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I wouldn't say insignificant. To fully appreciate some of his works, the reader needs to understand the racist mindset he had and the larger fears he was playin

by cjslep 11y ago

I wouldn't say insignificant. To fully appreciate some of his works, the reader needs to understand the racist mindset he had and the larger fears he was playing off of that stemmed from racism. Do dismiss his flaws would be a disservice for readers and his works alike.

panzagl 11y ago
Lovecraft's genius was in taking science at face value and stripping away the sentimentality. You want an infinite universe? Then don't be surprised when some random cosmic event wipes humanity away. You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. In many ways his views remind me of PG's 'Taboos' essay- we can't really come to grips with the thought of a super-volcano wiping us out tomorrow so we just kind of keep going with our lives.
- lawpoop 11y ago
  > You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. Why not? Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. And anyways, his Bible believing audience section would have believed that God created humankind from dirt, yet still loved them, equally.
  - hackercomplex 11y ago
    > Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. I think it scales, but it's not always obvious how to deploy into production. It takes patience, practice, determination, and the willingness to read the docs. I recommend compiling from source with the Buddhist "Pali Cannon".
    - panzagl 11y ago
      I think thermodynamics would state that it doesn't scale.
  - aaronem 11y ago
    > Why not? Because "we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator" requires a Creator. Take that away and you end up with Hobbes: "nasty, brutish, and short". Anything beyond that requires a sustained miracle of human ingenuity, along with an extremely congenial environment which grows ever more obviously improbable as our knowledge of the universe advances, and which is almost as fragile and delicate as we are and could easily, by random coincidence of forces set in motion long before our first forebears came into existence, be upset entirely and spill everything we were, are, and could ever hope to be, by the wayside, without even noticing. Mostly we choose to concentrate on the miracle, which is how it should be, not least because our believing in it is the only reason it exists. But there's value in someone seeing it clearly for what it is, if only because there's no other way for us to really understand how improbably amazing we are.
    - lawpoop 11y ago
      I wasn't thinking so much as the 'creator' aspect of it, thanks for pointing that out. But as far as equality, nastiness, brutishness, shortness, and amazingness, they are value judgements that originate from human beings. Insofar as the universe being a nightmarish phantasmagoria in most places and continued human existence a 'good' thing on the order of a miracle, those are perceptions of mind, not objective realities. That is, if the scientific revolution in the West has disabused us of fairy-tale notions of love, mercy, equality from a Creator, simply by doing away with the creator, it does not follow that that leaves only misery, horror, desolation, etc. in their absence. The Eastern philosophers remind us that such dualities of good/bad, love/hate, bliss/horror, are projections of mind onto reality, not states of the universe. If you get rid of one, you have necessarily gotten rid of the other, because they are interdependent, like two sides of a coin. The actual reality is neutral.
      - aaronem 11y ago
        Well, yes, of course you're right. Reality doesn't give a damn; reality doesn't even notice, because there's nothing there to do any noticing. You don't need a lot of imagination to see the horror in that. What you need a lot of imagination for, and a particular kind of imagination besides, is not seeing it. Not everyone can do that, which is why people who could do it invented gods, for the use of those who couldn't. And now we've outgrown gods, or think we have, because we've grown up to a point where we can do things which in the past only gods would dare imagine, and where's the place for gods in that? But it could all still go wrong for us, because reality doesn't give a damn, and if our descendants find themselves surrounded on every side by the bones of fallen dreams and a world that doesn't care, then people with the right kind of imagination will give them gods again. Because in times like those, gods are what people need, and there's no reason in the world why people shouldn't have what they need. And where's the place for Eastern philosophers in that? There's such a thing as too much navel-gazing, and the point at which it becomes too much is the one where you fall in and stop being of any use to anyone. Of course, some of them climb back out again and set about helping other people, and those, called bodhisattva, are the only ones worth the trouble. The others there's no point to, because what good does it do to go around telling people that reality doesn't give a damn and there's no meaning to existence and everyone lives and dies in a universe that might well casually wipe out the whole lot of us without even noticing, only it hasn't happened to happen yet? Going around doing that is rather missing the point, because, like Martin Amis, you haven't thought it all the way through.
  - dogecoinbase 11y ago
    Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss... There's a quote from a Martin Amis book that I'm hoping not going to butcher too badly in paraphrase: "The universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe as regards human life."
    - aaronem 11y ago
      If that's the full quote, then he hasn't thought it all the way through: > The universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe as regards human life. And here we are.
philh 11y ago
What does it even mean to say someone's flaws are "insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought"? Those two things don't seem like they can be put on the same scale in order to compare them. What are you two disagreeing about? I kind of feel like it's "he had flaws, and he thought well; I like him" versus "he had more flaws than you make it sound".
- panzagl 11y ago
  The common flaws listed for Lovecraft are his writing style and his racism, and it's usually the latter that people tend to bring up to discredit him. The applicability of his flaws to his ideas is usually a tar pit that unfortunately has become associated with the "feminism/SJW/gamergate" conflict within sci fi fandom, which means people often jump to bash/defend him prematurely.
- cjslep 11y ago
  > What are you two disagreeing about? I think we are both supporters of Lovecraft, but I just wanted to say that sometimes when his racism shows it isn't insignificant: to understand the fear he is applying the reader needs to know what racist people of that time feared (ex: voodo). EDIT: To be clear, I am not trying to say ALL of his fear-invoking was through racism. In some stories during some of the buildup of terror, the reader might miss out if unaware.
  - armitron 11y ago
    Totally misguided assumption and also entirely wrong. Read through his letters published by Arkham house instead of making up stories out of thin air. I suggest you start with Volume IV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Lovecraft_IV_(1932%E2%80%931934) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Love...)
pjlegato 11y ago
Everyone has flaws. Viewing the entirity of one's accomplishments constrained through the lens of one flaw is absurd and unsupported by evidence. In other words, there is no evidential reason whatsoever to suppose that the larger fears he played off of categorically stemmed from racism. Criticism of that nature is unscientific and irrational, based on nothing more than arguments of the form, "it seems to me.." Further, making such an argument is inherently a moral absolutist position. You are imposing the cultural mores of your own society on a very different society from another time and place -- and ironically, condemning Lovecraft for having done exactly that. It is, at the very least, hypocrisy.
- cjslep 11y ago
  Wow, so I think you must have really set up a really flammable strawman for me, really tried to read into what I said, or mistaken me for someone else. All I was trying to say is his racism is occasionally (story-dependent) not insignificant because for a reader to fully appreciate the fears Lovecraft is invoking, the reader needs the capability to understand the fears racists had (such as voodoo). You are trying to make me sound like I am saying Lovecraft was some sort of propaganda machine for the KKK; I am not. Lovecraft is about the slowly creeping rise of terror and horror in his stories; to miss a step along the way is to miss a subtle piece that makes his works enjoyable. I am suggesting the very thing you are accusing me of not doing: saying readers need to put aside their own cultural mores of their own society to view a very different society from another time and place.
  - armitron 11y ago
    You are projecting here. Lovecraft's "racism" has nothing to do with silly superstitions. He was a cultured, educated man and knew better than what you're assuming. You'd know that had you read even a small percentage of his letters. Which was also parent's point.
rafaeltorres 11y ago
Agreed, not insignificant. Some context if you haven't read the details about Lovecreft's racism: http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/ http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-th...

by cjslep 11y ago

panzagl 11y ago

Lovecraft's genius was in taking science at face value and stripping away the sentimentality. You want an infinite universe? Then don't be surprised when some random cosmic event wipes humanity away. You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. In many ways his views remind me of PG's 'Taboos' essay- we can't really come to grips with the thought of a super-volcano wiping us out tomorrow so we just kind of keep going with our lives.

lawpoop 11y ago
> You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. Why not? Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. And anyways, his Bible believing audience section would have believed that God created humankind from dirt, yet still loved them, equally.
- hackercomplex 11y ago
  > Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. I think it scales, but it's not always obvious how to deploy into production. It takes patience, practice, determination, and the willingness to read the docs. I recommend compiling from source with the Buddhist "Pali Cannon".
  - panzagl 11y ago
    I think thermodynamics would state that it doesn't scale.
- aaronem 11y ago
  > Why not? Because "we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator" requires a Creator. Take that away and you end up with Hobbes: "nasty, brutish, and short". Anything beyond that requires a sustained miracle of human ingenuity, along with an extremely congenial environment which grows ever more obviously improbable as our knowledge of the universe advances, and which is almost as fragile and delicate as we are and could easily, by random coincidence of forces set in motion long before our first forebears came into existence, be upset entirely and spill everything we were, are, and could ever hope to be, by the wayside, without even noticing. Mostly we choose to concentrate on the miracle, which is how it should be, not least because our believing in it is the only reason it exists. But there's value in someone seeing it clearly for what it is, if only because there's no other way for us to really understand how improbably amazing we are.
  - lawpoop 11y ago
    I wasn't thinking so much as the 'creator' aspect of it, thanks for pointing that out. But as far as equality, nastiness, brutishness, shortness, and amazingness, they are value judgements that originate from human beings. Insofar as the universe being a nightmarish phantasmagoria in most places and continued human existence a 'good' thing on the order of a miracle, those are perceptions of mind, not objective realities. That is, if the scientific revolution in the West has disabused us of fairy-tale notions of love, mercy, equality from a Creator, simply by doing away with the creator, it does not follow that that leaves only misery, horror, desolation, etc. in their absence. The Eastern philosophers remind us that such dualities of good/bad, love/hate, bliss/horror, are projections of mind onto reality, not states of the universe. If you get rid of one, you have necessarily gotten rid of the other, because they are interdependent, like two sides of a coin. The actual reality is neutral.
    - aaronem 11y ago
      Well, yes, of course you're right. Reality doesn't give a damn; reality doesn't even notice, because there's nothing there to do any noticing. You don't need a lot of imagination to see the horror in that. What you need a lot of imagination for, and a particular kind of imagination besides, is not seeing it. Not everyone can do that, which is why people who could do it invented gods, for the use of those who couldn't. And now we've outgrown gods, or think we have, because we've grown up to a point where we can do things which in the past only gods would dare imagine, and where's the place for gods in that? But it could all still go wrong for us, because reality doesn't give a damn, and if our descendants find themselves surrounded on every side by the bones of fallen dreams and a world that doesn't care, then people with the right kind of imagination will give them gods again. Because in times like those, gods are what people need, and there's no reason in the world why people shouldn't have what they need. And where's the place for Eastern philosophers in that? There's such a thing as too much navel-gazing, and the point at which it becomes too much is the one where you fall in and stop being of any use to anyone. Of course, some of them climb back out again and set about helping other people, and those, called bodhisattva, are the only ones worth the trouble. The others there's no point to, because what good does it do to go around telling people that reality doesn't give a damn and there's no meaning to existence and everyone lives and dies in a universe that might well casually wipe out the whole lot of us without even noticing, only it hasn't happened to happen yet? Going around doing that is rather missing the point, because, like Martin Amis, you haven't thought it all the way through.
- dogecoinbase 11y ago
  Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss... There's a quote from a Martin Amis book that I'm hoping not going to butcher too badly in paraphrase: "The universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe as regards human life."
  - aaronem 11y ago
    If that's the full quote, then he hasn't thought it all the way through: > The universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe as regards human life. And here we are.

philh 11y ago

What does it even mean to say someone's flaws are "insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought"? Those two things don't seem like they can be put on the same scale in order to compare them. What are you two disagreeing about? I kind of feel like it's "he had flaws, and he thought well; I like him" versus "he had more flaws than you make it sound".

panzagl 11y ago
The common flaws listed for Lovecraft are his writing style and his racism, and it's usually the latter that people tend to bring up to discredit him. The applicability of his flaws to his ideas is usually a tar pit that unfortunately has become associated with the "feminism/SJW/gamergate" conflict within sci fi fandom, which means people often jump to bash/defend him prematurely.
cjslep 11y ago
> What are you two disagreeing about? I think we are both supporters of Lovecraft, but I just wanted to say that sometimes when his racism shows it isn't insignificant: to understand the fear he is applying the reader needs to know what racist people of that time feared (ex: voodo). EDIT: To be clear, I am not trying to say ALL of his fear-invoking was through racism. In some stories during some of the buildup of terror, the reader might miss out if unaware.
- armitron 11y ago
  Totally misguided assumption and also entirely wrong. Read through his letters published by Arkham house instead of making up stories out of thin air. I suggest you start with Volume IV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Lovecraft_IV_(1932%E2%80%931934) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Love...)

pjlegato 11y ago

Everyone has flaws. Viewing the entirity of one's accomplishments constrained through the lens of one flaw is absurd and unsupported by evidence. In other words, there is no evidential reason whatsoever to suppose that the larger fears he played off of categorically stemmed from racism. Criticism of that nature is unscientific and irrational, based on nothing more than arguments of the form, "it seems to me.." Further, making such an argument is inherently a moral absolutist position. You are imposing the cultural mores of your own society on a very different society from another time and place -- and ironically, condemning Lovecraft for having done exactly that. It is, at the very least, hypocrisy.

cjslep 11y ago
Wow, so I think you must have really set up a really flammable strawman for me, really tried to read into what I said, or mistaken me for someone else. All I was trying to say is his racism is occasionally (story-dependent) not insignificant because for a reader to fully appreciate the fears Lovecraft is invoking, the reader needs the capability to understand the fears racists had (such as voodoo). You are trying to make me sound like I am saying Lovecraft was some sort of propaganda machine for the KKK; I am not. Lovecraft is about the slowly creeping rise of terror and horror in his stories; to miss a step along the way is to miss a subtle piece that makes his works enjoyable. I am suggesting the very thing you are accusing me of not doing: saying readers need to put aside their own cultural mores of their own society to view a very different society from another time and place.
- armitron 11y ago
  You are projecting here. Lovecraft's "racism" has nothing to do with silly superstitions. He was a cultured, educated man and knew better than what you're assuming. You'd know that had you read even a small percentage of his letters. Which was also parent's point.

rafaeltorres 11y ago

Agreed, not insignificant. Some context if you haven't read the details about Lovecreft's racism: http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/ http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-th...