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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26186 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending.

I'm reminded here of a Tanner Greer piece at City Journal I read recently, on the popularity of dystopian YA novels (one of the many pieces drawn upon in an effortpost I'm currently mentally composing, involving Weberian rationalization, software “eating the world,” “computer says ‘no’,” Jonathan Nolan TV series, “Karens” wanting to talk to a manager, the TSA, Benjamin Boyce interviewing Aydin Paladin, and the Butlerian Jihad):

This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters.

The resonance these stories have with the life of the twenty-first-century American teenager is obvious. The stories are, as perceptive film critic Jonathan McAlmont observes, “very much about living in a world where parents discuss things out of earshot.” The protagonists all struggle “to perform the role that grownups have assigned [them], despite the fact that [they] are still coming to terms” with their own identity and purpose. Teenage frustration with a lack of agency is the fuel that propels Anglophone pop culture. The prewar imagescape of these novels supplies extra emotional resonance, styling the problem of out-of-date authority as a holdover from a stuffier, more restrictive past. For the hero of a YA tale, this general problem would be resolved in the final, climactic battle with the powers that be. In his or her quest for victory, the protagonist would journey from pawn to player. There are few transformations for which the modern teenager yearns more.

And yet, these stories also increasingly resonate with modern adults as well:

This obsession is grounded in experience. It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. Bearing the brunt of a recession we did not cause, facing disastrous wars the stakes of which were unclear at best, the citizens of the liberal West spent the last two decades nursing the wounds of lost agency. This loss extends past grand politics. A series of studies have traced this process in the United States. Increasingly, Americans “bowl alone”: the social clubs, civic societies, and congregations that once gave normal people meaningful social responsibilities have declined significantly. Most issue-oriented action groups that remain are staffed by professionals who seek only money from their members. As a growing number of Americans live in crowded cities, government becomes more remote and less responsive to any individual’s control—a problem exacerbated by the increasingly national cast of American politics. More important still, one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing.

For the most part, the citizens of the West have accepted this. They have learned to comply with expert directives. They have learned to endure by filing complaints. They have learned to ask first when faced with any problem: “Can I speak to the manager?” They have accustomed themselves to life as a data point.

…

Yet if these novels speak to the sum of our anxieties, they are a poor guide to escaping them. In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it. They depict greatness as a thing to be selected, not striven, for. This fantasy is well fit for an elite class whose standing is decided by admissions boards, but a poor guide for an elite class tasked with actually leading our communities.

The key part that stood out to me was the final two paragraphs:

Yet outside of the modern fairy realm, power is not given, but created. The morality of the twenty-first-century fairy tale is in fact a road map to paralysis. Its heroes begin as the playthings of manipulative and illegitimate authorities, their goodness made clear by their victimhood. But faced with this illicit order, nothing can be done: even rebellion can be trusted only to unwilling rebels. Our fairy tales imagine a world where only those who do not want power are deemed fit to use it. Translate that back to reality, and we are left with a world where all power is, and will always be, deemed illegitimate. No magic curses justify the power of our managerial class; ultimately, their legitimacy rests on how well they wield it.

In the stories of the modern fairy realm we see the seeds of stagnation. Protesters who occupy Zuccotti Park without the faintest notion of what their occupation should accomplish, political parties that seize all branches of the government without a plan for governing, Ivy League students pretending that they are not, in fact, elite—all of this flows from a culture that can articulate the anxieties of the overmanaged but cannot conceive of a healthy model of management. We cannot suffer ourselves to imagine righteous ambition even in our fantasies. Responsible leadership is not possible even in our fairy world. Little wonder so few strive to realize it in the real one.

We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them. And it's the latter that really stands out. It's not just that we seem to fear the idea of having someone else in charge of us — though we submit readily to Hannah Arendt's rule of Nobody, "a tyranny without a tyrant" — but that we're perhaps even more afraid of stepping up and taking charge ourselves, of bearing responsibility for that power and its consequences. We find it better to be a human cog in the machine, able to say "I don't make the rules, I just follow them," than to take ownership of the exercise of power.

(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)

(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)

Dictator? Dictators are a really bad thing.

Leader? I can definitely imagine. I would also happily read it, as long as it is not played as tragedy or playing it as tragedy without realizing it (by whitewashing dictatorship).

We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them.

I work in a startup, and know my CTO and CEO on a personal basis. The problem with personal leadership, as with family-owned restaurants, is that the quality is so variable. We've run through 3 CEOs in the time I've been at the company, each notably flawed in different ways, and my current CTO is a competent but over-promoted nepotist who hoards control and seems to believe that only people who grew up in his particular part of France can be trusted. My current manager is literally his old friend from university. This in an Asian company with employees from all corners of the globe.

Personal venting aside, my point is that although it’s probably better on average to work for someone you know, don’t romanticise a world where your quality of life depends purely on your personal relationships. Especially since we’re all weirdoes ;)

Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever. 2), no, although there was a tv series loosely based on a fictionalized account of the life of Bashar Al-Assad which played him sympathetically(this was before the war), although I can’t remember the name of it.

But more to the point, modern literature is allergic to leadership and agency because the protagonists are figures to which things happen, and not figures who make things happen- you said as much- but it’s worth emphasizing that this is a relatively recent change. The Lord of the Rings has its fair share of protagonists going out and shaping the world in which they live. So does other older fantasy like the Belgariad. Compare to Harry Potter and Twilight, where protagonists don’t necessarily do nothing, but neither do they take a particularly active role in shaping the narrative. Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen are content to be manipulated by more powerful figures in a way that Roald Dahl protagonists and the kids of Chronicles of Narnia aren’t.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

This is a observation (or complaint?) I've seen about modern literature and particularly comic books and comic book inspired film. There are proactive characters shaping the world according to their will. Those are villains. There are reactive status quo preservers. Those are the protagonists.

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

This is exactly my point. And I'd agree that while it's only recently that it's become so widespread, I think there's a case that, per Max Weber, the roots go back over a century, possibly to the "Enlightenment" itself.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

Naruto is an extremely noncentral example of a child soldier.

Yeah, reading that, my mind went to the Gundam franchise, but I don't think any series from that IP comes close to that description.

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