… or Help Destroy It. This essay was written in response to an article in Quillette entitled The Western Reinvented. Again.
If we really want to talk about the Western Reimagined we should talk about Firefly- and not just because of the sci-fi take on a classic genre. The are some who will argue that once one thinks of space as little more than a change of scenery, and draws equivalencies between the anti-corporatist ethos and the villainous cattle baron of yesteryear then it is simply a repackaging of an old genre for a new audience.
But this misses the consistent theme of government as a potential source of evil, especially in the light of the subsequent highly popular and cult classic movie Serenity. Here we see government doing evil in what it perceives is the pursuit of good, and as such, although Firefly lacks the literary genius of 1984 or the vision of Brave New World, it nonetheless belongs in the ranks of the most powerful futuristic sci-fi dystopias.
I mention all this because there are persistent rumours of Disney+ resurrecting the old brand. If it’s true, I do hope it isn’t woke. Whilst it might be OK for the Firefly character Inara Serra to champion the cause of a trans companion in an episode, making her trans would be tantamount to shoving gender ideology down the throats of 50% of Disney’s audience- one can only imagine the screenwriters arguing ‘Let’s stick it to the bigots!’ Maybe the core worlds went to war with the colonies because they had been usurped by an ‘authoritarian’ figure like Trump (who, it increasingly appears, really does believe quite committedly that the 2020 election was stolen). Again- it’s not enough to win the Culture Wars, we have to make sure they know we were right and they were wrong.
I mention all this, because we’ve recently seen rehashed and repackaged Sci Fi classics ruined by the types of committees who believe that if you stick a lesbian in the new Star Wars all lesbians will feel included and love it. That if there is the slightest bit of action in a movie, all the female characters have to be strident feminists who are kick ass babes and action heroines. And that every Black character has to deliver a brief soliloquy about racial injustice, even if the film happens to be set 500 years in the future. Such irrelevancies might tick boxes and make the higher ups at Disney feel secure in their fortress of power, wealth and very real privilege (of the old kind), but it is hardly conducive to plot, character development or indeed the heroic journey, and it’s barely watchable.
Which is tragic, because at its best sci fi can offer a critique of standard narratives and, by examining the world from a completely different perspective, build empathy across divides. Perhaps the real problem in the Firefly universe is that big government and big corporations entered into a dark alliance and their oppression came in the form of a new economic charter and colonial project which saw young people desperate to have kids and beset by spiralling living costs marshalled into a missionary force espousing ‘woke’ capitalism, with its glaring hypocrisies and painful lack of awareness that most economic injustice these days comes in the form of class-based frictions, with the blue collar class- regardless of race- treated like untermenschen. One only has to look up Dead Peasants Insurance on Google to see the truth of it in the real world.
Maybe the frontier was beset by corporations licensed to operate monopolistic fiefdoms, declaring all the small scale commerce in a colony as illegal, before moving in and price-gouging. Maybe the young and idealistic settlers really did believe that the frontier types were violent and ignorant, and only got to see their humanity and compassion of those they once despised when they were up close and personal, when they became the beneficiaries of their generosity. That could be the first episode- a young corporate couple on the run, with a young baby, helped by the very people who they were once taught needed to be ‘educated’. Maybe the baby has the same genetic traits as River Tam.
Because the true power of sci fi, when done well, is its power to expose the hypocrisy of well-meaning platitudes which mask something far more sinister- the unveiled grasping for totalitarian power inherent to socialism in 1984, the way consumerism really is no substitute for meaning or purpose, as witnessed in Brave New World. In our current political and social climate, the concurrent theme has to be how establishment power has reinvented itself as superficially moral through wokeness- substituting platitudes for the reform of their own excesses, the power structures they perpetuate and the way ordinary Americans have been told the lie that bribes are what they should want- a new government program for every occasion- when the real problem is that government has become a partial referee, always favouring the corporation over the little guy and backing their corporate allies.
And that’s the power of the sci fi Western- it has the potential to subversively unite. The frontier town could be a metaphor for Main Street being bulldozed by corporate interests. The populist Right may have little in common with the progressive Left, but they both have every reason to hate finance- for different reasons. They both have reason to hate Globalism- for different reasons. And they both have reason to hate establishment politicians, with their corrupt corporate duopoly- again, for different reasons.
Perhaps that’s the answer to a media and social media landscape which increasingly encourages us to hate each other. Not to learn to stop hating, but to find things we hate which we have in common. One genuine thing that millennials have every reason to hate and feel cheated by is the way that finance has pumped the scarcity costs of housing and building land to put homeownership forever out of reach of most younger American. The real tragedy is that in many cases they don’t know that local government, far from being the solution, is part of the problem- feeding the process which places their dreams out of reach. And the Right should know that finance actually see pricing, the process of adding cost without adding value, as the new frontier of profit for private equity firms. And given that these are the self-same guys who took a government license- the promise of an S & L style corporate bailout for taking on endemically bad risk (there was a reason why most of the bad lending decisions accrued in the government sponsored/run Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae)- to blow up the world’s financial markets in 2008- denuding so many Trump supporters of their life savings, robbing the value of their homes and making so many subject to punitive interest rates and mortgage evictions- maybe this is something that young and old, Left and Right really can agree upon. It’s not the only thing they have in common which they should both hate.
Little wonder then that Twitter banned Brett Weinstein’s Unity 2020 party, which was dedicated to finding an alternative to the system which forced voters to make an insanely less than ideal choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The only thing the idea was lacking was something in common for people from across the political spectrum to hate. This is what a visionary form of Western Sci Fi should imagine. A way to sow America back together by finding things that everybody hates. Anything is preferable to continuing to hate each other.
All my posts are designed to provoke discussion. I often posit out-there very tenuous hypothesis, simply because I don’t know something, and want to crowd-source my readership for knowledge that I don’t yet possess. Please take idle speculation in the spirit it’s intended and by all means feel free to participate in the discussion. With the complexity of the modern world it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on every topic, but with the technology we now possess it’s now possible to quite easily find someone who is. That’s the tragedy of social media- it substitutes superficial knowledge and tribalism for the genuine search for knowledge. My essays here are an attempt to reignite genuine debate.
You're never boring, Geary, but really, hate as the ultimate unifier??? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. I always thought that finding things that we all love is the job at hand, at which we are failing. I know there are plenty of people arguing that hate is always stronger than love, but I prefer not to believe that. People united in common hatreds is a dystopian idea, a deal with the very devil.
Well, it depends whether the hate is directed at a thing, doesn't it? I agree with you on love- but I think the hatred across the political spectrum has gone too far. I have Leftists who are personal friends and I have conservative friends- when they know each other personally, it's fine, they get on, apart from the odd bit of needling - but increasingly people across the political divide only know the caricatures they have been taught. Distance breeds contempt.
Now I'm really confused. Intimacy can also breed contempt. Of course it's all gone too far; that's the problem with hate, it always does. I know from my own experience that you can love someone, know them very well, but hate their ideas. So how do you get beyond that? There has to be a higher value that is positive and that unites; otherwise we are lost in hate. And as far as I can see, that is what we lack. Religion as well as the Enlightenment have lost their hold on us; there is nothing left to orient and unite people in the West. I do actually believe that we are in a deep and lasting crisis of basic values. 'Human Rights' doesn't work as a rallying cry, either. It's a legal concept, and it is of great importance in a democratic state, but it is not a big idea that can unite a society as diverse as ours. We have to ask ourselves what we are, what we believe in and where we want to go, all over again. And at the moment, we seem to be struggling in the dark. My ultimate value is freedom of thought and tolerance, but the pandemic has taught me that I am in the minority. Far too many people worship at the altar of security and are all too willing to sacrifice their freedom as well as mine. And I have a lot of trouble liking these people. I am bad at hating, but I have come close to hating them. And I don't like myself when I am in hate. It's a dilemma.
One of the things I find darkly amusing is the glaring unwariness of one of the meanings of 'bigotry', which many of the highly educated use so liberally- 'the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life.'
I was talking to a friend on this very issue last weekend, whose sympathies lie on the Left. We were discussing an open mike incident between Gordon Brown and a then loyal labour supporter. To cut a long story short, he called her a bigot for expressing concerns about immigration levels.
My friends argument was that he should have stuck to his guns. Mine was that he may well have been right in some sense, but Gordon Brown was demonstrating bigotry as well because he didn't delve down into the reasons for her concerns. It could have been wage dilution and labour displacement- both of which are proven now from economic study. It could have been community displacement, because poorer groups moving into a country have higher cultural ingroup and only feel comfortable if they concentrate into their own communities (which is one of the reasons why the Australian system is so good, because market dominant migrants tend to integrate far more quickly and successfully.
