A response to PragerU's "If There is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"

With a little under two weeks to go before Best American Short Stories 2019 drops, I thought I'd use my blog to indulge in a non-literary but still-important-to-me topic. If you follow this blog for literary reasons and aren't really into God and moral philosophy, I'll see you on October 1st. This is a response to a video that some friends of mine were talking about the other day, and I thought I'd collect all my thoughts in one place to aid our conversation. You, the reader, are welcome to join in.

Prager "U" and the video in question

If you're not familiar with PragerU, the quick version is that they're more of a conservative media company than a university, whatever their name might imply. They create videos with relatively simplistic versions of Christian or politically conservative arguments, done in such a way to get millions of people who agree with those ideas to re-post the videos on social media. A friend of mine posted one the other day, mostly to say how stupid he thought it was. This was the video:

Another friend, who is deeply trained in classical philosophy, saw that post and asked what the external basis was for morality without a god. He wasn't so much agreeing with the video as asking what, if my other friend found it objectionable, we might substitute for God-given morality. It's a reasonable question, and one I've been chewing on for 25 years since I left Christianity behind me. I think I've got three responses, and not just because three is always the number people pick when they want to support a thesis.

Synopsis of Prager's arguments

Denis Prager, the "dean" of PragerU, basically argues that without God to dictate what morality is, all views about morality, even when it comes to nearly universally accepted premises like "it's wrong to murder," are just opinions. You can say that nearly everyone agrees with the idea, but that's not the same as being able to point to empirical data for why you believe in something like gravity or that the Earth is round. There's no firm foundation. Morals are relative, and if society began to reject the notion that murder is wrong, we'd be unable to make a grounded argument for why that was evil.

When I raised this with Mrs. Heretic, she had the same reaction I'd guess a lot of people do. She thought it was a stupid thing to say and that plain, old "common sense" ought to tell us it's wrong to murder even if we don't believe in God. I'm not entirely sure she didn't suspect I was concocting some kind of sophistry to convince her there is no such thing as morality, since she knows I don't believe in God. It took me a while to get across that the argument is simply that without reference to an objective criteria we all agree on, you can't say "murder is wrong" like you can say 2+2=4. You'd lose the "self-evident" nature of moral arguments the founders were so fond of. You couldn't argue about more advanced moral issues either, like abortion or immigration or welfare, because you'd have no postulates to build a proof from.

I'm sympathetic to Prager's argument, because it has a lot of intuitive appeal. C.S. Lewis and Christian apologists after him have used an offshoot of this argument to argue for the converse. Rather than arguing that we need God to have morality, they have argued that the near universal existence in human society of morality is proof of God as the giver of that moral code within our consciences. I used to really buy into that belief, and it took me a long time, even after I no longer accepted it, to be able to explain why. So here I go.

Argument #1: Christians are in the same shaky boat

If Christians want to argue that without God, we have no moral absolutes, that's fine, but this overlooks that they're in a very similar logical quandary themselves. They have to face a question about the nature of good and evil and its relationship to God that has plagued Christian theologians for centuries. The video sort of glossed over it by saying that murder is evil because God says it is (and then showing a cartoon depiction of the Ten Commandments).

But here's the conundrum: is murder wrong because God says it's wrong, or is it wrong because it's objectively and independently wrong, and God merely happens to have the right moral beliefs, beliefs He chooses to share with us? Some hard-core Calvinists have held that morality is whatever God says it is, and that if God had chosen to say murder and rape were good, they would be good. Most theologians balk at that, because that would seem to mean that God didn't choose moral precepts out of his own character. But if we say that God commands us to do what is good because it is objectively good, then that means there is a good and an evil that predates and "outranks," if I may use that term, even God. It means murder is wrong because it's wrong, not because God says it is.

There's really no good way out of this dichotomy for Christians. If we go through door number one, then morality isn't really "moral," it's still relative or "opinion" as PragerU puts it. The only thing different about this opinion is that the supreme ruler of the universe holds this opinion. It's an extreme example of "might makes right," the kind of thing we see at the end of the Book of Job when God's answer to Job's question of why bad things happen to good people is essentially, "Shut up and be glad I didn't make it worse, because I am strong and wise and you are not."

Door number two feels right to most people, I believe, but it also makes God's rightness on moral matters contingent. God did not create good and evil. God did not tell us to murder because he happens not to like it, but because murder is wrong. It was wrong before God said anything about it. It was wrong for all 60,000 years when homo sapiens was developing the ability to record its moral precepts. If that's the case, then doesn't it really make no difference whether we believe in God or not? Shouldn't our proper interest be in the good and evil that existed before the Ten Commandments? Are we not capable of being our own priests, communicating in some sense with moral rights and wrongs that are independent of God?

You could argue that even though right and wrong are what they are without God saying anything, He is, by his completely good nature, the only being capable of revealing their nature to us. That kind of ruins Lewis's argument for morality proving the existence of God, then, because that is essentially saying we don't understand right and wrong without God, when Lewis would like to say that God plants and understanding of morality in all of us and uses that to help us find our way to Him. If Lewis's argument is true, then we will maintain a conscience whether we believe in God or not.

