A little bored with the new critical consensus on Substack

Banned Books Week, Hasan Minhaj, "stolen valor" and, finally, Edmund Spenser

Hello friends. I realized I’d been remiss in not celebrating the biggest holiday of the year for a queer YA writer—Banned Books Week. This is the week where we speak out against book bannings and whatnots. I’ve always been a bit of a book banning skeptic. The numbers of books banned seemed quite low, when distributed across hundreds of thousands of schools and libraries. But there’s certainly been a noticeable uptick in book bannings, with the still-low number rising by quite a bit. In this, statistics on book bannings are like those for hate crimes: you assume that you’re getting only a tiny fraction of the total number, but that trends within that fraction reflect trends within the broader universe.

Moreover, I am positive that the potential for being banned will affect book ordering, not just at the school level, but at bookstores as well. You can’t ban a book from a bookstore, but you can certainly protest to the owner, and they’re quite likely to take the wishes of their community into account. I have a proposal for another YA novel out on submission with kidlit editors, and I get the sense they’re holding their breath to see how this wave of book bannings has affected sales.

My perspective is that parents are allowed to protest whatever books they want, but their reason for doing it is essentially homophobic. They want to terrorize kids and make them realize being gay isn’t okay. And I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to do. Moreover, recent laws instituting speech codes in public primary and secondary schools have been interpreted as prohibiting books that contain certain speech, which seems like a first amendment violation—though God knows if our current courts will see it as such.

I’ll note that my books have never, to my knowledge, been banned. I just don’t think they’re popular enough! So I can’t claim that the issue personally affects me.

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Lately I’ve felt rather frustrated and bored with the critical consensus on Substack—it amounts to a skepticism about new things and a trust in things from the early 20th century, whether that’s formalist critique, modernism, art for art’s sake, or any of that other stuff. And that’s fine, I suppose, but a little dull. The reason we left behind the old things is they began to seem rather passionless and sterile. I think one of the exciting things about the neo-reaction crowd is that they impugn the Enlightenment and all of its fruits, which just feels very new.

The center-left and center-right critic had an easy time of it during the last ten years, when the old things felt like they were under attack. Now that the attack has receded, what’s left? Are there any new avenues for discussion, anything we haven’t heard a million times before?

As a critic, I have certain reliable techniques, one of them is a retreat into the individual and phenomenological—what does this thing look like from the standpoint of the human being experiencing it.

I think book bans are interesting because the rhetoric is meant to evoke Nazi book burnings. It’s meant to create a “this could happen here” vibe. But there’s a big difference between parents using their social pressure to limit access to a book, and a totalitarian fascist movement burning that book in the streets.

Lately I’ve been hearing the term ‘stolen valor’ quite frequently. Until now my main referent had been the Stolen Valor Act that made it illegal to wear military decorations you hadn’t been awarded. But I’ve been seeing the term pop up quite a bit lately, usually in reference to somebody claiming some experience that they hadn’t really experienced in quite the right way. For instance, this article about Hasan Minhaj uses the term in reference to him fabricating racist incidents to use in his standup. Or, I don’t think anyone used this term for her, but there was that Penn student who lost her Rhodes scholarship because she’d written about being in the foster system, and hadn’t mentioned that her abusive mom was a wealthy radiologist who’d sent her to private schools. It was clear she was using the term “foster kid” to evoke a range of negative experiences that she hadn’t really experienced (although in my opinion she didn’t outright lie, and she stayed well within the line of what’s allowable in a personal statement).

I’m just allergic to any sort of squabbling over authenticity. Like, things aren’t bad because they’re like other bad things, and they’re not bad because they really happened to me—they’re bad because they’re bad. It should’ve been possible for Minhaj to just say, yeah all that stuff didn’t happen to me, it was just jokes for my comedy (the reason he didn’t is because his material wasn’t that funny and the act wouldn’t really work without the claim to authenticity). And it should be possible to be like, these book bans aren’t Nazi stuff—they’re not even really bans, to be honest—but they’re still bad. They aren’t bad on free speech grounds; they are bad because they are cruel. Because banning books about queer kids doesn’t make people not be queer; it just makes them feel sadder and more ashamed of being queer.

Similarly, I think it’s a bit much to expect a PoC writer or thinker to literally embody the wrongs that they oppose. Like, if a PoC had experienced the apex of racism, they wouldn’t be there to speak up about it. They would’ve been erased, professionally. The very fact that you know what they think is evidence that they’re more powerful than you. So, it’s just very difficult for them to honestly make the claim that they’ve had it hard, race-wise, unless it’s paired with the implicit claim that they are just so good and so brilliant that they were able to overcome everything.

