MORAL COMPROMISE AND THE LESSON OF THE HUGOS

I’m not sure how widespread this is, but there’s a crisis going on in the Science Fiction community, and I think it’s got at least a little bit of significance in terms of how we choose to live our lives.

Here’s the situation.

Every year, there’s a World Science Fiction Convention — fans from all over the world, but usually mostly North America gather to celebrate science fiction, socialize and have a party. Along with the fans come writers, editors, industry professionals and whatnot. It’s a pretty big deal.

Also each year at the World Science Fiction Convention the Hugo Awards are presented for the best Science Fiction of that year — movies and television, novels, short stories, fan works. This is also a big deal. Within the Science Fiction community, a Hugo win is a major status symbol, its recognition, and it’s often a major boost to sales.

In 2023, the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Chengdu, China.

This was a little bit controversial, given the Chinese government’s genocidal actions regarding Ughyers and Tibetans, their authoritarian police state shtick, etc. But everyone went along with it. Why rock the boat?

The problem came with the Hugo Awards.

Now, the thing with the Hugos, is that everyone submits nominations, the Hugo Awards Committee vets the nominations, and a final list gets put out for the fans and convention members to vote on by secret ballot. Now, that’s how I understand it. I might have gotten some detail wrong, but I believe that’s the gist. It doesn’t matter.

Here’s what matters:

The Hugos were corrupted. The Hugo Awards Committee turns out to have been screening out the works of American, English and Chinese creators, on behalf of the Chinese government. Basically, anyone whose novel or background was critical of the Chinese government, or even politically sensitive, like mentioning Tibet, was dropped from the list.

People still got to vote for the award. It was just that the selections were screened.

And although people got to vote, I’ve heard that some of the math ended up a little funny, but I don’t really know or care much about that, I’m just leaving it on the table.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. There’s no actual evidence that the Chinese government, or any of its officials, actually put any pressure on the Hugo Awards Committee. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t, there’s some indication that dossiers were floating around the committee and question where they might be from. But no one is admitting. So there’s no real indication of Chinese meddling.

Instead, this appears to be something that the Hugo Awards Committee, a group of Canadians and Americans, just took it upon themselves to do.

The thinking appears to be “Well, here we are in China, so we better make sure that the Awards slate doesn’t include anything that we thing might hypothetically, conceivably, possibly offend our Chinese hosts, so let’s get out our censor pens and start striking names off the list!”

So basically, self-censorship.

Except that they were censoring other people out of existence, or at least out of the competition.

Quietly, unobtrusively, without any fuss or discussion. Just dropping names and titles from the list, with some vague bureaucratic criteria about ‘This does not meet the Awards criteria’ and similar phrasing that’s about as firm as jello and offers no purchase or opportunity to argue.

The problem of course, is that being on the whole, a decent group of people, they weren’t all that practiced or good at these kinds of Shenanigans, so they were clumsy. And the Science Fiction community as a whole tends to favor logic, analysis and cantankerousness.

So inevitably, they were found out, the whole thing blew up, and most of the Committee has resigned in disgrace.

That doesn’t help the 2023 Hugos and any taint that attaches.

Honestly, if the Hugo Committee has been a more corrupt and sleazy bunch, they’d have been able to finesse it and never get caught, or at least end up so slippery nothing could be pinned on them. But they were kind of amateur, and they got nailed.

So anyway, that’s the scandal.

And let’s be fair, it’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot. What it all amounted to was a group of well-meaning people going along to get along, taking measures to ensure that the boat didn’t rock. The broke the rules and ditched their integrity ‘for a good cause.’ Nobody died. Nobody went to prison. No one was at risk of dying or going to prison. Out there in the mainstream world, no one’s even heard of the Hugos. Even the great sin here is so subtle that you actually need to go through the chain to see the breakdown of integrity.

Under other circumstances, I wouldn’t even bother. This is the sort of trivial bunfight with small breaches and small consequences that you find in niches. It’s not the end of the world.

But there’s something worth examining here.

It’s about the subtle nature of corruption and moral compromise.

The thing people often overlook is how easy and slippery it is.

We tend to think of moral compromise as a matter of good and bad.