And lo and behold, we find cultures all over the Earth who have developed morality independently of Judeo-Christian values. Those moral codes do what moral codes are supposed to do--regulate the behavior of individuals in such a way that society becomes possible. If only God's edicts can create reliable morality, whence all these other long-standing societies?

Argument #2: So what if morality is just opinion?

I agree that murder isn't "Evil" with a capital "E." There is no Platonic perfect morality, of which our Earthly morality is just a shadow, and on which all our best moral ideas are modeled. Murder is only "evil," which is to say that society regards it as such. It's an opinion, even if it's one held by nearly everyone. For me, it's evil because it does not lead to the kind of world I want to live in, which is my main rule for deciding whether I find something moral. But others may have different reasons for thinking it wrong, and a few stragglers out there might not find it immoral at all. So why don't I find this a threat to the good of mankind, if I can't prove those who think murder isn't evil are wrong?

Consider for a moment the 1988 movie "Mac and Me." (If life has been good to you, this will be the first and only time you will ever consider it.) I cannot "prove" that it is a bad movie. There is no formula that proves it, no empirical data. But 100% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes agree that it is bad. How did we arrive at such a unanimous consensus if there is no ultimate, unshakable basis for stating what is good and bad in a movie?

I guarantee this is the only time this movie has been cited in a moral argument. 

I would contend that moral reasoning works something like aesthetic reasoning. In aesthetics, we may not be able to come to scientific statements about what is good or bad or beautiful or ugly, but we still have some hazy understanding of  what we mean, and this hazy understanding actually helps produce consensus a lot more than you'd think. Yes, 38% of the audience said they liked the movie (I would be willing to bet at least half of those are trolls pretending they loved it). We won't get total unanimity. But we can get close. Murder is the Mac and Me of the moral world. Nearly everyone who isn't just trying to troll others happens to have the same opinion. If the goal of morality is to help people know what they should and should not do, then isn't the "right ballpark" of morality good enough, even if we don't have a map to show us exactly where we are?

Prager argued that utilitarian ideas of morality fail, that they are "wishful thinking." We can't argue that people will do what is moral because they either fear punishment or wish to live in a pleasant world. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin killed, and no utilitarian argument stopped them. Here, I don't think Prager is being entirely honest. He just admitted that plenty of Christians have done evil things, even done them in God's name. But then he talked right past that and spoke of how there is a reason that the rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs has coincided with an increase in murder. He claimed that Judeo-Chrisitan societies were the first to accomplish a host of social goods, implying that without Judeo-Christian beliefs, we can't really hope to advance the social good.

I don't deny the many good things Christians have accomplished. But they sure took their sweet time getting there for many of them. Before some Christians began opposing slavery, people arguing from the same Judeo-Christian beliefs also expanded it on a scale that had never been dreamed of before. Prior to expanding the vote to women, Christians excluded them from the vote. Why did it take so long? Maybe because for all his belief in how clear God makes morality, there aren't that many things that are really terribly clear from the Bible. Should we outlaw slavery? Christians made arguments both ways, both quoting from the same book. Should women be allowed to vote? Same thing. If God is the source of all morality, He's done a lousy job of making it clear what we ought to do and not do. Even today in America, there are liberal Christians arguing for more state welfare and conservative ones quoting Saint Paul's "if a man will not work, he will not eat," arguing for far fewer.

God doesn't make morality any clearer. Morality is inherently difficult, and more of a general grid on a map than a specific dot. It's a region of a graph, not one coordinate. But the map isn't really any foggier without God than with Him. Instead, we have to try to figure out what a person we cannot know and certainly cannot create proofs for wants, rather than trying to figure out what we want ourselves.

Reason #3: We already made morality without God once

Like all agnostics, I believe humanity evolved without supernatural intervention. Therefore, as unlikely as it sounds, that means human beings evolved as moral creatures. There was likely an evolutionary reason for this. Most mammals seem to show some signs of empathy, and I think empathy may help explain some of our success over the last 65 million years. If you're looking for a bedrock on which to build your moral principles, empathy might be as close to one as you've got. (Of course, this still doesn't make anything simple. If you try to go through life operating on the "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" heuristic, you'll soon find yourself in a morally difficult position of having to decide which "other" you should be doing unto when there are competing camps of "others" who want things.)

Evolved morality is not the same as God-given. This is more along the lines of behaviors that have worked in the past to help us propagate as a species than it is an unassailable principle upon which arguments can be built. We don't understand exactly how it evolved or why, but it's not too great a stretch to see how it can be evolutionarily useful as a species for one person to risk his or her life for another. Within bodies, it happens all the time, with some cells sacrificing for others. In insects, it happens at the organism level. It would not require supernatural interference for humanity to evolve selfless behavior, even to desire to behave selflessly. And nearly all mammals almost HAVE to have empathy at some point, because as milk-eaters in our infancy, we all rely on a mother who is willing, for a time, to put her interests aside for those of her children. Without this selflessness, nearly all mammals would die before having a chance to pass on genes.

Even non-mammals evolve behaviors of how to behave. Insects have incredibly sophisticated social lives. They know what is expected of them and how to act without God. And although some theists insist that "instinct" is just a word for what we don't understand and that God may have been the one to put the moral instinct there, I would respond that while I accept and enjoy the existence of beautiful mysteries, that is not the same as accepting God as an explanation for them.

It's really not very hard to imagine an evolutionary basis for morality. There are much more difficult questions for a non-theist than this one, actually. Humanity saw what was good (little "g"), did it, and when it evolved to a point where it could codify its already-existing practices, thought it important enough to put moral codes in the mouth of God. We invented right and wrong, not God.

Summary

Prager claimed that every non-theist he has ever debated admitted that without God, morality is "just an opinion." I don't know that all philosophers would agree to his dismissive characterization, but I certainly don't object to the claim that morality isn't certain. At least, it's not certain if your aim is to construct philosophical dialogues that proceed by getting someone to accept one point and then building from there, one abstract brick at a time. But maybe that's not really how moral philosophy ought to work. People are living beings. Moral philosophy ought to be about how to live as a human among humans, not how to turn morality into a geometry problem. I think it's actually a good thing that we can't always reduce moral problems to math. As C.S. Lewis once put it when explaining that the complexity of the Bible was a good thing, because it kept believers from reducing its truths too much, "No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish."

What do you know about The Nellie Massacre: the problems of striving for diversity in literary publications

Pop quiz for literary gatekeepers: Without looking, what are the major political parties in South Korea, and can you trace their recent evolution? What are the three main languages of Nigeria? What can you tell me about the Nellie Massacre?

I'd be beyond impressed if there were a political science major who could rattle off all three of these answers off the top of her head. But I'd be utterly shocked if an editor of a literary journal or the people in charge of selecting the winners of a literary prize could. I'm not criticizing literary editors for lack of global awareness here; it's just really hard to know about the issues every single part of the world faces with any real depth. I don't even pretend to understand half the world, and I tend to block large parts out so I can focus on the things I'm supposed to know about. But even the things I supposedly know a thing or two about are tough to keep up with. Even though I know a lot more about question #1 above than the average person, even I would struggle to answer it without hopping online to check up a few facts first.

Impossibility of editorial responsibility for the rest of the world

If you are a writer who submits often to literary journals, as I do, you're probably used to seeing language from magazines that goes something like this:

We welcome previously unpublished work from writers of all backgrounds and identities, particularly including people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, members of religious minorities, people outside the United States, and all others whom traditional publishing has historically excluded. We believe your stories are valid stories, and we want to consider your work!  

This is a completely legitimate editorial mindset, and not just because of the justice aspect of it. It's also an important approach aesthetically just for the simple sake of providing the most enjoyable literature. While it's certainly possible to bring a fresh take on old subject matter, there's also a lot of joy for readers just getting access to worlds they've never encountered before. Even a bad story about a culture the reader knows nothing about can at least enlighten the same way a geography textbook can. As Roxane Gay said in her introduction to the 2018 Best American Short Stories, one of the things she looked for in a story was when it "teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don't know and need to know about the lives of others." 

But there's an issue with editors picking "people outside the United States" as a focus of their literary affirmative action if the motivating factor is some kind of cultural balancing of the scales. It takes years of careful study to understand another country's political landscape enough to know whose voice there is being excluded and whose is not. Just because a voice has not been heard much in the United States yet or has not yet been heard by the editors of a particular highly exclusive journal does not mean that voice is really struggling to be heard. In reality, just the fact that this voice has reached a Western audience is a good indicator that the author might come from a group whose voice is being heard plenty. An Oromo herder getting kicked off his land for a government project in Ethiopia isn't likely to get the opportunity to write a heart-rending short story in English that will ever earn the attention of an elite American literary journal. But the Amhara child of a government official in Addis Ababa might. 

On the other hand, just because some exceptional Oromo herder managed to accomplish the impressive feat of making it to school somewhere abroad, learning English and also having the right temperament for literary fiction, does not necessarily mean the government's development project is wrong. It doesn't mean that writer's voice is a protest about something that really should be protested. Knowing which voices in Ethiopia are worthy of an audience in America is tricky, and even an Ethiopia expert would struggle with it. So isn't it somewhat irresponsible of a literary journal with no particular knowledge of Ethiopia at all to favor a story from one side or the other? 

If the point of publishing one of these stories is not merely to let American readers whet their whistles with another culture, learning a few words or foods or customs along the way, then having lay people pick which stories will represent the country outside America seems like a fairly questionable practice. It's one thing to pick art that the society itself loved, translate it, and present it to an American audience. That's letting the culture speak for itself to the greatest extent possible. When a writer from another culture who also has enough roots in ours to succeed at writing a story in English puts out fiction, that's not letting the culture speak for itself, it's appointing an ambassador from that culture to speak to an American audience, only the American audience itself is picking the ambassadors. 

It's a big responsibility to pick a story and thereby give readers the only information about, say, a Tamil kid those readers are likely to come in contact with for the next six months to a year. It's not a responsibility a guy whose expertise is in stories is maybe up to. Ideally, American audiences would form their art-based opinions about other parts of the world through a kind of triangulation between the art formed by the culture itself, art produced by that culture's diaspora, and art produced by outsiders who have learned about the culture (the sort of thing I write). But it's risky for a literary journal without any expertise in the culture it's choosing to represent in a story, because the landscape is bound to be incredibly tricky and even the editor's attempts to become grounded are likely to be the little learning that becomes a dangerous thing. 

I'm sure editors generally act in good faith. They do some research, maybe reach out to a friend who either is from that country or knows something about it, before picking a story. And I'd guess most editors would say that even a story with a voice from the dominant narrative in its country of origin is still a new and excluded voice here. Their job isn't to know which voices are right and wrong, only to know which ones move the reader and elicit empathy. They'd probably guess that just following their instincts about a good story is likely to guide them in the right direction more often than not. 

If American literary fiction produced hundreds of stories a year from Afghani-Americans, Afghan writers in translation, and Western travelers to Afghanistan, there would be no real concern with editors at a particular journal picking a story from any one of these groups. There'd be plenty of other narratives to balance whichever one they chose out. But that's not the case. Only a few stories from any of these groups get published. And it's the second group, stories from the diaspora, that tend to find the most reception. Of the three major short story anthologies from 2018, I count approximately eleven stories written with a setting in a foreign country or with characters who are first-generation immigrants in America. The best I can tell judging by the author biographical statements, all eleven were written by diaspora members from those cultures, all currently living in the West. So only the second type of stories are getting representation in the big anthologies. That's probably indicative of which types of stories are also the ones getting published in journals across the country. 

I've focused here on writing from "people outside the United States," which doesn't always mean "outside" the United States but more "from the perspective of someone whose worldview was shaped outside the United States." But you could apply these problems to the other areas of diversity editors look for. An editor may think she's promoting diverse voices if she picks a story about gay characters from an author who identifies as gay. But there are, of course, a plurality of voices within the gay community. Some of those voices are politically more advantaged than others. Does an editor have the sophistication to know where this particular voice lies on the spectrum? Or is it just a story that seemed nice and met the external criteria you've set?

The point I'm making here isn't that diversity is a stupid goal, or that editors aren't right to use it as a criteria of something they're looking for. The point is that there are problems in trying to select those kinds of stories. In all likelihood, the benefits from trying to pick these kinds of stories outweigh the problems, but only if we acknowledge the problems do exist. Choosing diversity as a goal doesn't immediately lead to paradise. In the short term, it probably causes more problems rather than less. For editors, that means expending resources to make sure stories really are providing a range of voices and not just a dominant voice most readers aren't aware is dominant because its dominance exists somewhere out of their view. 

What a story means should matter: thoughts after reading the big three short fiction anthologies

Because I've enrolled in a few writing classes online and used an editing service or two, I get a lot of emails offering me similar services. One came this week: "Send Your Manuscript Back to School!" The instructor of the fiction school offers this concerning his philosophy of fiction:

"When I respond to fiction drafts of any length, I try to think in the simplest of terms: what is the story doing well, what is it about, and what could it do better? I'm fairly convinced that authorial intent, while important, is often overrated--especially by the writer her or himself."

He then lists the elements of fiction he concerns himself with: what's it about, beginning, ending, details, plot/organization, character, setting, and voice. I think this is a typical way to approach writing nowadays. The primary concerns are with whether the story "works," not with its meaning.

He never mentions theme, but theme is, I think, why a lot of people serious enough about writing to go to graduate school or spend a lot of their personal time trying to hone their skills fell in love with writing in the first place. Unfortunately, the business of literary fiction now, especially short fiction, seems to be in the hands of writers, meaning there is a disconnect between what those writers pick to publish and what most readers actually want. Most people want stories that have a deep meaning, while most writers think in terms of the instructor in that email I received. I'd argue this disconnect accounts in part for the public's general indifference to serious short fiction.

In defense of theme 

What is theme? A lot of people talk about it as though it were the same as subject matter. They say things like, "The theme of this story is friendship." That's not really right. Friendship is a subject. How the story feels about friendship is a theme. "Friendship is both a blessing and a curse" is a possible statement one could make about the theme of a story. It's not a terribly deep or interesting statement, but it serves the purpose of demonstrating the difference between theme and subject matter.

I think modernity tends to shy away from theme because it comes too close for us to the "moral" of a story. It's didactic, and that summons up images of condescending schoolmarms smacking the hands of distracted students with rulers while tsking their way through some recitation of Aesop's fables. It implies certainty on the part of the writer, when the business of post-modernity is learning to live with uncertainty. But theme doesn't have to be as dry as "haste makes waste" or "love conquers all."

Just this week, I was talking with my son about Whitman's poem "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." I pointed out that you can intuit a lot about how the narrator feels about the soldiers without him saying anything at all. From the tone and language, you can see that he admires the soldiers, that he thinks they are perhaps engaged in something noble. This is entirely achieved through the pleasure of beautiful images and powerful language, but the themes are still there.

Typically in modern fiction, theme is hinted at and felt more than overtly stated. That's great for readers who want to feel like the story is real and organic, but it's not so great when we, as readers, start to feel the natural urge after the story is over to think about what it means in some larger sense. It's great when a writer masters all those elements of fiction mentioned above, and it's a keen pleasure to read fiction in which those elements are mastered, but at some point, we want to know how we ought to feel about all that wonderful manipulation of what is often called "craft." When that happens and the task is beyond us, we might need professionals to help.

