesed or Yiddified or Polacked in our own back yards! If they’d only lend us a little of their guts, I wouldn’t begrudge them the New England towns they’ve overrun! Shake, Pierrre mon frère! You may be a rival, but you’re nobody’s football!
None of this, however, in any way diminishes his contribution to weird literature in any way whatsoever…in fact, loathsome as many of his racial ideas were (honestly, his letters read like Mein Kampf) they are in very large part responsible for the mindset from which his fantastic fiction sprung. It is for this reason that I would disagree with the following:


However, none of his works were actually written in an attempt to convey racist ideals. The racism in his works was generally small and only incidental - i.e. it can be completely omitted without any impact on the literature itself.

[Xenophiliac]

Michael Moorcock, "The Opium General" Harrap (1984), reprinted from Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 1978)

In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused for) a terror of the masses, the 'ugly' crowd.

While I am not familiar with all of the authors lambasted by Moorcock in this piece, I will say that with this statement the author definitely shows his ignorance, at least as far as his understanding of Lovecraft’s racial thought is concerned. His xenophobia does not stem from his anxieties regarding sex, but from what he perceived as the encroachment of alien blood and culture and into the United States and its subsequent dilution of what he considered to be superior racial stock.

[Philosopher Jay]

Thanks for the very interesting discussion and Moorcock's very interesting article.

I went to the preview showing of "Star Wars" in 1977, a few days before it opened.
The cast and crew cheered wildly at the beginning and ending, but everyone was practically silent for the rest of the film.
I remember thinking that it was going to be a big flop. It was silly and childish. Plotwise, it was an inartistic mess. The dialogue was laughably bad and the characters unlikeable and cartoonish. It had two or three great special effects, but who would want to sit two hours for two minutes of special effects. The film wasn't fun at all with just one good musical/visual joke in the alien bar band.
The worst thing about it was its politics. It trivialized rebellion and revolution, ripping off and making fun of the recent youth rebellion. It promoted militarism and war in the old Hollywood way of making it look glamorous and heroic.

At the time, I thought the American people had learned their lesson from Vietnam and Watergate. The success of "Star Wars" should have taught me that ignorance and idiocy was produced systematically in the culture. It took the success of Ronald Reagan and George Bush to prove this to me.

[Invader Zim]

God, that article really does its utmost to strip all the fun out of the entire genre? And why place Asimov and Herbert in the same boat as Tolkein? And why put Tolkien in the same boat as Heinlein?

I never 'got' the criticism of Heinlein. Ok, he depicted a fascist state in the future, but it is fiction. While Heinlein may have seen positives in the fantasy system he created (I don't know, I never met the man) it is still nothing more than escapism. It isn't real and was never supposed to be.

And for the record the best critique of that book and its politics was the film, and the film treated it exactly how it needed to be treated, with comic irreverence.

[Xenophiliac]

God, that article really does its utmost to strip all the fun out of the entire genre?

I could not agree more!

[Psy]

Thanks for the very interesting discussion and Moorcock's very interesting article.

I went to the preview showing of "Star Wars" in 1977, a few days before it opened.
The cast and crew cheered wildly at the beginning and ending, but everyone was practically silent for the rest of the film.
I remember thinking that it was going to be a big flop. It was silly and childish. Plotwise, it was an inartistic mess. The dialogue was laughably bad and the characters unlikeable and cartoonish. It had two or three great special effects, but who would want to sit two hours for two minutes of special effects. The film wasn't fun at all with just one good musical/visual joke in the alien bar band.
The worst thing about it was its politics. It trivialized rebellion and revolution, ripping off and making fun of the recent youth rebellion. It promoted militarism and war in the old Hollywood way of making it look glamorous and heroic.

At the time, I thought the American people had learned their lesson from Vietnam and Watergate. The success of "Star Wars" should have taught me that ignorance and idiocy was produced systematically in the culture. It took the success of Ronald Reagan and George Bush to prove this to me.

Yet Star Wars inspired Gundam that took the idea that took the ideas of Star Wars and grounded them in power struggle between space colonies and the imperial Earth yet space fascists use the grievances of spacenoids to exploit them and create a completing imperial power to Earth, and the defeat of the space fascists only lead to Earth turning towards fascism interpreting the problem being them being to liberal towards their colonies.

[RED DAVE]

God, that article really does its utmost to strip all the fun out of the entire genre? And why place Asimov and Herbert in the same boat as Tolkein? And why put Tolkien in the same boat as Heinlein?They all wrote pro-capitalist or conservative fantasy.


I never 'got' the criticism of Heinlein.Would it help if you knew that his novels were part of the stock in trade of the emerging libertarian right in the 70s?


Ok, he depicted a fascist state in the futureAnd loved it.


but it is fiction.Carrying with it a right-wing ideology. Do you have the same feelings about the science fiction writings of Ayn Rand? Just fiction!


While Heinlein may have seen positives in the fantasy system he createdHe did.


(I don't know, I never met the man)Then do some research.


it is still nothing more than escapism. It isn't real and was never supposed to be.You are very naive about the political uses of fiction.


And for the record the best critique of that book and its politics was the film, and the film treated it exactly how it needed to be treated, with comic irreverence.One of the features of the film for me was its complete lack of irony. Personally, I wasn't able to get through the whole thing at one sitting.

RED DAVE

[eyeheartlenin]

To pick up on what IndependentCitizen wrote, the thing I remember about Starship Troopers is that, if you look closely, the troopers' uniforms come straight out of the Third Reich, right down to the positioning of the boards on the lapels. If I remember correctly, the troopers went to other planets to wipe out the bugs, which reminded me of the Reich's invasions of other countries and the Reich's characterization of anyone that got in the way of its expansion as "sub-human." So, yeah, given the troopers' fascist uniforms, I also thought it was kind of cool how the bugs fought back, defending their own territory.

[Commissar Rykov]

To pick up on what IndependentCitizen wrote, the thing I remember about Starship Troopers is that, if you look closely, the troopers' uniforms come straight out of the Third Reich, right down to the positioning of the boards on the lapels. If I remember correctly, the troopers went to other planets to wipe out the bugs, which reminded me of the Reich's invasions of other countries and the Reich's characterization of anyone that got in the way of its expansion as "sub-human." So, yeah, given the troopers' fascist uniforms, I also thought it was kind of cool how the bugs fought back, defending their own territory.
The uniforms were created by Paul Verhoeven and it was because he already wanted to do a sci-fi movie mocking the Nazis and their exploits he just happened at last second to tack on the Starship Troopers story. He only read I think two or three chapters if I remember. Verhoeven is interesting because he has taken a rather hardline against the Far Right due to having lived under Nazi Rule himself as a child when his native Netherlands was invaded.

Regardless Heinlein did sympathize with the Nazis and fascists in the book. The history/civics teacher [/URL]Rasczak praises Hitler and Mussolini for showing the weakness of democracy and being men of action. Then basically goes on a long diatribe about how democracy made men weak and ineffectual and thus a new era was created by military men.
[URL="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000682/"]
(http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0005424/)

[Invader Zim]

They all wrote pro-capitalist or conservative fantasy.

So do the vast majority of authors. If you proposing that leftist boycott ideologically inpure reading material then our collective library will not only dry as dust but also rather small.


Would it help if you knew that his novels were part of the stock in trade of the emerging libertarian right in the 70s?

I already knew that. But Starship Troopers was written in 1959 and is actually highly critical of the majority of notion shared by Libertarians. So you aren't criticising Heinlein for what he wrote in Starship Troopers (which is arguably contains far more reactionary ideas that anything he would go on to write), but for what he would go on to write.

To be honest if you read a novel like Starship Troopers and take it seriously, you've obviously not paid attention. It is a comic book without the pictures.


And loved it.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, it matters not one iota.


Carrying with it a right-wing ideology. Do you have the same feelings about the science fiction writings of Ayn Rand? Just fiction!

Yes, the difference in this case being that Atlas Shrugged, etc. is a load of overwrought, portentous, long winded, badly written and incredibly boring rubbish with pretentious philosophical ramblings, while starship troopers is practically a penny dreadful pulp piece about men in power armour cutting down laser toting giant insects. And, while nonsense, is at least readable and entertaining enough. yet, funnily enough, after having read it, I didn't feel the need to goose step down the highstreet telling passers by that they shouldn't be able to vote unless they get some sense of social responcibility and join the army.

