Noble Lies
Aug. 28th, 2024 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealDo I need a tag for "this is tangential to an upcoming book review but it's sufficiently its own thing to make it its own post"? At this point, probably.
A while back I read a short story that did not work for me at all. A big part of the problem was that it had two, very contradictory, thesis statements.
1. Humans are basically garbage and even when the stakes are high, our petty shortsightedness gets in the way and ruins everything.
2. Humans are basically decent and worth fighting for, and even if the fight is not going well, most of us are well-intentioned people who at least deserve hope in the dark times.
I prefer (2) to (1), and the longer the story is, the more strongly I feel that preference--it's one thing to read several thousand words and then be like "just kidding, rocks fall, everyone dies," it's even more frustrating after several hundred pages of investment. I suspect that many other people have a similar preference; after all, most readers are human. But then, there are times when too much of (2) can make a story feel unrealistic, especially in light of humanity's mediocre response to stuff like COVID; this was one criticism of "Project Hail Mary."
However, even worse than (1) is the incongruity of trying to make both points (1) and (2) at the same time!
The POV character winds up, after some hesitation, adopting the perspective of the "noble lie." To wit: "humanity is screwed because we're garbage, yet at the same time, most people are just ignorant rubes who deserve hope; they might as well die happy. So we'll lie to them and pretend there are reasons for hope, even though there aren't."
As readers, we share the perspective of the POV character. We know the truth, the whole story. But most of the characters in the world do not. Part of the insidiousness of the noble lie as a narrative is that how easy it is for readers to identify with the knowledgeable and manipulative elite, rather than the more numerous people who are being led. (Similar to the criticism of "when people imagine Plato's philosopher-king society, they imagine being the philosopher-king, not the peasants.)
Early in COVID, there were many people whose thought process went roughly as follows: a. masks might be useful in reducing the spread of the virus if it turns out to be airborne, but we don't really know that yet; b. there are not very many medical-grade face masks in the supply at this time; c. doctors and nurses and medical staff have a more pressing need for medical-grade masks than the rest of us. Therefore, d. it would be good if we didn't rush to panic-buy masks but let the professionals have first dibs; if it turns out masks are useful, we'll expect more of them to be manufactured in the weeks and months to come.
All a valid thought process. But what some of those people actually said was e. "You rubes shouldn't buy up medical masks because you're too stupid to know how to wear them, they won't do a bit of good on you." Which rung hollow when the scientific consensus rapidly converged to f. unlike other similar diseases, COVID is airborne, and even a mediocre homemade cloth mask is better than nothing when it comes to reducing transmission. Which in some cases rapidly evolved to g. I'm wearing a mask to signal that I'm a Good Person, and if you were really a Good Person, you would too.
In this case, the early messaging (e) was so off-base that it undermined people's credibility; to the extent that Trusting The Science became a capital-letter dogma rather than an ongoing evidentiary process, people were more skeptical of real discoveries like (f) than they had reason to be.
But even if it hadn't been for that, the difference between (d) and (e) is the power-tripping of "haha, I'm smarter than those people, so I can tell them what to do--it's for their own good." And I think that's very dangerous.
Again, it's like--I have a lot more book-learning than many other people, so if "having more formal education than someone else" correlates to "being more likely to condescend to them," I should be much more worried about telling the noble lies than being told them. Except, I'm not. Because even though there are a lot of people I might be at risk of condescending to, because they're rubes, I don't spend a lot of time around them, because they're rubes. Even though the people who are cooler and more above-it-all and jaded than me are perhaps only a small minority, they're the ones who I want to spend time around and curry the favor of. Because they're cooler and more above-it-all than me. Is there something fallacious about this?
A while back I read a short story that did not work for me at all. A big part of the problem was that it had two, very contradictory, thesis statements.
1. Humans are basically garbage and even when the stakes are high, our petty shortsightedness gets in the way and ruins everything.
2. Humans are basically decent and worth fighting for, and even if the fight is not going well, most of us are well-intentioned people who at least deserve hope in the dark times.
I prefer (2) to (1), and the longer the story is, the more strongly I feel that preference--it's one thing to read several thousand words and then be like "just kidding, rocks fall, everyone dies," it's even more frustrating after several hundred pages of investment. I suspect that many other people have a similar preference; after all, most readers are human. But then, there are times when too much of (2) can make a story feel unrealistic, especially in light of humanity's mediocre response to stuff like COVID; this was one criticism of "Project Hail Mary."
However, even worse than (1) is the incongruity of trying to make both points (1) and (2) at the same time!
The POV character winds up, after some hesitation, adopting the perspective of the "noble lie." To wit: "humanity is screwed because we're garbage, yet at the same time, most people are just ignorant rubes who deserve hope; they might as well die happy. So we'll lie to them and pretend there are reasons for hope, even though there aren't."
As readers, we share the perspective of the POV character. We know the truth, the whole story. But most of the characters in the world do not. Part of the insidiousness of the noble lie as a narrative is that how easy it is for readers to identify with the knowledgeable and manipulative elite, rather than the more numerous people who are being led. (Similar to the criticism of "when people imagine Plato's philosopher-king society, they imagine being the philosopher-king, not the peasants.)
Early in COVID, there were many people whose thought process went roughly as follows: a. masks might be useful in reducing the spread of the virus if it turns out to be airborne, but we don't really know that yet; b. there are not very many medical-grade face masks in the supply at this time; c. doctors and nurses and medical staff have a more pressing need for medical-grade masks than the rest of us. Therefore, d. it would be good if we didn't rush to panic-buy masks but let the professionals have first dibs; if it turns out masks are useful, we'll expect more of them to be manufactured in the weeks and months to come.
All a valid thought process. But what some of those people actually said was e. "You rubes shouldn't buy up medical masks because you're too stupid to know how to wear them, they won't do a bit of good on you." Which rung hollow when the scientific consensus rapidly converged to f. unlike other similar diseases, COVID is airborne, and even a mediocre homemade cloth mask is better than nothing when it comes to reducing transmission. Which in some cases rapidly evolved to g. I'm wearing a mask to signal that I'm a Good Person, and if you were really a Good Person, you would too.
In this case, the early messaging (e) was so off-base that it undermined people's credibility; to the extent that Trusting The Science became a capital-letter dogma rather than an ongoing evidentiary process, people were more skeptical of real discoveries like (f) than they had reason to be.
But even if it hadn't been for that, the difference between (d) and (e) is the power-tripping of "haha, I'm smarter than those people, so I can tell them what to do--it's for their own good." And I think that's very dangerous.
Again, it's like--I have a lot more book-learning than many other people, so if "having more formal education than someone else" correlates to "being more likely to condescend to them," I should be much more worried about telling the noble lies than being told them. Except, I'm not. Because even though there are a lot of people I might be at risk of condescending to, because they're rubes, I don't spend a lot of time around them, because they're rubes. Even though the people who are cooler and more above-it-all and jaded than me are perhaps only a small minority, they're the ones who I want to spend time around and curry the favor of. Because they're cooler and more above-it-all than me. Is there something fallacious about this?
