Being Judged by the Company You Keep
Forty years on from earning her Fine Arts Degree — winning awards, and mounting many exhibitions — a painter friend of mine announced that she was hanging up her brushes.
“Everyone’s a bloody artist”, she fumed, “from snotty five-year olds fiddling about with digital apps on their iPads, to pink-rinse retirees filling their guest bedrooms with yet more still-born watercolours of dead flowers. I’m finished.”
I couldn’t argue with her. I felt the same about writing.
In writing’s case it started when educationalists decided to abandon the idea of teaching High School students how to spell and structure English sentences (too hard), convincing themselves that “free expression” was a better path for the undeveloped mind to follow. That led, inevitably, to an ever-expanding demand for creative writing courses at bottom-dwelling universities. Soon everyone was a writer.
But now, as I pointed out to my painter friend, there was a glimmer of hope for both of us. It came in the form of the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.
“How can anyone call themselves an artist,” I asked rhetorically, “when all they have to do is ask DALL-E 3 to produce a painting of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as Angel and Supplicant in the style of Fra Angelica?”
“And who dares call themselves a writer,” she countered, “when all they have to do is tell Chat GPT-4 to produce 20,000 words on the Exodus from Gaza in the style of Leon Uris?”
“Precisely!” I replied. “Now everyone should be properly described as a Prompt Engineer. The words Writer and Artist are ours to claim back again.”
She wasn’t entirely convinced.
“So what makes me an artist?” she asked. “I think I’ve forgotten.”
“Well,” I answered, “you struggle to express a thought or feeling that can’t be described to others except by your giving it a visual form — and even then, not always to your satisfaction — and it sometimes takes an agonizingly long time for it to emerge, and then most people don’t get it, and the process is a disaster financially, but you have to do it because you’re a painter. And painters paint.”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure that makes me an artist,” she objected, “but I get the bit about being compelled to do it. And what about you; what makes you a writer when ChatGPT is spitting out opinion pieces for free and taking over Hollywood? Who needs writers anymore?”
I could have replied that the same answer applied to me, as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. I needed to convince her, and I wasn’t convinced myself. A jumble of half-forgotten memories began jostling to be heard, and the more I allowed them to speak, the more I realised that I was deceiving myself by falling back on the old “Writers need to write” cliché. I had a whole stack of other clichés waiting to be rolled out as well.
Here’s how they rolled.
When I was 12-years old my mother, a young solo parent with an eye for men in gold-braided uniforms, showed a Royal Naval Captain a book I had written in the style of C.S. Forester about a British Man O’War in the 1700s. Missing the point, he told her that I was just the sort of young man the Royal Navy needed, and four years later I was surprised to find that I had been enrolled in the Australian Naval College. As neither effort nor knowledge was required on my part to be there, the Navy was rightly affronted when I did everything in my power to obtain a release and got dumped on the dockside two years later with a $5 note in my pocket and the address of the nearest Seamen and Wayfarer’s home. It was a good decision for both of us. The Navy got rid of a potential troublemaker, and I formed a lifelong resolve to prove that you don’t mess with a 12-year old’s self-image.
I’d been misunderstood, and one of the drivers that motivates a writer is the desire to have people understand.
For the next 50 years I worked variously as a journo, a copywriter, a PR hustler and an accumulator of bottom drawer manuscripts that would have required the reader to participate in the writer’s delusion that his life and experiences were uniquely entrancing. Luckily, I had the good sense not to ask any readers to share that delusion. The manuscripts lay peacefully at rest, never troubling anybody, particularly my wives, because — unlike most writers — I’d found ways of making a comfortable living by other means.
Nevertheless, you can’t keep a writer caged forever. In 2013 I decided to give away my business suits and become a full-time scribe. Not long afterwards I had an agent mildly enthused about a film noir script I had written, together with its adaptation to a murder/mystery novel. The setting was New York in the 1970’s. Time and place were critical ingredients.
“They love it,” the agent reported, “but ...”
“But ..?”
“Charles’s love interest is Black. He’s white. You can’t do that today.”
“It isn’t today, it’s 1978.”
“I know, but times have changed. It will never make it past the sensitivity readers.”
“What the hell are they?”
“The people who protect publishers from attacks by people on social media who might be offended. It could work if you were prepared to make Charles Black also — and gay — with a back story of institutional abuse maybe.”
“I presume you’re pulling my leg. What else did they say?”
“They said, nothing personal, but they’re not publishing anything this year written by straight white men. It’s all about diversity. I’m sorry. Have you thought about self-publishing?”
As I write this in 2024 I am embarrassed by my naivety. Despite believing myself to be a hard-bitten product of London’s, New York’s and Sydney’s corporate cauldrons I was sideswiped by the revelation that I was so culturally out of date. How had I missed all this? My daughter was a sharp-tongued millennial who’d spent a third of her life at university. Why hadn’t she told me that there were taboos around what could be thought and said being policed by the publishing industry, which was, on the whole, staffed almost entirely by people of her gender (if not sex)?
You see, when it comes to expressing themselves, creative writers are all libertarians, no matter what their declared politics. They can’t be told what to think and say. That’s for propogandists. (As an aside, the creative writers I enjoy could best be described as anti-establishment, contrarian sceptics, but if there was ever a political party that could comfortably accommodate such people they would, like Groucho Marx, refuse to join an organisation that would accept people like them.)
So, a writer is a person driven by a desire to be understood, and with a libertarian attitude to how and what to express. I’ll come back to that, because it could equally well describe any opiniated person.
Until I made the conscious decision to become a fulltime writer, I had lived as an international corporate entrepreneur with a well-hidden secret life as a closet writer. My circle was scathingly conscious of political correctness, but not of any cultural war being fought in the institutions that might have needed our attention. The New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian I regarded as laughable in their continuing climate change catastrophizing, as if staffed by high schoolers who had no knowledge of the Paul Ehrlich brand of hyperbole that had characterised eco catastrophism since the early seventies. For balance, I read The Spectator and Spiked Online because they played well to my scepticism and disdain for the establishment. I also read Thomas Sowell, John Gray, Christopher Hitchens and a vast and eclectic collection of social commentators, economists and philosophers of every stripe, but nobody warned me that war had broken out and the western world was in the process of being cleaved in two.
One of the first to come out and announce it was Douglas Murray in The Madness of Crowds. Once you detect a bad odour, you begin to smell it everywhere. Jonathon Haidt and Jordan Peterson were smelling it in academia, but it seemed in those early days to be a faculty issue rather than a universal problem — at least to me. Then Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay lifted the lid off the sewer with the publication of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody. And there was the source of the smell.
Now, I need to recount a brief interlude that occurred in 2019. I was at a creative retreat in Tuscany, at which there were also a couple of professors from a California university on sabbatical. They were economists. At the end of the day we all gathered around an outdoor table and spoke briefly, in the case of the writers and academics, about the subjects on which we were engaged. I said that I was working on a script for a comedy about two movie makers facing old age and competing as to who deserved the greater victim status. It had already become apparent that the academics, in particular, were very inhibited when it came to discussing politics, and social and economic issues, treating much of what I had to say as if I was lobbing hand grenades at them.
On this occasion, one of the academics’ wives, her face rigid with indignation, wondered if my story was a fit subject for cinema, being both ageist and sexist (she may have added racist, as well!). Nothing closes down conversation like those epithets, so I turned my attention to the Chianti, while wondering how far I could stretch comedic absurdity before they surrendered and realized uncensored words weren’t going to kill them.
The following day I brought a skit to the table about minority groups going to extremes to try and outpoint each other in their claims for victimhood, stretching the absurdity of the story almost to breaking point. The starting premise was credible, but the way the characters’ behavior quickly spiraled into the realms of insanity somehow freed these Californian people from their conscription to political correctness, enabling them to laugh. The lesson was obvious: this subject was so serious that it could only be treated as comedy.1
That was my response when I read Cynical Theories for the first time. You mean Michel Foucault is the Chief Deity in the Church of Postmodernism, I cried. I read him in the eighties. He was a sadomasochistic pedophile who would squeal and shout anything in his desperate attempts to stay out of prison. Of course he saw himself as the victim, and society as the oppressor. But to take that seriously, you have to be joking, professor. No?
And Herbert Marcuse, one of the Church’s High Priests: “Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.” Or, better still: “That which is cannot be true.” Each one of those quotes is worthy of three years’ PhD study at $80,000 per annum as a minimum, surely.
Oh, and Judith Butler, the High Priestess (one of many): “... rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." Sorry Judith, I know you won a prize for that sentence, but I simply had to shorten it. I’m sure it didn’t alter its meaning.
By 2019 I realised that the war was real and war correspondents on both sides were covering it with daily reports. Being forced to take sides felt to me like having to declare myself to be either Protestant or Catholic in 1980s Belfast, or Pro-Trump or Pro-Clinton in November 2016. My instinct was to say, this is all so BS that it’s laughable. I took my cue from Peter Ustinov and his belief that “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious”. My contribution to the subject would be to satirise it, leaving the despatches from the front to the brave and dedicated souls willing to risk their livelihoods to vilification and cancellation by the enemy.
In all wars the antagonists eventually become inured to the sound of bomb blasts and their minds start wandering. Mine started wandering early on. What if the two sides ran out of the energy needed to resist the opponents’ points of view and found it easier to be accepting? How far apart would they be? And what would the future then look like, overlaid with the influence of time and technology?
The future is so more attractive to me than the present. Being predictive it is free to be wrong, providing it is cast forward far enough, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be fun. The arm wrestle between progressivism and conservatism will be over before the average person becomes aware that it has taken place, I thought. But the after effects will be there and will warrant some explanation. That’s a project that energises me.
Earlier I said that a writer is a person driven by a desire to be understood, and with a libertarian attitude to how and what to express. But that could equally describe a person who is simply opinionated. What motivates the creative writer is the desire to say it well. That’s why writers are such voracious readers, not in order to steal the thoughts of others, but to compare their skill at expressing themselves. Good writing pulls you along to keep up.
And that’s why I decided to join Substack, because the good writers are here: the journalist like Bari Weiss, Matt Taibi, Seymour Hersh and Michael Shellenberger; the social scientists and commentators like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff; the creative writers like Salman Rushdie and Chuck Pahahnuik. To be judged by the company you keep may be the subject of an Aesop Fable, but it is also a great spur to keeping your standards up.
So, join me as I explore the aftermath of the cultural wars forty years in the future, and let’s see if we can find some pathways that encourage hope. This is where “Agenda 2060 Book Three” will take shape. Occasionally I’ll be tempted to lash out at the present, but mostly I’ll leave that to others. Your contributions to the conversation are most welcome. Just keep a smile on your face, and keep it polite, please!
Welcome to my Substack.
A.I. Fabler
© January 3, 2024
1See “Agenda 2060 Book One: The Future as It Happens” (2020)
Click on the image to watch A.I. Fabler interviewed on “Cover to Cover Book Beat”
A.I. Fabler is the pen name of the New Zealand-born author of the satirical predictive novels “AGENDA 2060: The Future as It Happens” and “AGENDA 2060: AI and the View from Space”, available on Amazon worldwide.