The Banality of Prejudice (A response to Adrian Chmielarz)

“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”

— George Orwell

Preface

When I was much younger and keeping a videogame blog during game design school, I wrote a story about the controversy surrounding the release of Resident Evil 5.

I saw no problem with the predominantly white (or at least light-skinned) protagonists shooting hordes of black zombies. They were, after all, in Africa.

I was confronted by N’Gai Croal, who I believe was working at Newsweek at the time, about this. It’s one of those moments that I may remember and Mr. Croal will not, as he was going out of his way to discuss the controversy on small blogs like mine, run by newbies at the marches of the internet. I was admittedly starstruck, but sternly defended my key point.

That key point: the intent of the Japanese developers was not to be racist. Clearly, I admitted, it could be interpreted as racist — but that was not the actual point Resident Evil was trying to make.

I did not consider myself racist — after all, I didn’t feel any animosity towards anyone because of their skin colour, language, etc. Because I was young and frankly hadn’t read anything on the topic, my worldview was very post-racist, post-politics, post-religion. This is the worldview of the uninformed and it is, unfortunately, very common in the Western world.

I’m not sure if I ended up admitting it to myself back then, but I was wrong — what I was doing was ignoring the actual effect of the imagery on people, ignoring the whole potential for a plurality of interpretations , and of course I was making a huge logical error. If I exclaim that I am not racist, but turn a blind eye to the examination of racism, then who really cares what I describe myself as?

So N’Gai took issue with the game’s imagery, and what I did not realize was twofold — there was my own inability to acknowledge his “subjective” and equally valid interpretation (after all, you can’t tell someone that they are actually not offended), and the idea that racism is not just or only individual, but organizational and institutional as well. It perhaps functions systemically — at least it certainly seems to.

Here’s a pull-quote from an interview he gave with MTV:

“And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.’ The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that.”

Facts about humans are difficult to “prove”, but this one about systems fits nicely with that idea precisely because the reason human affairs are difficult to prove “true” or “false” is that we engineer them. But we don’t engineer them personally — for the lack of a better term, we’re herd animals at heart. We live and think in groups, and we are all born into an already-constituted social world.

This seems rather self-evident, for the curious reason that it is. Whether it’s the spooky, evil leftist and founder of sociology Max Weber, or the comfortably cranky conservative John Searle, or whatever theorist — famous or not — you can find, everyone agrees plainly that we construct our societies, and we do it in groups. Money exists because we believe it does, and we honour that institution as a group, as part of an unwritten social contract we are born into. Of course the tricky bit is that despite being constructed they are no less real — try convincing a store clerk that money is simply exploitation of labour or a credit/debit relation enforced by the state.

RE5 was a prime example of racism that seems to have occupied a space above the individual; Japan has a history of being isolationist, and the current of xenophobia which follows from that history is perhaps more of a latent cultural belief than an individual prejudice. It is just a fact of life in Japan that you don’t come into contact with many black people, and they are, as N’gai said “othered” in media depictions — just as the famed British-Polish author Joseph Conrad did, subconsciously, when he wrote about a harrowing voyage into the “dark continent” in Heart of Darkness (which heavily inspired Apocalypse Now).

That is, perhaps nobody on that development team meant to produce hurtful imagery when depicting another ethnic group, but the very lack of consideration implies a level of cultural tone deafness that shows a disrespect that would not be tolerated if applied in turn to Japanese culture or Japanese people.

Note however that the journalist who commented on the story at Destructoid reflects the “this is all normal, carry on” point of view:

“However, I find it absurd to think that a Japanese publisher would set out to purposely (or even accidentally) conjure up negative racial overtones towards blacks while publicizing their next game.”

…

Go back and view the trailer one more time, and then decide for yourself if you see anything worth commenting about (other than the game itself) on a social level. Are there any villagers that seem to be pigeonholed into a stereotypical view that screams out to you in a way that says, ‘Aha! That is obviously aimed at denigrating blacks!’?

No, you won’t find that. What you will find is a stunning trailer for a highly anticipated game, which just happens to take place in an area where non-white villagers are under the influence of something evil — and it might lead back to a shady corporation that goes by the name of Umbrella.”

Interestingly Capcom did respond to the criticism, and the response raises even more questions — other ethnicities were added into the mix, especially Asian people. Which, while making the zombie horde more “diverse”, also is admittedly now a strange composition for a zombie outbreak in Africa — a place not exactly dominated by Asian people.

On Ideology

I am writing this because there are adult people who still think like I did back then. That is a problem — not because I think I’m smart, but because I know for a fact that I was uneducated back then. This is not an article about racism; rather it’s about the way in which we casually, unknowingly, arrogantly subscribe to ideas which are not our own — and how we can therefore perpetuate them without understanding that we endorse them by doing so.

People can be prejudiced, then, not just because of an individual opinion they hold (“Women are stupid”, “Black people are inferior to whites”) but because of adherence to and reproduction of cultural values and modes of thinking which are racist or sexist in a dumb, yet persistent, machine-like fashion. The same might be said for less politically charged areas of social analysis, such as the classic idea of social classes and the inequalities produced in economic systems.

In many ways, Adrian Chmielarz embodies the mindset of the average white male gamer. One look at his Medium blog shows almost nothing but “logical” or “scientific” arguments against proponents of anti-sexist rhetoric. In a word it is a feminism-bashing blog sitting atop a foundation of holier-than-thou theorizing.

Take this post about how women don’t actually play videogames. To support his claim, he wants to refute the idea that if you simply make a good game, women will play it. He links to a proprietary infographic concerning League of Legends player demographics, produced by Riot Games, which claims that 90% of its players are male. It’s citations are opaque, such as citing itself (Riot Games) as a source.

Now, the anthropologist David Graeber has a good point when he says that to claim that someone’s argument is irrational is actually to claim that someone is out of touch with reality — since if we reduce “rationality” to simply accounting for the world correctly (perceiving), then if you are being irrational it must mean that you have no idea what’s going on around you.

I hesitate to make accusations of irrationality because I think that’s often a tactic used by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and who are puffing their chests out in challenge.

But it does seem like Adrian himself, chest puffed out, really has no idea what’s going on here. He starts this argument on a false premise — responding to a Twitter post which incoherently states that if you make a good game, women will play it. What, exactly, is a “good” game? Is it any surprise that League of Legends, a game with the most toxic, racist, misogynist online community gaming has ever seen — is not enticing to many women?

This is what you can go ahead and call “confirmation bias”. Say it with me: “confirmation bias”. The same thing occurs with his link in the same article to CCP reporting that 96% of Eve Online players are male, and so concluding that science fiction is for men.

Adrian goes on to describe that certain games are better for women — because more women play them. Thus, he concludes, women need to play special games made for them. Of course, games about warfare, space, etc etc are male topics. The odd female, he admits, will enjoy slaughtering Orcs with us menfolk — but on the whole, it’s clear that women primarily play the female-centric games which are marketed to them.

Here is a choice quote that should paint a good picture of Adrian’s ideological bias:

“Note that in games, the process in which men gravitated towards certain types of games, and women went after something else, was organic. There were no quotas, no ideology behind it. It just happened because that is how the market works.”

At the very least this shows a misunderstanding of the term “ideology”, which he seems to conflate with something like “regulations”. In fact, an ideology is an inherent belief — something we take for granted as “normal”. Something such as this statement itself, that the “free market” is value neutral, and is itself, magically, not ideological.

That’s just how the market works.

Really, is it?

He continues:

“There is also the question of cultural colonialists eager to conquer a new territory. We have seen that happen to comics, we have seen that happen tosci-fi, we have seen that happen to atheism — now it’s time for video games. Chances of the colonialists succeeding are slim, but bigger than previously, due to the amplification provided by the gaming media and the ideologyinfecting the developers themselves. We will see if the push-back from certain group(s) of gamers stops the assault, but mostly the issue will simply be decided by the public’s wallet.”

Adrian here uses the term “cultural colonialist” to denote the “politicizing” of art by the politically correct intelligentsia (yeah, put on your tin-foil hats folks). This is of course said smirkingly, as such intelligentsia are often described as post-structuralist and constantly critique colonialism and imperialism. Adrian is a smart one though, and identifies THEM as the colonizers!

His point is that art isn’t for anything but itself (how exciting). This is almost as naive a claim as it is arrogant. Philosopher of art Arthur Danto famously described this position:

“But the concept of art interposes between life and literature a very tough membrane, which insures the incapacity of the artist to inflict moral harm so long as it is recognized that what he is doing is art.”

To hit a bit closer to home perhaps, for Adrian, Danto introduces that essay with this:

“In the days before Glasnost cast its first pale and tentative light over what conservatives refer to as The Empire of Evil, authors from the West who went there as cultural emissaries found it bracing-”inspiriting” was the term used by Hortense Calisher-to be in a world where writing was considered dangerous.”

Danto’s point is that in the West, and behind the Iron Curtain after its lifting, a “free society” deals with subversive art by sanitizing and infantilizing it. It becomes “just art”, just entertainments vestigial to a past of differing opinions and conflict now seen as historical within societies which consider themselves, like Adrian, to be post-ideological.

Adrian was a co-founder of the Polish game studio People Can Fly, and is currently in a similar role at a new studio, The Astronauts. During my last Twitter hiatus I apparently missed a pitched battle between Adrian and the more social justice-y elements of the gaming press over his apparent ambivalence concerning “Gamer Gate”. I observed a lot of this from the sidelines as my presence on Twitter has been greatly reduced lately, but after investigating it’s clear that the behaviour of many gamers and in fact game developers has been childish and uneducated.

It’s been my idea to use this blog in part to intelligently discuss issues like race and gender — Adrian for his part would like to inform us that this is all reactionary Lefty groupthink; and make it known that his wife — herself a woman — has confirmed that he is not “a sexist”. We’re both working for different demographics, but we’re trying to do the same thing — show how the other side of the aisle is dead wrong.

I don’t mean to attack Adrian or his games personally here, and I don’t condone those who have in the past (even though he has in turn been reduced to name-calling), but what he represents is a very real issue in the videogame industry and the world in general. While I want to be somewhat polite, I also want to say that I believe him to be patently wrong in many cases, and while his crusade to position himself as the offended party does not seem disingenuous, it is frustrating because he has dangerously missed the point of the whole debacle.

In one of his latest articles, in which he predominantly (and personally) attacks games journalist Arthur Gies, Adrian gives us a run-down of his personal experience growing up fairly destitute in post-Cold-War Poland (a country which, to note for later, is predominantly white — how white? About 98 percent white).

No doubt he experienced challenges and he overcame them — this is, after all, to note for the seemingly oblivious strawman social justice warrior that white people can be poor. What is interesting however is the mindset of those from his location and generation. It seems that many people emerging from a world once kept under the thumb of the U.S.S.R. or its satellite puppet regimes are, because of circumstance, disillusioned with “The Left” — and have turned to what seems to be something like a more Centrist populism.

This is what allows Adrian to speak about the “authoritarian Left”; a concept so devoid of meaning beyond the countries previously falling behind the Iron Curtain that it’s still unclear to me what it is supposed to mean to my own generation. The most vehement critics of the U.S.S.R. — and especially Stalin — both at the time of its existence and now, have been Marxists. Indeed the politics of WWII-era Europe do not translate well to the modern day — Poland was, for instance, first occupied by Germany (who we might define as the “fascist” Right) and later by Stalinist Russia (“The Left”). Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski is a good example of a public intellectual who despised Stalinist Communism after the war, and his reaction was to revise his Marxism — something that should clearly indicate for the skeptics that Marxism is not equal to Communism.