But that doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist, no? And who is entitled to speak about it if not people who know how it works in their own community? This constant search for authenticity is just absurd. If something exists, we ought to be able to prove empirically that it exists (as we can with racial disparities). Nobody argues that there aren’t racial disparities, and many of the people who argue that those racial disparities aren’t a result of racism do so by, rather comically, invoking racism themselves! “Black people aren’t discriminated against, they are just inherently inferior on a cultural or biological level” is not a winning argument against the fact of racism. It’s like this recent article on why misogyny doesn’t exist, which patiently explained that women are inherently less likely to be brilliant than men.

Of course, many people do believe Black people are inferior. This is what they must believe, in order to maintain their worldviews. I realized this recently while looking into scientific racism. If you believe that racial disparities in intelligence are the cause of racial disparities in wealth, income, achievement, etc, then you must also, rather necessarily, believe that intelligence is a prime determinant of wealth, income, and achievement in our current society. But since people who believe in scientific racism are often also critical of our current elite, doesn’t their theory fall apart? Shouldn’t our current elite be genetically superior to the rest of the population? And if that isn’t true, then how can racial disparities in intelligence cause racial disparities in income and social status? It simply doesn’t make sense. But I realized they don’t genuinely believe the world is fair and that the most intelligent people succeed—they just think Black people are stupid, which lets them wipe the issue of race off the table. They don’t need to think about race or worry about fixing racial disparities, because Black people are stupid. It’s like in Aristotle, he says that a city must aim towards the common good…of its citizens, by which he means those able to hold office and participate in public affairs. Women and slaves don’t count. Scientific racism is just a way of excepting Black people from the common good, so you can excuse a society that doesn’t operate for their benefit.

It’s strange how limited a conception scientific racists and misogynists have of mankind’s capabilities. They think everything about our biological capacities is revealed in our present circumstances. They cannot imagine that human beings might have capacities that are suppressed by our surroundings. Like, women have a capacity for scientific brilliance that was suppressed by lack of contraception and high maternal mortality. Some thinkers sort of knew, or suspected, that women were intellectually the equal of men, but many dismissed it out of hand. Aristotle is full of talk about how women can’t be real citizens, and women are more like slaves or beasts of burden than they are like men.

Is it stolen valor to see in yourself all the women who couldn’t, and still can’t, achieve their goals? Personally, I mourn all the people, of every race and sex, who can’t sell books because the market is simply too dumb, too philistinical, or because they’re unconnected middle-class nobodies who don’t live in New York. It’s a very heavy feeling, all the unfairness in the world. I think under the new consensus, you’re simply supposed to swallow it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s unfixable, I don’t know. I know it’s not art’s job to fix the world, anyway.

But, on a phenomenological level, that heaviness, that feeling of life’s unfairness, is at the root of the concept of stolen valor. I can well understand the desire to embody the full richness of the world. Success is such a homogenizing factor—no matter what your social background, after you’ve gone through the grinder of X college and Y career track, you come out looking and sounding the same—and it’s difficult to make art without to some extent reversing that process and imagining, “What if I’d turned out a different way?”

I’m a bit of a panpsychist. I don’t think we’re unique at all. We’re all the same crackling energy, shoehorned into some particular form. When we’re alone, when we’re freed of our social role, we return to that primordial state, unless we work to keep ourselves penned up. I think from that ur-state, we can see the beauty in particularity—without it, life would be dull. And I think precisely because we sense how contingent our form is, we also feel, I could monkey with it here or there, I could change, alter my story, do this and that, and what’s the harm? And I’m not sure there is any, after all. Is there any harm in calling it Banned Books Week—in kicking up a fuss, in getting worked up over what is, essentially, a small petty cruelty? Probably not. It’s something to do, something to while the hours away.

At the same time, I get reports from

Erin Reed

each day about some new law targeting transgender people, and it’s a bit horrific. In a way, it’s odd, because being trans is so un-revolutionary, so dull. There’s literally nothing to talk about. It’s just a phenomenon—one that opens up some interesting questions about the nature of sex and gender—but one with little practical implication for society, given that legal distinctions between men and women have been practically erased. And these laws are so cruel and so without merit, so clearly driven by bigotry, that it feels tedious to remark upon them.

Do I want people to think I am oppressed? Is that stolen valor? I don’t know. I think people understand, more or less, the exact contours of my oppression. I am afraid to visit Florida. I am worried my next books will unleash a flood of anti-trans harassment. But otherwise I am relatively safe. It’s scary, in the abstract, to think that there is a political movement dedicated to my eradication as a trans person (something that I would equate with death), and I do worry somewhat about national laws targeting gender-affirming care (what if estrogen got the mifeprestone treatment, for instance). But lots of things are scary. I don’t expect anyone to care about me in particular—I just assume that if they have a brain, they know these laws are morally wrong. Not because it is wrong per se to worry about our kids, but because in this particular case, the laws are driven by fear of gender-bending rather than by true evidence of harm.

