Thought & Language On The Final Frontier

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized                                                  

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One thing that makes Wokism and Cancel Culture so pervasive is a heavy reliance on words and language to gain entre not only to the basic institutions of society, like government and academia, but also popular entertainment and the ardent focus of its attendant subcultures, where it is hoped the trend will find greater acceptance.

Strange New Worlds, Indeed

Stacey Abrams on Discovery

A recent example is the heated flack over the latest streaming Star Trek series when a May 14 op-ed piece by Fox News' David Marcus, "Star Trek Writers Take Starship Enterprise Where It's Never Gone Before—Woke Politics" (1), earned the ire of former Star Trek" Deep Space Nine scribe Robert Hewitt Wolfe (along with numerous fans), whose clumsy attempt, to clothe the intolerance of the current Woke craze with the garments of the dialectical progressivism of the older incarnations of the space opera only substantiated the criticisms.

In "Fox News Reporter Says Star Trek Has Never Been Woke Before, DS9 Writer Calls Him A Moron" (2), running the following day on Gamer.com, Rhiannon Bevan cites numerous examples of Star Trek's history tackling racism, labor and other topics, while ignoring Marcus' well-observed point that "Star Trek is one of a small handful of entertainment brands with the popularity... to be (a) shared story. But to do so, its creators must choose that universality over scoring cheap, predictable, and partisan political points.... Everyone supports "voting rights" but that isn’t the same as supporting Stacey Abrams (the Georgia Democrat who had a recent cameo as the head of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek: Discovery, the first of three live-action series launched since Trump's presidency).

Further, the new shows' inclination to weave directly current events into their future history, such as attributing the roots of the Earth's very destruction to the so-called January 6 Capitol "insurrection" in the pilot of Strange New Worlds frowns on the sort of

March Yale student protest

involving debate (much like the student activists who disrupted a forum between a Christian and an atheist at Yale last March[3]) Gene Roddenberry's original series used to elucidate via allegory important issues, like nuclear brinksmanship ("A Taste Of Armageddon"). Yet Wolfe and/or Bevan (her piece is so slanted it is hard to tell which person is speaking) cannot grasp this important distinction: "I have no idea how this is any more political than the Bell Riots (a projected social upheaval that would lead to the founding of the Federation).... I guess Marcus (an avowed Trekker, himself) just isn't happy that he might be the one getting called out this time."

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry

Being very much immersed both in the media and literary science fiction scene for many years, I also noticed the resentment-cultivating, self-policing aspects of this movement finding its way into this community in the years just before Covid-19, one of the first indicators being an overheard conversation between two elderly attendees at Boskone, the annual convention of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA), held each February in Boston almost continuously since 1965.

Safe Spaces, Personal Safety & The Sanctity Of Thought

Sitting in the row behind them while awaiting the start of the next panel discussion in one of the hotel's ballrooms, I heard one gentlemen expressing puzzlement to his friend about younger attendees advocating for the establishment of a "safe space" at the venue. I paid particular attention, because seniors, as volunteers and attendees, represented the backbone of this and many other such events and had seen alot. Neither could make sense of this, having not heard of any comparable complain before. After all, since the first genre convention in New York City, 1939's WorldCon, science fiction/fantasy fandom, like many gatherings of individuals sharing a common interest, had evolved to take pride in its sense of acceptance and, certainly in terms of creative expression, even reveling in the different (all you have to do is watch the puzzled reaction of hotels guests staying for a wedding reception having to share an elevator with wildly-costumed fans).

While Boskone already had a detailed and proactive anti-harassment policy, the majority of attendance being out-of-towners having booked rooms at the hotel would obviate the need for the ongoing establishment of a safe space based on sexual orientation, identity, or race. To date, as far as I know, NESFA has not established such a potentially divisive policy, although, before too long, I would begin to feel like I needed a refuge myself from the development of a sort of acculturated neuroticism spreading to other gatherings.

Two months later in Tarrytown, the registration table at LunaCon 2017, the annual convention sponsored by the now-defunct New York Science Fiction Society, offered the new option of colorful foil ribbons, which could be appended to one's ID badge, notifying fellow attendees what pronouns applied to you socially. Not really getting why something so personal as one's sexual identity would be of anyone else's business, particularly a stranger's (save on a dating website), nor why an honest mistake in this regard should inspire a reaction that could not be resolved with an apology, I didn't give it that much thought at the time.

Then, at Arisia, again in Boston (perhaps the following January), the convention planners had hastily designated a restroom "gender neutral" with a taped-up sign. This afforded me a memorably awkward episode when, following use of the only available facilities at the time, I found myself washing my hands next to a female attendee, neither one of us deviating in the slightest from looking straight ahead at the mirror throughout--she uncomfortable being alone in a public restroom with a man, while I was uncomfortable with making her feel uncomfortable by my presence.

But it was an issue of one of the genre's oldest magazines a few years later that demonstrated to what lengths the literary form, itself, had been colonized by Wokism's postmodernist (or, as former New York University scholar/social critic Michael Rectenwald contends, second-generation postmodernist[4])  absurdities.

Personal Thoughts As Social Menace

The January/February 2022 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact featured an brow-raising exchange between Tari Neutraedter, a disgruntled reader and editor, Trevor Quachri, over the heavy use of the "singular they" in a a short story in a prior issue: "I (was) continually... trying to figure out who else was being referred to when only one was.... The character had no gender role, a gender could have been picked with a coin flip. Using the grammatically incorrect pronoun simply made the story hard to read."

While pointing out that "The Chicago Manual and AP guide style have recognized 'singular they' as applicable in cases where... gender is 'unknown, irrelevant, nonbinary, or... needs to be concealed,'" Quachri (in similar fashion to Wolfe's reaction to the Marcus Star Trek critique) sidestepped the reader's complaint as to why it was used throughout a piece of fiction whose plot did not hinge on such ambiguity, wrapping up with a familiar haughty and unwarranted presumption: "Regardless of your feelings... people who use nonbinary terms exist; pretending they don't would be fantasy, and this is, after all, a science fiction magazine." (5)

Beyond the immaturity of the response their lingers more psychologically intrusive implications implicit in the subtle transposing of that which is taken as a form of address with that of reference.

When a radio host opens his program with a declaration that he uses the pronouns "he/him", or an award-winning transgender author revises her bio to state her identifying as "them", both may or may not realize that they are, in fact, not claiming simply how they prefer to be called, but, rather, how they want to be called by others when two or more people are talking about them, not to them.

Pronoun-based linguistic reform is being used to self-discipline how people should regard others, even in their absence, and for Analog's editor, in particular, to miss this is weirdly at odds with the title's storied tradition of challenging readers with both daring fiction and contrarian essays. Founded in 1930 as Astounding Science Fiction, the pulp grew into a bastion of free inquiry and Libertarian thought within the community under the later oversight of John W. Campbell (responsible for making household names of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein).

The Weight Of Words

Efforts to convince the public through the various recreation cultures they are plugged into that it should be acceptable, even desirable, for the precincts of one's own mind to become the domain of others, along with a roving yen for dead-end divisiveness and "gotcha!" victimhood works to make normal the serious real-life outcomes for dissenters like another NYU professor, Marc Crispin Miller, who faced cancellation in 2020 because he discussed both sides of the Covid-19 masking question, ironically in a popular class on propaganda (6).

Marc Crispin Miller

And as Nichelle Nichol's Lt. Uhura demonstrated in her reply to Abraham Lincoln's apology for describing her as a "charming negress" in the 1968 Star Trek episode, "Savage Curtain", so much of Wokism starts with the manipulation of and weight people allow others to put on language: "You see, in our century, we've learned not to fear words."

Neither should we.

References:

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1) https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/star-trek-starship-enterprise-democrat-woke-david-marcus

2) https://www.thegamer.com/star-trek-woke-discovery-strange-new-worlds-writer-response/

3) https://freebeacon.com/campus/hundreds-of-yale-law-students-disrupt-bipartisan-free-speech-event/

4) https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/

5) "Analog Science Fiction & Fact" ("Astounding"), Vol. XCLL, Nos. 1&2, January/February 2022, p. 203

6) https://truthcomestolight.com/nyu-professor-mark-crispin-miller-the-latest-victim-of-cancel-culture/