In March of 2013, I was sitting in an airconditioned bunkhouse in Kuwait. I was a soldier, on a security force deployment, which meant that I spent a lot of time sitting at desks in minor entry control points and in towers looking over the sea.
Luckily, I had a kindle.
At the moment I’m remembering, I was lying on my bed, reading a book called Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña. I learned about it after a series of long facebook threads in which I engaged a number of journalists, friends of my parents, and undergraduate literature professors about a book that accurately captured the experience of being a hippy. I had recently finished The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and, as I mentioned in the thread, was turned off by Wolfe’s authorial voice. I wanted to know, Was there a hippy book that was more authentic? –produced by someone who wasn’t an interloper looking to cash in?
The answer was–I was very surprised to learn–no, not really; there was not a major, quintessential novel narrativizing the qualitative elements of the hippy movement. The best anyone could come up with was Fariña’s book, which, in this memory, I am reading–and realizing is obscure for good reason.
Eleven years later, this episode comes to mind as I finish ARX-Han’s self-published novel, Incel, which is, as far as I can tell, the novel that best documents the interiority of some men associated with the online right–4Chan and pre-Trump Reddit–of which I myself was an anonymous member, especially during my deployment.
To be sure, Incel isn’t the only contemporary book to explore masculinist perspectives on sex and rage and violence and hatred of liberals; it’s just the only one I’ve read so far by an author who apparently understands that planning and writing a serious novel is an enormous, life-changing campaign, taking at minimum a period of years, and, indeed, I read somewhere that Han did spend about a decade on this project.
It shows.
With this level of commitment in mind, I am attempting with this review to begin a conversation with a person who is not only a serious and committed artist and author, but also a lot like me. I understand that he deserves care and respect. Therefore, I am not attempting to match wits with a disposable internet avatar; I am not trying to beat my chest and claim territory because as much as I like–even love–Incel, Han and I probably have different values regarding some bedrock philosophical, theological, and aesthetic principles. I do intend to make the case for my positions, but mostly I intend these notes to be feedback for a writer who has done something difficult and important.
The structure of the review is as follows.
The purpose of satire
Anon as protagonist and how to capture charisma in text
Describing spiritual experience
Challenges to materialism
Final thoughts
One final introductory note: in general, I view an author’s commentary on his own work as something like the wall-text accompanying a piece of visual art in a museum. In certain museums, wall-text can cover a lot of wallspace: you can feel like you’re walking into a Wikipedia page instead of an art or history museum. I recall, for instance, a piece in one big city contemporary art museum which was something like an argyle sock on the floor accompanied by about 10 paragraphs of wall-text. This scene is absurd because we know intuitively that a piece of art should speak for itself. So in this review, I’m mostly going to engage with the text of Incel and not the author’s supplemental commentary–with one exception: the framing of this work as satire.
The purpose of satire
I happen to know something about satire because I was–17 years ago–a headline contributor to The Onion. I also wrote for another somewhat well known online satire publication, and I still read Click Hole all the time. In my experience, successful satire hinges chiefly–like so many other things in fiction–on a sense of play. Click Hole, for instance, takes the brainlessness of Upworthy style clickbait websites and injects a kind of silliness that borders on madness, which makes things fun. The point of Click Hole is not to use humor to draw our attention to unrelenting social evils, like poverty in Ireland or like the Godlessness on Wall Street; the point is to take an obnoxious social phenomenon, like Upworthy, and transfigure it into something fun.
Think of an example of successful contemporary satire. Was Steven Colbert really drawing attention to Republican hypocrisy? Or was he just having fun at the expense of Republicans? Did his act provoke reflection or guffaws? How did The Onion succeed when it was able to? What about the Babylon Bee? Show me any example of effective contemporary satire that isn’t just fun. If the answer is Bret Easton Ellis, then you’ll have to convince me that American Psycho had any effect other than to allow its author and readers to wallow in shallow American materialism with psychotic characteristics; you’ll have to convince me that American Psycho had any moral effect on American society or intelligentsia, and finally, you’ll have to prove that American Psycho is not, in a horrible way, fun.
Worse, if Incel is truly satirizing incels and “radicalized” young men, it would render this work into a minor tentacle of the larger liberal hegemon, for which “radicalization” is a means of anathematizing legitimate critique; it would render Incel into a piece of–and I mean this in spite of its overuse–regime propaganda.
Either way–if Incel is or is not an effort to neutralize the casualties of liberalism–I’m happy to engage with it, but I’m going to view the author’s claim to “satire” like I view Bret Easton Ellis’s: an excuse to explore prohibited subject matter without interference by the tattle-tails in American letters, whose function is (1.) the glorification of the cult of the self and (2.) enforcement of compliance with the regime that facilitates the cult of the self.
Anon as protagonist and how to capture charisma in text
Incel is a character driven story; therefore, it was appropriate for Han to choose the first person perspective, which allows easy access to the protagonist’s interior. The interior of this character is dark: he is suicidal, obsessed with sex and violence, and mired in a kind of blackpilled, naturalistic worldview. Han renders these traits into an essentially realistic personality–that is, the protagonist, Anon, strikes me as familiar and unromantic; he isn’t a vehicle of base wish fulfillment like so many protagonists of self-published authors though he seems like a good example of a rightwing poster in “meatspace”: a 22 year old white male graduate student who can’t make an intimate connection with a young woman.
If I am planning a story about a dark protagonist, I know that I need to create, above all things, a sense of play; I need to do this because a photorealistic portrayal of a suicidally depressed atheist who wants to use women for sex belongs in the domain of the clinical, not the aesthetic.
Luckily, there are examples of authors injecting play into their renderings of evil. Humbert Humbert suggests himself, for instance, as an inspirational point of reference. One of the most memorable elements of Lolita is the sense of abandon one feels witnessing Nabakov’s play developed to stratospheric heights: even with this protagonist! Nabokov repeats this feat in Pale Fire, another book whose sense of play passes almost into the sublime.
But, it appears that Han is interested in a kind of clinical portraiture, which means that Anon is mostly a source of frustration and gloom: there is very little leavening humor or personal charisma. One might think of inceldom as anathema to humor or charisma, but that is simply wrong. Look at their message boards: many of them are hilarious and have fascinating literary voices. Nick Fuentes is, to my mind, the charismatic incel (he’s not exactly an incel, but he’s “adjacent”). If you click the embedded link and watch that brief clip–starting at around 7:51–you will see Fuentes in peak incel mode drawing laughs from Jimmy Kimmel himself and his corny audience. Note Fuentes’s sense of play.
The idea of a charismatic incel suggests an important question: How does an author capture charisma in text?
Charisma is hard to approach with precision. For the purposes of this review, I’ll use my macbook’s dictionary, which says: “compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others: she enchanted guests with her charisma.” That example sentence, taken directly from the dictionary, contains another important word: “enchanted.” Indeed, an author must enchant the reader with charisma rendered in text.
Does that mean simply telling the reader that charisma happened? Will Smith appeared, and the audience went wild. The studio band played “Summertime,” and Smith began to rap, etc.
Obviously not.
The author’s job is to produce enchantment, not to say that it happened; the author’s job is to spend years reading widely and pinning down maybe one text in 50 in which he finds charismatic writing and to ask himself–what is it about Melville’s text? –about Calvino’s text? –about Marinetti’s text? –about Hopkins’s text that creates the effect of enchantment? The author’s job is to then reverse engineer the charismatic mechanism and assemble a new one within the metaphysics of his own storyworld. It might be that the entire storyworld needs to derive from the author’s conception of charisma in order to produce it, and indeed, something like this derivation of storyworld from authorial charisma appears to exist within Incel: the book’s settings–the various capitals of secularism: the university, the city, the therapist’s office, and so on–facilitate the use of Han’s chief authorial charism, let’s call it: materialist description and analogy.
I am going to reproduce two of Han’s passages, the first of which contains an example of a sober description of a psychological process–a process that sounds to me like an “autist” approximating emotion.