The real issue is people can't be bothered to find out why someone might feel a certain way- and instead jump to the worst possible motives in an act of mindreading. On Covid, the vast majority of NHS staff who had refused the vaccines did so because they had the virus, and were all too aware, anecdotally, that vaccination after Covid was most likely to cause strong ADRs. Of the remainder, many had family auto-immune issues and had been told by experts not to get the vaccine under any circumstances.
The latest thing is Ukraine. Don't get me wrong, what Putin did was horrible, but expressing viewpoints that the West fed Russian paranoia, that we created the conditions for his rise with 'shock therapy' or that it might not be appropriate to cancel innocent Russian citizens like pianists or tennis stars, can all get you labelled as a Putin sympathiser. Nobody can be bothered to find out why someone thinks a certain way.
“ All my posts are designed to provoke discussion. I often posit out-there very tenuous hypothesis, simply because I don’t know something, and want to crowd-source my readership for knowledge that I don’t yet possess. Please take idle speculation in the spirit it’s intended and by all means feel free to participate in the discussion. With the complexity of the modern world it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on every topic, but with the technology we now possess it’s now possible to quite easily find someone who is. That’s the tragedy of social media- it substitutes superficial knowledge and tribalism for the genuine search for knowledge. My essays here are an attempt to reignite genuine debate.”
That is precisely why I read you, Geary.
I don’t watch TV (at all) but I was staying at a place last summer where some people were watching old episodes of Firefly. Seemed like the kind of show I’d like. Can’t really comment on the politics of it since I didn’t really see much.
Recently, I've taken to watching Wellesley Theatre on YouTube- it's free and it has a full catalogue of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. They aren't really true to literacy Sherlock Holmes, other than The Hound of the Baskervilles, but they make for an interesting snapshot of Allied War Propaganda- most were made during WWII, with the Nazis as the villains.
One can pretty reliably predict that at the end, Basil Rathbone will recite one of the greats from English literature- last night it was John of Gaunt's speech from Richard III- 'this sceptred isle'...
Slowly- I thought the pop culture reference might draw people in. Apparently not. I keep adding to my subscriber list, but it is slow going. I'm trying not to lean into the Culture War stuff too heavily. It's like the Dark Side of the force, too seductive and easy. Of course, I will sometimes cover it, but only if I think it is acting as an impediment to viable solutions to real problems.
Not sure how long this will last but we have Russia now. Will that do?
Come to think of it - all the dirty wet dreams the elites not only in my country (Germany) came true and the side effects are Putin's fault. How more luck do you really need to get your utopia going?
On more serious note - I do not need to like you to have a common goal of living in one country. I may even despise you and accept you for a president (or king etc). The way it works is a commonality on some level. Not sure if hate can cut it. Not for long I suppose - all movements against X - fall apart when X is achieved. Of course the leftists found the ideal that cannot ever be achieved - equity. Similar to CO2 free society. I suppose imbeciles that rule us enjoy the ride so at least some have fun while we all slide to hell. OTOH even if we do slide to hell there is (in some limits) always another day with shining sun. I would just prefer if I was not made to pay for the slide to hell.
You think you have it bad. I have the misfortune of living in a country where the reigning party happens to be the conservatives (even though they bear little resemblance to the label). Margaret Thatcher may have considered Tony Blair her finest creation- but the current opposition bears little resemblance to the New Labour of the 90s.
When the electorate vote the current batch of imbeciles and miscreants out of office, my country has the full gamut of craziness to look forward to. I look forward to legislation of the type now found in Scotland, where children are encouraged to report on the offensive speech of their parents in the privacy of their own homes.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
Sci-fi has always been dystopian I find. One author worth reading for the depth he brings to the issues you mention is Heinlein. Essentially sci-fi is focused on loss and how we struggle to process it.
TV or film sci-fi (apart from Tarkovsky) has always disappointed.
I recently bought Citizen of the Galaxy for my Kindle. It was an unusual purchase. Usually the only books I actually buy are nonfiction- even though I read a lot of fiction as well. Before that, the last sci fi I bought and read was the Takeshi Kovacs novels- but that was a present for my brother, so it doesn't count :)
Did you try Never Let Me Go? The novel was written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He also wrote Remains of the Day.
Funnily enough I've never come across that one. My favourites are 'Friday', 'The cat who walks through walls' and 'Podkayne of Mars' but all his stuff is very readable. He's not liked by the woke brigade though but is far more clued in than any of them.
Ironically I don't read much Japanese sci-fi. That which I have read tends to be superficial. 'Remains of the day' was excellent so I'll have to try 'Never let me go'.
The Takeshi Kovacs novels were written by Richard Morgan, a British sci fi author, before all the crap about people staying in their own lane became popular.
Cheers mate. One of the tragedies of our time is that the Blue Collar Class has so much in common- yet the ruling establishment has been incredibly successful in dividing their interests and setting them against one another. Divide et Impera.
You're never boring, Geary, but really, hate as the ultimate unifier??? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. I always thought that finding things that we all love is the job at hand, at which we are failing. I know there are plenty of people arguing that hate is always stronger than love, but I prefer not to believe that. People united in common hatreds is a dystopian idea, a deal with the very devil.
Well, it depends whether the hate is directed at a thing, doesn't it? I agree with you on love- but I think the hatred across the political spectrum has gone too far. I have Leftists who are personal friends and I have conservative friends- when they know each other personally, it's fine, they get on, apart from the odd bit of needling - but increasingly people across the political divide only know the caricatures they have been taught. Distance breeds contempt.
Now I'm really confused. Intimacy can also breed contempt. Of course it's all gone too far; that's the problem with hate, it always does. I know from my own experience that you can love someone, know them very well, but hate their ideas. So how do you get beyond that? There has to be a higher value that is positive and that unites; otherwise we are lost in hate. And as far as I can see, that is what we lack. Religion as well as the Enlightenment have lost their hold on us; there is nothing left to orient and unite people in the West. I do actually believe that we are in a deep and lasting crisis of basic values. 'Human Rights' doesn't work as a rallying cry, either. It's a legal concept, and it is of great importance in a democratic state, but it is not a big idea that can unite a society as diverse as ours. We have to ask ourselves what we are, what we believe in and where we want to go, all over again. And at the moment, we seem to be struggling in the dark. My ultimate value is freedom of thought and tolerance, but the pandemic has taught me that I am in the minority. Far too many people worship at the altar of security and are all too willing to sacrifice their freedom as well as mine. And I have a lot of trouble liking these people. I am bad at hating, but I have come close to hating them. And I don't like myself when I am in hate. It's a dilemma.
One of the things I find darkly amusing is the glaring unwariness of one of the meanings of 'bigotry', which many of the highly educated use so liberally- 'the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life.'
I was talking to a friend on this very issue last weekend, whose sympathies lie on the Left. We were discussing an open mike incident between Gordon Brown and a then loyal labour supporter. To cut a long story short, he called her a bigot for expressing concerns about immigration levels.
My friends argument was that he should have stuck to his guns. Mine was that he may well have been right in some sense, but Gordon Brown was demonstrating bigotry as well because he didn't delve down into the reasons for her concerns. It could have been wage dilution and labour displacement- both of which are proven now from economic study. It could have been community displacement, because poorer groups moving into a country have higher cultural ingroup and only feel comfortable if they concentrate into their own communities (which is one of the reasons why the Australian system is so good, because market dominant migrants tend to integrate far more quickly and successfully.
The real issue is people can't be bothered to find out why someone might feel a certain way- and instead jump to the worst possible motives in an act of mindreading. On Covid, the vast majority of NHS staff who had refused the vaccines did so because they had the virus, and were all too aware, anecdotally, that vaccination after Covid was most likely to cause strong ADRs. Of the remainder, many had family auto-immune issues and had been told by experts not to get the vaccine under any circumstances.
The latest thing is Ukraine. Don't get me wrong, what Putin did was horrible, but expressing viewpoints that the West fed Russian paranoia, that we created the conditions for his rise with 'shock therapy' or that it might not be appropriate to cancel innocent Russian citizens like pianists or tennis stars, can all get you labelled as a Putin sympathiser. Nobody can be bothered to find out why someone thinks a certain way.
