PKD, trolls, grey vampires

Here’s one reader response to the Dick blurb:

“Regarding the following two comments on one of your most recent blog posts:

‘Dick was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.’

‘At the moment, I can’t think of anyone else who looks better if plugged into that sentence, though there must be other examples.’

It seems that PK Dick, like other Sci-Fi writers (a loose term) have this scary quality of being ‘in sync’ with their time as a function of their prophetic gift. For instance, George Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World are both heralded as ‘timeless’ because they seem to speak so well to our own time in many ways. Or even Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is eerily prescient (although of course he denies being a science fiction writer). Yet, all of these writers were really just reading the leaves of their own time.

In many ways this is very similar to the role of the Old Testament prophets. Modern evangelicals misinterpret ‘prophecy’ to crudely be ‘fortune telling’ (especially considering at least one of the prophecies in Ezekiel concerning the siege of a city didn’t actually come to pass, so it can’t be reduced to this at all). The fact is that the OT prophets were more often than not just gifted in some way with being able to have their eyes and ears open to the actual cultural, political, and religious situations of the time.

Perhaps that’s why some of the best sci-fi writing has this quality: perhaps these authors’ seemingly fantastical visions were actually, when it comes down to it, the most realist?

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By the way, your advice posts have been incredibly helpful to this PhD student, and the ones warning against trolls and grey vampires have been especially encouraging.”

I hadn’t thought of the connection with Old Testament Prophets, but that’s another good case where the sentence would probably work as a compliment: “Ezekiel was not ahead of his time. Rather, he was scarily in sync with it.” Yes, that’s convincing.

Good science fiction writers do have that Old Testament Prophet air about them, now that you mention it, and that’s why Bradbury and others, such as Orwell, could probably be plugged into that sentence with the effect of a compliment. H.G. Wells, maybe.

It doesn’t work even for all good science fiction writers, however. I still don’t think it would sound like a compliment if Lovecraft were placed in the sentence, and that must tell us something about how Lovecraft differs from the others, though I’m not yet sure just how.

I’m also glad this reader liked the trolls/grey vampires point. This is essential.

Remember, it is a fallacy to think that statements are nothing but propositional content, and hence there is no obligation to respond to all propositional content. In some cases you may find it valuable to reflect even on the time-wasting contrarianism of such people, and in other cases you may be obliged to respond for purely practical reasons. But generally speaking there is an irreducible difference between those who are responding to subject matter and those who are responding to people.

Criticism can either move the ball forward by saying “but you’re missing something important here,” or it can be devoted precisely to preventing the ball from moving forward.

If you want your thinking and writing to develop, it is essential not to waste energy on those who are creating obstructions for others as an alibi for their own acts of waste. And we all make mistakes in judging this, but over time it becomes easier to cut the cord early once you’ve sniffed out a grey vampire. (Trolls are easy to recognize: they don’t need to be sniffed out, you just need to avoid interacting with them, which can also be hard because they tend to be such sneaks about choosing situations where it’s hard not to respond.)

There’s a practical technique for doing this… You can ask yourself “who are the people I truly most respect?” Imagine what their criticisms might be of the work you are doing, not what some hypothetical devil’s advocate might say. A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger’s or Whitehead’s best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of “obligatory passage point” (Latour’s term) in the discussions that follow.

Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made “fewer mistakes” than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress.