Such nonsense. What you are saying is: you are not allowed to think on certain subjects - whatever it is that you are going to think - because a racist like Lovecraft has thought about the same subjects. As a matter of fact, I was already going to post on Lovecraft, and this makes it more urgent. Your connection of Lovecraft with the Depression is nonsense: Lovecraft's mind formed well before Black Friday, and the fear he cultivates is rooted in late-nineteenth-century European concerns that may be summed up by the names of Darwin, Baudelaire and Nietzsche. To imagine that any conception of stunted races below the ground is a reaction to the Depression, let alone to Roosevelt, is unhistorical to say the least.
But what is most dangerous is simply the basic notion - you cannot think on this subject because racists have thought about it. Do not say that is not what you meant, because if that is not what you meant, what did you mean? What you said in so many words is that Kirby's basic concepts could be twisted into becoming Nazism. If you did not mean that, then one of us has a serious problem with communication. And to give you an idea of why I consider that kind of attitude dangerous and damaging: I am currently working to enlarge my knowledge of linguistics (I am the world's worst linguist, but my field of research demands it), and specifically of Indo-European languages. One of the towering figures in the field is the German Augustus Schlegel - a man whose theories were a compound of what is most objectionable to me: Hegelism with its denial of the law of non-contradiction, Darwinism in its most brutal and self-satisfied guise, mystical nationalism, and the organic idea of communities and languages (from which comes the talk of "youth" and "decay"). Nonetheless Schlegel is an absolutely central figure in the history of linguistics, and if you tried to delete his theories, odious though they are, from its history, you would make it all impossible and meaningless. You have to study his work; period.
This kind of thinking is the kind that drives American conservatives and scientists to each others' throats, and that makes so many scientists accept the trash of Richard Dawkins and the like. It is the same that says that because Darwin was a smug Victorian theorist of racism and cruelty, therefore his scientific discoveries must be ignored or rejected. It is, in the end, the long wave of a forgotten but still living Calvinist heritage that says that the saved must be separated from the sinful in everything, because any and every sin corrupts totally and to the depths of nature. It is a kind of thinking that needs to be avoided like the plague, because it stunts the mind and makes the soul vain of its very ignorance. It builds up whole categories of the damned and the reprobate, in which can be conveniently placed some of the greatest achievements of mankind; and which leads to an ever narrower circuit of the mind, in which fewer and fewer thoughts are admitted.
no subject
But what is most dangerous is simply the basic notion - you cannot think on this subject because racists have thought about it. Do not say that is not what you meant, because if that is not what you meant, what did you mean? What you said in so many words is that Kirby's basic concepts could be twisted into becoming Nazism. If you did not mean that, then one of us has a serious problem with communication. And to give you an idea of why I consider that kind of attitude dangerous and damaging: I am currently working to enlarge my knowledge of linguistics (I am the world's worst linguist, but my field of research demands it), and specifically of Indo-European languages. One of the towering figures in the field is the German Augustus Schlegel - a man whose theories were a compound of what is most objectionable to me: Hegelism with its denial of the law of non-contradiction, Darwinism in its most brutal and self-satisfied guise, mystical nationalism, and the organic idea of communities and languages (from which comes the talk of "youth" and "decay"). Nonetheless Schlegel is an absolutely central figure in the history of linguistics, and if you tried to delete his theories, odious though they are, from its history, you would make it all impossible and meaningless. You have to study his work; period.
This kind of thinking is the kind that drives American conservatives and scientists to each others' throats, and that makes so many scientists accept the trash of Richard Dawkins and the like. It is the same that says that because Darwin was a smug Victorian theorist of racism and cruelty, therefore his scientific discoveries must be ignored or rejected. It is, in the end, the long wave of a forgotten but still living Calvinist heritage that says that the saved must be separated from the sinful in everything, because any and every sin corrupts totally and to the depths of nature. It is a kind of thinking that needs to be avoided like the plague, because it stunts the mind and makes the soul vain of its very ignorance. It builds up whole categories of the damned and the reprobate, in which can be conveniently placed some of the greatest achievements of mankind; and which leads to an ever narrower circuit of the mind, in which fewer and fewer thoughts are admitted.