Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game was my gateway drug to H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. His works shaped my concept of horror and put me on the Mi-Go haunted path of writing adventures and monographs for Chaosium. I am proud that one of my creations is now included among the Great Old Ones. I even co-authored a paper on Lovecraft with physicist Paul Halpern. While Lovecraft is well known for the horrors of his Cthulhu Mythos, he is also now well known for another sort of horror, racism.
When I was a kid, I was blind to the prejudices expressed in Lovecraft’s writings—I focused on the strange vistas, sanity blasting beings, and the warping of space and time. As I grew older, I became aware of the casual prejudices expressed towards minorities and his special horror of “mongrel races.” However, I was unsure whether he was truly a racist or merely expressing a common world view of his (and our) time. Which can also be seen as racist. As I like Lovecraft’s writings, I was disturbed as revelations about his racism piled up.
For forty years the World Fantasy Convention had awards in the form of a bust of Lovecraft. Nnedi Okorafor won a WFA in 2011 and was disturbed when they learned Lovecraft had written a racist poem. While not as surprising as the revelation that Dr. Seuss drew racist cartoons, such evidence of blatant racism altered my view of Lovecraft as a person.
As should be expected, some have tried to defend Lovecraft. A notable defender was S.T. Joshi, a leading authority on the author. The defense of Lovecraft follows a well-worn approach to address the issue of whether and artists’ personal qualities or actions are relevant to the merit of their art. I turn now to considering some of these stock arguments.
One stock response is the “product of the times” defense: although Lovecraft was racist, it is claimed that most people were racist, so this is not a special flaw of the artist. This defense has some merit as it is reasonable to consider the social and moral setting in which an artist lived. After all, artists have no special immunity to social influences. To use an analogy, consider feminist arguments about the harmful influence of the patriarchal culture, sexist imagery, sexist language and unrealistic body images on young women. The argument is that young woman are shaped by these forces and develop low self-esteem, become more likely to have eating disorders, and develop unrealistic images of how they should look and behave. If these cultural influences can have such a devastating impact on young women, it is easy enough to imagine the damaging impact of a culture awash in racism upon the young Lovecraft. Just as a young woman inundated by photoshopped and AI images of supermodels can develop a distorted view of reality, a young person exposed to racism can develop a distorted view of reality. And, just as one would not hold the young woman responsible for her distorted self-image, one should not hold the young racist accountable for his distorted images of other people.
It can be countered that the analogy fails. While young women can be mentally shaped by the patriarchal influences of the culture and are not morally accountable for this, people are responsible for accepting racism even in a culture flooded with racism, such as the United States in the 1900s (and today). As such, Lovecraft can be blamed for his racist views, and his condemnation is thus justified. The challenge is to work out how some cultural factors can shape people in ways that excuse them of responsibility and others leave people morally accountable. This does point towards a general problem of moral accountability and the issue of the extent to which we are responsible for our beliefs. One can certainly argued that Lovecraft should have been aware of the arguments against racism (which date back to the invention of racism) and should have been able to overcome the racism of his time. After all, other people did so.
Another reply is that this argument is a version of the appeal to common practice fallacy—a fallacy that occurs when a practice is defended on the grounds that it is (or was) commonly done. Obviously, the mere fact that a practice is common does not justify it. So, although racism was common in Lovecraft’s day, this does not serve as a defense of his views or an excuse for his racism.
A second standard defense of artists is to argue they have other traits that offset the negative qualities. In the case of Lovecraft, the defense is that he was intelligent, generous and produced works of considerable influence and merit. This defense has some appeal—after all, everyone has negative traits and a person should be assessed by the totality of her being, not her worst quality taken in isolation.
While this is a reasonable reply, it only works to the degree that a person’s good qualities offset the negative qualities. After all, there are awful people who are kind to their own pets or treat the few people they love well. As such, consideration of this defense would require weighing the evil of Lovecraft with the good. One factor worth considering is that although Lovecraft wrote racist things and thought racist thoughts, there is the question of whether his racism led him to harm anyone. While it might be claimed that racism is harm enough, it does seem to matter whether he acted on this racism to the detriment of others. This, of course, ties into the broader philosophical issue of the moral importance of thoughts versus the moral importance of actions.
Another concern with this defense is that even if a person’s positive traits outweigh their negative, this does not erase the negative traits. So even if Lovecraft was a smart and generous racist, he was still a racist. And this would be grounds for condemnation.
A third, and especially intriguing defense against a specific moral flaw is to argue that the flaw is subsumed in a greater flaw. In the case of Lovecraft, it could be argued that his specific racism is subsumed into his general misanthropic view of humanity. While there is some debate about the extent of his (alleged) misanthropy, this has some appeal. After all, if Lovecraft disliked humans in general, his racism against specific ethnic groups would be part of that overall view and not racism in the usual sense. Many of Lovecraft’s stories (such as in “the Picture in the House”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, ‘the Rats in the Walls”, and “the Dunwich Horror”) feature the degeneracy and villainy of those of European stock. The descriptions of the degenerated whites are every bit as condemning and harsh as his descriptions of people of other ethnicities. As such, one could argue that Lovecraft cannot be accused of being a racist—unless his racism is towards all humans.
One counter to this defense is to point out that being awful in general is not a defense of being awful in a particular way. Another counter is that while Lovecraft did include degenerate white people, he also wrote in very positive ways about some white characters—something he did not seem to do for other ethnicities. This, it could be argued, does support the claim that Lovecraft was racist.
A final standard defense is to argue that the merits of an artist’s works are independent of the personal qualities of the artist. What matters, it can be argued, is the quality of the work itself in terms of such factors as aesthetic value and contributions to the field. One way to argue for this is to use an analogy from my own past.
Years ago, when I was a young cross-country runner, there was a very good runner at another college. This fellow regularly placed in and even won races. He was one of the best runners in the conference. However, he was almost universally despised by other runners and some joked that the only reason no one punched him in the face was because they could not catch him. Despite his being hated, his fellow runners had to acknowledge he was a good runner and merited all his victories. The same would seem to apply in the case of an artist like Lovecraft: his works should be assessed on their own merits and not on his personal traits.
This sort of reasoning can be enhanced by noting that an artist’s non-artistic qualities do not seem to make their art better. A person might be exceptionally kind and generous, but this does not mean that her guitar playing skill will be exceptional. A person might be kind to animals and devoted to the well-being of others, but this does not mean that his verses will flow like magical wine. So, if the positive traits of an artist do not improve an aesthetic work, it should follow that negative traits do not make the work worse.
This then leads to the reasonable concern that an artist’s negative qualities might corrupt a work. To go back to the running analogy, if the despised runner was despised because he cheated at the races, then the personality traits that made him the object of dislike would be relevant to assessing the merit of his performances. Likewise, if the racism of a racist author infects his works, then this could be regarded as reducing their merit because they are infected with racism. This leads to the issue of whether such racism detracts from the aesthetic merit of a work, which is a lengthy issue for another time.
I think that Lovecraft’s racism made him a worse person. However, the fact that he was a racist does not impact the merit of his works—except to the degree that the racist elements in the stories damage their artistic merit (which is an issue worth considering). As such, Lovecraft should be condemned for his racism but given due praise for the value of his work and his contribution to modern horror.