>And then it all went bad. The Daily Telegraph, following up on biographical discrepancy in a BBC documentary, uncovered proof that Patrick O’Brian…was not Patrick O’Brian.
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.
The "human connection to the artist" is believed to be important by some, but I disagree. People tend to create an image of a musician and are too often disappointed because, for example, they disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social or political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.
I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
I don't, especially when the artist flows into the art.
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
The interesting thing about Lovecraft is that, despite all those racist tropes you mentioned, he actually tried to make horror that wasn't about fear of falling down the evolutionary ladder. This idea was absolutely everywhere for at least 100 years, and Lovecraft definitely perpetuated it sometimes. But he did actually try to find horror in completely different ideas.
So, despite his own extreme personal racism, he probably managed to shift the culture away from at least one very racially-loaded trope.
Some authors are indeed very hard to separate from their work, and Lovecraft is one of them.
I still enjoy reading him, but I always struggle reading his passages about mongrels, halfbreeds or dark skinned people being evil or deceitful, because that's what he truly believed. So yes, it flowed into what he wrote.
A much less odious -- and better! -- writer who I also had trouble with was Jack London, who also wrote some racist descriptions of blacks and Native Americans, doubly troubling because he was a socialist.
I get what you're saying. The problem is that I cannot stand ironic (or otherwise) racists comments on 4chan, so reading it like that wouldn't be a saving grace for Lovecraft. I actually find 4chan more grating.
I appreciate Lovecraft, especially for the influence it had on other writers, on comics, tabletop and video games; and some of this stories are pretty good (e.g. The Color Out of Space, The Outsider). But it's really hard to swallow his racism and xenophobia, especially since as mentioned by others, it cannot simply be excused by saying he was "a man of his time". He was xenophobic even for his time.
I guess you have to have the right outlook for it. An ironic comment is (supposed to be) funny because it makes you think "haha, what if someone actually said that?" In Lovecraft's case there's no irony to it, so I think it helps to try to empathize with him. Why is he like this? He's not just some monster that hates/fears people for no reason. There must be a reason, and it's probably either his upbringing or his lifestyle. At that point, at least for me, it can no longer evoke disgust, and it just causes either pity or laughter, like listening to a flat-earther.
If someone is racist, would you rather they harbor those opinions in secret, or for them to voice them proudly? Consider for your answer that in either case those opinions will affect their decision-making.
In general I'd rather they fester away in secret, with the knowledge that if they were to air their views publicly they would be considered shameful. In places like 4chan they are given cover by "ironic" racists, who I don't honestly believe are in any way ironic anyway. It's just a cover, and a poor one.
I once saw a couple of guys looking at jeans, one of them picked up a pair of acid pink jeans, saying to his friend "Hey, do you think I could wear these ironically?"
It doesn't matter - If you like them then buy them, wear them. Wear them ironically, wear them seriously. At the end of the day you're still going to be a guy wearing pink jeans. Own that or don't.
Indeed, unless the artist is some kind of moralist, where i may be concerned about hypocrisy, I believe their public appearance to be part of the act, what they are like at home is none of my business.
> he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
Someone pointed it out to me that, if a person does something bad and faces the consequences by law, then that should be the end of it. Applying a personal punishment individually like avoiding anything they have involved in, is pointless or even unfair.
It can’t apply to all scenarios. But that struck me as an important thing to consider. Sometimes people get out of the consequences by using the riches they accumulated by being bad.
Why are we even thinking about "fairness" in this context? It's not like we read every book in the world, in order to be fair to all authors. Or all genres, all qualities, all equally. You have to make some choices and actually make every second a choice, to pick a book, to pick it up, to continue it after page 100...
I don’t think it’s that fairness. It’s about - what’s a fair amount of punishment? Since society has created the laws and laid down mechanisms to punish wrongs, each person then individually deciding to punish the person is unfair in a civilised society.
P.S: I was writing it as a response to the my parent comment. I haven’t read C&G books and don’t know this author.
I think the desire to not have to be accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world is also childlike, personally.
One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
Beyond that it's not just about reducing everything to good or bad, it's also about understanding the context of the works you're consuming. Sometimes the author's life, prejudices and mores seep into the work, and put a new spin on the characters and scenarios.
> One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
“I believe that almost everyone fails to completely understand how badly they need the people they can’t stand.”
Eh, I'm not watching a video to see a quote from someone I've never heard of and have no particular reason to value.
And whatever he might have to say, I'm not reliant on the work of a specific author, which is the context here.
Nor do I buy into "you can't survive without relying on/funding some people you disagree with therefore you shouldn't seek to act consistently with your own ethics in any regard" as a philosophy.
> Eh, I'm not watching a video to see a quote from someone I've never heard of and have no particular reason to value.
Your loss.
> Nor do I buy into "you can't survive without relying on/funding some people you disagree with therefore you shouldn't seek to act consistently with your own ethics in any regard" as a philosophy.
But what exactly is your ethics here? Is it that nobody should rely on people who have done something bad? If it is, then how should these condemned people live? And if not, would you then happily allow other people to rely on them, without decrying those people, as well?
Seems unlikely. I'd have read an argument but I don't generally consider links-to-youtube to be an argument.
> Is it that nobody should rely on people who have done something bad?
My point is it's not impossible to make ethical choices about spending, even in a world where you don't have full control.
The idea that it is wrong to make ethical decisions about how to spend your money, time or attention, either because the system we live in makes complete consistency impossible or because of some notion that we might force people judged as bad to starve, is just so bizarre.
A thread here the other day covered several brands of "Italian" or "Australian" tomato paste in Australia that have been caught using Chinese tomatoes, which are largely from areas we know use forced labour. I don't approve of forced labour and I'm willing to pay a little more to avoid contributing to that. If enough others join me, it might make a small difference. By directing what economic activity I can to products from nations with good standards of worker rights, I hope I help keep slavery-free products viable, until such time as we get a government with a backbone.
But am I boycotting everything made in China? Could I even conceptually avoid using all Chinese products when they're literally everywhere? No, that seems very unlikely to even be possible in this day and age. But I don't consider that the inability to do that negates the choices I make where I can. Your quote makes it seem like you do think that? All or nothing? Go live in a locally made yurt and grow your own food or just give up?
> If it is, then how should these condemned people live?
Well if there's no more profit to be had in selling the output of indentured servitude, it might stop? And these "condemned" people could do something else to make a living rather than being slavers?
If a particular author was known to be (for example) funding white supremacist groups, am I supposed to feel guilt that I might not buy their book? Why? They need to eat? Maybe they could stop the funding then?
Now, where your specific red lines are is going to be variable, and where it comes to artistic output things are always blurry. But I still don't think it's wrong to ask "Where is my money going? What second order effect is this purchase having on the world?"
An author who abandoned his family and lied about large parts of his life is clearly not a good person. Whether that puts you off reading them is up to you. I still (occasionally) reread HP Lovecraft, with the knowledge he was a pretty godawful racist, even for his times, and so is some of his work. That said, buying a book of his isn't going to fund him or his views these days, as there is no identifiable estate.
I think boycotts are effectively useless. If you disagree, can you name a few, or even one, consumer-level boycott in, say, the last 50 years, which actually accomplished its goal? Accomplished by the actual boycott alone, I mean.
Boycotts are, as I understand it, only a way for you to feel that you still are morally pure. But the counterargument is that it is impossible to be actually morally pure. When you last needed, say, a plumber, did you know how they voted before you engaged them? How does your electricity company CEO vote? How about your local grocery store cashier? If you would actually go though every single thing and person that you depend on, and boycotted every one who is a terrible person or organization, you would not be able to live.
Therefore, boycotts are doubly bad: They don’t accomplish anything, but they feel useful, and therefore they rob you of any incentive or energy to do anything actually useful, like changing relevant laws. Also, many people go at least one step further, and denounce people who simply do not participate in their pet boycotts.
Who says that avoiding Chinese tomato paste doesn’t accomplish anything? It funnels money to other brands and keeps them going rather than rewarding forced labour and driving other forms of production out of the market. That in itself is an actual, practical effect in a capitalist system.
And doing so certainly wouldn’t make me less likely to vote for a party promising to address the issue.
And I mean, isn’t this just how capitalism works? Buy stuff you want to see more of? Don’t buy things you don’t like. I try to buy local when I can, because I like local produce and I want the local economy to thrive. It’s just taking an active role in the feedback mechanisms that exist around us and deciding where you want to put your very small level of personal influence.
> can you name a few, or even one, consumer-level boycott in, say, the last 50 years, which actually accomplished its goal?
The Bud Light Boycott of 2023 springs immediately to mind. Not that I agree with the people doing the boycotting, or would drink bud light anyway, but it certainly made the company backpedal.
> Boycotts are, as I understand it, only a way for you to feel that you still are morally pure
Then I guess you don’t understand very much, and you certainly don’t understand my posts higher up if you think I’m demanding moral purity of myself or anyone else.
To me, this all just sounds like a justification for your own lack of conscientiousness.
> Who says that avoiding Chinese tomato paste doesn’t accomplish anything? It funnels money to other brands and keeps them going rather than rewarding forced labour and driving other forms of production out of the market. That in itself is an actual, practical effect in a capitalist system.
Your individual boycott accomplishes absolutely nothing. Even the total number of people participating in this boycott will not change a single thing.
> The Bud Light Boycott of 2023 springs to mind. Not that I agree with the people doing the boycotting, but it certainly made the company backpedal.
Unlikely, since, from what I hear, the brand everyone switched to was owned by the same company. The most a boycott can accomplish is a public statement, no actual change. Also, this statement was a result of the publicity, not the boycott itself. The company fought publicity with publicity by making a public statement of their own.
> you certainly don’t understand my posts higher up if you think I’m demanding moral purity of myself or anyone else.
You did say that those not participating in boycotts should be held “accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world”.
> To me, this all just sounds like a justification for your own lack of conscientiousness.
> Your individual boycott accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Incorrect. I've already explained why. The simple act of making choices in capitalism has an effect on the markets you participate in.
> Unlikely
But a factually true and well documented answer to your demand, which itself was little to do with my arguments, but I produced one anyway like some sort of performing seal.
> You did say that those not participating in boycotts should be held “accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world”.
Nope, certainly did not. And you're the one obsessed with boycotts, purity, "condemned" people and other such hyperbolic statements.
> No personal attacks, please.
You first eh?
At this point I'm done with this conversation and your persistent misrepresentation of what I'm saying. Have a nice life.
Then what did you mean by “I think the desire to not have to be accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world is also childlike, personally.”? I though you meant that people who do not participate in boycotts should be held accountable. If that is wrong, then my replies to you were irrelevant. But in that case, what did you mean?
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.