Warnings and Cautions, No Triggering Required

The Atlantic piece cited Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as two classic texts that have

stirred calls for trigger warnings due to their racially motivated violence

and domestic abuse, respectively.

— Katy Waldman "The Trapdoor of Trigger Words"

Slate on Line 5 Sept. 2016

            Before "trigger warnings" became widely known (and conditioning their meaning), there were — still running and more widely seen than trigger warnings there are: MPAA ratings on films, and less formal cautions for parents and others on games and music. And these ratings and cautions and warnings make judgments about what may harm kids and disturb some adults, and most of them, like literal trigger warnings, concern violence and sex, with taboo words and drug use a close third and other potential triggers in line to join the list, if the more fastidious posters on the Internet will set the standard for sensitivity.

            In the early 1980s, putting together a "List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF," Thomas P. Dunn and I anticipated the current crop of the fastidious and decided that sex and violence and "dirty words" were far from the only potential dangers in works we annotated; so we began adding additional CAUTIONs and a few WARNINGs, with the desire to provide useful information and perhaps chide those overly concerned with sex, violence, and dirty words.

            Thom and I did this for the "Lists of Works Useful" accompanying the essay anthologies The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982) and Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and also for Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography [sic] of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF (1993).

            To start with an example of an innocuous, there's this one with Dan Simmon's The Fall of Hyperion: "TEXTUAL WARNING: If using the 1990 Doubleday edition, be sure there's an errata sheet giving p. 305." This alert we thought would be useful, but it might also reflect a bit my own mild annoyance that the folks at Doubleday had managed to misplace a whole goddamn page.

            Arguably less innocuous examples can be found among the whole range of CAUTIONs we used in Clockworks. For example:

                        For Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) we note failed attempts at ethnic humor, including attempts to render non-WASP dialects that might be offensive to contemporary ears, or, on esthetic grounds, the ears of those who grew up reading Mark Twain, who had some talent at reproducing on paper different varieties of English.

                        We found Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1926) silly in its conclusion (though we didn't mention that), but still great visually and of profound importance for an early female robot; but we thought Thea von Harbou's novel version (1926/27) should bear the "Caution: The owner of the Metropolitan exotic-drug and whore house is negatively characterized in terms of the nations contributing to his genealogy." Hint: They're not Aryan, and "The politics of the novel generally (definitely including its gender politics) differ from the film's somewhat, but may be even more simplistic."

                        Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan (1990) was more bellicose than we had expected from her The Ship Who ____ series, outside of The City Who Fought, and also strongly pronatalist, a political position of great importance but one insufficiently recognized by heterosexual readers as political, and one that should be highly controversial.

                        For the re-issues of Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon — 2419" and "The Airlords of Han" (1929), we added the "CAUTION: As [Alan] Kalish et al. demonstrate, the revised versions remove the 'Yellow Peril' language of the original but are still racist (sexism in the revised stories is more complex)." These seminal Buck Rogers stories are significant in prefiguring atomic warfare, but also genocide, and to have genocide "normalized" and even celebrated for young readers is, we thought, a more serious matter than some scenes of fornication or repetitions of the word "f*ck" or even some racial slurs.

                        Dealing with an insightful but definitely post-structuralist reading of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001), I felt a need to add, "CAUTION: Some proofreading problems aside, this is an excellent essay in the late-20th-c. style of cyberpunk critique, quite useful for studying fictional characters and real people as social-cultural creatures living in postmodern, late-capitalist, sophisticated urban areas of the planet Earth. For such postmodern people, nature is safely inside of human culture and identity is problematic; however," I thought I should remind our readers, "there is a good deal of natural world beyond our small planet, and even in advanced-capitalist countries it is arguable that most people are barely modern, let alone pomo. And it is possible that human beings are spiritual as well as social-cultural animals, and as certain as anything can be that we are animal animals, with an evolved genome and a range of basic behaviors that preceded specifically human culture." Like, a lot of theorists of postmodernism really do need to get out of The City more and deal with a nature that has existence, validity, and power outside of and without humans and which can deconstruct humans quite quickly. And readers into postmodern theory should, on occasion, be cautioned about that. (Such readers — and more so authors — need stronger and more specific cautions before, say ocean sailing or backpacking on glaciers.)

                        Most useful, I think, was our suggesting the need to note the cop stories, movies, and TV shows — even in science fiction — for which people should exercise, "Caution: Contains material offensive to the 4th Amendment and other parts of the American Bill of Rights." If Americans and others have been too acquiescent in the chipping away of our rights in the interest of safety and police power, part of the reason is watching all those television cop shows and shoot-'em-up movies in which police respect for the Bill of Rights, due process, and simple courtesy — is for wussies. Consider the case of a sympathetic White cop with racial prejudices but who follows rules and has the courage to take a bullet rather than shoot an unarmed suspect; and consider a sympathetic cop of impeccable attitudes and sentiments on race and is militantly equal-opportunity in "Taking out the trash" by manfully shooting first and asking questions … pretty much never. Other scholars and teacher issues warnings about racial attitudes; I thought we should say something about the Bill of Rights and US  Civil War Amendments.

