Positive Liberty

Well, everyone, I’ve tried to pack in quite a few posts this week, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your hospitality. Thanks to everyone at Positive Liberty for having me as a guest blogger!

I’ll leave you with a couple of parting recommendations.

First, The Libertarian Futurist Society (the organization that bestows the annual Prometheus Awards to recognize and promote libertarian science fiction) has a new blog here. Of recent note is the controversial revelation that science fiction authors have joined the war on terror.

Second, I am happy to say that in the last year an excellent new English translation (by Natasha Randall) has appeared of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic and still all-too-relevant SF dystopia, We. Banned by the Soviet censors and not published in Russia until 1988, We tells the story of a totalitarian One State that controls its citizens’ lives with mathematical precision. Led by the Benefactor, the One State seeks to explore space in order to bring the rest of the universe under the dominion of the powerful government apparatus. Yevgeny’s descriptions are chilling in their timeliness. For example, the One State’s status quo is maintained the Welldoer (implying, of course, that everything the government does is good, and those who challenge it are Evildoers). Moreover, individual privacy is nonexistent. The very walls of the buildings are made of transparent materials so that everyone, everything, is always visible to the penetrating and all-seeing eyes of the state. Surveillance is not only a matter of government policy, but an intrinsic part of neighborly relations. Against such pervasive control, Yevgeny holds out little hope for dissent. The story is a powerful and haunting one, and We has rightly been hailed as the ancestor of 1984, Anthem, and a number of modern SF dystopias.

Even among the ancients, the most mature among them knew that the source of right is might, that right is a function of power. And so, we have the scales: on one side, a gram, on the other a ton: on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance the scale against a ton?

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

* Shawn Wilbur has just completed posting the entire collection of Benjamin Tucker’s journal of 19th-century individualist anarchism, Liberty, in PDF form. Learn more here.

* While I’m mentioning online archives, here are a couple of others I highly recommend:
- Hypertexts in American Studies at the University of Virginia
- The Online Library of Liberty (by Liberty Fund, Inc.)
- Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature

* And, especially for the Icelandic Sagas, there are several good resources:
- The Online Medieval and Classical Library
- Icelandic Sagas Page, including links to online texts
- Icelandic Sagas Archive
- Icelandic Lore from the Internet Sacred Text Archive
- “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case” by David Friedman
- “Privatization, Viking Style: Model or Misfortune?” by Roderick T. Long

* You may recall that I recommended Lois McMaster Bujold’s fiction here: her award-winning novella “The Mountains of Mourning” is available for download from the Baen Free Library.

I am by no means the only scholar who defends J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series - or, for that matter, teaches the texts at the university level. (I spell out my position on the series in the article “Harry Potter is a Hobbit: Rowling, Tolkien, and the Question of Readership” from CSL here.) My course “Harry Potter and his Predecessors” routinely overflows the enrollment limit and spawns a waiting list nearly as long as the class roster itself, and I understand that my experience is not unusual.

Considering that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows debuted a week ago tomorrow, I thought this would be an appropriate time to discuss the political implications of this thought-provoking series. The final book, I am pleased to say, ably underscores the series’ consistent messages about ideas of power and responsibility. Deathly Hallows makes it clear, once and for all, that those who desire and seek power are those who are most poorly suited to wield it wisely and justly, while those who do not want power when it is thrust upon them are most likely to be good and responsible stewards of it — and, like the classical Cincinnatus, are most likely to relinquish it willingly, rather than become tyrannical. Her Orwellian portrait of the fall of the Ministry of Magic to Voldemort’s control is chilling, as has been her portrait of the ways in which the self-interested within M.o.M. (”Mom,” like “Big Brother”) and the press enabled Voldemort’s second rise to power.

University of Tennessee Professor of Law Benjamin Barton has written about the “real Libertarian bent” of the series. I recommend his article “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy” from the Michigan Law Review, in which he argues, “Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill.”

The Harry Potter and the Law issue of Texas Wesleyan Law Review is now online, as well. A standout among its many excellent articles is “Making Legal Space for Moral Choice” by Andy Morriss of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The essays are also available in a more printer-friendly format here as Harry Potter and the Law.

Author John Granger, I should add, is currently hosting a discussion of the “Nazi history echoes” in Deathly Hallows on his blog.

Rowling, throughout the book series, does an exemplary job of considering the plight of the disenfranchised. Her consideration of the dispossession of the Centaurs, for example, who are facing encroachment by the wizarding community and losing land to the Ministry of Magic, and the plight of the Giants, who now, after being fought and hunted, face waning numbers and infighting thanks to forced close cohabitation with traditional enemies, swell with allusions to Indigenous histories. We should not be surprised to learn, as Hollie Anderson argues in the essay “Reading Harry Potter with Navajo Eyes” from Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives , that the outsider Harry resonates with Native readers.

Last but not least, I must give a nod to Rowling’s careful study of gender, by mentioning Kathryn N. McDaniel’s compelling essay “The Elfin Mystique: Fantasy and Feminism in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series,” which debuts next week in my new edited collection Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy and Faith in the World of C.S. Lewis . (You thought you were going to escape a commercial by yours truly, didn’t you?) In this piece, McDaniel answers the question asked by many readers, “Does the house-elves’ supposed happiness with their subordinated position create a fault-line in Rowling’s liberal fantasy: are they natural slaves who should not gain liberation?” If we use second-wave feminism to understand the house-elves’ attitude, McDaniel explains, Rowling’s message is revealed as consistent with the rest of the series.

There are good reasons to celebrate Rowling’s popularity, not the least of which is that, through her Harry Potter series, she is introducing the key subject of liberty to a vast global audience.

Gothic fiction is not often remembered as an important genre in the literature of liberty. This is unfortunate, since some truly great works have much to offer the liberty-minded, such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which provides, among other things, a scathing indictment of how liberty without responsibility degenerates into dangerous license, thus rescuing the best of Wollstonecraft and Godwin from the worst of Romanticism.

I hope you will forgive the self-promotion, but last month, Valancourt Books published a new edition of an important Gothic classic, Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s 1845 epic The Magic Goblet, the first English edition in well over a century. (It is edited by yours truly.) The author, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, worked her way up from humble beginnings as a fisherman’s daughter to become the first “professional novelist” in Sweden, and certainly one of Europe’s most celebrated women novelists. Her writing also underscores the themes of liberty in the Gothic tradition. The Magic Goblet, for example, reflects profound frustration with social institutions that inhibit economic mobility and self-betterment, as well as with the dependent, unequal status of women in her country. After reading the novel, one is not surprised to learn that Flygare-Carlén championed education and supported women’s suffrage. Because of her honest depictions of divorce and unwed motherhood, The North American Review in 1845 called The Magic Goblet a “wild phantasmagoria of unmixed and unaccountable evil.” Not a flattering review, perhaps, but hey, it sold books.

At its heart, Gothic literature was and is subversive literature, defying conventions, pushing boundaries, and questioning coercive powers. Now that the Gothic is gaining new attention from the academy (see, for example, the journals Gothic Studies and The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies), and new and innovative Gothic-specific presses are emerging (such as Valancourt Books, Zittaw Press, and Whitlock Publishing), perhaps it is a good time for libertarians to revisit one of the great subversive genres of literature.

Speaking of Native cinema and the sovereignty issue, I highly recommend checking out the website for Standing Silent Nation, a new independent documentary about one Oglala Sioux family’s legal and political battle to rise above poverty and be economically self-sufficient by raising industrial hemp, and the government’s efforts to stand in their way.

When the Oglala Sioux Tribe passed an ordinance separating industrial hemp from its illegal cousin, marijuana, Alex White Plume and his family glimpsed a brighter future.

Having researched hemp as a sustainable crop that would grow in the inhospitable soil of the South Dakota Badlands, the White Plumes envisioned a new economy that would impact the 85% unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

They never dreamed they would find themselves swept up in a struggle over tribal sovereignty, economic rights, and common sense.

From the hemp fields of Pine Ridge to the US Federal Court of Appeals, the one-hour documentary Standing Silent Nation tracks one family’s effort to create economic independence for themselves, their reservation, and their future generations.

The most recent issue of the online publication Common-Place includes the article “National Character: Daniel Day-Lewis, American historian” by Jim Cullen. In this article, Cullen notes that

…the Day-Lewis message is not a particularly fashionable one in the academy. In the long, ongoing argument about whether the heroic individual or the impersonal process shapes history, the pendulum has long lingered on the latter….

There is one other aspect of Day-Lewis’s vision of American history that distinguishes it from others propagated by popular media. And that is that it is a vision, a sweeping interpretation that takes in the American past as a whole. Not many professional historians (Sean Wilentz comes to mind as an exception) consider it appropriate to even try. In this regard, Day-Lewis harkens back to earlier generations of American historians: Hofstadter, Parrington, and, especially, Turner, and maybe a few modern descendants such as Patricia Limerick. For a variety of structural and ideological reasons, the contemporary professional vision of the past is fractured, slivered into shards that are constantly being recombined into often compelling new arrangements. A postmodern playhouse. That’s fine for graduate students, maybe. But that’s not what the kids I see need right now.

This reminds me of an article from a previous issue of Common-Place, “The Little Picture” by Edward Gray, in which Gray turns from the practice of “micohistory” to say

…I’ve begun to miss those good old days when big questions were all the rage and when some Harvard or Yale professor would happily trundle out a book explaining the origin of the American Revolution or the meaning of Progressivism—at the expense of whatever poor sap had previously tackled the problem.

I’ve even started to look back fondly on what has become the most absurd and laughable of all modern scholarly trends: the original American Studies movement. Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean?

Surely leaving what Cullen calls the “postmodern playhouse” has political implications - as much as, certainly, remaining within its doors. Is Gray correct in saying “What America needs are critical faculties, and critical faculties need a thesis to knock around” - and, if so, what “big picture” are we likely to draw from renewed considerations of U.S. exceptionalism? Or, to put it another way (and borrow Gray’s phrase), who is afraid of the big picture?

This month marks the 100th birthday of the Grand Master himself, Robert A. Heinlein.

One of my favorite quotes from his work comes from the mouth of the “rational anarchist” Professor Bernardo de la Paz, a character based on real-life libertarian and founder of the Freedom School, Robert LeFevre:

“May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?”

“Uh…that’s a trick question.”

“It is the key question, dear Wyoming. A radical question that strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government. Anyone who answers honestly and abides by all consequences know where he stands - and what he will die for.”

- Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

If I could choose one contemporary author to name the “new Heinlein” - that is, a writer capable of writing military, hard-science-based SF, yet who focuses the imagination on the social, economic, and political ramifications of future change, and its relationship to liberty - I would pick Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan series especially is “must read” material.

That said, there was and is only one Heinlein!

Recent articles of interest:
* “Heinlein at 100″ by Brian Doherty (Reason)
* “100 Years of Heinlein” by Scott Van Wynsberghe (National Post)
* “Heinleiniana” by John Derbyshire (National Review)
* “’We must ride the lightning’: Robert Heinlein and American spaceflight” by Dwayne A Day (The Space Review)
* “In A Strange Land” by John J. Miller (National Review)
* “Heinlein’s Ghost” by Dwayne A. Day (The Space Review)
* “Robert Heinlein at One Hundred” by Ted Gioia (Blogcritics)

For additional information:
The Heinlein Society
The Robert A. Heinlein Page
Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Website

TANSTAAFL!

Hello there! Thanks to Timothy Sandefur for the introduction, and to everyone at Positive Liberty for inviting me to be a “guest blogger” for the next few days. As Timothy mentioned, my scholarly work rests in the dual fields of Native American Studies and Science Fiction/Fantasy Studies, and you can learn more about me at my official website.

The recent flurry of Emmy nominations for Western-themed works brings up the issue of how Native America is portrayed in modern cinema. My favorite poster child for recent disappointments is the 2005 miniseries Into the West, produced by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks. I allowed myself to have high expectations for this work - indeed, I assigned it to my university class studying the “Frontier Thesis” and U.S. Exceptionalism - but the first installment set a pattern that held throughout the series, of treating non-Native characters as three-dimensional, self-interested actors, and Native characters as mystical, preternatural, legendary figures. The creators were rewarded for this stereotypical handling of Native subjects with 16 Emmy nominations.

I have great hope for Native portrayals in cinema, however. The most obvious reason for this is the proliferation and success of films by indigenous filmmakers, such as Chris Eyre’s outstanding Smoke Signals (a personal favorite), Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), and Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing. This also extends to documentary films, such as Rich-Heape Films’s recent (and excellent) Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy.

Both the Native American Producers Alliance and the Aboriginal Film and Video Alliance recognize that taking the lead in telling Native stories and portraying Native realities has direct implications for sovereignty. (And American Indian sovereignty is an issue that is coming to the fore with a vengeance. One brief example: contrast the illegal 1997 occupation of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma by the BIA with the 2006 decision by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to bypass federal approval from the BIA for its new constitution.)

It does not take a Native filmmaker to tell a Native story, however. Italian-American John Fusco is proof of this. His 2003 Dreamkeeper, an impressive achievement, draws heavily on Native oral sources while employing a variety of Native actors to portray Amerindian characters in the present as well as the mythologized past. (Incidentally, Fusco is also responsible for the earlier Thunderheart, which draws heavily on several contemporary Native issues, including the story of Leonard Peltier. And speaking of Peltier, another example of a non-Native doing justice to a Native subject is Michael Apted’s documentary about the Peltier case, Incident at Oglala.)

A number of obstacles stand in the way of accurate and meaningful portrayals of Native America in the cinema. Some filmmakers are simply ignorant, and falling back on stereotypes takes the place of acquiring accurate insights. Others fall prey to a flat and stagnant view of culture as something to be preserved rather than lived, and so they historicize and marginalize what should be a dynamic, relevant subject. And there is the ownership problem of determining who “owns” a perspective, who is “authentic” in the telling of a narrative. I hope that Native and non-Native filmmakers alike will continue to innovate and experiment with offering compelling cinematic stories. Perhaps this will help audience members to remove Native America from the museum of their minds and consider the urgent issues affecting American Indians today — including the issue of sovereignty.