Luke Ford

Kyle Rowland writes: Stream got 28k live viewers on twitch! Interesting conversation.

HasanAbi: How much do you personally, Sargon, care about protecting the ‘Western race’ in comparison to Nick, I just want to understand and distinguish your thoughts from his.

Sargon: I’m not really interested in answering that question, because it’s obviously loaded and pointless –

HasanAbi: No, I don’t think you agree with Nick, that’s why I am trying to make the distinction here –

Sargon: I’m not really interested in [indistinct – policies?] like that because it’s never going to happen, but the thing we can talk about, and this isn’t a racial question, this is a civilizational question — the idea that American civilization somehow excludes black people is ridiculous, they’ve been there from virtually day 1 —

Destiny: That’s not a good point. Just because they’ve been here from day 1, I’m pretty sure if you came here as a slave, I’m pretty sure you’d feel excluded from society, just the fact that they are there doesn’t make you feel included

Sargon: No, they had a place in society, it wasn’t a good place, but —

Destiny: OK, but generally when someone says something is inclusive, they don’t mean just a place —

Sargon: I never said anything was inclusive.

Destiny: I thought you said included. My bad.

Sargon: They were a part of it, but inclusive is a particularly ideologically loaded word. It means something to progressives. They were still part of that society, and they had a particular role, and it wasn’t a good role, and I completely agree obviously with the abolition of Jim Crow and slavery and all this nonsense. But the point is, from the position we’re at now, Western birthrates are actually declining quite rapidly, and it looks like this could actually be a bad thing in the long run. So the question is, is our society worth continuing, and then it’s like OK, how do we continue society, well we have to make the voluntary choice to have, y’know, at least 2-3 children each. So is that worth us doing? Is it a good idea? Because if it is a good idea, if we do think that maybe the West actually figured morality out better than the rest of the world, we do have an obligation to keep that going because otherwise we’re gonna get people who are not believers in western values, who do not come from western cultures, who are just simply going to exist longer than we will and will basically forget about us when we’re gone.

Destiny: I’m super curious, where does that obligation to continue society come from?

Sargon: Our moral judgement that our society is a good society.

Destiny: Where do those moral judgements come from? Because if we’re gonna make this argument, we gotta go real foundational here.

Sargon: Our thoughts. Our own moral perspectives.

Destiny: So let’s say that you have a family, and this family, a husband and wife, these two people wanna be programmers, you think that you have the moral authority to tell them, no, you are going to have children, because you have to, because we have an obligation to continue western society —

Sargon: That’s a false dichotomy.

Destiny: OK, OK, let me soften that a little. Let’s say that you have a society full of people that could better allocate themselves into jobs where they would be personally happier, do you think you have the moral authority to push so much kind of cultural norms to these people that some of them decide to have children instead?

Sargon: I think that we can have people who procreate and work at the same time.

Destiny: Well yeah, but it seems like given the option to choose to have children, people seem not to if they have the ability not to. That seems to be, I mean for all that Nick talks about natural choices, that seems to be naturally what happens, if you look at countries —

Sargon: That’s not natural at all, that’s totally artificial –

Asmongold: Don’t you think that’s an outcome of the current economic climate?

Destiny: No, this is a well observed phenomenon, as countries enter first world status people just have less children, they don’t need to have as many children to populate —

Nick: Except for Israel, Israel’s birthrate is going up, but, nevermind that there are–
[HUBBUB]

Destiny: For one second, if we could not focus on fucking Jewish people, I know it’s real hard for you Nick —

Sargon: I’m more with Destiny here —

Hassan: Before we get into foundational philosophy, I just wanna really understand what you mean when you talk about Western civilization. Can you point to a specific example that does not include other cultures and other civilizations and other technological achievements, created in, like, the Islamic culture for example, in the Golden age of Islam, that the Western civilization has built itself upon.

Sargon: Hassan, I’m not saying that Western civilization has not been influenced by other civilizations.

Hassan: It’s not just influence. I mean, this is how it works, we’ve always had globalism, we’ve always had globalization, as a consequence of trade, wars.

Sargon: I agree, people always fought with each other, and traded with one another. Humans move, yes, I agree.