A theme can be a moral, but it doesn't have to be that obvious. 

An intelligent person who is not a professional in literature might walk away from a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us" or "Nights in Logar" by Jamil Jan Kochai feeling like we have some sense of what to take with us as we go, but we might have a difficult time expressing that when we discuss the story with others. And we might not have a clue what we're supposed to feel after a story like "The Houses That Are Left Behind" by Brenda Walker or Carolyn Ferrell's "A History of China."

That's when it can be useful to have a critic, someone skilled at scouring the elements of fiction for the unique ways in which fictional logic creates meaning and then communicating that meaning to readers--preferably to readers who are not literary professionals. But such critics hardly exist. For every movie out there, you can find a dozen quality YouTubers doing God's work trying to mine the movie for meaning, but darned if you can find that for the best literary fiction. That's true even if you're talking about short fiction, which is probably easier to critique in the manner I'm talking about than long fiction. There's a reason students of Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories are finding my blog. It's not that I'm the most skilled person on Earth at this. It's that hardly anyone else is even trying critique on this level.

Instead, we get a review. Literary Review, critique, and theory are related disciplines but differ in important ways. A good review will let you know if you should read a book. A good critique will help you to analyze the work critically. Theory is more for professionals, and interrogates the work on a deeper level in which literature itself is often being investigated as much as the particular work under discussion. The three disciplines overlap to some degree: critique can include opinions on quality, and theory will include close reading of how the elements of fictions build meaning. Critique is the middle ground between heavily academic thinking about literature and a more personal reaction to it. But nearly all writing about serious literature one can find tends to lean toward the review end of the spectrum, because it's mostly other writers running the show.

This is even true of the anthologies themselves. Having just finished my critiques of the most recent big three American short fiction anthologies (Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the O. Henry Prize Stories), I found a lot of great fiction. (I was actually worried, when I started, if I would be able to go through with a full critique of all the work, since I'm trying to get published myself by many of the same venues that published the work I'm analyzing, and I didn't want to make enemies. But I was surprised how often I could blog positively with a clear conscience.) But I didn't find much in any of the three anthologies to help orient a lay reader about meaning.

BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2018

This is the best selling of the three, and for the six years I've been reading it, has followed the same format. Heidi Pitlor, who has narrowed the possible candidates down to a little over a hundred, has a guest editor pick the twenty stories that appear in the volume. Both Pitlor and the guest editor offer thoughts on the volume, Pitlor in a foreword and the editor in an introduction. Often, these include some musings on how the stories reflect the historical year covered by the anthology.

In 2018, both Pitlor and guest editor Roxane Gay focused on the chaos and uncertainty in American democracy and how the stories they picked may or may not address that chaos and uncertainty (and for Gay, why they should be excused if they do not seem to address it pointedly enough). Pitlor's foreword begins with a list of all the unbelievable news that had happened in just the month before she finished work on the anthology. Her concern with fiction in this political context is more existential than semiotic, more about whether fiction can survive than what it might mean: "Fiction writers are now faced with the significant challenge of producing work that will sustain a reader's attention amid this larger narrative."

Pitlor relates her personal history with the BASS anthology, which she first discovered in college. Her first contact with the series included her realization that there was a section of writer notes in the back, a feature that still exists in BASS today. "After reading a stellar story, I turned to the mini-essay that provided access to what seemed like secrets: confessions about the difficulties of writing, self-deprecating comments about the author's obsessions; profound assessments of the themes of the stories." (emphasis mine)

Pitlor seems to care about the same things I've just said most readers really care about in reading literature. The raison d'etre of the anthology is to provide insight into the big questions. She writes that "The stories in this book offer readers passageway inside contemporary and age-old questions of what it means to live together in a society, as well as what it takes to define ans sustain oneself in difficult times."

She then moves on to a brief and now-familiar discussion of how literary fiction makes readers more empathetic, more open to diversity. But it's clear she sees one important purpose of fiction is to deliver meaning, not just great craft.

Gay, in her introduction, is even more concerned with existential questions than Pitlor. She writes about the realities of writing, how it takes time and space, and how we can't expect the perfect story responding to the present age to just emerge because we'd like it to. With all the political and social background to picking the year's best stories, all of which Gay is deeply concerned about, she says what she's looking for begins with writerly questions:

"First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don't know and need to know about the lives of others." (emphasis mine)

So both Gay and Pitlor are looking for some kind of meaning, some thematic epiphanies from what they read in fiction, although these questions are of varying relative weight to each. But the notes from the writers in the back tend, for the most part, to rather pointedly avoid this kind of pontification. There are a few exceptions. Interestingly to me, the same writers who wrote what I considered the best stories in the volume (Brinkley, Cline, Evans) did try to address what their stories were about at their heart in some way. I wonder if one of the reasons I, a reader who reads for theme, connected with their stories is because the writers themselves also show a similar concern.

Most of the writers stuck to the background of how the story was written. Many wrote about aesthetic or "craft" considerations. For a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," his biographical notes are quite helpful for thinking about theme, since Guajardo's life is similar to his main character. When he writes that, "Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it's hard to hide that you are in love," he is writing auto-biographically, but he's also written a pretty good thematic statement about his own story. In fact, most of the better thematic statements in the author's notes section start with a statement something like, "I wanted to write a story about..." They are still writing from their own experience of writing the story, but by talking about what they wanted to say, we end up with a helpful guide to the story for the confused lay reader.

Ferrell, however, whose story "History of China" may be the most daunting to write about thematically, offers almost no help, choosing to write only about craft and the history of how she came to write the story. Ron Rash's writer notes are as fatuous and conceited as the story that appeared in the volume. Matthew Lyons wrote that male violence was at the heart of his story, and while that's a helpful hint at theme, I don't think it's entirely accurate. Maybe that's because I thought the story didn't quite work on the level of craft, dabbling a little too exploitively in exotic religious customs. But at least it was a thematic statement. Kristen Iskandrian, Rivers Solomon, and Esme Weijun Wang also offered an analysis of their stories that I partly disagreed with, but at least they gave some sort of analysis.

In short, the author comments usually didn't really offer much of the "profound assessments of the themes of the stories" that we were promised. Maybe that's too much to ask of the authors, who are, after all, only responsible for producing the themes themselves, not the analysis of those themes. But this analysis needs to exist somewhere. I'd like it if BASS itself too charge of leading the production of some of that criticism, either in the volume itself or somewhere with an official presence online.

All too often, I think the statements about these stories tend to dodge the thematic questions, because those are hard. You can be wrong about what you say. It's hard to be wrong when you say so-and-so wrote beautiful sentences, but saying a story's meaning is such-and-such can be contested. You can end up looking stupid. I'm sure I've failed at some of what I've blogged. I do it because critique is so rare and so important, I'm willing to provide something imperfect to at least have a starting point for readers. But I think BASS could call upon literary professionals to do better. 

PUSHCART

The Pushcart Anthology doesn't offer much of anything to help a reader out. Its focus is on getting air time for writers from smaller presses. It's an absolutely admirable job, and it gives a huge shot in the arm to the trajectories of the writers who make it into the volume. But it's an paperback-only book, which means size matters. They try to get as much content into it as they can, and that means they don't have a lot of room for introductions or writer notes. The introduction this year was only a few pages, focused on personal notes from the editors, and passed on any responsibility to contextualize the stories thus: "I won't even attempt to describe the immense variety in theme and style of what follows."

If there isn't any real criticism of the big anthologies, there's damned sure not going to be any real criticism of Pushcart. This is a shame, because writing without good reading is the answer to the old Buddhist koan of what one hand clapping is like. It's nothing. Pushcart provides a great opportunity for writers desperately deserving of it, but without an active readership, it's difficult for the writers to develop an active base of followers. Writers typically gain a following when readers are attracted to thematic elements in what they read. But there has to be some discussion of what those thematic elements are before the readership can, in a sense, discover itself. So Pushcart itself is only half of the puzzle.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

Overall, the O. Henry anthology shows a little more attention to theme than the other volumes. It groups stories by similarities rather than by the randomness of alphabetical order of the writers, which in itself means they are taking editorial responsibility for how the reader experiences meaning. In Laura Furman's introduction to the series, she takes several stabs at thematic statements about the stories. She doesn't do this for every story, but she does it for many of them. I found some of her thoughts helpful in writing about the anthology. This section of the book provides something BASS was lacking. It gave at least a few paragraphs of thoughts from an actual literary professional about two questions: What is the subject matter?" and "What is the heart of the story?" I take this second question to be largely one of theme. 

Like the foreword to BASS, O. Henry's introduction promised further answers to these questions in the notes from the writers at the back of the book. "After you have completed a story in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions 'What is the subject matter?' and 'What is the heart of the story?' And if you turn to 'Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018,' you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer."

However, like BASS, the authors are not always as interested in thematic elements as the readers likely are. There are exceptions. One wonderful exception was Brenda Walker, who provided a succinct statement of what she thought was at the heart of her story. This was helpful, because her story was one of the more challenging to find a thematic core of. But most of the writers stuck to origin stories of their stories. Again, I don't really fault the writers for this, but it is disappointing to the reader who wants to engage with the work on a deeper level to find a dead end. 

O. Henry also includes a short essay from each of three guest editors. In each essay, the editors talk about their favorite story and why they liked it. This is more help O. Henry provides to readers that BASS and Pushcart do not give. However, since the editors are writers and not critics, their comments tend to focus on elements of craft rather than theme. 

Overall, O. Henry is the most satisfying to read if you are hoping to get some kind of foothold on climbing up the mountain of understanding meaning. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. There are many places where the introduction uses discretion as the better part of valor where a thematic statement would be difficult. It evades statements about the "heart of the story" for "subject matter" or aesthetic statements. It chooses review over critique, when readers would probably enjoy a bit of the latter and feel they are relatively more capable of drawing their own conclusions about the former. For example, Furman concludes her talk of Dave King's "The Stamp Collector" by saying, "In a short story, the writer has to do it all right away--establish the tone, ensnare the reader, and make us want more. Dave King does all three just right in 'The Stamp Collector.'"

This was my first year reading O. Henry, and I really was grateful for the way it was put together. But I'd like other anthologies to follow its lead, and for O. Henry to go much further than it does. I'd love it if the anthologies also included criticism about the stories. Preferably, it would be independent criticism. The critics wouldn't be required in any way to like the stories they analyzed. 

