you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

So I have been thinking a lot about MammothFail (short version: Patricia Wrede writes a fantasy YA about settlers in the magical American West -- having eliminated the Native Americans altogether. People, naturally, find this problematic. Lois McMaster Bujold says some very stupid things on the internet...)

Anyway, having read lots of analysis and quotes from the link above, these are my two (quasi-original, or at least I haven't seen them completely put out this way) thoughts:

(1) Wrede's decision to write about a magical America sans indigenous people has nothing to do with how "hard" it would be to write Native Americans in a non-offensive way. It has everything to do with how impossible it would be to write the whites in a non-completely-unsympathetic way. We don't think about it, and our (or at least my) history books are all about the heroic and intrepid pioneers, (and I grew up on the Little House books too) but settling the West (or any of the Americas, really) was imperialism. It was moving onto land already occupied by a civilization, and is not separable from the displacement and extermination of that civilization.

I hadn't really thought about that until this internetsplosion. I think that it is generally recognized that one cannot talk about e.g. the antebellum South unproblematically. The hoopskirts and rolling hills and peach orchards may be very nice, but it is not possible to write a novel about the planter class and their lives with their slaves in the background and not have it be read either as racist or as a indictment of the society with a dark and ironic undercurrent or something.

The same should be true of the pioneer novel, really. And in this respect, Wrede's choice to eliminate the "problem" is trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Or more bluntly: to avoid white guilt while still having her settlers-in-the-west story.

(2) One of the things that has come up in many of the posts and discussions I've read the last few days is the prevalence of the pioneer narrative in, esp. science fiction. That may be the expression of the human desire for the frontier or whatever, but it's also the ideal, unmessy colonization narrative: wide-open spaces with no strings attached in the form of people already living there. (Ironic that LMB's first Vorkosigan novel is set on exactly such a planet: unpeopled and ready to be contested by "advanced" galactic civilizations?) It's certainly much more squicky when done an alternate-earth, where the peoples who are getting eliminated to make it easier for the Europeans are precisely those whom the Europeans really did try to eliminate in order to make it easier for themselves. But how much of this more general fantasy/sci-fi plot is essentially doing the same thing in a less obviously bad way?

Also, I really hate to bring this up, because LMB is one of my favorite authors, in spite of her rather unadvised comments recently, and because I particularly like her Chalion books, but her fantasy is a pretty obvious earth-analogue that also functions by removing the inconvenient and guilt-inducing parts of history: a transparently Reconquest Spain where the fake!Moors are conveniently barbarous and imperialist and the *fake!Jews are conveniently not there? There is something a little bit weird about fantasizing Isabella and Ferdinand and then removing the problematic aspects of their careers.

I had been having an urge to read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" again, so last night I ditched Plato for Jonathan Edwards. I think it is because it is finally autumny out, and I always associate fall with Thanksgiving and hence with Puritans.*

Now I've been reading variously from his sermons, and, it's all in the same very powerful and very creepy vein. Even the more cheerful, or at least, more encouraging ones seem to be setting up the listeners for misery. For example, he writes (says? -- these may be through-composed, so to speak, but they are meant for performance and are certainly written at the listener. Were they all given, or did he write some sermons that he never gave? I should actually do some research.) that if you are touched by Grace, you will become wise and prudent; that in fact, it can happen in a sort of overnight transformation from foolishness to plain wisdom. On the one hand, this would tend to promote a certain kind of pretense of prudence and godliness, but on the other hand, an individual would be bound to realize or suspect that s/he was only pretending, and so I can't help imagine New England villages full of agonized hypocrites. (I suppose Hawthorne thought so.) It is at any rate easy to see where the accusation of "precise, whimsical and hypocrites" would tend to come from.

Or these bits, from the rather thrillingly entitled "Eternally Undone by One Thought of the Heart"

"God may Leave Persons that he Punishes by forever witholding his Conv. Grace from them. Some he in his sovereignty Continues under means of Grace or under some strivings of his Spirit so as to Put them upon seeking Conversion, and yet he Punishes their sin by forever denying them success to Means and to their seeking. … [S]ome may seek Repent and pardon Carefully and with tears and yet God may forever withold it from them in wrath…"

"Every sin as we have observed already deserves the Penalty of the Law which is death and the Curse of God on this Life and that which is to Come, and therefore Every Particular sin and Even Every sin of thought deserves this Curse, viz. being Eternally Left of God to Continue in sin and to Perish at Last. If it were so that there were any men that never had Committed but one sin, God is not bound to such a man not to Inflict this Punishment, viz. Eternally to Leave him without Repentence and Pardon. God has Reserved his sovereignty to himself in this matter he Remains arbitrary."

Generally, I do not like opinions of the form "I can't believe in a God who would/does X." Because generally, the idea of a god is that he was there before you were, and is a whole lot more powerful than you are, and if he happens to exist, it's just too bad for you if you don't like the way he does things. And for someone who does believe in such a god, presumably the above are considered to be true. But, in an ethical religion, there can, I suppose, be a question of whether the god is acting justly, or in accordance with What Is Right.

But I don't think that even that is a legitimate objection to Mr. Edwards' theology. His god does seem to be acting in accordance with Justice. (Although, if God created the world, and is the one constant thing in it, is there any absolute standard not created by Him? That sort of pokes a big hole in the God-approves-of-it-because-it-is-good and not it-is-good-because-God-approves-of-it argument, so much for Socrates/Plato, then!) It's simply hard for me to imagine living in a belief system where it is only a matter of time before the hand opens and you tumble down to the infernal eternal, particularly when the one possibility you have for an out, viz. (to borrow a phrasing) Repentance and Pardon, might be denied to you in spite of your best efforts at it. And this kind of system is, inevitably, one where you are set up to lose.

Certainly, I have a kind of gleefully morbid interest in this kind of belief-system for that reason. I think that I also find it fascinating because it is such a "pure form" of religion. It lays out an unpleasant and borderline hopeless situation with very little to comfort of buck up the individual believer. But it still succeeds, sort of, although I suppose this strict Calvinist kind of worldview isn't too common anymore.

I also wonder if I am thinking a lot about sin today because I fudged a practice-room card against the possibility that my quartet wouldn't be able to find an open room. In the end, we didn't need it, but I am still feeling like a bit of a terrible rule-breaker.


*I do know that the colonists with whom Thanksgiving is concerned were by and large Congregationalists/Separatists and not Puritans.