Here’s what said Polish Marxist had to say about Communism:

“The abolition of the market means not only that the consumers — that is all members of society — are robbed of virtually all choice of consumption and all influence over production; it also means that the information and communication are monopolized by the State, as they too need a vast material base in order to operate. The abolition of the market means, then, that both material and intellectual assets would be totally rationed. To say nothing of the inefficiency of production convincingly demonstrated in the history of communism, this economy requires an omnipotent police state. Briefly: the abolition of the market means a gulag society.”

Political divides are not as simple as Adrian would like to believe. But let’s also call a spade a spade and note that Stalinist Communism was in fact instantiated Marxism — but equating the theory with the implementation is simply the same as noting that democracy in theory is nice and then noting that its inventors, the Athenians, were among the most active in the slave trade, treated women in ways not unfamiliar to the Taliban, and were quite fervent empire builders.

For a Westerner like myself this “Authoritarian Left” hit me at first as baffling, rather than self-evident. Canada and America are both founded on rather individualist values but those are undercut by a current of radically socialist ideals concerning human rights, democracy, and “freedom” stemming from the French Revolution and “post-Imperial” Britain. But this kind of radical thought is ensconced in documents from the past, and the reality is more of a neoliberal one: Randian-style business, “free market economies”, etc. Socialist ideas, even in Canada, are still seen as strange and new.

For a country like Poland, of course, socialism means a dark past of subjugation, starvation, poverty. The light at the end of the dark tunnel on the other hand is an individualist free market where a person can, through hard work, pull themselves up and improve their economic and social standing through ingenuity and determination.

The reality is hard to pin down, and I won’t argue here about which kind of political ideology is “best”. But that’s just it — my ideas about what is best are highly influenced if not nearly entirely moulded by not just my own past but the past history of my entire country. It’s a contentious claim which becomes self-evident upon closer inspection: there was a whole world here which existed long before I was born, which I was merely born into — much of what I think is my own, original thinking is just a rehashing of past influences and norms which I take for granted as facts of life. The “facts of life” are, tellingly, different when one moves between Canada and Poland — they are contingent, in fact, not fixed points.

What I mean to point out here then, to Adrian, is that his point of view is an ideology which is not new or in fact simply not an ideology. Nothing may be more disingenuous than claiming you are free from bias. G.K. Chesterson makes the point well:

“The modern habit of saying ‘This is my opinion, but I may be wrong’ is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying ‘Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me’— the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”

You’d be right to point out that Chesterson may also be concerned here with claims to universality in a philosophical system constituting a worldview, but the point I want to derive from it is that individuals do not hold special opinions. Individuals assert beliefs, which may or may not be correct, about ideas which have existed already for thousands of years.

I won’t belabour this bit about ideology besides making the point that this very detached, individualist appeal to being some sort of hard-nosed scientistic observer is nothing new and nothing special, and doesn’t grant Adrian special epistemological status. His conspiracy theories about the nature of GamerGate (which he shortens, Voldemort-like, to “GG”) and the “cultural colonizers” are nothing more than that.

I should note how extensive this is, actually. In the comments section to this article about Gies and GamerGate, Adrian went on a bit of a roll about the Sad Puppies — a group within the science fiction literature community which organized “strategic voting” for the annual Hugo awards. The Sad Puppies were protesting what they saw as affirmative action — awards were being given to, not earned by, authors belonging to a minority group. Science fiction, in their view, was post-political and all about rocket ships and laser guns (not even, they admit, about good writing). It is a fundamental claim that a novel can, in fact, be about nothing, and be proud of it.

Adrian goes on, cleverly he thinks, to point out that its organizer (who was himself “strategically” voted for in many categories by the Sad Puppies) is in fact a Hispanic man. If Adrian can’t be construed as a sexist, ever, because he has a wife, how can this man, who is Hispanic, be racist? Even if his actions are, this man is in fact immune from such a state of being — this is the belief.

It’s also worth noting that this author, Larry Correia, like many people of Hispanic origin, is fair skinned. The concept of whiteness is historical, and is an idea (hi, ideology!) that originated in the United States — in fact early on, Syrians (a people who have so much trouble immigrating at the moment) were considered legally to be “white”. My own background is partially Finnish, and since the Fins could be “Finno-Ugric”, at one point in the United States it was contested as to whether or not Fins were more “white” or “Mongolian”. Whiteness as a socially constructed belief is rather recent.

