Is literature a false God?

Feb 06, 2025

As a child, Johanna would endlessly reread a series of novels about a heroic space captain who went to foreign planets and kidnapped innocent aliens to force them to crew her ship.

Then, with a ship manned almost entirely by these flogged and surveiled aliens, this captain—Helen Handler of the Royal Eretanian Navy—would engage in desperate fights against the depredations of the League of Free Peoples, a group devoted to breaking the bonds of interstellar imperialism.

Of course it was more complicated than that. In the Helen Handler novels, the Eretanian Empire—the good Empire—was capitalist and liberal, and it brought civilization and prosperity to these conquered people. And the evil side, the League of Free Peoples, professed democratic and egalitarian ideals, but actually this was only a cover for their own form of imperialism, where they would brutally conquer and extract wealth from subject planets to feed the hungry plebes of their capital planet.

So in these novels, both sides were imperialist, but one side had a genuine interest in uplifting alien races, and the other side didn't.

Captain Helen Handler felt a lot of sympathy for the aliens who crewed her ships. Much of the drama and pathos of these novels came from her relationship with Terpsichore, one of the very few alien officers in this navy. This Eretanized (i.e. civilized) alien believed that Eretania was the lesser of two evils, and he hoped to provide an example to aliens and to human beings alike that true cooperation was possible.

However, many of the aliens were sullen and resentful. They longed to break their chains. They believed in League propaganda, and the prospect of sabotage and mutiny was omnipresent on these ships. That prospect led in turn to a constant desire on the part of the Eretanians to flog and monitor and dominate the crewmen of these ships.

The very first book of the series sets the tone for the rest: in Hand Over Fist, Helen's ship is assigned to protect a rich Eretanian settlement in Terpsichore's home star system. She realizes that a League vessel is nearby, trying to stir up an alien revolt. She is outgunned and outmanned. The Commodore, her commander, orders her to evacuate the Eretanian colony and surrender Terpsichore's home planet to the league.

But then the Commodore is wounded by an angry Eretanian colonist who is upset that he's being asked to leave his home. As the commodore lies unconscious in sickbay, Captain Helen Handler quietly changes course, because she believes this system is too strategically important to abandon.

Her ship fights with all their missiles, all their guns, but one by one their offensive batteries are destroyed. The Commodore wakes up and tries to order an evacuation. The ship only has enough lifeboats for the Eretanians: the aliens will be left behind, in a ship that might blow up before the League can take it.

At this point, one of the alien sergeants—infected by League propaganda—begins a mutiny, so they can claim the available lifeboats. Violence breaks out onboard, and Helen makes a decision. She accelerates her vessel to ramming speed—the only way to destroy the opposing vessel. Even as she fights to retain control of her command, the vessel itself speeds inexorably to its doom.

Ultimately, she talks to the alien mutineers, and she reveals that this sergeant doesn't have their best interests at heart. The sergeant carries documents which proves that the League, when it takes control, plans to conscript vast numbers of these aliens and export them to foreign mines where conditions are harsh and lifespans are short.

She offers up the lifeboats to the mutineers, and she says, in her deep, husky voice:

"You can go, if you please, but this is your world down below us. Yes, it has some hundreds of thousands of my people, but it has hundreds of millions of yours. I know it is too much to ask that you die as slaves, but can I not ask you to stay and fight as free men? To fight, not for my sake, but for the sake of your families? This ship is yours, you have won this battle. Now what will you do with that victory? Will you turn and surrender yourselves to yet another foreign conqueror? Or will you fight, under a commander of your own race, to retain the freedom you’ve so recently won?

The aliens, led by Terpsichore, return to their stations. Freed from the flogging and oversight and electro-shock implants, they are able to work harder and better, and they repair the ship in record time. Gunnery and weapons systems perform at levels two or three times the typical projections for a vessel of this class. And in the last few minutes before the collision, the enemy ship breaks apart, and Handler is able to swerve clear of the wreckage, leaving her ship damaged, but intact.

Afterwards, as the sole remaining representative of Her Majesty’s Government in this system, she uses her authority to grant home rule to the planet below.

In subsequent books, Handler becomes a booster for the idea that they can only win this war if they harness the full ingenuity of their subject peoples. Each book tests this belief—why should enslaved and colonized people ever come to believe in the goodwill of those who hurt them?—but in each book, she proves that the core of Eretania is good. That her nation has done evil, but it is not inherently evil, and that they can only win this war by adhering to their highest principles.

As an adult, Johanna realized that these books were weird. The books did not shy away from discussing the brutality and contempt with which Eretanians treated their colonized people, and yet these books continually created a situation where those same conquered people were willing to reaffirm the essential goodness of their oppressors.

Within the world of the books, this made sense! The Eretanians actually ruled with a fairly light hand, compared to their opponents—something that was obvious to most educated aliens. And in this world, the Eretanians were genuinely ashamed of their Empire—they'd acquired it first out of fear of falling behind, and then out of fear of being invaded. As their subject peoples slowly prove themselves in battle, the people of Eretania become convinced that they can surrender this Empire voluntarily and become friends, linked by culture and trade, with the people they'd so lately ruled.

Lately Johanna has been thinking a lot about these books.

You see, Johanna lives in a country that's recently elected a government that is now attempting to actively persecute people like Johanna (i.e. people who have transitioned from male to female).

This government's intention is to completely erase the possibility of legal and medical transition. Within weeks of taking office, this government directed all government agencies to identify areas where they acknowledge the possibility of transition, and then to stop that acknowledgement. In the short term, this means the government has invalidated the passports of people like Johanna. Johanna is quite worried that if she loses her passport, she'll simply never be able to get a new one. Other women like Johanna who've applied for passport renewals have simply had their documents confiscated. These women are no longer able to leave the country.

For her part, Johanna is unsure whether her own passport will bear up under scrutiny. If a border patrol agent decided to take her passport, how would she get it back? She would have no recourse. This government has signaled that it is open season on people like her, and that they have no protection under the law.

And that's only in the first two weeks. More is coming.

Johanna is a writer. She writes online about literature. She generally eschews writing about contemporary politics.

This avoidance of politics is the result of some experiences over the last ten years. Essentially, for the last ten years, a culture has arisen in Johanna's country where, at any one time, there is a certain party line. And whoever speaks this party line gets upheld by authority. They get big book deals and awards and jobs and newspaper columns.

But the party line changes quite rapidly. Every three to four years, there is an entirely new party line, and if you don't change your opinions, then you lose everything you accumulated by following the old party line.

What's difficult is that each time the party line changes, there's usually some element of the new party line that's sensible and reasonable. For instance, ten years ago, the party line was that America incarcerated way too many people of color. Johanna hadn't thought much about this until then, but she was convinced by that idea. She continues to believe America incarcerates too many people of color. Let's call this party-line 'wokeness'.

Similarly, about three years ago, the party line changed again: everyone decided that too many authors were playing to the crowd, flattering the biases of their audiences, and writing simple, didactic novels that set up straw-men and knocked them down. Johanna also agreed with this. We can call this party-line 'aestheticism'.

Each change of party line begins with a good, true idea.

But...then the idea gets turned into a platform, and some people use that platform to get ahead. Suddenly, the true idea turns into a truism, and it starts being applied in all kinds of weird, inaccurate ways. For instance, when aestheticism became the new party line, it came with the concomitant notion that...books shouldn't have politics, and that you shouldn't discuss politics.

This didn't make sense. It never made sense to Johanna. She wrote a few articles about how actually a political book can be good, it just needs to have integrity. It needs to take the opposing side seriously.

However, the aesthete's party line was amplified, and turned into the idea that making political points in your fiction was somehow bad. That a person's writing shouldn't be political, it should be...something else? Beautiful?

In reality, the aesthetes all had very safe, reliable politics! They were all good liberals. They all believed in affirmative action and trans rights and ending the carceral state. They just didn't make those beliefs a major part of their writing. As a result, their writing started to seem a bit vacuous.

But it would be pointless to critique this group of people, because now the party line is changing again, and it’s unclear what the new program will be.

This new government was elected primarily on the basis of resentment against the kinds of people who get mainstream book deals and magazine jobs, and although most of Johanna's friends and colleagues aren't in the cross-hairs in the same manner as Johanna, they are all facing irrelevance.

What'll happen is that there will be a settlement. Some new people, associated with this right-wing movement, will come in, and they will start getting some of the spoils associated with victory. These right-wingers will be taken seriously by the New York Times and New Yorker, and they will get big-money podcast deals, and they will start institutes at major research universities, and hopefully that will placate the right-wing and give them a stake in the system. And the hope is that if you can make those people happy, then hopefully some left-liberal people will get to keep their jobs too.

This is already happpening. And everyone who see this happening calls it "the vibe shift."1

This is exactly what happened ten years ago. A lot of people made critiques of the system, calling it racist, and the system responded by giving them a lot of money and giving them a platform.

Now those people are out. And instead there were some new people, with some new critiques, and hopefully these new people would get co-opted in turn (only to be dumped ten years from now, of course, but nobody can see that far ahead).

Johanna has a lot of friends in the intelligentsia who are extremely preoccupied, whether they know it or not, with this process. When they write about "the vibe shift" they are essentially writing, "What is my own future? What is the future for people like me? Will I continue to be relevant?"

These people are asking, "Is there still room for me?"

It's unclear.

There's no room for woke people anymore. They're out. But maybe there's still room for the aesthetes. They need to find a way to make themselves useful to the new regime somehow. They're trying out various lines, trying to see what resonates. Johanna wishes them well in that endeavor—everyone has to earn a living.

You might ask, is there any room in this process for integrity?

Of course there is! But...it's just hard to point to a given person and say, "This person has integrity."

If a writer in 2025 goes on Bluesky and starts posting about how America is sliding into fascism, and wonders why aren't we marching in the street, is it because they genuinely believe that to be true? Or is it because they initially rose to prominence in a time when saying that kind of thing could get you attention, get you a book deal, get you a large following, and now they're slow to realize that times have changed and that they won't be rewarded anymore for speaking out?

And, on the other side, if someone like Johanna abstains from speaking out publicly against the government is that because they're a sell-out?

Or is it because she realizes that this new government really feeds on the angst and sorrow of people like Johanna. That many of the people in this government, and many of the people who support this government, are really in it just to hurt people like Johanna. So by denying them those expressions of panic and sorrow, she feels like she's sapping this movement of its energy.

In Johanna's opinion, this right-wing government will eventually be destroyed by its own internal contradictions. This is a government that has no interest in governing. It has no interest in creating policies that can be applied well or fairly. It has no interest in doing things that might create safety or prosperity even for its own constituencies. And eventually the people who support this government will realize that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

The people who supported this government didn't like being told they were racist or sexist. They didn't like feeling as if the country wasn't theirs. And they enjoy how this government is making them feel as if they have control of their country again.

But...that's not the only thing these people want. They also want peace and prosperity. And this government cannot provide those things. Moreover, at the end of the day, everyone will still be living together in the same country. They might not like each other, but they do need to cooperate.

Johanna has always had a fondness for her country—the one where she was born. She has always thought this country was more good than bad. Fundamentally, there is a limit to what government can do in this country. This is something her own side discovered recently, and now it’s something the other side will get to discover as well. People need to work together and cooperate. The people who have elected this government have some vague idea that transgendered people will somehow disappear, because the entire phenomenon was underwritten by the liberal elite.

However, that is not true. Transgender people are a real, durable entity, and they won't simply go away, even if they are stripped of all legal recognition. Eventually, people will realize that legal recognition of trans people was exactly that: it was recognition of a phenomenon that clearly existed. That legal recognition arose, fifty or sixty years ago, because it was simply easier to recognize that it is, in fact, possible to transition, and to create ways for people to transition more easily and with less friction.

Johanna understands that her only job is to endure. That her opponents have bought into a delusion—the idea that they can wish a group of people out of existence—and that eventually this delusion will come into contact with reality, and it will evaporate.

In the meantime, Johanna has been wondering how she ought to conduct herself as a writer.

She loves classic literature. She reads these books for their own sake. She does not regard classic literature as 'white' culture or anything like that. She's reading Herman Melville right now—it's incredible. This whole post was inspired by Herman Melville's early books, Typee, Omoo, and Whitejacket. Johanna loves the ways that Melville prods at the assumptions of the kinds of naval fiction that Johanna read as a kid. Melville is so anti-authority, anti-establishment. Melville does not see the discipline of the naval vessel as being an inherently good thing—he sees it as dehumanizing. And yet...he doesn't necessarily have a program for how to run it better! He's only a lowly seaman: he's not a captain, he's not in charge.

It's such a deep, rich humane voice. Johanna loves it. Reading these books has truly made her see all of these naval stories (which she loved growing up) in a completely different way.

So obviously Johanna will continue to read the Great Books, read the Great Authors, etc—that poses no problems for her whatsoever. There is no world where Herman Melville or James Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain are her enemies.

But Johanna does have questions. She wonders if it really makes sense in this moment to write essays about Herman Melville. Johanna is embedded in an ecosystem of people who would reflexively say, "Art is everything! Art is life! Literature endures!" Johanna understands that. She agrees with that.

But it's one thing to say those things, and it's another thing to truly believe it.

It’s only worthwhile to write about literature if: a) it’s your livelihood; or b) you genuinely find it to be life-sustaining. Since writing about literature is not her livelihood, then her posts on this subject can only occur if she finds them to be a vital and necessary use of her time.

And yes, with her words and her thoughts she can say that is true. But…in the months to come, will she actually do the twenty hours of reading per week that is necessary to put out this newsletter? Will she actually sit down and read Moby Dick? Will she actually take the time to form her thoughts into a post that has some value, some light to shed on the subject? And, moreover, will she continue to do these things even though she understands that a large portion of her audience is not particularly concerned with trans rights?

She is not at all sure she will. Right now, she’s about to finish reading his second book, Omoo, and her mind is absolutely blank. She has no idea what, if anything, she can say about the book. This is not uncommon. She has read many books that she couldn’t think to write about.

But it’s also possible that her mind is simply preoccupied with other things, and she will begin to write more and more about those other things. If that happens, then literature will, in fact, have proven to be a false God. It will, in fact, have proven unable to sustain her.

Johanna understands at this moment that you can worship a God your entire life without knowing if that God is actually able to sustain you in times of need. Her God is reading and writing about literature. There is a lot of rhetoric surrounding the life-sustaining properties of literature, but...is it actually there for you? Or is it a false God?

Johanna is fairly certain that literature is real. It's actually good, and that she will continue to read and write about it. But…she also finds it quite annoying the way that other people, who aren’t being persecuted by this government, frequently exhort her to fight and to believe and have faith. These people are obviously in a very different place from her mentally, and they don’t want her to fall apart, because, if she did, they would start to suspect that the God they worship, literature, is a false one.

The fact is, she is different from her friends. They have the option to ignore the current regime—she doesn’t.

This reminds her of one of the later Helen Handler novels: Hand To Mouth.

In this novel, the fifteenth, Admiral Handler is visiting the planet of her old friend, Terpsichore. The war is in its final stages, and Eretania is in the process of settling accounts with its empire. Terpsichore has been made Governor-General of his home planet, Daelinn. But he's being challenged by a fiery demagogue: Maradnok—the sergeant who led the mutiny in the first book.

