One of the perennial accusations from the left against us was -- still is -- in the term of the left's beloved USSR that we were "nekulturny." Which is to say without culture.
One of my favorite books -- in fact the basis for the essay that got me into the exchange student program, without which I wouldn't have known there was a place I belonged -- is Farenheit 451. The words "I am Ecclesiastes" sends a shiver up my spine. Because in the context of the book it represents the thin thread of memory linking humans to timeless wisdom, to the intellectual heritage of our ancestors.
Hold those two threads in your head, please. I'll be bringing them together in a moment.
The accusation of being without culture resonated within the right, even with me. Even though I knew, as far back as thirty years ago that the left dominated the culture not through some great feat of creativity or amazing intelligence, but because they wouldn't let anyone else IN, I believed that the right lacked culture because of something innately broken in most. I will confess most of this was through exposure, as a young woman to my grandmother's moralistic and stifling Victorian books. There's only so many stories of good boys who grow up to be saints, and bad boys who grow up to be evil and punished you can read before you believe that it is wrong to inflict that on children. Or to be fair, on humans. Hold that in mind, too, please.
This was not improved by the few places where the right held sway being prey to a sort of bizarre need to preach. So, Christian houses instead of publishing things that emulated Tolkien wrote tales like the Victorian ones. Evil punished. Virtue rewarded. Faith in G-d is a vending machine and will reward you with material goods and a perfect life!
In retrospect, those places and those houses were caught in the same sort of trap that the left has caught itself. By wanting to be explicitly and ... um.... heavily (like a hammer pounding an anvil) "Christian" they ended up writing to a choir of believers, and losing even people like me, who, while believers, want to read fun stuff with engaging characters, instead of lengthy sermons with characters.
Now, don't tell me there are decent Christian writers. I know that. Though it's not my favorite form of entertainment, I read them now and then. I don't have many among my favorites, and don't remember their names. (I only remember most author's names when I see them. Unless it's a handful I have re-read a lot.) I do remember reading a Christian author writing WWII books in the mainstream who was a delight and a wonder, and amazingly knowledgeable. I will just have to go search to find her name. Unfortunately I read her in KU so.... (I wish Amazon would keep a record of what you borrow. Honestly, the last two years, if I love a series I've started buying it. Even if I never read it again, it makes it easier to find it on the kindle, to recommend to someone.) Also Denton Salle's Bears of God work is Christian allegory of a sort, and I've read those (before they were published.)
However, this was my view of it 30 years ago. Remember there was no Amazon. The only books available to me were those I found in the bookstore, and though I bought heavily from used bookstores (oh, let's be honest, people, I often "shopped" the rejected bookshelf in front of used bookstores: a lot of gothic romances; some good books in too poor a shape to be resold; a 19th century medical encyclopedia set which unfortunately seems to have been lost in our first move in Colorado. (Probably "lost").) So the number of Christian books I'd been exposed to were limited, and quite often were "free" books given away at our church. (A way to publicize for self-published or small press religious authors.)
So I accepted the Nekulturny accusation for our side, and embraced the dictum -- by my late friend L. Neil Smith -- that "you can't fight a culture war if you ain't got no culture." In fact I've quoted it in here and urged you to go and make excellent culture. This imperative remains, perhaps more than ever. We need good artists -- hi, Richard! Hi, Maggie! Hi, Caitlin! Hi, Jack! Hi, Cedar! -- good writers, (too many of you in the audience, and many becoming better every day), good movie makers (there we still lag, not in content, but in tech and well... money), good philosophers (hello, Doctor Peterson!), good thinkers, good readers. We need them, not for the "right" but for humanity at this point. More on that in a moment.
Twenty years ago, I'd started suspecting that the "the right is not creative" slur was just that. I knew enough of "us" submerged and hidden, and had seen how the leftist gatekeepers would only let us through if we sang their message. How even the non-leftist house was hampered by a leftist distribution circuit. And I'd seen the amazingly good people who were unable to dissemble their political beliefs (yes, many on the right are religious, but not all Probably, honestly the same proportion as the general population. Believe it or not there are a lot of "religious" leftists. They just don't understand how the doctrine has gotten substituted with Marx in their heads.) who were resolutely held out of publishing, even though they beat the inferior product the left was pushing into every store all hollow.
I had a long standing back and forth argument with Roger L. Simon -- of Blacklisting Myself fame, mind -- over this. He thought the left was genuinely more creative. To be fair Dr. Peterson thought that until very recently. Heck, for all I know he still does.
It's very difficult to pierce through the massive gaslighting veil the over culture had/has become.
But by 2000 I had some awareness of it. Most of all I had some awareness of how bad -- horrifyingly bad -- the mainstream output was.
What I mean is, look people, I'm a reader. Reading is my main form of mind clearing. Listening to audio books is my main form of keeping myself on task while gardening or cleaning or other body-work that doesn't involve the mind. I'm addicted to narrative, but even more simply to words strung together as some people are to cocaine.
I don't remember the full Heinlein screed in Glory Road, but I'll do my own: I'm addicted to the printed word. Let me go too long without, and I get twitchy and weird, and start picking fights for fun. I read while eating, while cleaning, while cooking, while walking, while sitting with friends. If I can find a way to read while sleeping, I'll do that too. Before Kindles, which can be covered in ziplocs while cleaning or cooking, I had a class of books I either got for free or very cheaply, which I knew were going to end up bleach-stained, wet or covered in tomato sauce. In extremis, I've read old newspapers, instructions for machines I never used, inserts for medicine I don't anticipate taking. The back of cereal boxes goes without saying. However, I've read newspapers and books in languages I barely understood by preference to not reading.
I don't read while writing, but it would be glorious if I could do both.
I have nothing against movies. They're okay when I'm tired and can snuggle with my sweetie, and do my crochet while I watch. I have a few favorites. But they don't compare to books. Books let me inside other heads.
I don't game. Either kind. RPG is too much like what I do while writing, and therefore by the time I found it it felt too much like work. (Though I sort of invented it in parallel to play back in Middle School.) And computer gaming is addictive but not .... rewarding for me. I don't like the way entire years can go up the spout when I become obsessed with a game. At least books I can read a couple a day and still write.
Anyway, this is to say, you see how it's my main form of entertainment, my way of easing the Weltschmerz of living in this workaday world, so I can get through and not be even more of an almighty termagant.
The problem was by 2000 I was having trouble finding books to read. Partly it was because I don't like ideas pushed at me undigested -- even those I agree with, as I say ahead -- and don't like to be preached at. By 2000 some of my favorite genres had enough preaching in them that I couldn't avoid it. Science fiction and mystery for instance were soaked in the shibboleths of the day for the left. While I escaped for a while by reading historical, that was around the time that mainstream publishers -- perhaps because others like me were escaping that way -- decided that historical "just didn't sell" and shut off that spiggot. (No, it wasn't legitimate. First, because they really have no idea what sells. It's almost impossible to figure out. No, not by design, but because the business is a kludge of 19th century practices and "clever fixes" that aren't. Second, because by that time what sold was mostly what was pushed. So if they decided it didn't sell it was a self-fullfilling prophecy.)
I escaped to romance for a while. But then even regencies were more and more unlikely sex scenes (I'm not a reading voyeur, but I'll take it to get the story. However, see "unlikely" not to say impossible.) and feminist screeds (to believe these romances every woman in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century read Mary Woolstonecraft (bah. Talk about preaching) worked at women's shelters, thought that the patriarchy was oppressive and longed to have a profession. Since this wasn't even true in the so very patriarchal Portugal of my youth, where most women were quite contented with their lot, my disbelief got suspended from the neck until dead.
From that I ran screaming into popular history, but that too started getting invaded by the time indie came about and I realized that no, it wasn't what people were creating. People hadn't -- all -- gone stupid and Marxist and full of the latest "niceness" of the left. It was just what they chose to publish or injected in the books.
Indie put paid to the idea the left was more creative.
But more importantly, since about 2008 when they decided they'd won, and we were all socialists now (snort, giggle) the left put paid to that.
The books they push, almost enforce, are as strangely confining and stultifying as the stuff grandma read as a young girl in Victorian times. If you don't believe me, read this review of one of the people they lionize, complete with the conceit that you can't read anything unapproved because it contains "mind viruses" for which the only cure is death, because you can't save the ones infected by bad think. (Thank you, Deedee for reminding me of this. You're responsible for this post.): Message Received.
Most of the left's output these days is simply unreadable. You can't go three pages without stumbling on a just-so story, a lecture disguised as dialogue, or something so at odds with reality that you laugh out loud in the middle of a supposed serious scene. (Well, to be fair I can't. I might be more sensitive than most. I grew up during the cold war under a succession of "socialist" governments. I have a cold war wound. It only hurts when I laugh.)
Their print runs show it. Though to be fair, all of traditional publishing is having issues because of the completely insane and getting worse system of distribution. If you want to know more about it, after I'm done here, look up "printing to the net" in this blog. Or "he beats me but he's my publisher" which also speaks to what creatives went through and still go through in most of traditional publishing.
And so, the left has done what it always does. When communists can't feed the masses, because government owned stores (Chicago, really?) and price controls (TrudCastreau, really?) fail to make food plentiful and available (Hey, morons, Marx was a lousy economist. In fact he wasn't one at all. He was a propagandist pretending to understand economics. Since I don't think any of you can read Thomas Sowell without a lot of effort, I recommend you read Eat The Rich by P. J. O'Rourke, to figure out what you're doing wrong.) it must be the fault of hoarders and wreckers, and the black market still, somehow, feeding the people at great cost must be eliminated. Then their stupid ideas will work. In Hell.
Now they can't get people to read their very boring and completely inane books. Their movies are becoming more and more like the books -- collections of the latest wisdom from above spewed on the page, connected by a thin and unconvincing narrative, which often is not a narrative at all, just a meandering irrational "and then this happened." (I suspect the declining quality is because the people in charge of selecting these books are now half-baked humanities graduates who really don't read for pleasure or understand books, but want to be heroes of the revolution. You have to be very stupid or very timorous to conform to what most of the houses demand these days. Not, not so far as I know Baen.)