“To the extent that I can formulate an understanding of her mental state, it is mostly an abstract undertaking (that is to say, there is not much limbic resonance between her emotions and mine). Just as a blind man can repurpose his vacant visual cortex for echolocation, the solution is to repurpose the part of my brain built for associational learning, allocating sufficient computational resources to solve for an intrinsic deficit in capacity. I don’t need to actually feel empathy in order to derive its associated advantages in reproductive fitness—I need only to replicate the function of this emotion, to tie its environmental inputs to their socially appropriate outputs (‘under conditions x, if the opposing agent does y, they are primed to respond positively to z’). For the foreseeable future it’s a black box in the form of a ‘Chinese room’ that doesn’t intrinsically understand what it’s doing; an emulator that runs on software, not hardware.” (124-125)
This description is kind of like the famous coda of American Psycho.
“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing….”
To many people probably, the Ellis passage, with its simpler language, is superior: its syntax is easier to follow; it hammers at simple ideas; it reads more smoothly, and so on. But to my mind, the Han passage is much more appealing. Han has a high definition understanding of how to capture psychological causes, whereas Ellis remains on the level of psychological effects: “My personality is sketchy and unformed…,” “[m]y conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago…” It’s easy to say these things, but hard to capture exactly how and when they happened. Han includes his high definition understanding–communicated, in this case, through clear analogies (“echolocation,” “software, not hardware”)–of how a person emulates emotion; he is able to demonstrate the specific mechanism of psychopathy or autism or whatever this is, not just say that his character is a psychopath. The effect of this kind of description is to charm the reader into believing the phenomenon is real, which creates a larger sense of enchantment in which the whole fake story seems real.
Incel, to its great credit, is filled with wonderful biological and psychological specificity, but I want to point out one more such passage, into which Han also injects a sense of play.
“It comes out that she’s on the varsity track team at another university, and a voice inside your head warns you that she’s almost certainly been fucked by one or more varsity-tier athletes, setting an impossible sexual standard for comparison. A synapse connects an electrical pathway from the nodal point of a latent insecurity to the organic machinery of your visual cortex, an object-oriented programming that projects a rotating three-dimensional cock-by-cock comparison between you and your median NCAA Division 1 African-American competitor (in the latest update from 2012, the baseline competitor penis has been updated to the smooth-beige hybrid vigor of the neo-mulatto subtype). Shaking your head, you snuff the polygonal penises into a state of inactivity, shifting back to a practiced mode of being.” (168-169)
Note the effect here: Han has captured not only the specific physical process by which thought happens in the brain (“A synapse connects…”), but also the charisma of 4Chan style humor (“...neo-mulatto subtype.”) This joke–the image of the protagonist’s vision dancing with multi-racial “polygonal penises”–creates a document of the style of humor particular to 4Chan and reddit. In my opinion, the key to creating the charismatic incel–that is, a charismatic character, which is different from charismatic writing–is this 4Chan style gallows humor in which reasonable Anons are bombarded by a world seemingly overflowing with animal self indulgence, personified by Chads, Stacies, bestial minorities, and so on. To be sure, there were a few very funny scenes in this book, and probably my favorite was the fantasy in which Anon uses a whiteboard to explain evolutionary psychology while Emily takes notes; it’s just that this hilarious scene was a kind of tonal exception in a story that was otherwise mired in the morose sobriety of blackpill materialism.
Describing spiritual experience
There are a number of problems with atheism, but in this review, I’m concerned primarily with the way that atheism appears in this story and affects its quality: namely, it creates, as mentioned above, a mire of aesthetic confinement.
In order to make my point on this subject, it’s important to describe what the world’s most important religion means in terms that internet people in the 21st century can understand.
One of the most important contributions of Christianity is to engage with and document the morality embedded within the human person, which Anon and his colleagues might refer to as a “module.” Part of this pre-loaded morality module is the conscience, which is, according to Cardinal John Henry Newman, “the echo of God’s voice,” which is to say: your conscience is not exactly God “speaking” to you, but it is pretty close.
This conception of reality, in which God is embedded within basically everything, allows for easy access to enchantment. Since divinity is in everything, the author has no shortage of potential subjects: he just has to do a good job of capturing spiritual experience.
There are a lot people for whom the idea of God–and therefore this morality module–is a construct to which weak minds flee the harshness of evolutionary reality: your conscience is a social or genetic construct, and Anon, like many incels, is one of these people; he’s a kind of right Nietzschean, for whom there is no meaning to life beyond reproductive fitness; he’s a kind of right Nietzschean, for whom (a.) the Christian God is dead, and (b.) the Christian project of identifying and systematizing a factually accurate understanding of the point of human life is an elaborate coping mechanism. To write about a person like this is to limit sources of enchantment to a familiar, if ominous, couplet: blood and soil. The true source of fascist enchantment is the spirituality associated with man’s animal nature: a spiritual connection to wilderness particular to a region, for instance; a spiritual connection to the race or tribe (and its mythology) particular to a region. Within the context of the rural idyll–think: Hobbiton or Watership Down or The Wind in the Willows–the enchantment associated with animal spirituality is easy to imagine. Within the context of San Francisco, it’s significantly less easy to imagine, and this problem of the (allegedly innocent) animal person bounded on all sides by industrialization and technology in the service of soulless communism or capitalism is often at the heart of fascist social critique.
Indeed, Han does choose to indulge the Pagan spirituality of certain right Nietzcheans, which was a reasonable decision. The problem is that Han’s authorial charism apparently does not extrapolate from material processes to immaterial processes. For example, here is his attempt at rendering the experience of fascist spiritualism.
A voice, disembodied, declares its presence in my cranium.
Nude, you are on top of the mountain.
Behind your ears, the wind speaks to you through the tall grass.
Stopping at a nondescript intersection of steel and glass condominiums, I listen as a vast soundscape unfurls from a three-dimensional matrix embedded in my surroundings, blooming trumpets carrying the opening oeuvre of “Neodammerung” from points hidden beneath the bowels of hidden alleyways and sewer grates.
The Norse gods have heard your prayers.
This apparition is not your enemy; he is your salvation.
Yes, of course–the apparition, the human vessel of your demise, the Übermensch woven into shape from the self-replicating tapestry of REM-induced simulations–where is he now?
From the ether, the spirit of a Viking berserker takes hold of his bones, spectral flames emanating from his pupils as a horned helmet descends from above, fusing to his head. (225)
This is one of the very few sections within Incel that I’d describe as frankly weak; it has the reverse effect of charisma: it creates a kind of gracelessness that draws the reader’s attention to the fakeness of the story. The problem is that, like Ellis in American Psycho, Han is suddenly speaking only in hazy, mythopoetic effects, not causes: the wind “speaks”; a “Viking berserker” appears “from the ether”; there are “spectral flames” in the pupils, and so on. These statements lack the kind of high resolution causal explanation that Han employs for material processes, which indicates a lack of familiarity with spiritual experience in general.
Similarly, here is Han describing romantic love as a kind of spiritual release from naturalism.
“As you lament the small wooden table intermediating the space between her body and yours, a great chasm declares itself in the space of your understanding: the gulf that separates the observation of beauty and beauty’s observation of you–an unlikely arrangement of particles that threatens to cleave your spirit from the container of its mortal shell and leave behind your corpse in the wake of its astral flight. It’s about an hour since she arrived, and within the span of these sixty-odd minutes you’ve come to reconsider your stance on a couple minor issues–one, the now-questionable viability of a solely materialist theory of consciousness and its implications on the potential existence of the human soul; two, the heretofore peculiar theory of panpsychism and its postulate that the binding of isolated, inanimate particles into a biological form might well unify their psychic energies into a centralized, conscious whole; and three, how all of this might be tied together in a manner analogous to the Japanese concept of the Lifestream as depicted in the genre-defining classic Final Fantasy VII that you played from ages twelve to thirteen.” (245)
I very much like the idea contained within this first sentence; that said, I might remove the latinate “intermediating the space” so that it reads something like, “As you lament the wooden table between her body and yours, a great chasm declares itself, a great gulf that separates the observation of beauty and beauty’s observation of you.” That latter idea–the observation of beauty separated from beauty’s observation of you, emphasized–has a kind of spotlight effect: the ugly subject is suddenly under beauty’s scrutiny. This idea is powerful and could be explored further, and the lens of Han’s text does zoom in on the domain of elemental physics as if he’s going to explore this idea (“an unlikely arrangement of particles…”), but he instead delivers spiritual effect, not cause (“cleave your spirit from the container of its mortal shell…”). In the next sentence, he resumes this same language of spiritual or psychological effect: “within the span of these sixty-odd minutes you’ve come to reconsider your stance…” But, we’ve just passed over an hour of essential experience, which would make for fascinating reading: the process of cognition as the person approaches love. This would have been a perfect section for high definition explanation of spiritual ecstasy in the same way Han can describe biological or psychological processes, and to his credit, Han does render some nice images–but no penetrating writing on the spirit.