                        And we should note racism, sexism, xenophobia, jingoism, religious hatred, natalism, teen-bashing, homophobia, authoritarianism, macho assholery, and other nastiness with assiduous militancy equal to those who spot sex and violence. And we should note them where they appear, e.g., I'll remind people that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), mentioned in the headnote, can do probably without a trigger warning for racial violence necessary for the story, but should have a mild caution that it is certainly open to a charge of casual acceptance of traditional sexism.

Religion, Atheism, Body Counts, "Foma," and a "Vital Lie"

         Among the comments on The Diane Rehm Show for Friday, 15 January 2016, one complains that Derek McGinty, the guest host, had much too quickly dismissed a call for (ultimately) eliminating religion to eliminate terrorism and other bad things. McGinty said the idea was — if I heard right — a "nonstarter."

         The commenter was right to resent the offhand dismissal, but McGinty had a point, given the numbers. Atheists are a small demographic, while believers' numbers are massive. The world may be moving toward the secular — and a recent book called Big Gods suggests that there is the possibility of an ethical, post-religious world — but currently the idea of large numbers of people giving up their beliefs and accepting a life of "Emptiness! Emptiness! All is empty" and futile is a nonstarter.

         A relatively objective, scientific, realistic assessment of the human condition is that the human species is trivial even in just our universe, to say nothing of a multiverse in which the vanishingly small significance of our galaxy approaches literal nothingness in what may be an infinity of worlds. Statistically normal people want significance for humanity and even individual human lives, and it's difficult to justify such ideas without some sort of leap into the absurd. Believing in God is a leap of faith; beginning that in The Big Picture some individual human is significant is just "counterfactual," what Kurt Vonnegut labels a "foma" in Cat's Cradle (1963): a comforting lie.

         Other numbers that need to be looked at are body counts, conveniently tabulated by Matthew White on line and in The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things. Religion (God knows ...) has produced an impressive number of human corpses and other atrocities, with the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions no slouches in slaughter. Still, humans are capable of killing humans in massive numbers for reasons less rationally elegant than religious fanaticism. Simple greed and arrogance led to the small-scale genocides of California Indians during the Gold Rush, and — unless you buy the Christianizing and "Civilizing Mission" bullshit propaganda — the large-scale murder in King Leopold's Congo and other places in colonized Africa. Genghis Khan felt the Mongol form of the Mandate of Heaven, but his conquests with their forty million dead were mostly nitty-gritty political. And, of course, Stalin was officially an atheist and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to spreading the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church.

         Certainly Idealists and Guys With Theories and Weapons are major threats, especially when they believe that the real human reality is in a soul separable from the body and of infinitely more value than the body. The Theory, though, doesn't have to be specifically religious, just idealistic enough to get fanatical about. Or, as with slave trades and slave economies, millions can suffer or die for other people's profit and joy in power. 

         It is probably a "foma" to believe that God exists and cares about human life and indirectly gives our lives meaning and purpose. To use an idea from Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck (1884), that human life has value may be a kind of species "vital lie," or "life-lie": a necessity for survival.

         Ara Norenzayan observes in Big Gods that most psychological research has been done on the "weird brains" of people who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic." That's a minor point for me; the major one is that the great majority of people are not weirdly wired and part of such statistical normality is religious belief. That's about as close as you'll come to an objective fact, and atheists who want the world to "get real" need to deal with that fact. They also need to deal with the implications of a rigorously materialist view of the human condition. The "Emptiness! Emptiness" of Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes") is one starting point for that discussion; so is the rigorous philosophy amid the twisted pornography of the Marquis de Sade in the "Manners" pamphlet — "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen …" — in Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). The mad but logical Marquis can argue that murdering someone doesn't really destroy life, on balance, since if you bury the body and dig it up later, what we'd call biomass has, if anything increased; and there's no particular reason in nature — only in humans' bias in favor of humans and human consciousness — to prefer the biomass of a living human to that of the organisms of putrefaction.

          Me, I am by temperament a vulgar Pragmatist — I check out where logical premises are going before accepting them — and one who read some Existentialism for Dummies at an impressionable age and took a fair number of courses in the life sciences. I'm also a Vonnegut fan. There's much bracing stuff in Koheleth and de Sade and Vonnegut and Jean-Paul Sartre in simplified translation. Still/So, as a practical matter, I'd prefer it if my fellow humans carefully follow beliefs that hold down body counts; and I'd prefer it if people who see themselves as tough-minded toughed it through the implications of their beliefs.

