"Stories are like people. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You just try and cherish them, overlook their flaws."
--Atticus, Lovecraft Country (season one, episode one)
The racism of H.P. Lovecraft (in addition to the ultimate irrationalism at the core of the way his work is at least commonly interpreted, as many people think one of his grandest themes is the asinine idea that there could be some creatures or truths that are outside the domain of the necessary truths of logic) is an unfortunate blemish on a fictional cosmos that otherwise tends to be rather grand and philosophically profound. It is hardly unusual for a show created in the current century to be made with awareness of this at the forefront behind the scenes--and in the story. Racism, the morally flawed nature of some fictional characters and their authors, and the metaphysics of cosmic horror are all jointly explored to various extents in Lovecraft Country.
In this story, a black American soldier named Atticus returns home in search of his father, only to find that one of the few clues that suggests where he went is a letter that mentions a place that is spelled almost exactly like the Arkham of Lovecraft's fiction. Atticus sets out with two relatives to find his father, and together they end up encountering bizarre monsters after sundown while in the shadow of the monster of racism. These twin horrors that are related in the life of Lovecraft are faced simultaneously in some scenes of Lovecraft Country. As intertwined as the two turn out to be, Atticus mentions early on in the first episode that stories and people can be morally mixed, meaning that to pretend like someone is all good or all evil when such a thing is not the case is erroneous.
His further experiences with a mysterious family continues to build on the happenstance association of cosmic horror and racism thanks to Lovecraft. After all, there is no conceptual link between racism and horror of any kind, only a link in terms of what some people have written or intended for the genre. Still, Lovecraft Country appropriately expands its focus to other things that are at the heart of the concepts in cosmic horror, namely epistemology and metaphysics. One example is how the periodically disappearing memories of Atticus's two African American companions and the ensuing mystery highlight the sometimes unexpected epistemological limitations humans can face. Of course, it is logically possible for memories to suddenly emerge and fade, contradict each other, and openly seem as ambiguous as they are with or without that sense of ambiguity; what is logically impossible is for anything that is true to contradict itself or anything else.
The core of Lovecraft Country, though, is still about grappling with the potentially complicated moral standing of storytellers and their works. Christians of all people should be among the first to embrace how a reader can rightfully reject some ideas in a text but not others. More foundationally, rationalists should be experts at doing so almost by default--I do not mean that rationalists have to read fiction or nonfiction at all either construct the parts of their worldviews pertaining to purely logic-based and introspective things or to prove key ideas to themselves, but that rationalists who do read fiction have no excuse for not being adept at separating epistemological fallacies, contradictions, and general errors of many kinds from the parts of a story that convey something true and perhaps even very deep. Of course, it helps to recognize that not all characters and words in a written tale are meant to be taken as descriptions of reality.
Awareness that what is contained in a story is not always condoned in the story itself or by its author is something that will benefit readers of everything from the Bible to A Game of Thrones, but awareness that stories which reflect a human author's actual fallacies and injustices do not dictate reality is just as important. A genuine rationalist sees this as they are able to consider just how hypocritical Western culture, in all of its contradictory nuances, is when it comes to issues like ethics. How ironic it is that a culture so desperate to condemn certain actions and ideas is simultaneously adrift in relativism and irrationalism, disconnected from the very things that would give their condemnations true weight and significance!
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