What I'm talking about, really, is more the phenomenon of "immunity" to argument, an absolute resistance to engaging contrary ideas.
I do think that definitely exists as well. I sometimes wonder if this can be a skill that people fail to learn when they can, and then they wind up just unable to engage contrary ideas. Like, I've met people who seemed literally incapable of seeing things from a different pov, and more than once I learned they'd been raised or still were a religious fundamntalist. Being taught that there is one relatively simple truth and that it was evil to doubt it, and that one should see anyone challenging it as the enemy, seemed to seriously affect one's ability to engage contrary opinions on any subject. My roommate works in education publishing and so sometimes runs into this problem--like sometimes she's not allowed to use the word "imagine" and fantasy as a genre is right out. (So they wind up teaching kids about the fantasy genre using the "Arthur" books, which are completely realistic stories except that Arthur looks like an anteater.)
And sometimes I'm even inclined to sadly drop my master hypothesis and decide that the author is probably an ass, after all -- though that's usually about a feeling that you totally understand them, that you've been there yourself and found it to be a false or dishonest place.
Yeah, and then there's always going to be other people who are in that place now and think it's great.:-) There are of course times when people think the author is saying something s/he isn't, like the time Neil Gaiman said he was thought to be making a very specific statement that had never occurred to him, but usually this sort of thing comes from reading a whole book or lots of work by that author and just getting where they come from.
Really, no matter how many characters a writer creates underneath they're all the same person, coming from the same head. An author can imagine him/herself as a different person with different values and a different personality but ultimately the author's limitations are their characters' limitations, and the author's blindspots are their blindspots. You can't write something you can't imagine yourself. It's like you were saying about Stephen King (and if you'd like to elaborate on that I wouldn't mind...;-) and how it's just after a while some basic ideas about how he sees the human race etc. can't help but become clear.
And things that fall under the heading of refusal are, I admit, things that personally I am not at peace with, things that I have unhealthily intense feelings about even now. Probably because I see them as the root of fundamentalisms and intolerances and interpersonal abuse of all sorts.
ITA. Sometimes in fandom people seem to be unwilling to hear what you say, and other times for some reason they can't. Other times, though, I know I've felt like if we could just get past what we superficially feel is being threatened about our ideas we'd see that the other person isn't really disagreeing with us but forcing us to think them through more thoroughly. That won't necessarily lead to the idea that everybody can think whatever they want and nobody can know what's right--it may just lead to you keeping your same ideas but making them more complex.
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Date: 2005-03-16 11:31 am (UTC)What I'm talking about, really, is more the phenomenon of "immunity" to argument, an absolute resistance to engaging contrary ideas.
I do think that definitely exists as well. I sometimes wonder if this can be a skill that people fail to learn when they can, and then they wind up just unable to engage contrary ideas. Like, I've met people who seemed literally incapable of seeing things from a different pov, and more than once I learned they'd been raised or still were a religious fundamntalist. Being taught that there is one relatively simple truth and that it was evil to doubt it, and that one should see anyone challenging it as the enemy, seemed to seriously affect one's ability to engage contrary opinions on any subject. My roommate works in education publishing and so sometimes runs into this problem--like sometimes she's not allowed to use the word "imagine" and fantasy as a genre is right out. (So they wind up teaching kids about the fantasy genre using the "Arthur" books, which are completely realistic stories except that Arthur looks like an anteater.)
And sometimes I'm even inclined to sadly drop my master hypothesis and decide that the author is probably an ass, after all -- though that's usually about a feeling that you totally understand them, that you've been there yourself and found it to be a false or dishonest place.
Yeah, and then there's always going to be other people who are in that place now and think it's great.:-) There are of course times when people think the author is saying something s/he isn't, like the time Neil Gaiman said he was thought to be making a very specific statement that had never occurred to him, but usually this sort of thing comes from reading a whole book or lots of work by that author and just getting where they come from.
Really, no matter how many characters a writer creates underneath they're all the same person, coming from the same head. An author can imagine him/herself as a different person with different values and a different personality but ultimately the author's limitations are their characters' limitations, and the author's blindspots are their blindspots. You can't write something you can't imagine yourself. It's like you were saying about Stephen King (and if you'd like to elaborate on that I wouldn't mind...;-) and how it's just after a while some basic ideas about how he sees the human race etc. can't help but become clear.
And things that fall under the heading of refusal are, I admit, things that personally I am not at peace with, things that I have unhealthily intense feelings about even now. Probably because I see them as the root of fundamentalisms and intolerances and interpersonal abuse of all sorts.
ITA. Sometimes in fandom people seem to be unwilling to hear what you say, and other times for some reason they can't. Other times, though, I know I've felt like if we could just get past what we superficially feel is being threatened about our ideas we'd see that the other person isn't really disagreeing with us but forcing us to think them through more thoroughly. That won't necessarily lead to the idea that everybody can think whatever they want and nobody can know what's right--it may just lead to you keeping your same ideas but making them more complex.