Reactions and Reactionaries-Part Two

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

[Jeff VanderMeer]: Do you believe in the existence of Evil?

[Steph Swainston]: Certainly not. 'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like.

--From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston"

by Jeff VanderMeer, Clarkesworld, October 2007.

In Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s (1983), British historian Paul Johnson set the beginning of the twentieth century in the year 1919 and a single event: the Eddington experiment, which confirmed a prediction made in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity regarding the deflection of light caused by gravity. The late Mr. Johnson's thesis is that relativity passed from physics into other realms of thought and practice--that Einsteinian relativity became transformed into moral relativism--and thereby the central idea of the 20th century was formed. Just as there are no fixed points of reference in space-time, there are now no fixed morals, i.e., no moral absolutes. What is moral for one person might be considered immoral by another, but it doesn't matter. All viewpoints are equal. All morals are relative, or they don't exist at all, and so every kind of depravity and atrocity is permitted. To put it another way, "'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like."

Here is a much longer quote, a passage, from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942). It opens Chapter VII. The devil Screwtape addresses his nephew:

My dear Wormwood,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient [i.e., the human being on whom Wormwood is working] in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [i.e., God]. The "Life Force," the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In emphasis: 

Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.

If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight.

If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In the Preface to The Screwtape Letters, the author put things more succinctly:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race [i.e., the human race] can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. 

Disbelieving in the devil--and by extension evil--as a moral, intellectual, and spiritual pitfall is older than that. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former communist (i.e., a materialist and a believer in "Forces") and a convert to Christianity (i.e., a believer in God and the spirit), traced it to the previous century. In "The Devil," in Life magazine, he wrote:

Baudelaire, that old flower of evil, was right: "The Devil's cleverest wile is to make men believe that he does not exist."

Baudelaire was of course Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and a composer of weird poems. I feel certain that Baudelaire had merely put into words an age-old insight among men.

The point in all of this is that any author, including authors of the so-called "New Weird," who disbelieves in evil; who believes instead in "Forces," including History; or who operates either as a materialist or a "magician," has fallen for wiles. He or she has been duped: supposedly smart and well-educated people, falling for the oldest trick in the book.

* * *

Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.

--1984 by George Orwell (Ch. 8) 

Authors of "the New Weird" appear to be--or state outright--that they are against what they call "reactionary" authors of the past. Two or three meet their special ire: J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and then take your pick: Robert A. Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis. (There seems to be less ire directed towards Lewis. Perhaps newer authors see him as gentle and non-threatening. But maybe he was fiercer than he appeared. I wonder what they might make of Flannery O'Connor.) Reactionary is sometimes a useful and descriptive word. But in the mouth of the radical or revolutionary leftist or Marxist, it is a pejorative, and one of the worst, though not as bad as "Nazi" or "Fascist."

To some people, I suppose, reactionary also means old. Maybe any difference doesn't matter to the person who is trying to tear down the past. After all, the goal is to start with zero. That means everything has to go onto the ash heap of History if we are to have a better and happier world. Taking away starting-at-zero as a goal, we are permitted to hold onto some things from the past. We can't get rid of Marx, after all. He's the granddaddy of all of our ideas. But just how old does something have to be before the people defending it are called "reactionary"? Rousseau is from the eighteenth century, but his ideas are considered fresh, while the younger U.S. Constitution is called outdated. We have to continue to believe in the perfectibility of man and society, as well as in the State as the expression of the general will of the people, but the rights to speak freely, to question, to dissent--these and more are problematic, if not disposable. Poverty, oppression, and political murder are as old as time, but they are to be respected under Marxism. Look at how leftists in America and their media lapdogs (or maybe it's the other way around) see Cuba right now. (I write in April. Maybe by May, Cuba will be free. May 1st would make a nice day for it. Update: It hasn't turned out that way, but it will happen soon, I think.) Meanwhile, newer and far more radical ideas--Christianity, unalienable rights, human freedom, including economic freedom--must be suppressed if not extinguished. We have to get rid of old-old things, but we have to raise up and hold on to new-old things, for example, ideas from "the New Left," policies and institutions from "the New Deal" and "the New Society," as well as the British New Wave as a model of the so-called "New Weird." The youngest of these "new" things (except for "the New Weird") is now more than sixty years old. So are many of the authors of "the New Weird."