Short fiction in America needs a boost. The anthologies provide that. Getting picked for one of these collections is an immense lift to a writer's career. But criticism is in an even more pitiful state than fiction. The anemic state of criticism is intricately tied to the weak state of short fiction. It's a truism that only writers read short fiction. But what do we expect? Most serious literary fiction is difficult for a non-professional in literature, even a smart one, to dissect. Without a leg up, what engineer or math teacher or fire fighter is going to invest the time, when that time is likely to end getting nowhere? 

In short, I'd love to see the big three anthologies combine their yearly output with a coordinated and linked critical output. I'd love to see my blog become obsolete. 

Things will get better whether they seem like it or not: "Solstice" by Anne Enright

I have a friend who, every year on the Winter Solstice, posts something on his Facebook page about how every day will get better from here. He's also the one who keeps a countdown to the start of baseball spring training. He's never more optimistic than in the middle of winter. And that's "Solstice" by Anne Enright in a nutshell.

Ross is down. His family life is a little unfulfilling. He doesn't understand his daughter, who laughs at memes that don't make any sense to him (I hear ya, brother). His wife just doesn't seem to like him that much, even managing to seem "affronted" by him in her sleep. His mother has died in April of this year, a fact he is never quite able to get past. He feels unmoored and without allies. And today is the shortest day of the year.

There's never a direct mention of the political situation in the world, but it's also fairly clear that the darkness of this particular day, Winter Solstice 2016, is symbolic of the general darkness out there. "It felt like the end of things. Made you want your religion back. He looked out over the landscape of west Dublin, the square industrial units set among dark young trees, and he entertained the possibility that it would not work this time. This time, the world would spin deeper into shadow." I'd say that's a pretty clear indication we're supposed to see the darkest day of the year of 2016 as somehow linked to a greater darkness going on across the world. Other than that, although we get an oblique mention of the Dakota Pipeline, it's only there to show how little the father and daughter communicate, meaning the main subject of the story is going to remain off stage.

The story eventually grants Ross the optimism he is looking for. He has one of those quiet moments with his son that every parent eventually learns are about the best you can hope for. They are waiting together for the exact moment, 10:44 AM in Ireland where the story takes place, when the sun starts to move back to a more direct angle for those north of the equator. He is able to explain to his son--and to himself--that "No matter what happens, the sun will always rise in the morning, the planet's orbit will tilt them toward the light."

It's not a triumphant epiphany with fireworks and lightning. "...it happened. Nothing happened, but they know it was there. The tiny stretch of daylight that will become summer." It's a soft little move in the direction of hope, which is what the Winter Solstice is.

For liberal people, which is, let's be honest, the majority of people who will be reading an anthology of the year's best short stories, times seem dark. 2016 was a really dark year. But it will get better, even if we don't notice the moment in which things begin to improve.

There's not much more I've got to say about this sweet and short little meditation that ends the anthology. Sometimes, it's okay to allow yourself to be optimistic and believe, even if there is no real proof of it, that things are going to get better. Since late 2016, I'm not sure Western democracy has gotten better, but that's not really a reason to give up hope. The coldest weather of the year comes right after the sun actually starts to shine more directly on us and for a little bit longer each day. If you told someone who didn't know how the seasons worked on December 21st that the sun was about to turn around and things were going to get better, that person would spend the next three months mocking you for being wrong. But that person will still enjoy the spring when it comes, even if it means having to admit he was wrong.

I've now blogged through all three of the major best of literary anthologies with short stories the U.S. puts out every year, doing my best to think seriously about every story in them. It's taken me so long to do it that the autumnal equinox, the day after which our plunge into darkness becomes more pronounced, is nearly upon us, but here in the sunlight of early September on a holiday I won't think of that just yet.

The thrill of dabbling in the occult: "We Keep Them Anyway" by Stephanie A. Vega

In discussing "We Keep Them Anyway," the penultimate short story in the 2018 O.Henry anthology, I wonder how much to delve into a topic the story bring to mind now and how much to hold back for something I want to write a few weeks from now, something based on reading all three of the major short story anthologies of the last year (Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Anthology, and O.Henry). I think I'll opt for going small for now and just teasing the idea I'm working on.

"We Keep Them Anyway" is about a soothsayer who comes from La Chacarita, a poor neighborhood of cardboard houses in Asunción, Paraguay. The fortune teller, Ña Meli, seems to be the real deal, not just some huckster using cheap parlor tricks to fool the gullible. "She had a second-grade education and terrible handwriting, but when she wrote the letters, her handwriting changed. Sometimes she used words she didn't even understand. Once I saw her write an entire letter in Portuguese. It was creepy, before we got used to her."

By the end of the story, Ña Meli is something of a holy woman, suffering terrible ordeals in her own body like a martyr in order to traffic messages to the living from the dead. But the unnamed narrator (How many times have I written "the unnamed narrator in the O.Henry anthology this year? Seems like about half the stories) remembers when Ña Meli was in it for the money. She wouldn't give anyone, not even the poor people of La Chacarita she lived with, a discount on the 500 guaranies she charged. And even then, she sometimes didn't deliver on her promises.