Still, this moment is, as far as I can remember, the first challenge in the book to the materialist conception of consciousness, which indicates love as an antidote to naturalism. Sadly, Anon’s only point of reference here is the absurd–but admittedly hilarious and tonally appropriate–reference to the “Lifestream” from Final Fantasy VII, which brings me to the subject of my final philosophical contention: Han has not shown Anon a viable way out of materialism.
Challenges to Materialism
In Incel there are basically four semi-substantive characters who challenge Anon’s worldview: Anon’s lab-mate Andrew; Professor Williams; sister Rachel, and, finally, his therapist. The purpose of this section is to describe the inadequacy of their challenges.
Andrew represents, I think, a kind of social justice feminism native to many American universities. In an early scene, Anon brings Andrew into an obscure room in the university library basement and proposes a research idea in which data on “amplitude of vascular pulsations in the vagina” could be used to discern with high precision the nature of female arousal. Here are two of Andrew’s initial objections to the idea.
“This right here is some real MK-Ultra shit, anon.”
“If anybody was crazy enough to actually try this, not only would they get destroyed by the REB, they'd probably get hauled in front of some kind of human rights commission they built exclusively to punish the people crazy enough to be involved.”
Let’s pretend we live in a country in which Anon’s premise–to understand animal instincts associated with human sexuality–is actually objectionable. The way to effectively communicate the left wing moral problems with Anon’s proposal is to explain that because of the way female sexuality has been the subject of social control historically, some people will probably be suspicious about lines of inquiry whose motives are not explicitly grounded in the project of feminist “liberation.” Instead, Andrew blurts the following when Anon doesn’t seem to recognize the gravity of his objections.
“Okay, because you’re clearly not following, I’m going to make it even simpler for you: vaginal wetness, blood flow, an erection, whatever–it’s not a fucking light switch, anon; physiology alone isn’t incontrovertible evidence of sexual desire,” he says. “There’s a lab down the hall where they’re writing a paper on vaginal wetness as an evolved reflex, a biological mechanism built to avoid life-threatening infections associated with genital tearing from rape. You can’t reduce sexuality to a single parameter. Not only is it dehumanizing, it’s dangerous. There’s no empirical substitute for talking to human beings and asking them how they feel–moisture isn’t the same thing as consent.”
He gestures around the room.
“Plus, there’s a reason nobody does this shit anymore. It’s creepy as fuck.” (80)
Part of the substance of this counterclaim appears to me to reside in a few key words: “whatever,” “light switch” (in reference to sexual arousal), “rape,” “consent”–all of which are italicized–and “creepy as fuck,” which is emphasized by Anon’s subsequent rumination. By removing these words from the paragraph and placing them into their own word cloud, another image suggests itself: that of the social justice feminist of the early 2010s, who personifies a tantrum-oriented feminism, incited here by Anon’s “autistic” pursuit of sex. Of course, the point-and-sputter technique is not a counterclaim. The real claim, referenced in the unsubstantiated assumption that rape was so common that vaginal wetness evolved to mitigate it, is just a feminist variant of historical materialism, which, of course, is not a challenge to, but indeed a kind of feminist version of, blackpill materialism. Therefore, Andrew’s challenge is not to transcend materialism, but merely to adopt a different, more socially acceptable perspective on it.