Maradnok raises a militia and captures Terpsichore, putting him on trial for collaborating with Eretania, for cooperating with them to hold his fellow people in captivity, so they could be forced to fight a foreign war.

Dailinn is the planet that was under threat in the first book. This is the planet that Terpsichore thought he saved when he and Handler persuaded the crew to return to their stations. But now his people are telling him that actually he only prolonged their suffering. That, really, Eretania was the true oppressor.

When Handler and Terpsichore are locked up together, she tries to tell him that he has behaved justly. This is a conversation they've had many times throughout the series. In book after book, we’ve seen them reassure each other that peace and comity are right around the corner.

But this time the conversation goes differently:

"You cannot know," Terpsichore said. "We are different, you and I. We are not the same."
"Come now!" Handler said. "This is the old rhetoric that we used to decry! How we used to rail against this sort of language—this valorizing of the differences between sentient beings. Terpsichore, you cannot lose faith. You cannot lose faith."
"I have faith," he said. "But ultimately, what I did for my people must be subjected to the judgement of my people. Eretanian honors, Eretanian medals—these are meaningless."
"That is rank tribalism."
"You are no longer my Captain, Helen. And now the time has come to confess that I had doubts. I chose the Eretanian cause, but I was not certain."
"After all these years, are you truly engaging in such revisionism?"
"No, Helen. My choice was correct. I know that now. But I was not certain. If Eretania had been an iota less good, then I would ultimately have cursed my choice. If it had been an iota less good, then I would have been the man who led my people into slavery, rather than into freedom."

It's a small moment, and it's interrupted by a warning that the League has used this confusion to prepare a sneak attack. Terpsichore and Handler join together, rally the newly-fledged Dailinn navy, and beat back the attack.

The series remains ongoing: Terpsichore and Handler continue to go on adventures to this very day.

Johanna thought it would be a very funny ending to this piece if the author of the Helen Handler series was a Trump supporter, but when she went to investigate, she found that he’s expressed very few of his political views online, and in fact has more or less pulled away from the internet in recent years as a result of caring for a wife who has health problems. He continues, however, to publish Helen Handler novels at a steady, albeit reduced, pace, and Johanna wishes him all the best.

Afterword

As I'm sure you can tell, the Helen Handler series is made-up. It's inspired by two different series I loved as a kid, the Honor Harrington series (by David Weber) and the Seafort Saga (by David Feintuch).2 Both of these series essentially took C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower and put him in space.

Lately I've been reading a lot of Herman Melville, and it's quite fascinating to see, in this author, a very different take on the discipline of the navy. For Melville, navy discipline feels quite silly and arbitrary. Melville shipped out as a common sailor, not an officer, and although he was an educated person, he had an instinctive love for the ordinary man.

I will have to write more about Herman Melville later—I don't feel quite able to do justice to the three books of his I've read recently: Typee, Omoo, and Whitejacket. But I have been somewhat-inspired by his approach to social ills. It's clear that he thinks the way naval vessels are run is quite tyrannical. And he also thinks the way Europeans behave in the South Seas is very arbitrary and wrong. At the same time, he's not a pamphleteer, he's not out to right wrongs. He's just gonna tell it like it is. Moreover, Melville doesn't necessarily have a great idea of how to do things better. Can you actually run a ship on democratic principles? Melville doesn't really suggest such a thing is possible.

In the same way, I live in a world where there is a government that I don't like. This government is making decisions that have negative material implications for me, personally. I don't expect to persuade any of you that this government is bad. You all have opinions already about this government. But...I'm not going to pretend this government doesn't exist. I do think I'll mention it from time to time.

This post isn’t a call to action, it’s mostly just a test: I don’t think I can feel good writing for an audience that’s going to protest if I sometimes mention policies that have a negative impact on my own life.

Woman of Letters

Discussion about this post

Woman of Letters

Is literature a false God?

Afterword

Further Reading

Discussion about this post