“ All my posts are designed to provoke discussion. I often posit out-there very tenuous hypothesis, simply because I don’t know something, and want to crowd-source my readership for knowledge that I don’t yet possess. Please take idle speculation in the spirit it’s intended and by all means feel free to participate in the discussion. With the complexity of the modern world it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on every topic, but with the technology we now possess it’s now possible to quite easily find someone who is. That’s the tragedy of social media- it substitutes superficial knowledge and tribalism for the genuine search for knowledge. My essays here are an attempt to reignite genuine debate.”
That is precisely why I read you, Geary.
I don’t watch TV (at all) but I was staying at a place last summer where some people were watching old episodes of Firefly. Seemed like the kind of show I’d like. Can’t really comment on the politics of it since I didn’t really see much.
Recently, I've taken to watching Wellesley Theatre on YouTube- it's free and it has a full catalogue of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. They aren't really true to literacy Sherlock Holmes, other than The Hound of the Baskervilles, but they make for an interesting snapshot of Allied War Propaganda- most were made during WWII, with the Nazis as the villains.
One can pretty reliably predict that at the end, Basil Rathbone will recite one of the greats from English literature- last night it was John of Gaunt's speech from Richard III- 'this sceptred isle'...
How is the struggle to build readership going? You mentioned something about that recently.
Slowly- I thought the pop culture reference might draw people in. Apparently not. I keep adding to my subscriber list, but it is slow going. I'm trying not to lean into the Culture War stuff too heavily. It's like the Dark Side of the force, too seductive and easy. Of course, I will sometimes cover it, but only if I think it is acting as an impediment to viable solutions to real problems.
Are you still mostly getting people from Quillette?
I get a few from people searching Substack, but yes- it mostly seems to be people from Qullette.
That’s what I figured. Have you tried Twitter?
Not sure how long this will last but we have Russia now. Will that do?
Come to think of it - all the dirty wet dreams the elites not only in my country (Germany) came true and the side effects are Putin's fault. How more luck do you really need to get your utopia going?
On more serious note - I do not need to like you to have a common goal of living in one country. I may even despise you and accept you for a president (or king etc). The way it works is a commonality on some level. Not sure if hate can cut it. Not for long I suppose - all movements against X - fall apart when X is achieved. Of course the leftists found the ideal that cannot ever be achieved - equity. Similar to CO2 free society. I suppose imbeciles that rule us enjoy the ride so at least some have fun while we all slide to hell. OTOH even if we do slide to hell there is (in some limits) always another day with shining sun. I would just prefer if I was not made to pay for the slide to hell.
You think you have it bad. I have the misfortune of living in a country where the reigning party happens to be the conservatives (even though they bear little resemblance to the label). Margaret Thatcher may have considered Tony Blair her finest creation- but the current opposition bears little resemblance to the New Labour of the 90s.
When the electorate vote the current batch of imbeciles and miscreants out of office, my country has the full gamut of craziness to look forward to. I look forward to legislation of the type now found in Scotland, where children are encouraged to report on the offensive speech of their parents in the privacy of their own homes.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
Sci-fi has always been dystopian I find. One author worth reading for the depth he brings to the issues you mention is Heinlein. Essentially sci-fi is focused on loss and how we struggle to process it.
TV or film sci-fi (apart from Tarkovsky) has always disappointed.
I recently bought Citizen of the Galaxy for my Kindle. It was an unusual purchase. Usually the only books I actually buy are nonfiction- even though I read a lot of fiction as well. Before that, the last sci fi I bought and read was the Takeshi Kovacs novels- but that was a present for my brother, so it doesn't count :)
Did you try Never Let Me Go? The novel was written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He also wrote Remains of the Day.
Funnily enough I've never come across that one. My favourites are 'Friday', 'The cat who walks through walls' and 'Podkayne of Mars' but all his stuff is very readable. He's not liked by the woke brigade though but is far more clued in than any of them.
Ironically I don't read much Japanese sci-fi. That which I have read tends to be superficial. 'Remains of the day' was excellent so I'll have to try 'Never let me go'.
The Takeshi Kovacs novels were written by Richard Morgan, a British sci fi author, before all the crap about people staying in their own lane became popular.
With sci-fi staying in ones own lane is happily an irrelevancy. Possibly, not a series I would want to read - it sounds very derivative.
The last paragraph places special emphasis on the whole. A lesson in humanity. Par excellence my friend.
Cheers mate. One of the tragedies of our time is that the Blue Collar Class has so much in common- yet the ruling establishment has been incredibly successful in dividing their interests and setting them against one another. Divide et Impera.