Ña Meli splits the difference between huckster and spiritual guide.

Although she was always in it for the money, at least at first, she was authentic. But over time, Ña Meli becomes more commercial, more cynical in her approach. She scrounges together a crystal ball and a turban, puts on an act. She works the San Juan Festival circuit, doing two to three fairs a day. Her audience at the fairs is no longer the poor, but "...adolescent girls. They came in pairs and bought letters for laughs, for the thrill of dabbling in the occult. Those kids had money to burn." She charges these kids four times what she had charged in La Chacarita.

While working for rich people, Ña Meli seems to have less concern for whether her letters she writes from the dead are authentic. Whereas before, if the dead did not communicate with her, she would write nothing, when working for the rich, she "always produced something that either delighted or horrified them. Either way, it kept them coming back."

However, at some point after selling out, Ña Meli seems to make a turn toward not just real medium again, but toward a kind of sainted and martyred medium. She is hearing more and more from those who were "disappeared" and tortured, raped, and murdered under the regime of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. The narrator worries for Ña Meli's safety in relaying these messages from "bad visitors," not just because the painful contents they relay are ruinous for Ña Meli to pass on, but because the same people who perpetrated all those crimes are still around. They might be a little less forceful and a little more careful about getting caught, but they're still there, and Ña Meli is risking catching their attention.

Ña Meli's increasing communications from the victims of Stroessner coincide with a real-world discovery of the notes, meticulously kept, of the tens of thousands of victims of the regime. Improbably, someone kept careful logs of who did what to whom, and then even more improbably, those notes were left in an office somewhere for years before someone figured out what they were. The narrator thinks that perhaps Ña Meli has helped to bring about this discovery: "Maybe all that rattling about of their names in documents (from Ña Meli) had lured the poor souls back. The 'Archives of Terror' had been all over the news, recently discovered in a pile in the back of a minor police station."

Ña Meli ultimately dies, and while the popular explanation is that she was at last overwhelmed by a painful communication with a "bad visitor," the poor from La Chacarita, who do not have "the luxury of being innocent," know that "there are more evil demons on this side," and figure she was done in by the government.

Who is the audience of this "letter"?

The author of this story about the long terror of a dictator in Paraguay is in much the same position as Ña Meli. She is carrying the testimony of the victims to the living. At first, I was a little turned off by the story, because I saw it as kind of cynical.

When a writer who is deeply knowledgeable of another culture or part of the world from what Western audiences and editors are used to writes a story, there are two ways that writer can game the system to gain acceptance. One is to use something that is well known in the other culture and pass it off as though the writer came up with it herself. This is sort of what it seemed to me that Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing" when she used the image of a student eating pages of a textbook in order to memorize them--which is a very familiar cliche in South Korea--in a way that made it seem she had come up with a fresh and original image in her story. The editor who picked the story for The New England Review even specifically called this out as one of the best parts of the story, even though it's so common in South Korea, you're likely to hear it thrown out as a chestnut on the evening news during testing season. (I don't think Choi did this entirely on purpose, by the way, but that's the way it worked out.)

The second way to play a Western audience is to give the audience what they are already expecting. You can put on a show, like 50 hotel workers in Hawaii shaking in grass skirts to Elvis songs while playing a ukulele. That's what I thought this story did, and I so I was resistant to it. It was allowing Western audiences to "dabble in the occult" by giving them an exotic version of the poor in a Latin American country, one that reinforces romantic notions of the poor. I was ready to bash the story, because it seemed inauthentic. It was not a real Paraguayan reaction to years of horrible oppression, because if it had been, there'd have been no need to explain about Paraguayan customs like the Festival of San Juan or about the discovery of the Stroessner documents. I was ready to call foul.

But as I thought about it, I realized that using Western expectations in a cynical way is a brilliant approach. It's what Ña Meli would have done. Yes, invoking the exotic plays on Western (is "Western" the right alternative to "poor Paraguayan" here? Paraguay is, after all, part of The West. But I digress...) biases. It's flash and lights without substance. But in the end, the story gets told and people hear it, which was sort of what Ña Meli accomplished as well.

I intend to have a lot more to say after I'm done with O.Henry on how fraught it can be when a Western editor tries to select a story that is deeply enmeshed in a culture the editor does not know about, how easily that editor can be fooled. But for now, I note only my approval with how Vega used that weakness in the system to get a story told to an audience that needed to hear it.

Is there a closed circle for the narrator?

To return briefly to the story, although the main point seems to be nothing more than to remind Western audiences that this was a thing that happened and it matters, there is still a character within the story to attend to. Does the narrator learn anything and change from her contact with Ña Meli? It seems so. Although Ña Meli warned the people who received the politically risky letters she wrote not to keep them, most did, because, as the narrator points out, "Everyone wants souvenirs, even of the worst things." But the narrator does not keep hers at the end, unlike most people in a story called "We Keep Them Anyway." She knows what she needs to know without referring to the letters.

This is a an act of humility on the part of the author, whom the narrator is temporarily "channeling." This story isn't what matters. It may have been published and won an award, but don't focus on the story. What matters, what must not be forgotten, are the voices of the victims within the story.