And because those horrible people won't read their books, starting about 20 years ago, the "culture" of the left has gone to war with anyone greater than them. Again, I beg you to believe "greater than them" is not an effort. There are probably fourth graders who are greater giants of literature, though we'll never find out since they do it with pencil, on composition books.
It started with fury against the past. I was somewhat puzzled back in the late eighties when I saw them demonize Heinlein -- Heinlein! -- as racist and sexist. This is enough to make anyone who read him laugh out loud. But they managed to convince people who never read him that to read him would put them beyond the pale.
Then it spread. These days anyone who is halfway competent, anyone who wrote more than 20 years ago, practically anyone who can carry a tale in a bucket has come under fire by the people who no longer remember how to think, let alone how to tell a story.
Sometimes literal fire. I used to be an habitue of libraries, because, well... you really can't support my habit (before KU) on a middle class salary, and I didn't marry a millionaire. And there were only so many used bookstores I could ransack for book rejects.
In the last ten years I've been less and less interested, and the last two years, after moving, I didn't bother to get a library card. Libraries have taken to a) only stocking books approved by the (leftist) review system. b) getting rid of books older than a couple of years. c) stocking a lot of commercial movies and music. The openly communist head of the librarians association is not an aberration. Like all gatekeeping, it was taken over.
The left has gone quite literally on book dumping sprees of all books in libraries and school libraries and well.... anything they can reach that don't conform with their bizarre anti-reality vision.
They've started rewriting the people they couldn't completely get rid of. Not only Roald Dahl (not a right winger, but my kids liked his YAs particularly Fantastic Mr. Fox when they were in elementary) and Agatha Christie (among many others) but also Don Rosa's Disney comics have come under the re-write sentence, which is worse than burning, because it distorts the past, so people will think they know it and know only lies.
They're even attacking statues and plaques, because anything in history, anything REAL in culture is a threat to their nekulturny views.
In fact, because their views keep changing and they demand you forget the past ever existed (hey, morons, 1984 was not a manual) they must continuously rewrite the past to conform with current views. This means they can't tolerate history.
Because they can't carry a story in a bucket, they must destroy all writing that can.
Because they think what causes people to consider and think (and sometimes disagree. As much as I love Heinlein, I'm sorry he fell for Margaret Mead's hoax) when they read a good novel, they are sure there are mind-viruses and therefore this infective literature must be destroyed.
Because they no longer can see reality through their just-so stories or perhaps just their terror of being thrown out of the in group, they have become convinced that our "leaders" are somehow hypnotizing us, and not that we're believing reality over our lying eyes.
In the end result, and even if -- as far as I know, but I pay so little attention to TV I wouldn't know -- they aren't enthralled by the endless, meaningless soap opera that consumed people in Farenheit 451, they have made their own culture as transitory, as meaningless, as unappealing as that endless soap opera.
Our culture is shaky. I don't like that we rest on Amazon for distribution, particularly since, like most of the tech enthralled of government money, they go crazier by the month. (Though to be fair, some of it is just "brilliant ideas.")
I also think that to reach the larger culture, which thanks to our craptastic schools has trouble reading well enough to read for pleasure, we're going to need movies, and for that we need better tech to compensate for the lack of deep pockets. We also need less explicit preaching, but that's something else. And the tech is coming along, just if you're someone who can, please work on hurrying it up.
And we need more culture-makers on every level, from art to music. And we need them not to preach and not to become a mirror of the left, but to make genuinely good art.
Trust the woman whose would-be-fluffy space regency will probably qualify (though who knows if it will even be nominated. I'm not campaigning this far out) for a Prometheus, your beliefs will come through. Don't worry about that.
Even maimed, just starting to be able to put stuff out and work freely as we are, we have more culture than they do. You can only call us nekulturny if you think all culture is on the left.
And that becomes more difficult every day. Even explicitly leftist writers are coming under fire because.... well, they wrote more than 20 years ago and they SOMEHOW the current left can't understand, captured the lightening in a bottle of good story. Therefore, they must somehow have mind virus. Making it worse, they also dared -- DARED -- not to explicitly support ideas the left itself never considered before recently. (Like trans. Or the idea that we must discriminate racially to stop racial discrimination. Or--) So they must be memory-holed. Along with all the past.
So the left has no culture. The left has gone Fahrenheit 451 and takes great pleasure in burning.
Go and read as widely as you can. Collect the classics of genre and of mainstream in their original form. If you can bring out forgotten, our of copyright classics in paper so others can collect it. Oh, and memorize if you can. (I can't anymore.) After all that is the ultimate repository. (I recommend the founding documents. You know why.)
And go and create. Go and write, and draw, and paint, and sing. Go make culture that stands on the shoulders of the giants of Western Civ and doesn't piss -- or axe -- downwards.
The future of humanity depends on it.
And the future is ours to win.
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