I would claim to be able to read Atlas Shrugged without feeling the need to go out and lecture individuals on the merits of "objectivism", but the novel is actually unreadable and I've never managed to get more than a couple of hundred pages into without falling into a near catatonic state brought on by crushing boredom. And I'm quite proud I got that far in, I feel it is a testiment to my willpower that I endured that much of it.

Your argument holds the same element of snobbery that lies at the heart of every moral panic brought about by some objectional piece of 'art'. The difference is that you've to it from the other direction than is typical. Instead you go for insufferable moral and ideological purity that turns all innocence abused, and is one step away from cries of 'Oh, think of the Children!'. It all boils down to the idea that you think the rest of the audience is too stupid to be able to spot and rationally analyse the political subtext of the book and be able to measure it against their own outlook. While the moral crusaders of the video nasty era believed that a splash of gore would send the nations film views into a frenzy of violence, or turn them into gibbering rapists, you seem to believe that reading Starship Troopers will dupe people into accepting an element of fascist ideology. Well good news Dave, it won't. The audience isn't stupid.


You are very naive about the political uses of fiction.

Actually I think I understand it, and far better than you do. You believe that media, literature and art, etc. actively change a persons view and, as a result, this kind of noval can be used as a tool of indoctrination. Thankfuly, however, you're wrong as plenty of research into the issue has proven time and time again. Media, literature art reinforces perexisting views and behavioral patterns, it doesn't actually have much impact when it comes to changing a person's view point or behavior. This is why violent literature, films and, in turn, video games have not turned each new generation into psychotic murders or even noticably increased violence. Similarly propaganda does not actually work in changing views. People who watch Fox news and believe it were not converted to conservatism. They watch Fox News because it reinforces what they already hold to be true. People like to have their views confirmed. So unless you're a champion of fascism already, the politics of Starship Troopers isn't going to have any impact on readers, beyond raising an eyebrow or two. Similarly Ayn Rand cultists were not converted by reading her books, they doubtless already shared many of her views prior to coming to the book, she just articulated them.


One of the features of the film for me was its complete lack of irony. Personally, I wasn't able to get through the whole thing at one sitting.

The problem isn't that it wasn't ironic, the problem here is your utter failure to spot it, which is remarkable given how heavily it was plastered on. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who went on to direct the anti-Nazi film Black Book, who outright detested the politics of the book to the extent that he couldn't finish it. All the additions, such as dressing the Mobile Infantry like SS storm troopers were obviously supposed to be satirical. And even then, for the people who didn't get it he spelled it out in various intervews, such as this one:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/paul-verhoeven,14078/

[Xenophiliac]

I adore the tales of HP Lovecraft but think many of you are being pretty charitable when you say that he abandoned his racism. It is true that he embraced socialism in the latter years of his life (he went from being a monarchist to a socialist via his own unique brand of fascism), but his racial views remained essentially unchanged, as can be easily seen in his correspondence even as late as 1934, less than three years before his death. These ideas may not have pervaded his tales as frequently as in his earlier years, but that does not necessarily mean that he had embraced a new egalitarian ideal.

He went to his grave regarding blacks as biologically inferior (he once opined in a very early letter that he considered them a link between ape and man) to every other race of human beings. He was vehemently opposed to miscegenation and was adamant that a “color-line” be in place to prevent the dilution of quality blood with that of what he considered to be subhuman.

His anti-Semitism, though based on cultural differences rather than biological, stayed with him as well. He did not believe that Jews were an inferior race, but that they tenaciously retained their own culture and were difficult to assimilate into his Anglo-centric ideal; that if they could be assimilated, as he considered his bride to be, they were of sufficiently good “racial stock” to be accepted. The fact that he married a Jew only proves that he practiced what he preached, not that he had reconsidered his anti-Semitism. He was critical of the Nazi’s methods and their racial fallacies (at least the ones that he did not share ), but was sympathetic to their desire to eliminate the Jewish cultural influence from Germany.

The only xenophobic ideas that seem to have diminished somewhat were those that had prejudiced him against “lesser European” immigrants like the Italians and the Irish, though even they do not completely escape his racial wrath in late era letters to acquaintances.


Additionally, he was a Felicentric Cat Supremacist!:D



Cats And Dogs

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written November 23, 1926
Published in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949
Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in your literary club, I cannot resist contributing a few Thomastic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have much weight against the brilliancy of such still active adherents as may bark upon the other side. Aware of my ineptitude at argument, a valued correspondent has supplied me with the records of a similar controversy in the New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl van Doran is on my side and Mr. Albert Payson Terhune on that of the canine tribe. From this I would be glad to plagiarise such data as I need; but my friend, with genuinely Machiavellian subtlety, has furnished me with only a part of the feline section whilst submitting the doggish brief in full. No doubt he imagines that this arrangement, in view of my own emphatic bias, makes for something like ultimate fairness; but for me it is exceedingly inconvenient, since it will force me to be more or less original in several parts of the ensuing remarks.
Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys, human beings, tradesmen, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the cat I have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy. In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.
Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon one's temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional people -- people who feel rather than think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple, and who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of austere, absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper elements do not also reside in the average cat-lover's love of cats, but merely to point out that in ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such. He is unwilling to set up himself and his cruder feelings as a measure of universal values, or to allow shallow ethical notions to warp his judgment. In a word, he had rather admire and respect than effuse and dote; and does not fall into the fallacy that pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience, constitute anything intrinsically admirable or exalted. Dog-lovers base their whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes. Cat-lovers escape this delusion, repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe, cynical and unconquered lord of the housetops.
Persons of commonplace ideas -- unimaginative worthy burghers who are satisfied with the daily round of things and who subscribe to the popular credo of sentimental values -- will always be dog-lovers. To them nothing will ever be more important than themselves and their own primitive feelings, and they will never cease to esteem and glorify the fellow-animal who best typifies these. Such persons are submerged in the vortex of Oriental idealism and abasement which ruined classic civilisation in the Dark Ages, and live in a bleak world of abstract sentimental values wherein the mawkish illusions of meekness, gentleness, brotherhood, and whining humility are magnified into supreme virtues, and a whole false ethic and philosophy erected on the timid reactions of the flexor system of muscles. This heritage, ironically foisted on us when Roman politics raised the faith of a whipped and broken people to supremacy in the later empire, has naturally kept a strong hold over the weak and sentimentally thoughtless; and perhaps reached its culmination in the insipid nineteenth century, when people were wont to praise dogs "because they are so human" (as if humanity were any valid standard of merit!), and honest Edwin Landseer painted hundreds of smug Fidoes and Carlos and Rovers with all the anthropoid triviality, pettiness, and "cuteness" of eminent Victorians.
But amidst this chaos of intellectual and emotional groveling a few free souls have always stood out for the old civilised realities which mediaevalism eclipsed -- the stern classic loyalty to truth, strength, and beauty given a clear mind and uncowed spirit to the full-living Western Aryan confronted by Nature's majesty, loveliness, and aloofness. This is the virile aesthetic and ethic of the extensor muscles -- the bold, buoyant, assertive beliefs and preferences of proud, dominant, unbroken and unterrified conquerors, hunters, and warriors -- and it has small use for the shams and whimperings of the brotherly, affection-slobbering peacemaker and cringer and sentimentalist. Beauty and sufficiency -- twin qualities of the cosmos itself -- are the gods of this unshackled and pagan type; to the worshipper of such eternal things the supreme virtue will not be found in lowliness, attachment, obedience, and emotional messiness. This sort of worshipper will look for that which best embodies the loveliness of the stars and the worlds and the forests and the seas and the sunsets, and which best acts out the blandness, lordliness, accuracy, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and contemptuous and capricious impersonality of the all governing Nature. Beauty -- coolness -- aloofness -- philosophic repose -- self-sufficiency -- untamed mastery -- where else can we find these things incarnated with even half the perfection and completeness that mark their incarnation in the peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and obtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity?
That dogs are dear to the unimaginative peasant-burgher whilst cats appeal to the sensitive poet-aristocrat-philosopher will be clear in a moment when we reflect on the matter of biological association. Practical plebeian folk judge a thing only by its immediate touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types form their estimates from the linked images and ideas which the object calls up in their minds. Now when dogs and cats are considered, the stolid churl sees only the two animals before him, and bases his favour on their relative capacity to pander to his sloppy, uniformed ideas of ethics and friendship and flattering subservience. On the other hand the gentleman and thinker sees each in all its natural affiliations, and cannot fail to notice that in the great symmetries of organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves and foxes and jackals and coyotes and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly with the jungle's lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger, and the shapely panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion, inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness -- the attributes of commonplace, stupidly passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively underdeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality -- the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
We may, indeed, judge the tone and bias of a civilisation by its relative attitude toward dogs and cats. The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh and pyramids rose in beauty at the wish of him who dreamed them bowed down to the cat, and temples were built to its goddess at Bubastis. In imperial Rome the graceful leopard adorned most homes of quality, lounging in insolent beauty in the atrium with golden collar and chain; while after the age of the Antonines the actual cat was imported from Egypt and cherished as a rare and costly luxury. So much for the dominant and enlightened peoples. When, however, we come to the groveling Middle Ages with their superstitions and ecstasies and monasticisms and maunderings over saints and their relics, we find the cool and impersonal loveliness of the felidae in very low esteem; and behold a sorry spectacle of hatred and cruelty shown toward the beautiful little creature whose mousing virtues alone gained it sufferance amongst the ignorant churls who resented its self-respecting coolness and feared its cryptical and elusive independence as something akin to the dark powers of witchcraft. These boorish slaves of eastern darkness could not tolerate what did not serve their own cheap emotions and flimsy purposes. They wished a dog to fawn and hunt and fetch and carry, and had no use for the cat's gift of eternal disinterested beauty to feed the spirit. One can imagine how they must have resented Pussy's magnificent reposefulness, unhurriedness, relaxation, and scorn for trivial human aims and concernments. Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense. Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative and imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog gives, but the cat is.
Simple folk always overstress the ethical element in life, and it is quite natural that they should extend it to the realm of their pets. Accordingly, we hear many inane dicta in favour of dogs on the ground that they are faithful, whilst cats are treacherous. Now just what does this really mean? Where are the points of reference? Certainly, the dog has so little imagination and individuality that it knows no motives but its master's; but what sophisticated mind can descry a positive virtue in this stupid abnegation of its birthright? Discrimination must surely award the palm to the superior cat, which has too much natural dignity to accept any scheme of things but its own, and which consequently cares not one whit what any clumsy human thinks or wishes or expects of it. It is not treacherous, because it has never acknowledged any allegiance to anything outside its own leisurely wishes; and treachery basically implies a departure from some covenant explicitly recognised. The cat is a realist, and no hypocrite. He takes what pleases him when he wants it, and gives no promises. He never leads you to expect more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be stupidly Victorian enough to mistake his purrs and rubbings of self-satisfaction for marks of transient affection toward you, that is no fault of his. He would not for a moment have you believe that he wants more of you than food and warmth and shelter and amusement -- and he is certainly justified in criticising your aesthetic and imaginative development if you fail to find his grace, beauty, and cheerful decorative influence an aboundingly sufficient repayment for all you give him. The cat-lover need not be amazed at another's love for dogs -- indeed, he may also possess this quality himself; for dogs are often very comely, and as lovable in a condescending way as a faithful old servant or tenant in the eyes of a master -- but he cannot help feeling astonished at those who do not share his love for cats. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it. We call ourselves a dog's "master" -- but who ever dared call himself the "master" of a cat? We own a dog -- he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat -- he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such a one more agreeable and interesting. A trace, I think, of this great truth regarding the higher dignity of the cat has crept into folklore in the use of the names "cat" and "dog" as terms of opprobrium. Whilst "cat" has never been applied to any sort of offender more than the mildly spiteful and innocuously sly female gossip and commentator, the words "dog" and "cur" have always been linked with vileness, dishonor, and degradation of the gravest type. In the crystallisation of this nomenclature there has undoubtedly been present in the popular mind some dim, half-unconscious realisation that there are depths of slinking, whining, fawning, and servile ignobility which no kith of the lion and the leopard could ever attain. The cat may fall low, but he is always unbroken. He is, like the Nordic among men, one of those who govern their own lives or die.