Hassan: Ok, so when you talk about the preservation of Western civilization, and you talk about birthrates… [unrelated moderator interjection]… more importantly the thing I am trying to understand is, why are we trying to preserve civilization or western civilization or why are we trying to make sure that like, mankind continues is an interesting conversation I guess, maybe, it’s not to me. What I am specifically trying to understand right now is why we’re talking about birthrates without talking about the actual factors that contribute to birthrates declining. We know that technological achievement is one of them, sociological status is one of them, and we see this with like, immigrant cultures that are also coming in, or immigrants that are coming into like, American society, and integrating into American society, and by the third generation completely adapting, and their birthrates adjusting to the existing ethnic groups that are already living in America, or in Western civilization in general. This is consistent across time, and it’s consistent in all of these other countries. So when we talk about the declining of the birth rates, it’s not a matter of ‘other people are coming in and replacing the original ethnicity of that country’ it’s more so that people are fucking less, quite frankly, because they have more access to technology, and they are wealthier, and they use condoms and shit. So how do you want to reverse that if you actually want to reverse that?

Sargon: I don’t really care about the ethnicity, it’s not really the question. Because what you’ve identified, correctly, is that this is a malaise that is gonna affect humanity, eventually, when all nations will eventually reach a sort of level of technological expertise and wealth, where the question is really, do we have a responsibility to what we’ve inherited, to pass that down to someone, or are we allowed to be selfish enough to be the end-point of that.

[Five full seconds of silence]

Asmongold: That’s a big question.

[Discussion moves on to next segment]

Kyle writes: I think this exchange is really interesting and significant. Sargon basically advances an ethnicity-neutral pronatalism that has the potential to radically improve the West’s prospects, and gets very little pushback on that front from the left-wing members of the panel. There are certainly antinatalist sentiments on the left, but they are vastly weaker than anti-racist sentiments.

In the debate, Nick Fuentes’ most radical stance (which probably got him kicked off twitch) was that he does not believe interracial relationships are healthy, and that they should not be depicted in film. I question the necessity of that stance. First of all, I don’t think it is possible to reverse societal acceptance of interracial relationships, particularly in a country as multiracial and free as the US.

Second of all, it seems to indicate some underlying misunderstanding of the nature and implications of racial differences. There are average differences in important traits between races. Moreover, when someone differs radically from their parent population, their offspring will tend to regress to that parent population’s mean. This is a matter of great importance in predicting and understanding the cause of gaps between races, between ethnicities, and between classes.

However, none of this can be taken to imply, even remotely, that a child with inherited characteristics from any major human population is better off not existing. People who have children should be celebrated for bringing new life into the world. To reject that principle is to take on a misanthropic and utterly self-destructive view of the world. If you claim that the world would be better off without entire demographics in it, you are revealing some combination of mental illness, misanthropy, and lack of social awareness. The worm immediately turns on you – why should someone who is so unconscious of the values of their country, and so harsh in their condemnation, not be condemned and excluded themselves?

Fundamentally, the moral and practical response to dysfunction in certain demographics, is to point out correctly that the burden will rest on those demographics to sort out their issues. If they never sort them out, then the burden rests on them forever. It is for each individual, and each organized group to attempt to sort out their future as well as possible.

Some people and some groups will be future-oriented. They will know that all important human traits are highly heritable, and maximize the chance that they have children who will flourish. They will understand that if they encourage this behavior among people associated with them, their children’s future will be even better than it would otherwise be. They will freely consider technologies, rules, and contracts that will take advantage of the opportunities afforded by knowledge of the high heritability of important traits, and the immense value brought by children.

Other people and groups will be less future-oriented. They will ignore the realities of heritability, and ignore the need for children to make the future bright. One can only hope that they live great, adventure-filled lives. Those whose children will walk the paths between their graves can only wish them the best.

Mitt emails: On Luke Ford show while reviewing Edward Dutton show, Kevin Michael Grace surmised pop culture has gotten dumber because of falling IQ.

Probably not. Take Japan. It used to make great films and produced a number of first-rank writers. But by the late 60s, the power of TV destroyed the film industry and 80% of all movies made were porn. And by the 80s, Japanese culture had become mostly pop idol music and cartoons. How did Japanese culture become so stupid even though its IQ didn’t drop?

Combination of TV, youth culture, complacency, decadence, and materialism made everything shallower and sillier.

Also, the rising new norm shamelessness made pop culture more vulgar and animal. Even a smart person, if raised in a culture of shameless vulgarity, will turn animal. Maturity isn’t same as intelligence. An person of average intelligence can be remarkably serious and mature, and a person of high IQ can be trash, vain, and shallow… like that Sirius radio Jewish oligarch who is really a man but prances around as a ‘woman’.

While overall IQ may have fallen in the West, there are still lots of smart people at the top. Also, brain-drain from the Third World added Asian brains to the West. And yet, the culture had gotten so stupid. Why? Decadence, youth culture, hedonism, and stupidity.

In contrast, Iran is a repressive nation with lower IQ, and yet its overall culture is more mature because the authorities do not allow rampant youth culture, hedonism, and degeneracy to run wild.

Kyle Rowland writes:

Greg Johnson says:

“Right wing terrorism helps the enemy and hurts our cause.”

“Harms our movement in four ways – creates public sympathy in our people for the victims of these crimes, and the victims of these crimes belong to groups that we would like to build a case for separating ourselves from them, it makes all the liberals want to cling to them even more, and dress like them, and act like them, and show solidarity with them. That’s not a good thing.

Second, it makes white advocates look bad, because our job is to convince the world that white nationalism is a solution to ethnic conflict, not a cause of ethnic conflict.

Third, it energizes the left. It gives them options for signaling and manufacturing martyrs and jinning up moral panics.

And fourth, those moral panics are used as pretexts for repressing us. Repressing our freedom of speech and repressing our right to bear arms, and those are bad things.

“I want to argue that times aren’t quite so desperate as some people think. Yes, as I argue in this book, The White Nationalist Manifesto, available in the lobby there, if long term demographic terms for white people are alarming, if we do no not halt the existing demographic trends, we will first lost control of all of our homelands and then we’re simply going to become extinct as a race. But that end-point still lies a couple centuries off. And even in parts of the white world where the majority of births are now of non-whites, and there are cities and states in the United States, and probably cities in Sweden where the majority of births are of non-whites, it’s still going to be some decades before these people have voting rights and can exercise political power.

And by the time that happens, you might find that a great deal of white people are willing to countenance limiting the franchise, or doing away with voting all together. So we are going to have some decades to get things right, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, depending on what country we’re in. And that means we have a lot of time to prepare, a lot of time to plan, a lot of time to get it right, and if doing it right won’t save us then doing it wrong won’t save us either. So, we just have to do it right, we have to do it the right way and figure out what the right way is, and the idea that things are so dire that we have to go on shooting sprees in hopes of setting off waves of repression that will cause some upheaval in the white world – those are desperate, panicky, and I think stupid self-destructive self-defeating measures.”

“It is the case that long term demographic trends are alarming. But, there are a lot of medium-term social trends that are working in our favor, and we need to recognize that these trends give us a great deal of room for maneuvering and a basis for actually surfing our way into power someday.”

“In any fair debate, our arguments beat theirs. We have truth on our side, everything they are arguing is based upon lies and sanctimonies and coverups of the catastrophes they create.”

“The question is not whether but how long it takes for us to change public opinion sufficiently that we inaugurate a new paradigm, that we sweep away globalization and that our kind of nationalism becomes the dominant paradigm in all of our societies. It’s not if, it’s simply a matter of when, because the longer we stay in the debate, the longer our reach, the quicker it’s going to happen. We win every argument in every fair debate.”

“Terrorism increases sympathy for our enemies, decreases sympathy for us, makes us look like maniacs when we’re really the most sensible and sane people in the world. Try that on for size. The rest of the world is crazy – we’re the sane ones. And we’ve done nothing wrong, and we think nothing wrong.”

Kyle Response:

You say “we” and “us” a lot. What “we”? What “us”? Here are some opinions I have noticed in white nationalist circles.

Russians aren’t really white — Norvin

Persians are whiter than me — Richard Spencer

Jews are white enough, so long as they convert to Christianity — Brundlefly

We don’t want gay people in our movement — Pretty much every straight white nationalist I have seen give an opinion on the matter

Mixed people aren’t a big deal, we can be welcoming of mixed people — Richard Spencer

We pretty much know who is white, there’s no big problem or complication with the definition — Mike Enoch

Jews should first give me all their money and then go straight to Israel — Mike Enoch

My view on ‘what is white’ is essentially northwest europeans… a nordicist view — JF Gariepy

I have also seen favorable allusions to the one-drop rule and ‘racial purity’ made.

Basically, to tell it to you straight, white nationalists have no idea what they want. Ethnicities are genetic clusters with fuzzy boundaries. Races are clusters of ethnicities, with fuzzy boundaries. There is inherent ambiguity, and everyone with with sense knows that a purity spiral will end up alienating almost everyone. However, the most inclusive definitions also have insoluble problems. Prominently, there’s a very large group of mixed amerindian-whites called Hispanics. If your definition of white is broad and generous to mixed-race people, you end up being radically pro-immigration in the American context. But no white nationalist is.

Similarly, no white nationalist I have seen is passionate about excluding all Hispanics, even those with all or nearly all European ancestry. Some have the northwest-european centric view which would exclude spaniards from ‘core whiteness,’ but they don’t tend to get very worked up about that.

Then there are the Jews, a European ethnicity that has significantly diverged phenotypically in terms of intelligence, and which has historically been quite distinct from other European ethnicities culturally and religiously. How do you deal with them? The overwhelming answer is – kick ‘em out. But this is not justifiable philosophically without a healthy dose of purity-spiraling when defining ‘white.’ The justification can be pragmatic – but if this about pragmatism rather than an attempt to accurately define a ‘people’ the entire ‘white nationalist’ thing seems like a liability. Pragmatically speaking, why not welcome high IQ or rich members of other races, who can provide much-needed contributions to a country or a movement? Clearly if all this trouble is to be justified, we need to be coming from some principled approach!

But there’s no principled approach that unifies the disparate perspectives of ‘white nationalists.’

Therefore, I have to contend that Greg is wrong, and victory for racial nationalism across the west is far from inevitable. Racial nationalism is not a particularly coherent idea. Ethno-nationalism is coherent, but quite unworkable in the American context. It is workable in certain European contexts, and they are welcome to explore that path if they like — I do not much care what they choose to do with their own countries.

As far as the country I am focusing on – the United States of America – I see no reason to adjust my prescription. Respect the rights and freedoms of American citizens. Educate people about the findings of scientists who study human variation. Attempt to attract the richest, highest IQ people into the country, and deter the poorest, lowest IQ people. Attempt to develop and implement policies and technologies that lessen or eliminate the fertility gap between the educated and uneducated. Emphasize the suffering and danger imposed on Jews by fraudulent narratives about how racial outcome gaps develop. Explain the disastrous story that plays out again and again across the world – from Indians in Uganda, to ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, to Jews in Old Europe, to Whites in Zimbabwe, and increasingly to Western Civilization and the world, the lie is told again and again – that those who are most productive are to blame for the plight of the least productive. In fact, those who are productive uplift those around them, and the world. Point that out, and avoid the disastrous morass that ‘white nationalism’ has so far proven to be. Emphasize that a richer, safer country is good for every American citizen, and that unfortunates who through no fault of their own cannot contribute as much should be protected from being undercut again and again by low-end foreign labor.

This perspective strikes me as hard to assail. Every line of attack faces powerful rejoinders in the scientific and moral realms. In this regard it stands in stark contrast to previous platforms advanced by the dissident right.

A philosopher emails me:

Hi Luke,
In case it might be of interest to you, or anyone, I had a few comments about Kyle Rowland’s position on white nationalism.

Two quotations from Kyle:

“Pragmatically speaking, why not welcome high IQ or rich members of other races, who can provide much-needed contributions to a country or a movement?”

“Attempt to attract the richest, highest IQ people into the country, and deter the poorest, lowest IQ people.”

What seems strange to me in this proposal is that Kyle never even considers the possibility that immigrants with money and high IQs might have other traits that would be damaging to the receiving society. In fact there wealth and high IQs will probably be damaging unless they have many other specific traits, such as patriotism or loyalty or reverence for the host society. A high IQ can be used to exploit and subvert society just as much as it can be used to make valuable contributions. And there’s no reason to assume that rich high IQ Chinese people or Indians or Muslims, for example, are going to be particularly concerned with what is good for American society or the American nation. On the contrary, it seems like these kinds of people are often quite openly indifferent or even hostile to American society. Kyle claims to be concerned with empirical evidence. So should he not at least attempt to demonstrate empirically that there is high probability that such immigrants will tend to have appropriate and helpful attitudes towards American society–that, for example, they won’t view it mainly in terms of how it can be exploited for their personal benefit or the benefit of their clan or ethnicity? Maybe he has offered solid evidence for this, and I missed that.

This indicates an internal weakness in Kyle’s proposal. He goes on to say that in his preferred version of America, low IQ or less capable citizens would be “protected from being undercut by low-end foreign labor”. But, of course, those kinds of protectionist policies won’t be implemented or retained unless the wealthy high IQ people in charge of American policies care about “low-end” Americans more than they care about profits. So these two elements might well be inconsistent.

If high IQ immigrants will not tend to care too much what happens to those Americans, opening the country to those kinds of people makes it pretty unlikely that these “low-end” Americans will actually be “protected”. And it’s also likely that, in the long run, the country will be opened to poor and low IQ immigrants as well, since that will be beneficial in the short term for a class of high IQ rich people who have no particular loyalty to America or the American people in general. In fact, there would seem to be a plausible empirical argument here that this is exactly what has already happened, as a result of the fact that the wealthy high IQ elites who have shaped American life for many generations are often immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) who have no particular loyalty to the American people and no concern for the long term well being of American society. Now America is full of low IQ immigrants who are a massive drain on public infrastructure and resources, who are culturally incompatible and disloyal to America, and whose presence is a cause immense hardship for the poorest and least capable Americans. How does Kyle think they got in? Which individuals and groups were behind the changes in law and policy and morals that facilitated these changes? One plausible answer would be that high IQ immigrants, especially wealthy high IQ Eastern European Jews, were largely responsible. Hard to say how things would have turned out if these people had never been admitted. But, on the whole, their relation to American society has been very complicated and ambivalent; it would be an absurd over-simplification to say merely that these kinds of people always “uplift those around them”. Or does Kyle think there is really no evidence at all of Jews and other clannish high IQ immigrants acting in ways that harm the poor, the out-groups, the less capable?

The book on Amazon.com.

Oren Cass writes in the WSJ:

Ever have the sneaking suspicion that your friends are more popular than you? Turns out it’s probably true—and not just because you may be insufferable at cocktail parties. Why it’s true is fairly complicated, but in his book “The Human Network” Stanford economist Matthew O. Jackson entertainingly analyzes this and other mysteries. Drawing on the academic discipline known as network theory, Mr. Jackson aims to introduce and popularize a powerful way of understanding some of modern society’s central challenges.

Start with the “friendship paradox”: Imagine drawing a network of everyone from your high school—a circle representing each person and a line between circles representing a friendship. First, assign each circle a “popularity score” equal to the number of other circles connected to it (i.e., that person’s number of friends). Then, for each circle, calculate the average of the popularity scores of the circles connected to it; now each circle has a “popularity score” and a “popularity-of-friends score.”

Here’s the paradox: A typical person will have a “popularity-of-friends” score higher than his or her own “popularity score.” Most people’s friends really are more popular than they are. Precisely because the most popular people have more friends, they show up on the most lists of others’ friends. Thus insecure high-school students comparing their popularity to those in their social circle are not looking at a random sample, but one that overweights the most popular kids in school.

This effect of networks overrepresenting the already-popular helps explain a lot of adolescent behavior. More socially active teenagers tend toward more extreme behaviors, leaving everyone else with a mistaken impression about those behaviors’ frequency. College students overestimate how much a typical student drinks because the average level of drinking in an individual’s own network likely exceeds the actual average…

The fun and games end with the introduction of “homophily,” which the author defines as “the general tendency of people to interact with others who are similar to themselves.” Importantly, he emphasizes, the phenomenon is common to almost all societies and “occurs along many dimensions including gender, ethnicity, religion, age, profession, [and] education level.” Racism and sexism are unnecessary to explain even highly segregated networks—in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, nomadic hunter-gatherers exhibit homophily on dimensions that include height, weight and strength.

00:00 Brexit
15:00 Jared Taylor banned from Europe
18:00 VIOLENT TRANSNATIONALISM: WHITE SUPREMACY IS AMERICA’S NEWEST GLOBAL EXPORT
42:00 Piers Morgan accuses Meghan Markle of being a ‘fake social climber’
46:00 Luke’s one simple ice cream trick
1:02:00 Matt talks to KMG about The Manchurian Candidate
1:53:00 Former Nevada lawmaker accuses Biden of inappropriate kiss
1:57:00 Why the Harvey Weinstein Sexual-Harassment Allegations Didn’t Come Out Until Now
2:04:00 Inside Trump’s Strategy to Use Mueller on the Campaign Trail
2:12:00 Cardiologist accused of killing mistress’s baby still seeing patients
2:16:00 Notre Dame mom’s anti-leggings letter sparks ‘naked’ debate
2:24:00 2 minutes of dead air
2:26:00 BOOK CLUB: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6864151/What-happens-Theresa-wins-vote-really-election-loses.html

https://www.thecut.com/2017/10/why-the-weinstein-sexual-harassment-allegations-came-out-now.html

NYT: Russia always knew there was no collusion https://t.co/ey7qZdgUSb

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/trump-wants-campaign-mueller-report-2020/585967/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-john-kass-chicago-policing-20190321-story.html

From the New York Times:

A measles outbreak in a New York suburb has sickened scores of people and stoked long-smoldering tensions between the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and the secular world at large.

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — Erica Wingate was working at a clothing store in town this week when a male customer, with the black hat and sidelocks typically worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews, started coughing.

Another shopper standing next to him suddenly dropped the item she had been holding and clutched her child. “She was buying something, and she just threw it down,” Ms. Wingate recalled. “She said, ‘Let’s go, let’s go! Jews don’t have shots!’”

A measles outbreak in this suburban New York county has sickened scores of people and alarmed public health experts who fear it may be a harbinger of the growing influence of the anti-vaccine movement. But it has also intensified long-smoldering tensions between the rapidly expanding and insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and secular society.

The authorities here in Rockland County have traced the spread of measles to ultra-Orthodox families whose children have not been vaccinated.

And so some residents say they now wipe public bus seats and cross the street when they see ultra-Orthodox Jews. Hasidic leaders said they feared not only a rise in anti-Semitism but an invasion of their cloistered community by the authorities under the guise of public health.

On Tuesday, county officials took the extraordinary step of announcing a state of emergency, barring unvaccinated children under 18 from public places, including restaurants, shopping centers, houses of worship and schools.

“They did it to themselves,” Ms. Wingate said, referring to the Hasidic people who have refused to vaccinate. “But I feel terrible for everyone.”

Here are some excerpts from this new book:

* Engle, the son of a horse trainer who regarded teaching as another form of athletic coaching, transformed the peer criticism component of Schramm’s method into a blood sport.

* When authorship became a sustainable occupation, certain commercially successful writers found themselves isolated from the literary community. Stephen King succumbed to this truth in his emotional acceptance of the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award from the National Book Award Foundation in 2003. King saw this lifetime achievement award as a token recognition of his decades-long dominance of the genre fiction market and an unmistakable sign that none of his works were worthy of the highly esteemed National Book Award itself, regardless of his various attempts to write literary fiction of that caliber. Authentic acceptance among the ranks of the elite literati permanently eluded him, he realized. The stigma of genre fiction writing that prevented him from joining the ranks of great American authors “was still hurtful[;] it’s infuriating and it’s demeaning,” he confessed. King has long held a grudge against the establishment occupied by figures like Martin Amis and Michael Chabon, leaving him “bitterly angry at writers who were considered ‘literary.’ ” Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is a graduate of the prestigious creative writing MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, and Amis is the son of the literary lion Kingsley Amis, whom Time named one of the greatest British writers since 1945. King, without a degree like Chabon’s or a legacy like Amis’s, complained that these writers “seemed to have an inside track.”38 He is not mistaken that Norman Mailer and John Cheever, among others whom King revered and emulated throughout his career, all coursed through Iowa City and joined forces with the Workshop during their careers, the former in various visits and conference presentations, and the latter as a faculty member. Had he been armed with an Iowa MFA, King (the King of Shawshank Redemption and Dolores Claiborne rather than Cujo) might have been a force to be reckoned with in the literary world.

American culture has been so disinclined to canonize popular writers because it deems that commercial success should follow rather than precede artistic greatness, mainly because of the persistent myth of the starving artist. To starve for one’s vision and then attain wealth is acceptable, whereas the reverse is an execrable taboo. Most master narratives of literary history, especially those produced by the webmasters and memoirists of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, obscure the commercial concerns for promotion and publicity in order to highlight a mystified portrait of the literary artist’s creativity, a vision of authorship ironically at odds with Engle’s. But creative writing programs came of age when literature itself became show business, and Iowa was attentive to this shift. Resistance to or renunciation of that shift crippled fledgling programs such as Columbia’s, which until recently offered limited financial support for its MFA creative writing students on the smug assumption that writing was the bastion of the independently wealthy.39 Iowa, on the other hand, responded to the cultivation of consumer taste and the popularization of literature visible not only in the standard bearers of the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Atlantic, but in increasingly sophisticated popular postwar venues such as Look and Flair.

* The coupling of literature with commercial culture received similar flack from the Workshop students in 1972 who rebelled against their director’s mandate for professional publications, a decree they said was as American as apple pie and Vietnam. But complete renunciations of commercial measures of authorial success had their own liabilities, as seen in Melville’s illustration of the idealistic young author’s role in derailing his own career. Without a market to check and balance the creative writer’s ego, the Workshop student risked falling into Melville’s trap (figured through the fictional Pierre), in which he “imagined himself as high priest charged by god to bring forth Truth.”42

Workshop students subscribing to such a conception of authorship rooted in the myth of the solitary genius passively waited to be “discovered” at their own peril…

Formal guidance on publishing would be useful, perhaps in the form of a class dedicated to it, she argued, since eventually “many excellent writers are forced to learn” how to write for a mass audience, and “probably with no detriment to their career hopes.”43 Although no such courses would ever appear on the curriculum, the workshop method served in tandem with the program’s well-connected faculty as vehicles of professionalization within the institution’s larger culture, whose privileged inner circle Spargo had clearly not circulated in. An insider like T. C. Boyle would never ask that class time be dedicated to instruction on how to publish; such information was exchanged in the social networks between rather than in classes.

Creative writing program administrators have long faced the dilemma of whether and how to train students to pursue truth at the expense of professionalism and vice-versa. Truth seeking and professionalization, as Michigan professor Irving King claimed in 1908, do not need to be mutually opposed goals. “The truth seeker,” he argued, “is really the person who chooses, definitely and habitually to abandon the careless attitude in the sphere of activity in which he is engaged.”44 Aesthetic truth, King contended, could be transformed into a deliberate undertaking rather than a “careless” one reliant on a purely intuitive process of conjuring insight. Interestingly, creative writing programs originally distinguished themselves from basic writing associated with introductory English composition courses and standardized vocational training of journalists. Both were considered too rigid and formulaic to accommodate the more wide-ranging experimentation and modes of expression of creative writing.

* Resistance to the forces that mediate writing proved quite marketable, ironically, in several notable instances throughout literary history. The increasingly commercial condition of literary publishing is the subject of a contemptuous satirical novel called The Literary Guillotine by William Wallace Whitelock. In it, editors take over control of contemporary literature. “Writers may be relatively important, but it’s the editors, in the last analysis, upon whom literature depends,” a well-reputed publisher proclaims.46 In the nineteenth century, the publishing house of Roberts Brothers expressed the same sentiment with their No Name Series, which represented a backlash against the myriad editors, publishers, and agents creating and conditioning the reception and thus the reputations of authors.47 The purpose was to separate the text from the industry and to cleanse it of any distorting filter or spin of intermediaries. The stated intention was to restore the pure, unsullied relation between author and reader, liberating literature from a reception dictated by marketing campaigns on behalf of authorial name brands. The literature, and not its promotion and meta-commentary by blurbers and publicists, they insisted, should carry the day. But such pretensions were a thinly veiled scheme by which to entice readers into guessing which of the well-known writers, such as Louisa May Alcott, recruited for the series had penned each title. Emphasis inevitably gravitated directly toward authorial identity as the fetishized literary commodity.

* It thus came as a shock to her instructor Paul Engle when the bespectacled, nunlike O’Connor regaled the room with the erotic encounter of Hazel Motes, later to become Wise Blood’s protagonist, and the oversized African-American prostitute, Leora Watts. Engle promptly called his star pupil into his office for a one-on-one conference, where she immediately froze.3 The private confines of his car, he suggested, might provide a more comfortable setting for her to speak openly about her sexual experiences.

Engle and his protégée, the strongest of the first generation of writers to enter the Workshop in the 1940s, walked in awkward silence down the hall, crossing the parking lot flanking the Quonset huts that housed the program. It was with trepidation that O’Connor climbed onto the wide bench seat of Engle’s car for an intimate discussion with her mentor about what constituted an effective sex scene. “There, I explained to her that sexual seduction didn’t take place quite the way she had written it—I suspect from a lovely lack of knowledge,” Engle recalled. Despite his efforts to transform his car into the functional equivalent of a confessional booth, a private place for the budding writer to fully disclose her sexual experiences to him, she refused to comply.4 Her confession in this case was that there was nothing to confess. She had committed no personal sin, nor—in her humble estimation—had she committed a literary one in her fiction. Politely holding her ground, she swung the door open and stepped out of the car, bringing Engle’s tutorial in literary erotica to an abrupt end.

* But like many creative apprenticeships, O’Connor’s aesthetic development would not reach full fruition until she had figuratively killed off her mentor.

* Snodgrass’s self-possession is extraordinary in light of the Workshop’s active suppression of subjectivity. The program according to Engle derided introspective writing as a narcissistic form of talking to one’s self, or worse, an indiscreet public method of resolving psychological problems that should otherwise remain private. Many graduates from Snodgrass’s era simply stopped writing after enduring two years of the doctrine of depersonalized authorship.

* During his expensive therapy sessions his doctor ironically steered him away from questions “about those things where I could sound impressive.” His powers of poetic expression were stymied; “more often he asked me how I was planning to pay my rent.”

* Snodgrass’s greatest creative achievement came at his most vulnerable personal and professional moment. He was at the nadir of his precipitous fall from family man to divorcé, from precocious prodigy to failed writer facing the prospect of dropping out of the Workshop, given Engle’s withdrawal of financial support.

* MFA John Gilgun observed that Iowa Workshop alumni, unlike graduates of Grinnell and Columbia, remain in close contact in the manner of former students of the English public school system, except “We don’t meet in the House of Commons or in The Foreign Service; we meet in the foyers of publishing houses.”

* In an interview published in Look magazine in June 1965, Paul Engle blithely bragged that “out of the nearly 2,300 men and women who have labored in his workshops, only one ever committed suicide on the scene in Iowa City.” He claimed this was remarkable since “Beautifully balanced people do not become artists.” In portraying himself as the “bill-paying daddy to more poets than any man in the history of letters,” Engle carefully suppressed details about the deceased and their circumstances.

* Medical research “is confirming the long-held suspicion that there is a clinical link with important psychosocial implications between creativity and mental illness.” In particular, eighty percent of a sample of thirty Iowa Writers’ Workshop members studied by Nancy Andreasen “suffered from affective disorder compared to thirty percent of a matched control sample whose occupations ranged from lawyers to hospital administrators and social workers.” Shelley was not in a small minority, as Engle liked to suggest. Among the thirty Workshop members of Andreasen’s study, “Forty-three percent of writers had suffered from bipolar disorder in comparison with 10 percent of the controls.” Two of them committed suicide, totaling six percent of the sample.

* Jane Smiley: She distilled Melville’s technique of maintaining reader interest into a two-pronged strategy focused on “the inherent strangeness of whaling, and the author’s quest (expressed in his varieties of style) to exhaust the spiritual meanings of obsession (or ‘monomania,’ as it was called then).” The length of the novel, she argues convincingly, is due to the time it takes to (re)train his audience. His novel “must be long,” she explains, because “it takes a while for the author to impart to the reader enough information to enable the reader to make sense of everything the author wishes to communicate,” much like Bach retraining his “listener’s ear and listener’s mind to his musical ideas.” She urges that the novel is worth the time and effort to relish “the double strangeness of Melville’s vision—the exotic locale and visionary ideas—above every other joy that novel can afford.” But in a “Note added later,” Smiley recants. She claims that despite its status according to many as “the greatest American novel . . . it clearly didn’t make enough of an impression on me” because she had “internal arguments with the author all the way through.” She wondered why she felt a duty to appreciate Moby-Dick despite not enjoying it, asking whether this was “because the concerns of the novel are extremely masculine and I really don’t care about them.” Revisiting the novel in an attempt to grasp it at a deeper level seemed out of the question. Such a rereading would be “like going out on another date with someone who was okay but not compelling the first time.”