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POMPOUS_ROSE_AGAIN

                                             March 30, 2018
                                             March 18, 2022

Going through the old material I quoted from the
criticism of Le Guin by Gregory Benford and Charles
Platt:

        POMPOUS_ROSE

   I see there's quite a bit of rhetorical hand-waving
   and posturing there but stripping the dispute down to
   it's core, it has to do with the plausibility of
   peaceful societies based on "consensus" decision-making.

   Yes, Benford/Platt are fine with Science Fiction as a
   place to play with speculative ideas, but they want to
   see *plausible* ideas, they want to see speculation about
   things that might "actually happen": they argue that
   Le Guin's utopias are simply impossible.

I found a discussion of this Benford/Platt piece by
Virginia Kidd-- this is nominally a discussion of Le
Guin's "Eye of Heron", but she shoe-horns in as much
about the Benford and Platt piece as she can.


    http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1948390

    Virginia Kidd summaries the scenario in "Eye of Heron":

      "The conflict here isn’t just between oppressors
      and oppressed, but also between consensus-driven
      pacifistic anarchy and violently patriarchal
      aristocracy."


   Beford and Platt treat that "consensus-driven pacifistic
   anarchy" as an unrealistic, impossible fantasy.

   Virginia Kidd chides them for forgetting about the Mennonites,
   which is certainly a point, but Benford and Platt probably
   could've contrived reasons that the Mennonites doesn't settle it.
   They could claim, the Mennonites are an unusual exception, and an
   extreme "religous cult", which raises the question of how free
   the people making these freely chosen "consensus" decisions have.

   Myself, I would wonder if our perception from the outside
   of what it's like to be inside a Mennonite society is
   really all that accurate-- and I would venture to guess that
   your average Le Guin fan is not anxious to convert.


Irrespective of the accuracy of every rhetorical
thrust in this debate, I'm inclined toward the
skepticism of Benford and Platt:

   There really is a recurrent
   syndrome among well-meaning        They want everyone to spontaneously
   intelligent people reaching for    come together and choose the same
   "consensus decision-making" and    things, without feeling coerced or
   then belatedly re-discovering      left-out.
   that it's an ideal that's
   difficult to live-up to.               I would venture to say that no one in
                                          the publishing industry thinks you
                                          can get by without bruising any egos,
       A lot of us have seen              Virginia Kidd included.
       attempts at ruling by
       "consensus" fail.



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