I harp on Marxism because China Miéville, born in 1972 and one of the originators of "the New Weird," is a Marxist, necessarily a materialist. Marxism is, I think, an attempt to bring back the glory days of feudalism, before there was a middle class (the Marxist bourgeoisie) to usurp the power of the monarch (our current or aspirational State) and the aristocracy (our current élite or clerisy). Feudalism is old, old. It goes back at least to the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. If it isn't literally ancient, it is very nearly so. And Marxists want it back.* Karl Marx was like a Scooby-Doo villain. His scheme would have worked--he would have been recognized as a great man, an Übermensch, and would have been able to lie around all day, doing as he pleases, lazing in luxury and wealth while Beulah peeled him a grape--if it hadn't been for those meddling bourgeoisie.

Even if feudalism is only new-old, systems and practices of political murder, oppression, impoverishment, and slavery are old-old--they go back many thousands of years. If you hate old things--if you consider yourself a progressive, radical, or revolutionary--why would you want to go back to them? Isn't that actually reactionary? Isn't the truly radical idea the Christian idea that we are free and equal because God made us so? (I remember the motto of the old Indianapolis Star: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.") That there are moral absolutes established not by men but by God and no moral relatives at all? That the State is not an absolute authority on anything? If these things are true--if tyranny is as old as time but freedom is ever new and radical--then who again is the real reactionary? Who wants to overthrow the radical revolutions of Christianity and human freedom and return to the glorious past when the State or king was a kind of god and an aristocracy ruled over the benighted masses?

* * *

I'll close part two of this sub-series with the words of a socialist on the subject of socialists. From The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937):

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

And:

To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my sensations of horror on first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in London. (It might have been rather different in the North, where the bourgeoisie are less thickly scattered.) Are these mingy little beasts, I thought, the champions of the working class? For every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority.

Finally:

But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. [. . .] The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred--a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred--against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.**

Now I will observe that China Miéville is one of the bourgeoisie--he, like his mother, is a writer and a teacher--and that he is related in one way or another to British barons, so in that way he is aristocrat-adjacent. The people who edit, publish, distribute, sell, and read his books are also of the bourgeoisie. As for Jeff VanderMeer, he, too, emanates from the middle class, as does probably every other supposedly liberal, leftist, socialist, Marxist, Labour- or Democrat- or Green-oriented, progressive, radical, or revolutionary writer, editor, academic, scholar, or critic, whether of "the New Weird" or not.

Silly.

-----

*Sacrifices made to Moloch are older still. Marxists and their fellow-travelers want those back, too. Abortion and infanticide are two examples. Transgenderism is another. Whitaker Chambers began to turn away from communism when the party demanded that his wife have an abortion, for it understood that if she were to have a child, he and she both would have loyalty to something other than the party. Marxists see the family as a threat to their belief system. They want only to destroy it. Marxism is, after all, a jealous god.

**I'm glad that George Orwell was a socialist, and that he was a Briton. If he had not been a socialist, socialists would have dismissed him as a reactionary. If he were alive today, they would cancel him, just as people on the left have tried to cancel J.K. Rowling, who is no conservative at all except that she understands that a man can't be a woman. And Britain needs Orwell more than we do. He can speak to the people of the United Kingdom as one of their countrymen. If he had been an American, they would easily have shut him out. They need to hear him, though, and heed the warnings that he provided them in his writings, especially in 1984 (1949), which was, as we know, not an instruction book.

By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news. (Stay tuned for more on Amelia, as well as Joy Division and Starship Troopers.)

A Signet edition of 1984 by George Orwell, with cover art by Alan Harmon.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley