For just over a year before Crooked Timber started, I had a blog called Junius. As the American right get more and more attracted by “natcon” views, I remember how shocked I was that even back then they could be quite sympathetic to the Franco regime. And I remembered I posted this (from May 2003):

Sasha Volokh, in the middle of a trip to Spain, comments on the Spanish Civil War and, frankly, shocks me:

…with every revolutionary construction of the war, Franco becomes more and more palatable to people like me, which means losing the support of any of the middle class or landowners and possibly even getting some of the Western democracies to intervene on Franco’s side. (I don’t know whether those countries would have the ability or desire to do that, but at least I, as a potential 1930s French or English voter (or Spanish resident), would have little difficulty choosing between Communists and Franco.)

This from someone who styles himself as a “libertarian” (I suspect these remarks reveal a greater concern for private property than for liberty). There were brutal massacres on both sides in the civil war, but the numbers slaughtered by the Francoists far exceeded those killed by the Republic and the graves of those executed are still being discovered today. What of the Francoist vision of society? Here’s Antony Beevor from his The Spanish Civil War, describing the social order imposed by the Francoists:

Every Spaniard was decreed to be a Catholic; divorce and civil marriage had been instantly abolished in Nationalist territory; and the penalty for abortion was made even greater than under the monarchy. The orphans of Republicans killed in the purges were forcibly baptized and given new Christian names. The church was in a position to establish a thorough control of public morals. One of their posters ordered: ‘No immoral dances, no indecent frocks, no bare legs, no heathen beaches.’ (The Falange, meanwhile, seized girls on the street whom they considered to be immodestly dressed and cropped their hair forcibly.(p. 385)….

According the the Falange, the state would only be ‘strong if the woman at home is healthy, fecund, hard-working and happy.’ She was therefore liberated ‘from having to work outside the home’, which meant that she was barred from practically all jobs except that of a domestic servant.(p. 387)

There are pages of this kind of thing. I realize that Mr Volokh may have good reasons for hostility to the Communist Party, but in the passage I quoted from him he is explicitly imagining himself as an English, French or Spanish person of the 1930s (I wonder how he can be so sure of what his reactions would have been?). The regime imposed by the Francoists had many Taliban-like features and even middle-class voters with property have daughters! Of course, the Taliban (not to mention many other brutal dictatorships) owed their success to a similar anyone-but-the-communists attitude.

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

A key element of the the ideology of the new populist far right (Trumpian, Faragist, Zemmourian etc) is some version of the “great replacement” theory, the idea that Western civ is under threat from migrants, Muslims, black people, brown people, yellow people and the rest. In some version or another, it actually goes back a long way, and was the main driver of things like the White Australia policy and similar paranoias elsewhere about white settlers being overwhelmed by coolie labour. I happen to think the fears are overblown and that the good stuff in Western civ – Bach, Shakespeare, Gothic architecture, science, ymmv – is going to survive any amount of demographic change. But the question I’d like to pose here is, how bad would it be, morally speaking?
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The New Yorker is running a profile of the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar. Reading it, I was unconvinced by the implied response to the obvious objection, “if life is so bad, why not kill yourself”, namely that suicide is painful in itself and causes pain to others.

I searched a bit, and discovered that, not only had Harry covered the book here soon after it came out, but I had made the same objection in comments[1], which I’ll reproduce for convenience

given that Benatar is arguing from a utilitarian rational choice position, his argument leads straight to the (more or less standard utilitarian) conclusion that there should be no moral weight attached to suicide. That is, people should commit suicide if they reasonably judge that their future pains outweigh their future pleasures. Sympathetic others should not deplore the fact of suicide (though they should be saddened by the facts leading to the decision).

Once that position is established there’s no problem bringing new people into the world. If they don’t like it they can always kill themselves. That, it seems to me, is orthodox utilitarianism, with a bit of a helping hand from revealed preference.

Of course, this kind of thing is all very well in a philosophy class. In reality, suicide is more commonly the result of momentary despair and is a tragedy for both the person concerned and their friends and family.

Since 2008, most Australian states have introduced assisted dying laws, which seem to strengthen the case against Benatar’s claim (at least as applied to Australians). People who face suffering that outweighs any future pleasure can end their lives painlessly and without causing harm to their loved ones (most people who have faced the painful death of loved ones supported the legislation).

It’s true that this option is only available to the terminally ill (12 months to live), but there was no apparent demand for broader access, and the number of people taking the option has remained small.

So, if painless suicide is possible, and those who care about us should (and mostly will) support our choices if life seems unbearable on careful reflection, Benatar just seems to be saying that we are all making the wrong choice in staying alive. How (except in the extreme nature of his suggestion) does this differ from someone saying we are all wrong in our choices of food, music, life partners etc and would be truly happy if we only ate food listened to music, and shared our lives with people we hated?

fn1. This happens to me a lot, either because of failing memory or excessive opinionating.

I love the various screengrabs that go around Twitter of an American working in the service industry being treated like crap by their manager who just doesn’t get that labour shortages mean power has shifted, and end with the worker quitting. They’re so popular I can only guess some are fake to hoover up extra likes, but the sentiment is real and the data seems to back it up. The Great Resignation is real, probably driven by deaths from covid, caring responsibilities and, it seems, older people leaving the workforce. In the UK, about a million Europeans have left the country, 700,000 of them from London by the first covid summer. Not that you’d know it from most newspapers. You have to infer it from the calls by government ministers for students to pick rotting vegetables and mothers to put in a shift in an abattoir after they drop the kids to school.

I used to always think having suddenly fewer of a certain essential group gave that group more power. Then I read sometime in the late nineties about China’s ‘one child’ policy, how it drove termination of pregnancies with girls, and how scarcity drove kidnapping and general mistreatment of the surviving girls and women as they grew up. Employers and governments have two choices; adapt the labour market to accommodate workers’ greater choices in the new reality, or punitively try and force them to continue behaving as in the old one. Or in the UK, complain about ungrateful (insert minority category)s, do corruption to personally buy yourself out of the broken system, and rail against reality while throwing dead cat after dead cat on the table. In this way, the ‘great resignation’ can mean both people resigning from shitty jobs and conditions, but also becoming fatally resigned to them.
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Around thirty people are dead, drowned in the English Channel. And everyone knows why they died. Because the UK government, like all governments of wealthy countries, makes it impossible for people who want to claim asylum to enter the country by the ways you and I travel. So people who want to do so – as is their human right – have to enter by clandestine means. And because states are powerful, have border guards, fences, technology to detect people etc, they have to make use of smugglers to get across international borders.

Whenever there’s a major loss of life, the same politicians who have done everything they can to make it impossible for people to arrive by safe means, blame the smugglers and criminal gangs whose businesses would not exist without the measures they themselves put in place. They deplore people who make a profit at the expense of the vulnerable, but make sure that they also criminalize people who would help those people for free from humanitarian motives.
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A couple years back I made a post about Le Guin’s “Omelas”. I teach it, and it’s been rattling around up there in the attic. I had this idea for a visual gag. And that led to a story, which led back to rethinking my story thoughts. I wrote a little essay. You can read the story and the essay here. And see the rest of the little pictures.

So this event on the relationship between social science and science fiction went live late last week. It has Paul Krugman, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton, Noah Smith and … me. I’ve been wanting to say something a little bit more about this relationship for a while. Here is one take, which surely misses out on a lot, but maybe captures some stuff too. [click to continue…]

Lately, I find I’ve been spending more and more time looking at Facebook groups of old photographs of Bristol, the city where I live. I particularly enjoy the aerial photographs of the interwar period, often colorized. There are lots of reasons for this: I like photographs, I like history, I like cities. But it isn’t just Bristol, I can also spend hours on the Shorpy site, sometimes going to Google Street View for a modern take, and I own several books comparing the Parises of Marville and Atget and the New York of Berenice Abbott to the same scenes today, as well as multiple volumes of Reece Winstone’s collection of historic Bristol pictures. So what’s the attraction, indeed the compulsion? What is drawing me and others to these scenes? And does this attraction also have a problematic side to it?

One common response to the images is a sense of thwarted possibility. You see a functioning, bustling city, full of life, and full of beatiful surviving buildings, densely packed. The train is everywhere, with bridges, tracks, sidings, sheds to match. Sometimes a locomotive is in view. The rail infrastructure criss-crosses with the water, canal and harbours. Factories with their chimneys sit adjacent to medieval churches with their towers and spires. The technology often looks amazing, as with the Ashton Avenue Bridge (1905)(covered for photoblogging a while back), which in its day was a double-decker swing structure, with road on the top deck and rail running below. These days it has but one functioning level – the old rail deck is for pedestrians and cyclists – and it hasn’t swung since 1951. The “then” pictures give us the romance of industrial modernity combined with the charm of the medieval.
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I’ve been thinking about how so many stories touch on the idea that another life or even world is almost perceivable but impossibly far away, under normal conditions, but the heroine can see different versions of the future or choose different paths, etc. Or the whole ‘sliding doors’ thing, where a critical moment splits a life in two. Those stories are delicious, not just because we get to explore versions of what might have happened, but because they satisfy a deeper intuition that our sister-lives are almost touchable. (I will only ever recommend Jo Walton’s ‘My Real Children’ as the best, most profoundly compassionate and practically wise branched narrative any of us is likely to encounter.)

When my husband Ed was deployed to Afghanistan, I wrote him letter after letter, not quite able to believe that the blue envelope could exist both in a military quarter in Scotland and, soon after, a base in Helmand. (Letters! The original time travel machine, and the best.) Or that he might have walked out the door five months before for what we couldn’t yet know was be the last time. (It wasn’t.) We often spin contingency around tragic or life-altering events, the ‘if only’s’ about humdrum decisions that set in train outcomes we so desperately wish hadn’t happened, and whose precipitating actions seem so trivial, so mundane, there must surely be a way to take them back. Even stuff like taking the stairs and not the lift at the airport, and just missing that flight. You feel like you can almost reach back and grab yourself of just a few minutes ago.

When I was a university student, my father was involved in a serious car accident. At home looking after my younger siblings, I heard his deeply familiar footsteps come down the hall. In the moment the door handle turned, I both knew it must be him and that it couldn’t be. Both seemed equally true, and until the person came into the room, my father was just as much walking into the kitchen as he was lying in an ICU. (The steps were my older brother Henry’s. I just hadn’t realised they then had the same gait and also source of shoes, i.e. my mother…)

Of course, a lifetime of reading Borges and SFF and popular science about quantum physics is inevitably going to create a fractally abundant way of thinking and feeling about what is only ever plain old contingency. Or just provide more metaphors that dissolve on contact with the inability to express how weird it is that time moves inexorably forward when we, surely, can just. not. Or could sidestep it beautifully in defiance of the expected rhythms, if we, too, had Dune’s choreographer Benjamin Millepied (he of Black Swan/Natalie Portman fame) teaching us how to move.

(By the by, I’ve not seen anything about how very, very French the sensibilities of that film are, from its director to its male lead to Charlotte Rampling’s perfectly ‘learning nothing and forgetting nothing’ Bene Gesserit abbess, to its very slightly orthogonal aesthetic relation to imperialism in the Arab world. Also the music, though I may be wrong about that.)

Anyway, I was just wondering if other people have that ‘can almost reach out and touch it’ feeling about branched lives, or other forms of intuitive disbelief about continuity, causality and contingency, or perhaps I’m calling it the wrong name entirely. How one moment leading straight to the next, and one thing inexorably causing another just seems unlikely, at very large and very small scales. I’m not entirely convinced about the middle one, either.

Does this mode of appeal to other possibilities predate late twentieth century literature and physics, or do we just use new models and metaphors to describe something people have always felt? Or was there – oh no! – a complete fracture in how we conceive of this, or perhaps just the mental model of how we make peace with it, and now there’s no going back? Perhaps what I’m calling contingency, which seems also to contain the idea of its own unsteadiness, is just a secular form of disbelief in the primacy of the present. Was it always thus?