As played by Peter Sellers!
I actually thought Nic Cage did a good job with that role.
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Oh, on the award.
It might be cool if they changed it each year.
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Edgar Rice Burroughs, too.
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My thoughts on Lovecraft’s racism: I. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.
Yeah, he was a racist. A stone-cold racist. Sofa-king what? His stories are good. They’re beyond good–they’re friggin’ great! I don’t give a rat’s ass about his politics or personality. How is this in ANY way relative to the quality of his writing?
I do not understand people who try to wave away Lovecraft’s racism–it cannot possibly be more evident in many of his letters–but neither do I understand people who make a big deal out of it. Seriously, why is this even an issue? I sincerely doubt anyone’s ever going to release a volume called “The Nigger” and Other Masterworks of Racist Literature by Howard Philips Lovecraft and Others.
I’m obsessed with Lovecraftian themes, writings. The dude was a racist… but I still enjoy his works of fiction and his style. You’re father and his friends shouldn’t roll their eyes at you but understand that yes he was a racist and no that’s not cool, still you can appreciate the art without agreeing with the artist.
HP’s stuff is often overrated, but I think what’s celebrated most is his “world building” the mythos that all ties together and the way it was expressed and the influence he had on modern horror writers.
Ethics by definition is supposed to be universal and not a societal construct at all. Ethos are cultural. You may not have confused these words, however; it’s a perfectly legitimate arguing position to say that ethics don’t exist specifically because of the claim to universality. But if you do accept the concept of ethics, then the principles of ethics are supposed to be universal absolutes.
Tell a room full of Lovecraft lovers that he was racist and you’ll likely get little more than bored nods. But “overrated”?!? Them’s fightin’ words.
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The thing about the argument people make, that racism was more socially acceptable in his day, is that while true, it misses a very important point: it was socially acceptable among his peers, fucking racists.
It’s an awful excuse for any argument, even by the standards of awkward handwaving. The exact argument could be used, literally, to describe modern day sexual assault on college campuses.
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Lovecraft suffers from a variation of the Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope.
The things his works did only really worked when they were fresh and new - but now that they’re well known and accepted (or at least the concepts that they are based on are), the works aren’t effective in they way they were when they were new.
Lovecraft’s horror is built from the concept of “mankind isn’t the center of the universe”. Everything is about humanity being dwarfed and overwhelmed by other, larger, unfathomable forces.
But in today’s world, where every day that passes find science proving even more incontrovertibly that the universe is impossibly massive and that humanity is impossibly small and insignificant within it, we by and large accept that we aren’t the center of the universe. In today world, Lovecraft’s notions are arguably as chilling and unsettling as watching excerpts from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
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You know what’s kinda funny? The only non-white Lovecraft fan I’ve ever met is S.T. Joshi.
And I’ve never met a female one.
So weird, this guy is so beloved by white dudes.
Just something I’ve noticed.
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Yeah, but if you handwaved away sexual assaults on a college campus you would be suggesting that real living people should be allowed to get away with sexual assault. There really is no parallel when dealing with a dead guy and his public domain writings. He was racist, a lot of people were racist. What now?
I assume this has something to do with the source of his horror relying on what is essentially an ontological concern, and with philosophy being the whitest, malest field of them all. Horror at the idea that you are not important is probably an affliction only felt by those who grew up with the deep sense that they were very important, or were supposed to be important. It’s the horror of realizing you aren’t entitled.
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Mistakenly clicked on the writer’s link, thinking it was a David Icke rant. Left disappointed.
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The problem is scope and scale.
In a world where the normal behavior is to be a “fucking racist”, where the concept of racism isn’t considered “wrong” by the vast majority, where only a few really even consider that that are other ways to behave or that there even should be, complaining that people didn’t abide by the values we now see as our own norm is kind of irrational.
Let’s put ourselves in their shoes. Let’s imagine a future in which something we take for granted as just being a part of our reality and world is overturned, and then the future judges us for not being more progressive and enlightened.
For the sake of sheer impact of concept, I’ll choose cannibalism. In today’s world, cannibalism is overwhelmingly forbidden - but suppose in the future, perhaps in part due to dwindling resources or an exploding global population, it becomes considered a normal, perfectly acceptable, and even strongly promoted concept.
Is it then fair for the people of the future to condemn us for not being cannibals? We’re letting all this good meat go to waste in a world of scarcity! Think of how much we could impact world hunger with Soylent Green! We’re all just a bunch of selfish monsters, greedily consuming the flesh of other lesser species while senselessly wasting the ample bounty of our kind!
No, it wouldn’t be reasonable to hold us to the standards of this theoretical future. Just because they’ve embraced cannibalism for their own reasons, doesn’t mean they have any right to judge us for not having embraced it in our own time - even if ultimately our reasons for doing so are rooted far more in culture and tradition than in logic or morality.
Racism stinks, but if people live in a world where it is overwhelmingly difficult to go against the popular sentiment which embraces it, can you really hold people accountable for not doing so? If someone grows up surrounded by racism, told from an early age that it is right and proper, and never being given a reason to think otherwise or have their societal indoctrinations challenged, can we reasonably expect them to think in any other way?
Pick anything you like, really - it doesn’t have to be as extreme an example as cannibalism. Find something that we do today that the past could have but didn’t, or that the past did but that we no longer do.
Do people go around condemning French Royalists for their support of the Monarchy over the Revolution’s attempts at Democracy and Republic? Goodness no! Do we judge the Vikings for invading, looting, and pillaging throughout northern Europe? Quite the opposite - we celebrate them as badasses! Do we call the Hebrews a bunch of “fucking elitists” for believing themselves to be the Chosen People and inventing Monotheism? Certainly not!
The world is a complicated place, and it has changed drastically over the centuries. What is right today can become wrong tomorrow, and to look back on the past purely to find fault with it for not matching the values we today hold is unreasonable, or at the very least unhelpful.
It is possible, and I feel healthy and necessary, to separate out the good and the bad (as we today understand it) from historical figures. We can look at Napoleon and condemn his tyrannical bid for European conquest in light of our modern sensibilities, without also condemning the man himself as some sort of monster. We can denounce one aspect of his life while simultaneously respecting or even admiring others. We can disagree utterly with one side him while still very much liking another, and not once do we have to resort to reducing him to a flat caricature, existing only to be derided - an effigy to be sacrificed on the altar of self-righteousness.
As the Christians would say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
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Then you have been wrong before also. I guarantee you that if you separate the urinal from Marcel Duchamp, it doesn’t end up in a museum. You can’t separate the art from the artist, but you can turn a blind eye, if you choose to.
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Based on extensive research, I’ve come to the conclusion that Nietzsche liked bone blades on arms.
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But @dobby is correct about Eugenics being a mainstream field of study. Not everyone bought into it, but enough did that we can indeed call it mainstream for its time. Not everyone who believed in Eugenics thought that meant that one race or the other was “bad” or “good” but just a basic fact of How people understood or deployed eugenics certainly differed, but there were eugenics departments in major universites and thinkers of the day reguarly used the language of eugenics to support their arguments. Plenty of feminists for example used eugenics to argue for the rights of white women for example.
Plus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in 1852. Eugenics generally emerged as a field of study in the post-Reconstruction period, some 30 years later.
I looked it up and that’s fucking brilliant! I love how she changes the names as she goes along… I laughed and laughed at the horrible things they said:
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The two aren’t contradictory. Anglophilia is a love of the idea, rather than the reality.
But if you’re taking back awards based on changing social ethics, there might not be an awful lot left.