Who Remembers the Armenians? (Yom Hashoah / Meds Yeghern, 2015)

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

«Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?» —

Reportedly said by Adolf Hitler 22 Aug. 1939,

most immediately concerning Poles.

            

On Sunday, 12 April 2015, Pope Francis commemorated the 100^th anniversary of the start of the mass murders of Armenians in the failing Ottoman Empire. What made major news, and serious diplomatic waves, was that Pope Francis called the killings a genocide, labeling it the first of the 20^th century.

            I believe that the government of Turkey (and that of Azerbaijan) should apologize to the descendants of the survivors of the massacres and pay reasonable but significant reparations, even if largely symbolic; but I would not insist that the Turks use the word "genocide."

Three places I'm "coming from" (as we used to say) on the Pope's assertion and the larger (often fierce) debate:

            1. Many years ago I taught an Honors course titled simply, "Massacres." It was the one course I taught in 40 years of teaching that got a perfect score on student evaluations, but, for whatever reasons, it was never approved for me to teach again, and it was not picked up by any of my colleagues.

                        Anyway, "Massacres" was the title I went with, but the working title was the frequent paraphrase of Hitler's rhetorical question as, "Who remembers the Armenians?"; and the premise of the course included the idea out of the work of Hannah Arendt that to even begin to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust we have to place it in a perverse tradition of mass murder. The murder of some five to six million Jews and five to six million Roma, homosexuals, Communists, unionists, priests, righteous Gentiles, and other "inferiors" or enemies of the Reich had precedents, including the largely premeditated Aghed — Catastrophe — visited upon the Armenians but also the almost casual murders of masses in Africa at the height of European colonialism there, culminating in one of the last holocausts of the 19^th century and first of the 20^th, the deaths of some five to ten million people in King Leopold II's Congo Free State (1885-1908).

            2. I grew up in and regularly taught in the Orwellian tradition of questioning the power of political and other authorities to manage the meaning of words. 

                        So the Congress of the United States could say that ethyl alcohol consumed to seek pleasure or avoid pain is not a drug, and that the nicotine in tobacco is not a drug — but alcohol and nicotine used as recreational drugs were and remain drugs. The government of the United States and its international clients and allies can stipulate as a matter of practical law that marijuana is a dangerously addictive hard drug with no legitimate uses, and keep it on "Schedule 1" of the Controlled Substances Act along with heroin; but the everyday fact remains that large numbers of people use marijuana without serious problems, and, for that matter, that heroin has undoubted uses as a pain reliever.

                        The US government and the UN can say that poison gas is a weapon of mass destruction, but poison gas isn't a weapon of destruction at all — part of the point of gas warfare is killing people without destroying property — and as weapons go even sarin nerve gas is much less efficient at killing than, say, cluster bombs, or even home-made "Improvised Explosive Devices" of commercial explosives plus nails and screws as shrapnel.

            3. I had a colleague who got a good deal of guff for noting that Stalin's purges had less of an effect on the general Soviet population than usually assumed, and who pointed me toward another scholar who got seriously attacked for documenting some eight million murders ordered by Stalin. This second scholar didn't deny that there was more blood on Stalin's hands, but eight million deaths was what his study could document. And this second scholar made the point that we lived in a strange world where he could be called an apologist for Stalin with having Stalin guilty of the deaths of at least eight million people: as if massacres become serious only if they reach double digits of millions.

Now "Genocide" centrally means the planned destruction of a people as a people, mostly by killing them, and there have been genocides in human history, including fairly recent ones in Tasmania and (on a small scale — there weren't many people to kill) in California. Attempted genocide should be treated in ethics and at law as the same as achieved genocide, but in our usage we should differentiate between the two crimes. 

Some of the "Young Turks" wanted at least "ethnic cleansing" away of the Armenians with the same fascistic undertone to "cleansing" as with Nazi desires for purity. Many Turks tolerated or participated in massacres and death marches of Armenians with the effect of mass murder on a massive scale. 

            Let the Turks admit to mass murder and offer reparations.

            Let Armenians say, "In spite of the Catastrophe, we are here; any attempt at genocide failed." And let the argument go on from there as to what should be done for compassionate and sensible reparations and reconciliation. 

            And let the United States and the International "Community" —defining "community" as "people who are stuck with one another" — let the powers that be in such matters confine the use of "genocide" to the obscene success of the destruction of a people and move swiftly and effectively to prevent not just genocide but attempts at genocide. Indeed, let the human community accept our responsibility to act swiftly and effectively to stop all mass murder and literal massacres, well before they become massive enough to qualify as attempts at genocide.