You think you've read drivel? You haven't read drivel until you've read this

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I really dislike "commentaries" like the JSTOR piece, picking apart old literature, songs, and poetry for the purpose of holding them up to a modern interpretation that allows them to sneer derisively at the "unenlightened" of long ago.

Lewis had a great term for it: "chronological snobbery." And he was referring to that sort of thing when it had some whiff of actual merit, not counterfactual codswallop like this piece.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

This piece, though in my opinion mainly written as a lure for clicks, is symptomatic of a disturbing and all-engulfing trend towards tribalistic identity politics that seems to have infected everything. Tolkien and Beowulf have drawn the basilisk's gaze because they are well-known and therefore provide a good soapbox from which to screech this hate-filled nonsense to the world. This is why comics, Hollywood, computer games and other mainstream cultural outlets are targeted for infiltration by these harpies. Their interest in literature and art is not cultural, it is political; and its primary motive is self-aggrandisement.

Hence you will see in this sort of article a lot of unsubstantiated assertions and no small number of half-truths, which when followed to their ultimate sources prove to be based on more of the same. The house is founded not on sand, but on its own roof. The worm eats its tail, or disappears into its own fundament. An endless wheel of circular argumentation. It is like arguing with a Puritan: every disagreement is heresy; all dissent is sin.

What, I would like to ask Miss Kim, is wrong with being English or white? Or a man? Would she, I wonder, be surprised to know that recently a group of pranksters took passages from Mein Kampf, substituted 'men' for 'jews' and got it accepted for publication by a supposedly peer-reviewed feminist journal? Well, a peer is only an equal; and some things are equal to zero.

So what if Tolkien wouldn't let one of his students engage in lit crit where he was supposed to be translating? Keeping people on topic was part of his job, and if they wouldn't keep to the discipline of learning the sources and their languages they didn't belong in medieval studies in the first place. Perhaps this is what Kim and her ilk are truly enraged about: entry into medieval studies still requires a modicum of learning and a little sanity. The cards won't play. It is not enough to be resentful, hectoring and iconoclastic: one must actually know something that is difficult and laborious to learn. Perhaps they should confine themselves to friendlier, less factually demanding places, like the Flat Earth society or a crystal healing clinic. There is still a big market for Bermuda Triangle literature, which has much the same degree of academic merit.

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

What, I would like to ask Miss Kim, is wrong with being English or white? Or a man?

... well.

(I say this as the person who commented up the original article, so envisage the appropriate shades of grey in my reactions to both this and that.)

As someone who is all three, my understanding is that it has nothing to do with there being 'something wrong' with those things; rather, the problem is with the vast number of people - indeed, the vast swathes of society and culture - which implicitly or explicitly insist that those things are a) better, b) more normal, or c) more important.

So you have cars being crash-tested using dummies designed to model the average human male, making them actively dangerous for shorter women with different average weight distribution. You have facial recognition technology going into wide release when it has a vastly lower accuracy with non-white faces. You have sports divided into 'football' and 'women's football' (which one do they show down the pub?). You have diseases being dismissed as not significant because the tens of thousands of people they're killing are only in China, or Africa, or India - not here, not in the countries that matter.

I could go on, probably for years. These things are an embedded problem in our society, and I like to think we're working on them, improving on them. One way we do that is by deliberately highlighting other perspectives, other people who are neglected by the historic view of 'normal' - and when, for example, a white, male, Anglo-Saxon academic gets in a huff because his students aren't treating white-male-Anglo-Saxonism as the standard baseline for opinions that his culture has taught him it Should Be, it's a step - only a small one, but a step - in the wrong direction.

(As I said at the first: the article provides no evidence that Tolkien did anything of the sort. But soooooo many people do.)

hS

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

One way we do that is by deliberately highlighting other perspectives, other people who are neglected by the historic view of 'normal' - and when, for example, a white, male, Anglo-Saxon academic gets in a huff because his students aren't treating white-male-Anglo-Saxonism as the standard baseline for opinions that his culture has taught him it Should Be, it's a step - only a small one, but a step - in the wrong direction.

I quite agree. And I similarly don't think we can assume that the author of the original article has some kind of insidious political motive just because the argument strikes as controversial, deliberately or otherwise. But I also think for me to get into that any further would be contrary to this forum's very sensible no-politics rule.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

You have sports divided into 'football' and 'women's football' (which one do they show down the pub?)

That, at least, is an easy one: when it comes to competitive athletics, certainly soccer and the like, men are better at them. Fact of biology, and Nature doesn't care that it's not fair. They have women's football because women couldn't make the men's teams; and the latter is shown down t'pub because it's a higher caliber of sport on display.

Fun fact: the womens' Olympic records across the track and field events wouldn't quailfy in the top 50- of US high school boys' results. The reason why the huge controversy over letting biological males with lipstick compete as "women."

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

That, at least, is an easy one: when it comes to competitive athletics, certainly soccer and the like, men are better at them. Fact of biology, and Nature doesn't care that it's not fair. They have women's football because women couldn't make the men's teams; and the latter is shown down t'pub because it's a higher caliber of sport on display.

(In the interests of harmony I will not respond to your closing remark.)

To avoid getting tangled up in my own answers, I hope you won't mind me turning them into a list? It's not any kind of structured response, just an attempt not to Too Many Paragraphs at you.

• I totally get why they separate the two, but I didn't make that clear, so thank you.
• 'Higher caliber of sport' is an interesting phrase here. I'm pretty sure having external gonads doesn't increase your tactical or technical skill, so what I think you're really saying is that it's more energetic. And sure, I can accept that - but why is that the only factor that counts in making it a 'higher caliber'? Could it be because that's the attribute men outperform in...?
• Setting that aside: think of a field where women generally outperform men. Is it split into 'thing' and 'men's thing'? Or is it 'women's thing' and 'men's thing'? What the language around football etc does is establish being a man as the norm, on a planet where actually, there's a slight majority of women.

And yes, both of these are very minor things in the scheme of things. But they're minor things that lean in exactly the same direction as countless other minor things - malewards.

In a community like the Downs, it's okay to have a lean or explicit bias: we all angle Tolkienwards here, and that's fine because people can just not join if they don't like that. But when the community is a country, that option isn't there.

hS

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

In all fairness, the presence of football is not what I look for in a pub.

I don't see how it's possible to address a highly racially charged article (which in my view is deeply and intentionally racist) without engaging with the politics that seem to lie at the very core of its being. This obsession with identity has largely driven me from the internet, because it insists on reducing every individual person to inborn characteristics over which they have no control; every relationship to an inevitable clash of those identities in abusive power dynamics. I've seen it before, from the opposite direction. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.

Tolkien was very much opposed to literary criticism in his subject and was a champion of the linguistic approach. I'm sure that the lit side of the English School would have welcomed with open arms the modern critical techniques approach, but it was not Tolkien's way. If you want to make it about race you have to earn it. You have to prove that Tolkien didn't want to hear a black man's perspective and that it had nothing to do with his well-documented distaste for contemporary critical theory. Throwing in all those references to Tolkien being South African, which are intended to dredge up memories of Apartheid, is blatantly disingenuous. Tolkien wrote a letter to CRT (Letters #61) in which he explicitly condemns that system, saying "...the treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately] not many retain that generous sentiment for long."

That, however, wouldn't suit the author's purposes. Her story is the racist famous academic holding back the Jamaican-born Rhodes scholar. Because those are the only grounds on which anybody can judge anyone, apparently. I prefer the provable story of a language specialist trying to hold back the ever-encroaching tide of literary criticism in English schools. Odd, since Tolkien champions in his essay the treatment of Beowulf as literature rather than a mine for information. It was a bitter struggle, though, and hard fought. I'm sure that such injustices were committed by both sides of it.

Writers of articles like these are professional activists. They make a living by declaring prejudice to exist, and arguing against them is considered proof of prejudice that invalidates opinion. You might as well debate theology with Matthew Hopkins as get involved in their game.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

In all fairness, the presence of football is not what I look for in a pub.

I don't see how it's possible to address a highly racially charged article (which in my view is deeply and intentionally racist) without engaging with the politics that seem to lie at the very core of its being. This obsession with identity has largely driven me from the internet, because it insists on reducing every individual person to inborn characteristics over which they have no control; every relationship to an inevitable clash of those identities in abusive power dynamics. I've seen it before, from the opposite direction. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.

Tolkien was very much opposed to literary criticism in his subject and was a champion of the linguistic approach. I'm sure that the lit side of the English School would have welcomed with open arms the modern critical techniques approach, but it was not Tolkien's way. If you want to make it about race you have to earn it. You have to prove that Tolkien didn't want to hear a black man's perspective and that it had nothing to do with his well-documented distaste for contemporary critical theory. Throwing in all those references to Tolkien being South African, which are intended to dredge up memories of Apartheid, is blatantly disingenuous. Tolkien wrote a letter to CRT (Letters #61) in which he explicitly condemns that system, saying "...the treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa. Unfort[unately] not many retain that generous sentiment for long."

That, however, wouldn't suit the author's purposes. Her story is the racist famous academic holding back the Jamaican-born Rhodes scholar. Because those are the only grounds on which anybody can judge anyone, apparently. I prefer the provable story of a language specialist trying to hold back the ever-encroaching tide of literary criticism in English schools. Odd, since Tolkien champions in his essay the treatment of Beowulf as literature rather than a mine for information. It was a bitter struggle, though, and hard fought. I'm sure that such injustices were committed by both sides of it.

Writers of articles like these are professional activists. They make a living by declaring prejudice to exist, and arguing against them is considered proof of prejudice that invalidates opinion. You might as well debate theology with Matthew Hopkins as get involved in their game.

Well said. Kim's paper is nothing more or less than race-based trolling: factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest.