Tara McMullin

I’ve been mainlining Le Guin’s non-fiction writing. It strikes me reading this passage again that she’s bumping up against Harry Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit.” To paraphrase, that bullshit doesn’t concern itself with the truth—it’s objective is outside the realm of information. I don’t think fiction is bullshit, obviously. But now I’m curious about the qualities of fiction as they relate to the qualities of bullshit.

"Redemption comes from a character who has incurred a moral debt through their actions then making good on that moral debt by performing some deed or service or act of heroism that will ameliorate the bad. That seems simple enough. But in the arid secular plains of modernity and its accompanying moral relativism, what is even good? What is even bad? How can there be redemption in the absence of a functioning moral schema?"