The Handy Dystopias - Instrumental Uses of Speculative Fiction
Sexy Slovenian saliva machine Slavoj Zizek recently had an original take on the dystopian fiction novel and Netflix series The Handmaid’s Tale. His theory is fairly simple. Essentially he sees it as something which allows the viewer to compare with the modern day, and allow us to look at the present moment through the same rose-tinted glasses usually reserved for our childhood; a “nostalgia of the present”.
I disagree.
In fact, its function, if the spontaneous outbursts of the average college feminists are anything to go by, is to present a warning of what men would do if we ever let up with the endless shapeshifting moral panic about patriarchal norms; the threat that anybody to the right of Rosa Luxembourg presents to the freedom of the fairer sex. I still remember how thirstily the girls in my class clamoured to insert their pointless diversion into the conversation in our Cybersecurity lecture. While most of the class, including the professor, were concerned about involuntary voice-tracking in the context of fraud, ransom, and government persecution, the mere notion of a dark future, despite no logical connection with feminism, invited the wild ejaculation from the front row girls, “HAVE YOU SEEN THE HANDMAID'S TALE OMG IT'S ABOUT HOW MEN blah blah blah”.
While most people in the first world fear the coming of 1984 (or if they are smarter, Brave New World, even something more boring and predictable like nuclear proliferation), feminists fear THT as if it's literally right around the corner. I suppose it is not entirely implausible; there are several parts of the world in which a misogynistic totalitarian regime dominates women in a comparable way. The only trouble is that these states are Muslim and are beyond the scope of analysis for any member of polite Western society.
There is literally nothing to be learned from THT that can’t be gleaned from a travel guide to Saudi Arabia. It is, I understand, well-written, and taps into all the visceral and noble archetypes of the Western revolutionary tradition, and all the noble stoic resistance that one would expect. But the West has already experienced their feminist revolution, and I sincerely doubt that we will return to a pre-birth control world any time soon. While it may have meant something different to Margaret Atwood, to her audience it means a call to arms, to stamp out the last dissenters from the latest mystic incantations of the high priestesses in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League Gender Studies departments. It is not even set in the future; it is set in what feminism imagines the past is (again, Ms. Atwood perhaps has more nuance to her than her fans, but it is they who draw my attention).
What it exists for, is the same sort of thing novels like When Smuts Goes served to provide for the fearful Unionists of the era leading up to Grand Apartheid in South Africa: a fear of alternatives. It is a bolstering of a laager mentality, a sense of being surrounded at all times by a frightening and menacing historic foe who could strike any day. It motivates an urge to police those who would defect from the movement (or in the case of the South African example, the leadership of Smuts), and ensure that the troops stay in line.
In South Africa there is no shortage of popular mythology to make us fear change. In the old days it was the swart gevaar. Today it’s the looming presence of WMC, which functions the same way as the Zionist conspiracy functions for antisemitic wingnuts in the United States. It’s a big bag of bullshit, but it has just ever so slightly enough truthful fibre in it to prevent it leaking through the burlap sack of conspiracy like hot diarrhoea. Most people vote ANC not because they think the ANC are doing a sterling job. They fear the DA will return apartheid and the EFF will kill everyone and steal all their stuff. Five minutes with the average voter may not give you much faith in the quality of information available to them, but they are pretty smart about what they think they know.
And so are feminists. But unlike the average South African who is merely desperate, frustrated and underinformed, the Western feminist is if anything, over-informed. It just so happens that they are informed by the wrong information. The bulk of the curriculum exists to delegitimise any criticism of the notion that women are universally and unconditionally, even supernaturally oppressed, at all times, by all men, everywhere, at a fractal level. Men’s very reluctance to believe this, is taken as evidence that it must be true. Women who don’t buy feminism are “internalising” their misogyny. This is not to say that internalised identity-based self-loathing doesn’t exist in reality, but rarely have I ever met a feminist capable of wielding a sophisticated concept with any more elegance or nuance than she could an industrial chainsaw.
Now that their ideas have been imported into race analysis by high priestess Kimberlé Crenshaw, and subsequently welded onto the already psychotic web of violent pan-African philosophies bubbling away in the background of the South African university, the volatile concoction has created an environment where no white person capable of pursuing happiness in life without immediately drowning in an ocean of self-loathing, is tolerated anywhere in polite society, unless they are very carefully and strategically quiet. This isn’t to say that that beneath the sophisticated, woke upper crust of the elite-curated English-language media there isn’t a frothing well of frustrated racism roiling away like the mucosal foam in the stomach of an epileptic dropping off their meds, but it is to say that amongst polite society, that haughty pretence of profound self-hatred (which is sometimes not even pretended) is thoroughly encouraged, even mandated.