Is there art to be made about this? Yes, but I doubt it will be made. It’s too real and potent of an issue—I tried to sell a proposal about a trans teen living stealth in a town considering a bathroom ban, and my editor—genderqueer themself—turned it down as being too intense.

It is a bit odd to return to a new, much calmer consensus at exactly the moment when I and people like me are most afraid. It reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s speech: “A thousand days trapped in a balloon”

What is my single life worth?

Is it worth more or less than the fat contracts and political treaties that are in here with me? Is it worth more or less than good relations with a country which, in April 1991, gave 800 women 74 lashes each for not wearing a veil; in which the 80-year-old writer Mariam Firouz is still in jail, and has been tortured; and whose Foreign Minister says, in response to criticism of his country's lamentable human rights record, "International monitoring of the human rights situation in Iran should not continue indefinitely . . . Iran could not tolerate such monitoring for long"?

You must decide what you think a friend is worth to his friends, what you think a son is worth to his mother, or a father to his son. You must decide what a man's conscience and heart and soul are worth. You must decide what you think a writer is worth, what value you place on a maker of stories, and an arguer with the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.

But is it stolen valor to mention Rushdie? After all, there is no fatwa against me! Probably it is. But what’s the harm? We all know what I am and what he was, and exactly what I fear.

I think what is fearful to me about the new consensus is that if artistic quality and progressive politics are de-linked, then there is no longer any need for people like me. The world can survive without our voice, just as it got along for thousands of years without the voice of women. There is no inherent reason, based upon the quality of the art, to pick fairness. Given that there are always winners and always losers, and that it’s difficult to separate the winners and losers on the basis of talent (something I, and I think most people, tend to believe), why should people like me be allowed to win at all? Why allow any women to win? Why allow any PoC? If all you care about is art and art’s quality, then there’s no particular reason, really. It feels intuitively wrong that large classes of people should be shut out, and I expect that intuition to remain, but that’s exactly the work that scientific racism and sexism do—they erase our intuition that everyone has equal capabilities. They allow us to feel good about excluding some people.

I’ve scorned a lot of identity politics as being about “fighting for our slice of the pie”. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to divide up the pie, personally, so that each race and gender cross-section gets their own little bit. Better to either make more pie for everyone, or to give equal pie to everyone as an individual. But with the fading of identity politics, I also see that it gave a real immediacy to national issues. It forced people to care about each group and sub-group, made sure nobody was rendered invisible. It kept us separate, but together, in a way. It felt very safe and nice to know that having certain opinions about trans issues was the only way to progress in the arts—I’ll certainly miss that part of the enforced consensus, though I get that, perhaps, it was necessary to jettison it to keep the balloon afloat.

I think my broader question under the new consensus is, “What is my role? What is my own project?” I started this blog as a center-left take on the Great Books. What can I write now that’s not either:

• A tedious linkage between the Great Books and an issue of the day (“Here’s what Aristotle says about loneliness!”);

• A village explainer series of articles about individual authors (“Here’s why Thucydides is worth your time!”); or

• Culture-war clickbait (“Here’s what woke people don’t get about Kant’s purported racism!”)

My basic point of view is that these books are worth your time, and that a lay reading of the Great Books can be productive, both in terms of wisdom and enjoyment. I also decided relatively early on to abandon any attempt to project expertise: I don’t have a PhD, I don’t know everything about literature, and I haven’t even read every one of these books I’m supposedly defending.

Within those contours, what is it interesting for me to do? The only answer I can think of is that I need to be guided by the specificity of the books themselves. Like right now I am listening to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which is perhaps the last of the major allegorical romances (allegories and dream-visions were very popular middle-English forms, but grew progressively less popular in early modern times). I’ve been listening to this book for days but haven’t written about it at all! Shaaaaaame. Shame on me!

It’s just hard to imagine that lots of people want to read about Edmund Spenser. I don’t even want to read about him! I am just listening to him because I am curious: he used to be in a triad along with Shakespeare and Milton, but he’s since fallen out of fashion. Maybe there’s something to be said about curiosity? Yeah that’s probably the ticket.

I think ultimately what interests me is the reading journey itself—the way we approach different books, and how they shape our identity and worldview. I like how reading the Great Books is essentially a very middlebrow, very uncool project, and what it means to have this relationship with literature that’s not really structured by fashion or social cachet.

Let’s do something with that for a while, perhaps. But let’s do it next week, because this post seems just about done.