Professor Williams serves a similar role: materialist orthodoxy enforcer. The setting is a meeting between the prominent professor and Anon, a lowly graduate student. Williams has concerns about Anon’s proposed research on ethnocentrism. He worries–uncharacteristically for a professor of his stature–that “someone reading this might draw some rather unfortunate conclusions of a political nature.” This leads to a digression, in which the professor simply reinforces the materialist conception of human nature. Here are the two most explicit sections.
“A good friend of mine, a philosopher at UC Riverside–can’t name him, paper’s not out yet–is working on a paper about consciousness, arguing that if you accept materialism, as we all do, obviously, then this probably entails that nation-states are conscious, with the neuron-equivalent being a single person” (212).
“Sure,” he says, picking up a stack of papers from his desk, getting up, “and everything that we as a species happen to value is derived from things our brains evolved to value. It’s arbitrary, a path-dependent historical contingency. A construct like any other.” (214)
As far as I can tell, Williams means what he says; therefore, his character similarly does not challenge the materialism at the heart of Incel. Instead, he reinforces it, but wants to police Anon’s political perspective.
Anon’s sister Rachel appears both in person and as a concept a number of times in the story. Her challenge to Anon is made at length towards the end of the book in two large paragraphs of dialogue, which read like a contentious comment on a Slate Star Codex post. Here is the first.
“No, I’m serious–it’s hardly even a science. Freud invented psychosexual concepts out of whole-cloth; half of the pioneers from the sixties were on so much LSD that even the spooks at the CIA couldn’t get anything useful out of them; anybody with even an iota of skepticism could tell you the Stanford Prison Experiment was basically a theater exercise. That neuroimaging you’re all so proud of, those little heat maps that you constantly throw up onto slides to estimate blood flow into different regions of the brain: it’s lifted off fMRI scans passed through bogus algorithms that can pull patterns out of literally anything–it’s like a schizophrenic writing Morse code from the blinking of an anchor on the six o’clock news. I studied this garbage, too…” (237)
This section is an attack on psychology, yes, but not on materialism. In the second section, we see more of the same.
“This fetishization of neuroanatomy, this gratuitous copy-pasting of computer-science metaphors onto biological systems: it’s all just cargo-cult neuroscience. I mean, look, all the serious work being done with neural networks is happening in a barbell-shaped distribution, either it’s computational modeling or fundamental cell biology stuff–everything in between is pretty much useless. I can tell you it’s sure as hell not being done in psychology departments staffed with people who couldn’t cut it in the harder sciences. Ever notice how they’re always citing neuroanatomy in otherwise flimsy psychological textbooks, pretending these fuzzy correlations constitute knowledge? And don’t even get me started on the statistical methodology of almost your entire field. It’s an undergraduate-level understanding of probabilistic reasoning, it’s p-hacking all the way down. Half of these guys aren’t even smart enough to know they’re p-hacking, which makes perfect sense given that almost all of them are morons.” (238)
As mentioned above, this observation has a kind of Slate Star Codex comments section “energy,” and it strikes me as a fairly male gendered style of contrarian internet autodidacticism. Whether my intuition strikes others as wrong or right, Rachel takes issue with psychology, not blackpill materialism, which is striking: within Incel, empirical science is more vulnerable to critique than materialism.
Before describing the therapist, I want to note that while Andrew, Professor Williams, and Rachel are relatively major characters, none is as prominent as Anon’s best friend Jason, who is a geyser of often unsolicited materialist theorizing. The therapist, who does offer a kind of tepid challenge to the materialist worldview, is, by my reckoning, the only character in the book who doesn’t personify some variety of materialism.