For example, take Eusebius McKaizer, on any given 702 talk radio interview. Any white person who has anything less than a self-flagellating attitude must be subjected to volleys of interrogative criticism peppered with hip, Western, Critical Theory jargon. He doesn’t exactly hate white people but, perhaps because of his upbringing in a world of white domination, he can never quite feel secure enough to let a white person take anything but a submissive role in conversation. It also explains his desperate need to inject words like “phenomenology” when he could just say “and how does that make you feel?” or any other number of vague and ambiguous inferences.
After all, isn’t that what White Privilege is about? It is an entirely nebulous, deliberately ambiguous concept which can be stretched to submit to any form of logical contortions necessary. It manages to simultaneously mean:
benefitting from an economy created by a white supremacist regime,
inheriting wealth in a society where whites are wealthier than blacks,
inheriting wealth generated by violent conquest,
benefitting from preferential treatment,
the incurable inability to understand any human being with a melanin content above a light tan,
and the inability to perceive reality with anything but the most warped perspective imaginable.
None of these six propositions are ever disaggregated, despite the fact that they do not consistently covary. Instead, those taught to use the concept dodge and weave through a forest of ambiguity and accusation until the white interlocutor either denies some aspect of the charge, in which case they are accused of racism on all six counts (a position which no educated white person I have never met or heard of takes), or else whitey submits to the understanding that they are to be unconditionally submissive in all social transactions with their darker brethren, and act as uncompromising inquisitor of their co-racial peers, in a never-ending competition to demonstrate how much guilt and self-hatred they can display by weeding out “racism”.
Of course, this tactic is often accompanied by ridiculous factoids like the mythical notion that “whites” in some abstract and undefined way “own” 85-90% of the economy, or 90% of the land, which would have been true in 1991, but is by no means true today, except with the use of some very creative accounting. Of course we are far better off than the man on the Simonstown line, there’s no denying, nor denying our well-trodden and shameful history. So why the ambiguity, the tricks, the fictions? Well, because of a perennial fear. I think that it is a serious mystery to certain members of the general population how Europeans dominated Africa. Instead of taking a simple observation based on factors like modern industrial economy, literacy, firearms and the natural tendency of states to competition for security and resources, it “must be” rooted in something deeper, some mystical, magical force which white people possess that magically elevates them above other races, and makes them crueller. If you have to believe that Africa was like Wakanda before Jan van Riebeeck rocked up, it is a sorry state of affairs indeed. Instead of bad luck begetting bad timing (i.e. someone getting to gunpowder and ocean trade before you), you are forced to resort to secular superstition to explain the downfall.
This kind of bunk is actually an insult to everyone concerned. It is also why “white liberals” (who are often not literal Liberals, but are a true phenomenon which several black writers have rightly pummelled with their scornful tongues) like it so much – it plays into the inherited sense of specialness they have – it is they who will save the world, particularly through a psychologically Christlike sacrifice of their egos, if only to show how much holier they are than all the other whites. Shit, I have a streak of that in myself too, though my ambition was always just to be a civil servant; perhaps a mediocre aspiration when you put like that, but I just wanted to be a good boy, a better-than-average South African doing good for his fellow citizen. I hope I am not being too assertive of my putative virtues by claiming that this is a fairly healthy degree of aspiration for any young university-bound young adult. But in a post-RhodesMustFall world, it is not deemed so anymore. We are busy taking up space by doing anything at all. And every woke whitey knows that this is how it works, or else they would oppose race quotas. If your uni/work/dog park has too many whiteys and you’re a conscientious example of a good progressive settler, you probably feel the hands of fate on your shoulder, a cold sweat trickling down your navel to a stomach full of snakes hissing the word “privilege”.
To the average radical black intellectual, clutching his Biko quotes and his Fanon bible, the white privilege concept is a shape-shifting mythical spectre – abelungu are larger-than-life, powerful and dominating, and yet at the same time, animals for the slaughter. This must produce an enormous quantity of anxiety. I cannot count how many times I have heard that everything is getting worse for these young black elites, the apocalypse is nigh, whites are taking everything. We are about to seize the government, or we already have. Yet at the same time, the revolution is also just around the corner. We are about to be avenged for our crimes, just now. Any time now. Izwe lethu, namhlanje! Not that they’ll see any of it. They just need to know that whitey doesn’t have it. Doesn’t matter if it goes to China, or India, so long as it's not lekgowa.
And in the meantime, they share terrifying stories about WMC, Anton Rupert and the Oppenheimers, the secret network of apartheid party planners in the DA, the impending takeover by Afriforum. It would be funny if it wasn’t drawing young recruits to the newly resurrected Poqo and similar fringe groups. Despite dominating every single public institution in South Africa, black South Africans still need the myth of white domination to maintain radical political ideologies.
Contrary to Zizek's interesting opinion, the narratives of the past are not creatively reproduced to show how far we've come, but to evince that we haven't come far at all. This is similar to the state of Western white feminists. Their moral code dominates every media publication, every news station, every university, every state department on the whole European continent and most of North America. Hell, even the leader of the Conservative party in Britain calls herself a feminist. And yet somehow, they always feel under siege.
I suppose all of us do these days.