The Political Compass
One of the places you should go every few weeks or so is The Political Compass. The reason that I mention it here is a long and tortuous one, but essentially, I think that it comes from reading SF and fantasy novels as political novels. It's interesting, for example, to look at Julian May's The Many-Coloured Land - the first book in the Saga of the Pleistocene Exile, and a book which presents an SF basis for European folktales - and speculate to what extent a Canadian perspective informs the author about how people ought to work together in a star-spanning community.
It's difficult to do the postmodern 'French thing' and say that narratives have no meaning except for the context that we create for them, and despite whatever meaning their authors intended. It's difficult because humanity insists on finding meaning, and on creating things on the back of their own perceptions of meaning. Like some great turtle supporting worlds, each person's biography subtly anchors the meaning of what they write; often, more so than the elephants on that turtle which are intermediaries between it and the world. Of course, in our present age, this includes teachers of literature, who for some reason persist in interpreting Shakespeare through Elizabethan lenses or worse, modern 20th/21st century eyes.
What then can one make of Tolkien's grand narrative, The Lord of the Rings? Is it based on a snapshot of the noble island race against their distant cousin who is attempting to grind the face of the world in the dust of history? Or is it just good vs evil, or what? I don't claim to know, but if Tolkien himself says it was not meant to be allegorical, we should take the man at his own word. Not that it isn't allegorical at all, but that he did not intend it to be. Is it possible then that it is unintentional allegory? No. I think that allegory requires deliberate intent; allos implies a side-by-side relationship, one of a high degree of congruence. But it is safe, I think, to say that Tolkien's culture and his education and all the aspects of his biography conspire to make his magnum opus something that nobody can imitate simply because they're not him.
So, what of the Political Compass? I think that it's possible for us to examine the underlying premises of any fantasy or SF novel and classify them according to any of a huge number of bipolar axes. But the Compass, which classifies by social axis (Fascist vs Libertarian) and economic axis (Laissez-Faire vs Controlled) is a useful start. i find it so because it is always amusing to read US authors in that light - they have awful issues about what 'Good' is about. Is it Law and Order, or is it Freedom and Individualism? I suspect that most of them think more in terms of the latter than the former, which is why the typical US press op-ed tends to heap scorn or disdain on countries like Singapore.
Yet when you look at people like Kerry, Bush and all the other people that US voters think of electing once every four years, you find that inevitably, they are less in favour of freedom and individualism and the free market than they claim to be. American leaders are at heart a little more Fascist, a little more in favour of central control than they let on. Whether Democrat or Republican, they who turn the wheel and look to windward all love to manipulate the economy and the lives of their citizens. Some are more obvious, some less. The more obvious ones, at least, are honest.
How did I score on the test? Economic Left/Right: -1.38; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.15. That makes me a slightly liberal person both socially and economically. Not much, but enough to be on the other side of the graph from most of America's politicians. Sigh... this will be a very long decade.
It's difficult to do the postmodern 'French thing' and say that narratives have no meaning except for the context that we create for them, and despite whatever meaning their authors intended. It's difficult because humanity insists on finding meaning, and on creating things on the back of their own perceptions of meaning. Like some great turtle supporting worlds, each person's biography subtly anchors the meaning of what they write; often, more so than the elephants on that turtle which are intermediaries between it and the world. Of course, in our present age, this includes teachers of literature, who for some reason persist in interpreting Shakespeare through Elizabethan lenses or worse, modern 20th/21st century eyes.
What then can one make of Tolkien's grand narrative, The Lord of the Rings? Is it based on a snapshot of the noble island race against their distant cousin who is attempting to grind the face of the world in the dust of history? Or is it just good vs evil, or what? I don't claim to know, but if Tolkien himself says it was not meant to be allegorical, we should take the man at his own word. Not that it isn't allegorical at all, but that he did not intend it to be. Is it possible then that it is unintentional allegory? No. I think that allegory requires deliberate intent; allos implies a side-by-side relationship, one of a high degree of congruence. But it is safe, I think, to say that Tolkien's culture and his education and all the aspects of his biography conspire to make his magnum opus something that nobody can imitate simply because they're not him.
So, what of the Political Compass? I think that it's possible for us to examine the underlying premises of any fantasy or SF novel and classify them according to any of a huge number of bipolar axes. But the Compass, which classifies by social axis (Fascist vs Libertarian) and economic axis (Laissez-Faire vs Controlled) is a useful start. i find it so because it is always amusing to read US authors in that light - they have awful issues about what 'Good' is about. Is it Law and Order, or is it Freedom and Individualism? I suspect that most of them think more in terms of the latter than the former, which is why the typical US press op-ed tends to heap scorn or disdain on countries like Singapore.
Yet when you look at people like Kerry, Bush and all the other people that US voters think of electing once every four years, you find that inevitably, they are less in favour of freedom and individualism and the free market than they claim to be. American leaders are at heart a little more Fascist, a little more in favour of central control than they let on. Whether Democrat or Republican, they who turn the wheel and look to windward all love to manipulate the economy and the lives of their citizens. Some are more obvious, some less. The more obvious ones, at least, are honest.
How did I score on the test? Economic Left/Right: -1.38; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.15. That makes me a slightly liberal person both socially and economically. Not much, but enough to be on the other side of the graph from most of America's politicians. Sigh... this will be a very long decade.
etched with acid at 1:47:00 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home