In any case, Mr. Correia may be able to “pass” for white, and so in his project to end “affirmative action” in science fiction writing, perhaps does not take seriously the situation of many authors who are identified by others as Hispanic and have a tougher time publishing. Further, in no way is Mr. Correria immune to being responsible for his actions because of his heritage — to say otherwise would be illogical. Just a quick example — next time you're at the supermarket, grab as much food as you can and walk out the door while loudly yelling “I AM NOT A THIEF!”, and see how many people you can convince.

There is a second point to me made, because Adrian mentions tolerance — he has learned, in the wisdom of his years, to tolerate others. Chesterson, it should be noted, was making a case against the tolerance of a feigned pluralism. This is a “Sure I respect your views: because I know I am right and you are wrong, and am not threatened by you because I can keep you at a distance” sort of approach to argument.

There is nothing to be learned with this attitude — only toleration of views which you hold, safely a priori, to be faulty. You are OK with the fact that those people are wrong — not open to the idea that they could have a point, or even more radically, that you could be wrong.

What’s more there is also attached to this a kind of false modesty: “Hey you people fighting against sexism, why can you not be tolerant of people’s opinions, like I am? Not very Left of you!”. This is always an odd but predictable twist, and there must be something to it . It would appear that you can’t claim to be anti-sexist and anti-racist while actively fighting against anti-sexists and anti-racists on the internet, as Adrian spends some significant part of his time doing when he writes here.

Take this recent video from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (a character originally developed for Conan O’ Brian skits voiced and “handled” by Robert Smigel of SNL cartoon fame), where the crew visits a university in New Hampshire.

The students are obviously mortified that their “political correctness” etiquette is being put to the test. What’s interesting however is that Triumph paints them into a corner in order to make them appear racist and homophobic (as well as, obviously, largely humourless) by asking them to describe a large black man acting flamboyantly to a sketch artist. Is he black? Is he gay? Is he fat? The students appear almost unable to even describe the man for fear of appearing offensive. However, Triumph and the audience seem to find this funny exactly because they believe that they are the more liberal ones. The students with their awkward and less-than-well-thought-out etiquette are unable to describe what is in front of them — until they are prodded to do so, and they are ashamed afterwards. To Triumph, these students are, for some unknowable reason, unable to interact with reality.

The point is that Triumph does not position himself on the political right — he positions himself implicitly farther to the left. Of course this black man is part of the skit; it’s obvious that Smigel and this actor know one another (as they must), and in the scene itself this plays as Triumph being comfortable treating this man as an equal. All Triumph has to do is access reality and describe the man in front of him.

This is the liberal — or the “neoliberal” multicultural ethos: there is no “Other”, because we are all the same. The students awkwardly betray the normal, comfortable order of social interaction by trying to annunciate and acknowledge some sort of difference — and to Triumph this is a sign that the students are in fact being racists: they are seeing an “Other”, rather than some guy who just happens to be large, gay, and black.

This is positioned all the time in discourse, through modesty, jokes, or disaffected intellectual posturing, as simply reality. If racism is not biologically real, then aren’t we all the same? It’s a social ontology which masquerades as the lack of an ontology, in which a belief in an ideal equality, (and a misapplication of knowledge of biology onto human affairs) overshadows recognition of the reality of economic and racial inequality. As Toni Morrison said, “Race isn’t real, but racism is”.

Adrian’s position is rather interesting. Like any number of intelligent men working in videogames you could pick out of a crowd, he argues against “social justice warriors” with an authority granted by appeal to “logic” that doesn’t often instantiate in his actual argumentation. But he does this in much the same manner Triumph/Smigel does — in an effort to show that he is the real champion of equality.

My message to Adrian (TLDR) is simple: take a step back and examine who you often rail against, and how you are thinking when you are doing so. What exactly is it that you think you are fighting for, and do you think the tools you’re using to do so are really the right ones?