He introduces this perspective by offering a famous–and profound–Siddhartha Gautama quote: “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other man to die” (268). The effect is instantaneous: Anon reports that his “sadness evaporates.” To be fair to my own claim that the book doesn’t actually offer an alternative to materialism: this quote is not inherently spiritual; it’s a therapeutic aphorism that is spiritually adjacent because it is attributed to Gautama. Still, it creates a kind of doorway out of the materialist mode. The doctor then describes an experience with Jain monks in India, whose compassion for “all living things” manifested itself in the form of cloths over their mouths to avoid inhaling insects. Both he and Anon agree that this behavior sounds like mental illness. Here’s the punchline:
“And so imagine my surprise when it turns out that the neurobiology of the insect nervous system is completely consistent with that of an organism that has its very own subjective experience, its very own consciousness; that it appears to possess all the neuroanatomy required to suffer, to feel pain. I felt as if I’d [been] hit by lightning–to think that the monks were right, that I was the one who was wrong. I couldn’t sleep for a week after that” (270).
Again, I think a word cloud is useful for analysis: “neurobiology,” “insect nervous system,” “organism,” “subjective experience,” “consciousness,” “neuroanatomy,” etc. Even here, in the heart of the most substantive challenge to materialism, the reader is bombarded in terms and concepts associated with scientific materialism, offset arguably by “subjective experience” and “consciousness.” That’s not to say that any challenge to blackpill materialism will avoid or eschew scientific terms, but I do think it’s worth noting in as far as it is further proof that the sources of authority in Incel are almost exclusively scientific or material, not spiritual or intuitive or of the conscience. Han does not render a challenge in the person of, say, Christ or Father Zosima; he doesn’t create a scene in which Anon comes to terms with the vocation of love through the mundane ecstasies of devotion to family and friends; instead, Han renders his challenge to materialism in the person of a psychologist describing the “neuroanatomy” of insects, which brings me to the substance of the therapist’s challenge: since insects can feel pain, the Jain monks were correct in their judgment to wear masks over their noses and mouths. This realization–that the monks were “right” because they regarded insects as forms of life–causes the therapist to lose sleep for an entire week. Therefore, the nature of this challenge is that it is possible (surprisingly) for adherents to a religious tradition to be vindicated by science, which in the context of Incel is a genuine glimmer of religious hope.
Ultimately, this challenge–flimsy as it is–barely affects Anon, whose thinking never returns to this conversation.
Final thoughts
In spite of my criticisms here, I think Incel is one of the strongest books to appear within the rightwing internet. It is the work of a competent and dedicated writer while many of the other self-published rightwing books are just not. It is dark, yes, but it captures the humor and the cultural experience of the early 2010s with impressive verisimilitude. In this way, it is an important document of the qualitative elements of this important internet subculture, which is relevant for scholars studying contemporaneous historical developments: the depravity of blackpill materialism and the experience of smug, hegemonic liberalism as precursors to the rise of Trump and authoritarian populism. It’s also fun to read for insiders who simply see versions of themselves or their worlds in this text. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in these topics and look forward to more writing from Han.
This is a fantastic review - your combination of stylistic critique and the analysis of the book's philosophical themes (mostly around neuroscientific reductionism/materialism) are really well executed.
For me, the process of crafting the book was quite challenging in that integrating the philosophical themes in a way that didn't feel overly contrived was a constant source of friction, but ultimately, I think that's the throughline that made it feel worth writing beyond just an exercise in style alone. As you correctly identified, a lot of these themes play out in arguments between characters, which felt like the most natural way to express this kind of dialogue.
You're absolutely right that the core throughline is this iterative dialogue on materialism and in particular its relationship to the hard problem of consciousness. This topic has interested me ever since I was a teenager, and although I've read a fair amount of philosophy of religion (e.g. various forms of Christian apologetics, including interesting arguments from consciousness like those espoused by J.P. Moreland), I've not been persuaded by theism as a general explanation for consciousness - I moreso lean toward a Philip Goff style articulation of anti-materialism (his latest short book, 'Why?', covers a ton of interesting ground on the anthropic principle and some very interesting newer arguments around psycho-physical harmony).
For the subject of my next novel, I intend to engage with Christianity and the Bible more overtly, but I'm still in the very early stages of thinking about this.
This is a superb review, and it has caused me to purchase the book and look forward to reading it. If you have not read My First Book by Honor Levy I strongly suggest that you do so. It provides a sort of female counterpart to this one, though set at a later date.