We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that all comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have beauty in a very ample degree; but even the highest level of canine beauty falls far below the feline average. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic -- nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. Puss is a Doric temple -- an Ionic colonnade -- in the utter classicism of its structural and decorative harmonies. And this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat's slightest motion. The sheer, perfect aestheticism of kitty's lazy stretchings, industrious face-washings, playful rollings, and little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something as keen and vital as the best pastoral poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way but it is his capacity for leisure and repose which makes the cat preeminent. Mr. Carl Van Vechten, in "Peter Whiffle," holds up the timeless restfulness of the cat as a model for life's philosophy, and Prof. William Lyon Phelps has very effectively captured the secret of felinity when he says that the cat does not merely lie down, but "pours his body out on the floor like a glass of water". What other creature has thus merged the aestheticism of mechanics and hydraulics? Contrast this with the inept panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling, scratching, and general clumsiness of the average dog with his false and wasted motions. And in the details of neatness the fastidious cat is of course immeasurably ahead. We always love to touch a cat, but only the insensitive can uniformly welcome the frantic and humid nuzzlings and pawings of a dusty and perhaps not inodorous canine which leaps and fusses and writhes about in awkward feverishness for no particular reason save that blind nerve-centres have been spurred by certain meaningless stimuli. There is a wearying excess of bad manners in all this doggish fury -- well-bred people don't paw and maul one, and surely enough we invariably find the cat gentle and reserved in his advances, and delicate even when he glides gracefully into your lap with cultivated purrs, or leaps whimsical on the table where you are writing to play with your pen in modulated, seriocomic pats. I do not wonder that Mahomet, that sheik of perfect manners, loved cats for their urbanity and disliked dogs for their boorishness; or that cats are the favorites in the polite Latin countries whilst dogs take the lead in heavy, practical, and beer-drinking Central Europe. Watch a cat eat, and then watch a dog. The one is held in check by an inherent and inescapable daintiness, and lends a kind of grace to one of the most ungraceful of all processes. The dog, on the other hand, is wholly repulsive in his bestial and insatiate greediness; living up to his forest kinship of "wolfing" most openly and unashamedly. Returning to beauty of line -- is it not significant that while many normal breeds of dogs are conspicuously and admittedly ugly, no healthy and well-developed feline of any species whatsoever is other than beautiful? There are, of course, many ugly cats; but these are always individual cases of mongrelism, malnutrition, deformity, or injury. No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful -- a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. Of course, it may be said that no aesthetic standard is other than relative -- but we always work with such standards as we empirically have, and in comparing cats and dogs under the Western European aesthetic we cannot be unfair to either. If any undiscovered tribe in Tibet finds Airedales beautiful and Persian cats ugly, we will not dispute them on their own territory -- but just now we are dealing with ourselves and our territory, and here the verdict would not admit of much doubt even from the most ardent kynophile. Such an one usually passes the problem off in an epigrammatic paradox, and says that "Snookums is so homely, he's pretty!" This is the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily "cute" which we see likewise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the "Billikin" or "Krazy Kat" order found in the "dens" and "cosy corners" of the would-be-sophisticated yokelry.