And we tend to think of ourselves and the people that we like as good, and therefore incapable of bad.

We think of ourselves as morally courageous.

But mostly we aren’t. Our morality is mostly a matter of comfort and safety. We are not challenged, we are not at risk, there is no suasion, no incentive.

We are good, because of the absence of any pressure to be bad.

That’s it.

We’re good because it’s easy, it’s the path of least resistance. And we are proud of our virtue. So very proud.

The Hugo Awards people are all probably very decent, very moral, very virtuous people. Without knowing them, I bet you that they’re all kind, thoughtful, openminded, generous to a fault. They got involved with the Hugos for altruistic reasons, they volunteer their time and effort. They probably volunteer for a lot of things, pillars of the community, the whole hog.

I do not mock them.

And yet, they sold out to a Genocidal Dictatorship.

Even worse, they weren’t threatened, they weren’t overtly intimidated. There was no open coercion. At least not that we know of.

The best evidence that we have at this moment is that they didn’t have to be asked, didn’t have to be told, they just kind of anticipated the position of the Chinese government and then proceeded to cater to it.

They engaged in exactly the sort of soft corruption that is the foundation for so much evil, the ‘go along to get along’ mentality that allowed racism, sexism, homophobia, and so many vicious, awful, genuinely evil acts and practices to continue protected, perpetuated, sheltered by never actually stepping above the radar, always just passing below attention.

It is so very easy to do, so very easy to fall into this kind of compromise.

Everyone wants to get along, everyone wants to be friends, no one likes waves, or discomfort or discord. It would be awkward to make a fuss.

And more, there’s ‘consequences’ to think of, and ‘implications as Dennis from Always Sunny in Philadelphia says.

The ‘implication’ that if we do something, if we take a decision, or a course, if we choose to act in a certain way that might displease or upset someone, well… so much easier just to not go down that road, avoid the possibility of ruffled feathers or awkward conversations.

I’m sure the Hugo Awards organizers at Chengdu, basically a group of Americans and Canadians, were well aware of the significance of a World Science Fiction Convention in China. It’s a country of a billion people, the 2nd largest economy in the world, The Chinese government had invested heavily. There was a lot riding on this.

Was this really the time to make waves? Or to allow waves? Do we really want to offend these hosts? Do we want unpleasantness?

I’m sure that the Hugo organizers had a lot of thoughtful careful decisions about how to proceed, and maybe they struggled with these issues.

Maybe they did.

I assume that they’re not stupid. I assume that they’re not blind, or unaware of the issues.

But hey, things look a lot different when they’re staring you in the face.

It’s one thing to sit back and pontificate about moral courage and principles.

It can be a lot different when you’re right there, ground zero, under the gun. It can be a lot less clear. Or let me rephrase that, it can be a lot harder to be clear. There’s a lot of internal pressure to just look the other way, to maybe not make a fuss, go with the flow and all that.

As things go, it seems that they made the wrong decisions. There are a lot of angry people out there. There were complaints over their rather clumsy handling, people have resigned in disgrace, others find themselves humiliated and shamed after spending years in good and faithful altruism. The world is a cruel place.

Neil Gaman wrote “ “I’m unsure how comfortable I would be participating if anything I was involved in was nominated for a Hugo in 2024, if there were people involved who had been part of what happened in Chengdu.”

I’m surprised by that. He was one of the people ‘excluded’ from consideration for an Award at Chengdu, not even allowed into the running. I suspect he’s angry at that and resentful. Still, I’ve always thought of him as one of the nicer, more forgiving types. To see that kind of seething anger, no matter how politely framed, is a little startling.

So definitely the wrong decision.

Now, maybe they were actually pressured, maybe the Chinese government actually had conversations, directly or indirectly, things said quietly, messages given and received.

But you know what strikes me?

It’s how trivial this is.

Forgive me, I’m sure it’s important to the people involved. Careers and friendships ended, a community rocked.

But let’s get a grip. Most people in North America have never even heard of the Hugos. Most people in North America are not science fiction writers, or readers. Hell most people in North America are not readers.

The Hugos aren’t the Nobels, or the Pulitzers. In the larger scheme, they’re a minor award, restricted to a literary/social subculture which might result in a few extra sales and an ego boost.

No one’s life was at risk. No one’s freedom was imperiled. No huge sums of money, no public safety.

This was a small trivial thing.

There was absolutely no need to compromise. There was no pressure the Chinese could have put. And even if some minor official was annoyed, so what. This was just not going to be an issue for anyone. It shouldn’t have mattered, no one should have cared. No risk, no punishment, no gain for throwing away integrity, nothing more than the some vague ‘niceness’ some misbegotten notion of ‘politeness’ over integrity.

And they blew it.

I acknowledge it was important to the people involved.

But it was still trivial. Like I said, no guns at the head, no lives at risk, no limbs, no prison camps or arrests, no knocks at the door in the middle of the night, no death threats, nothing.

It should have been laughable that this was even an in issue. There was almost no risk. Or no risk at all. There was almost no coercion. Or no coercion at all. The stakes were mild, the pressure either nonexistent or basically ineffective.

I mean, these were Canadians and Americans. It’s not like they were ever worried about disappearing into a Chinese Gulag. If they felt the tiniest bit of unease, they could have just not gone to China, they were untouchable.

And still they compromised themselves.

For … nothing.

They imagined themselves mighty trees of virtue, towering in their certainty, or at least sturdy poles.

But at the merest trace of a breeze, they trembled like a leaf. They caved, they rolled over. Their courage deserted them, in order to avoid rocking the boat the tiniest bit.
Somehow, what should have been black and white and utterly simple for them, wasn’t, and they did the wrong thing, made the wrong choices.

They’re us. All you people, all us people who think we’re so brave.

This is what moral compromise is really about, just not rocking the boat, doing the wrong thing quietly in the background, because it’s just a little bit easier.

Doctor Martin Luther King Jr, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail criticized ‘well meaning people of shallow goodwill’ and complained that they were sometimes worse than the Klan, because their shallowness, their politeness in the face of wrong, their commitment to not rocking the boat and going along to get along supported and perpetuated the system of segregation that he fought so hard against.

Well, the Hugos Scandal isn’t the battle for Civil Rights. But the sort of moral compromise and coercion that King criticized is on display here, and it’s frightening how unnecessary it was, how shallow virtue turned out to be.

How do we really act, how do we really think or behave, how virtuous are we if we are genuinely tested, if there’s a real push. How often have you bowed your head and simply gone along to get along.

And how brave will you be when there are real consequences? When taking a stand actually can get you arrested, or get you fired from your job, or get you beaten up? How principled are you, when there’s money involved, either to lose or to gain? When principles mean some form of inconvenience? When principles mean going against the crowd?

Sadly, I think that most of us won’t be. We’ll be just like the Hugo folk.

But we don’t have to be. We can be better.

I am a big fan of doubt. I’m a fan of doubt because I think we lie to ourselves, and in times of pressure, we lie to ourselves easily. We do the wrong thing and tell ourselves its the right thing, and if we don’t have doubt, we can end up believing it.

The only safety is to question and to doubt, to ask ourselves if our righteousness is genuine, or simply cruelty in a mask, to ask ourselves if our choice is more cowardice than moral.

Because if we can doubt, if we can stop ourselves to ask that question, ‘are we doing the right thing?’ then maybe we can end up doing the right thing.

People, in comfort, in a vaccuum, can and do make genuine moral decisions, there is that moral capacity. It’s just that when real life intrudes, there’s a strong tendency to forget about the moral dimension.

I suspect that if we force ourselves to ask, if we get used to asking, then maybe we’d be more courageous, that we’d resist the temptations and intimidation and just stand up for the right thing. Or at least, we’d be clearer that what we do, how we cave in is the wrong thing, and we’d be a bit more conflicted about it.

In my cynical side, I suspect that most times, people would make the wrong moral choice, but hopefully, in the face of more pressure, or intimidation or incentive than this. Maybe I just want people to suffer more.

Anyway, we’ve been down this path before you and I. Sorry to belabour it. How we treat each other is a hobby horse of mine. I’ve had my tests, and I’ll have more. I’ve dealt with them.

What about you?