In the matter of intelligence we find the caninites making amusing claims -- amusing because they so naively measure what they conceive to be an animal's intelligence by its degree of subservience to the human will. A dog will retrieve, a cat will not; therefore (sic!) the dog is the more intelligent. Dogs can be more elaborately trained for the circus and vaudeville acts than cats, therefore (O Zeus, O Royal Mount!) they are cerebrally superior. Now of course this is all the sheerest nonsense. We would not call a weak-spirited man more intelligent than an independent citizen because we can make him vote as we wish whereas we can't influence the independent citizen, yet countless persons apply an exactly parallel argument in appraising the grey matter of dogs and cats. Competition in servility is something to which no self-respecting Thomas or Tabitha ever stooped, and it is plain that any really effective estimate of canine and feline intelligence must proceed from a careful observation of dogs and cats in a detached state -- uninfluenced by human beings -- as they formulate certain objectives of their own and use their own mental equipment in achieving them. When we do this, we arrive at a very wholesome respect for our purring hearthside friend who makes so little display about his wishes and business methods; for in every conception and calculation he shows a steel-cold and deliberate union of intellect, will, and sense of proportion which puts utterly to shame the emotional sloppings-over and docilely acquired artificial tricks of the "clever" and "faithful" pointer or sheep-dog. Watch a cat decide to move through a door, and see how patiently he waits for his opportunity, never losing sight of his purpose even when he finds it expedient to feign other interests in the interim. Watch him in the thick of the chase, and compare his calculating patience and quiet study of his terrain with the noisy floundering and pawing of his canine rival. It is not often that he returns empty-handed. He knows what he wants, and means to get it in the most effective way, even at the sacrifice of time -- which he philosophically recognises as unimportant in the aimless cosmos. There is no turning him aside or distracting his attention -- and we know that among humans this is the quality of mental tenacity, this ability to carry a single thread through complex distractions, is considered a pretty good sign of intellectual vigour and maturity. Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble, cats and philosophers stick to their point. In resourcefulness, too, the cat attests his superiority. Dogs can be well trained to do a single thing, but psychologists tell us that these responses to an automatic memory instilled from outside are of little worth as indices of real intelligence. To judge the abstract development of a brain, confront it with new and unfamiliar conditions and see how well its own strength enables it to achieve its object by sheer reasoning without blazed trails. Here the cats can silently devise a dozen mysterious and successful alternatives whilst poor Fido is barking in bewilderment and wondering what it is all about. Granted that Rover the retriever may make a greater bid for popular sentimental regard by going into the burning house and saving the baby in traditional cinema fashion, it remains a fact that whiskered and purring Nig is a higher-grade biological organism -- something physiologically and psychologically nearer a man because of his very freedom from man's orders, and as such entitled to a higher respect from those who judge by purely philosophic and aesthetic standards. We can respect a cat as we cannot respect a dog, no matter which personally appeals the more to our mere doting fancy; and if we be aesthetes and analysts rather than commonplace-lovers and emotionalists, the scales must inevitably turn completely in kitty's favour.
It may be added, moreover, that even the aloof and sufficient cat is by no means devoid of sentimental appeal. Once we get rid of the uncivilised ethical bias -- the "treacherous" and "horrid bird-catcher" prejudice -- we find in the "harmless cat" the very apex of happy domestic symbolism; whilst small kittens become objects to adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and trochaics. I, in my own senescent mellowness, confess to an inordinate and wholly unphilosophic predilection for tiny coal-black kittens with large yellow eyes, and could no more pass one without petting him than Dr. Johnson could pass a sidewalk post without striking it. There is, likewise, in many cats quite analogous to the reciprocal fondness so loudly extolled in dogs, human beings, horses, and the like. Cats come to associate certain persons with acts continuously contributing to their pleasure, and acquire for them a recognition and attachment which manifests itself in pleasant excitement at their approach -- whether or not bearing food and drink -- and a certain pensiveness at their protracted absence. A cat with whom I was on intimate terms reached the point of accepting food from no hand but one, and would actually go hungry rather than touch the least morsel from a kindly neighbour source. He also had distinct affections amongst the other cats of that idyllic household; voluntarily offering food to one of his whiskered friends, whilst disputing most savagely the least glance which his coal-black rival "Snowball" would bestow upon his plate. If it be argued that these feline fondnesses are essentially "selfish" and "practical" in their ultimate composition, let us inquire in return how many human fondnesses, apart from those springing directly upon primitive brute instinct, have any other basis. After the returning board has brought in the grand total of zero we shall be better able to refrain from ingenuous censure of the "selfish" cat.
The superior imaginative inner life of the cat, resulting in superior self-possession, is well known. A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone. Only after such a glimpse of unaffected tail-chasing grace and unstudied purring can one fully understand the charm of those lines which Coleridge wrote with reference to the human rather than the feline young -- page eleven

".... a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself."
But whole volumes could be written on the playing of cats, since the varieties and aesthetic aspects of such sportiveness are infinite. Be it sufficient to say that in such pastimes cats have exhibited traits and actions which psychologists authentically declare to be motivated by genuine humour and whimsicality in its purest sense; so that the task of "making a cat laugh" may not be so impossible a thing even outside the borders of Cheshire. In short, a dog is an incomplete thing. Like an inferior man, he needs emotional stimuli from outside, and must set something artificial up as a god and motive. The cat, however, is perfect in himself. Like the human philosopher, he is a self-sufficient entity and microcosm. He is a real and integrated being because he thinks and feels himself to be such, whereas the dog can conceive of himself only in relation to something else. Whip a dog and he licks your hand - frauth! The beast has no idea of himself except as an inferior part of an organism whereof you are the superior part -- he would no more think of striking back at you than you would think of pounding your own head when it punishes you with a headache. But whip a cat and watch it glare and move backward hissing in outraged dignity and self-respect! One more blow, and it strikes you in return; for it is a gentleman and your equal, and will accept no infringement on its personality and body of privileges. It is only in your house anyway because it wishes to be, or perhaps even as a condescending favour to yourself. It is the house, not you, it likes; for philosophers realise that human beings are at best only minor adjuncts to scenery. Go one step too far, and it leaves you altogether. You have mistaken your relationship to it and imagined you are its master, and no real cat can tolerate that breach of good manners. Henceforward it will seek companions of greater discrimination and clearer perspective. Let anaemic persons who believe in "turning the other cheek" console themselves with cringing dogs -- for the robust pagan with the blood of Nordic twilights in his veins there is no beast like the cat; intrepid steed of Freya, who can boldly look even Thor and Odin full in the face and stare with great round eyes of undimmed yellow or green.
In these observations I believe I have outlined with some fullness the diverse reasons why, in my opinion and in the smartly timed title-phrase of Mr. Van Doren, "gentlemen prefer cats." The reply of Mr. Terhune in a subsequent issue of the Tribune appears to me beside the point; insomuch as it is less a refutation of facts than a mere personal affirmation of the author's membership in that conventional "very human" majority who take affection and companionship seriously, enjoy being important to something alive, hate a "parasite" on mere ethical ground without consulting the right of beauty to exist for its own sake, and therefore love man's noblest and most faithful friend, the perennial dog. I suppose Mr. Terhune loves horses and babies also, for the three go conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center's credo as highly essential likings for every good and lovable he-man of the Arrow Collar and Harold Bell Wright hero school, even though the automobile and Margaret Sanger have done much to reduce the last two items.
Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants, cats are gentlemen and the pets of gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethic and humanocentricity above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves "folks and folksiness" and doesn't mind sloppy clumsiness if only something will truly care for him. (Tableau of dog across master's grave -- cf. Lanseer, "The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner.") The guy who isn't much for highbrow stuff, but is always on the square and don't (sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y. World too deep for him; who hadn't much use for Valentino, but thinks Doug Fairbanks is just about right for an evening's entertainment. Wholesome -- constructive -- non-morbid -- civic-minded -- domestic -- (I forgot to mention the radio) normal -- that's the sort of go-getter that ought to go in for dogs.
The cat is for the aristocrat -- whether by birth or inclinations or both - who admires his fellow-aristocrats. He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe, and who worships that beauty in all its forms without regard for the sentimental and ethical illusions of the moment. For the man who knows the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to what is real -- as beauty is real because it pretends to a significance beyond the emotion which it excites and is. For the man who feels sufficient in the cosmos, and asks no scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves repose and strength and freedom and luxury and sufficiency and contemplation; who as a strong fearless soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face and accept his alternate blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful equal in the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy of fear, subservience, and devolution. The cat is not for the brisk, self-important little worker with a mission, but for the enlightened dreaming poet who knows that the world contains nothing really worth doing. The dilettante -- the connoisseur -- the decadent, if you will, though in a healthier age than this there were things for such men to do, so that they were the planners and leader of those glorious pagan times. The cat is for him who does things not for empty duty but for power, pleasure, splendour, romance, and glamour -- for the harpist who sings alone in the night of old battles, or the warrior who goes out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame and the splendour of a land athwart which no shadow of weakness falls. For him who will be lulled by no sops of prose and usefulness, but demands for his comfort the ease and beauty and ascendancy and cultivation which make effort worth while. For the man who knows that play, not work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of life; and that the round of striving merely in order to strive some more is a bitter irony of which the civilised soul accepts as little as it can.
Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners -- what more can civilisation require? We have them all in the divine monarch who lounges gloriously on his silken cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake -- pride and harmony and coordination -- spirit, restfulness and completeness -- all here are present, and need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast? The star of the cat, I think, is just now in the ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which clouded the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle of sentimental regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty.
And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due among groping mortals -- the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art -- the type of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry -- the bland, grave, compliant, and patrician cat.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Additionally, he was a Felicentric Cat Supremacist!:D

That one is quite accurate as opposed to some of the other things. Dogs are vile things and the characterisation of dog-lovers is fairly accurate. Dog-lovers have a tendency to regard intelligence as being revealed by how obedient or not an animal is, which is why they think pigs are dumb.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I like cats and dogs, I've never gotten why there's supposedly a debate about which is the "better animal".

A lot of "cat lovers" seem inverted and anti-social, the classic old marm cat lady charicature, if we're going with generalizations.