On the Evils of Speculative Fiction

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, et al.

Here’s the problem with fiction. In fiction, there is evil. “It’s actual, like cement” (Philip K Dick, The Man In The High Castle).

Take Lord of the Rings. The premise of the trilogy is that ring is evil. Galadriel could try to use it for good; so could Boromir; it would corrupt them. The end. Sauron is irrevocably corrupted. There is nothing redeemable about him; there is no good left in him. The ring is evil and will inevitably turn you evil; there’s no question in the readers’ mind that it should be destroyed.

You can’t ever have that in real life. There is nothing that can turn you irrevocably evil, and no person who is pure evil. You can posit that there are sociopaths who don’t have . . . whatever you want to call it: a moral compass, human empathy, remorse, a soul.  For the sake of argument, let us refer to the “soul,” with the understanding that it may not be a physical or even a mystical property. We may be simply referring to an idea that we impose upon our biological impulses and evolutionary development, an abstract that is an aspect of the larger abstract we call our consciousness or sapience, which allows society as we know it to exist.

“Evil” generally refers to those which lack this quality—“evil” people lack a conscience, compassion, or the ability to buy into the contract of human society.  But even if those people exist, we can never say for certain who is one.  Those who believe in the death penalty may say, “this person deserves to die,” and almost all of us may agree, “that person cannot function in society,” but none of us can actually look inside another human being and see if that thing, the soul, exists—not in the least because we don’t know what that thing is.

In fiction, however, you begin with a premise, and the reader assumes the premise is true for the universe of that story. The author can start with the premise that there is God, which means God exists in that universe. The author (not necessarily the narrator, who can’t always be trusted) can tell us there is evil, and there is. It is a fact of that universe, the way the existence of magic is a fact of Harry Potter’s world, the way vampires are a fact of Buffy’s, the way hobbits are a fact of Middle Earth.

 

This used to be what interested me about speculative fiction; it could be black and white.  Lord of the Rings was not meant to be ambiguous. It is meant as an exploration of archetypes, of the heroic saga, of myth and religion. The premise that evil exists is a very simple and common basis for millions of stories.

And although it will never be like that in the real world, maybe that oh-so-clear delineation will help us make distinctions in real life. Maybe we can use stories like Lord of the Rings, where the evil is recognizable, to more easily see it in our real lives. Maybe we can use that story to understand that power can corrupt, that even the best of intentions can go awry. Maybe when we feel temptation towards a thing we are more likely to stop and consider whether there is evil in it.

I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this reason.

I was in college and I had a horrible time there. I had few friends and I was very lonely, and I couldn’t read what I wanted because I had to read for class, and all of it was this Madam Bovary bullshit (sorry, Bovary fans) where everyone was morally reprehensible and I just hated everyone.  The world then seemed gray, and what I really wanted was Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—black and white. Or even Independence Day. What I really wanted was to feel comfortable hating something, vampires or aliens or what have you, something I didn’t have to question.

Hello, Buffy. I remember thinking the first few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—the first time you see a vamp’s face go bumpy, the first time Giles said that the person inside was dead when you became a vampire, the first time Buffy explained vampires were just demons—that this was exactly what I needed.

The premise of Buffy… in the beginning is that vampires are evil. It’s a fact of the universe, like the evil of the ring is of Lord of the Rings, like superpowers are in superhero comics, like vampires exist. It’s black and white. Good and evil. Old fashioned ass kicking.

And then morally gray stepped onto the scene.

Angel provides the morally gray, where not everyone who is a vampire is evil and should be killed. Angel proves that vampires aren’t just demons, with no vestige left of the human that inhabited the body. Angel proves that vampires are the evil in us all.

Angel asks the question of who we are and what we are capable of. Angel is the temptation toward evil, and also the love and hope that holds us from the brink of it. Angel plays the role of both Gollum and Frodo.  (Except he’s taller.  And wears a swirly coat.)

And yet, as with Lord of the Rings, black and white can be pretty firmly delineated when it comes to Angel—or at least, Joss Whedon, the writers, to some extent the text would like us to believe that. Angel has a “soul.” That’s why he’s different from other vampires. The other vampires are still evil and should be killed—no moral conundrum there.

We, the viewers, are familiar with the word “soul”, and so immediately define “soul” as compassion, conscience, what it takes to be functional in society, etc—however we have defined that word in the past.  As for how the soul is defined by the show, the only working definition we are given is “power of choice.”

Once Angel loses his soul, the implication is that he is incapable of behaving any other way than evil, or that he is capable but does not desire it. When Angel does have the soul, he still has the same evil impulses, but he desires to be a better man, and is capable of behaving as one. Therefore, the one definable thing that has been taken away from him is the desire or ability to act differently—the ability to choose.

Therefore, according to the premise of this universe, the soul includes the mechanism by which we choose. Vampires cannot choose to behave as they would if they did have that thing—the soul. And without that thing, they are evil. It is morally acceptable, even necessary, for Buffy to slay them. It’s the premise of the story. The show has given us what appears to be black and white to work with.

Enter Spike.

At the end of season six, Spike goes to Africa and earns his soul back.  Later, the show suggests that he did not choose to get a soul, that he thought he was getting a chip in his brain removed when he went to Africa. The text does allow for the possibility of this, and in doing so, the text is allowing for a vindication of Buffy, Angel, and the fact of black and white.

I.e., if Spike doesn’t choose to get his soul back, we accept the premise that was given to us by the creators of this universe: vampires cannot choose. Angelus cannot choose to be a good man, which exonerates Angel for Angelus’s (soulless Angel’s) behavior. We can also exonerate Buffy for slaying all those vampires.

But if Spike did choose to get his soul back, the metaphysics of this universe are actually different than we have been led to believe. If Spike can make the choice to earn his soul, then the definition of soul is not choice. It means any vampire can choose.

Yes, Spike had special circumstances. Yes, Spike’s a special guy. He’s a unique and beautiful snowflake and his love for Buffy is epic and pure. Maybe he’s the only vampire in the history of ever who would ever choose to earn his soul. But the point is, if Spike chose, then the premise of the universe does not include the fact that a vampire can’t choose. And if a vampire can choose, he can have a soul. And if he has a soul, he’s not evil—by the laws of this universe.

Where this really gets ambiguous is Buffy. If Spike did choose his soul, then the viewer doesn’t know what vampires are capable of either, or why they are the way they are. There is not metaphysical fact given by the premise of the show about what a vampire really is, what a soul really means, what a vampire is capable of. Because those facts are not given to use by the authors of this universe, we know no more about vampires in this universe than we do about human beings in our own. How, then, are vampires different than human beings?  Does this make Buffy a murderer?  What do we with vampires?  Is slayage the only option?
What I would have appreciated from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is those questions being asked.

I’m not condemning Buffy Summers. Vampires rape murder pillage kill and eat the babies, and those are evil things. And for the most part, vampires are not Spike; they will not choose to earn back their souls. Also, they need blood to live.  This, uh, is how they are different than human beings, and personally I have no idea whether murder would be a better answer than letting serial killer terrorists run amok. What I want is not for the show to tell us Buffy is wrong, but for that question to be asked.

The show does ask plenty of times if Buffy is wrong, but it’s never about slaying vampires. The problem is that the evil of vampires was the premise, remember? The story isn’t really about the villains, except for the exceptions that prove the rule.

Instead, this story was supposed to be a story about humanity, humanity struggling in the face of adversity, an undefeatable foe: evil. Lord of the Rings is not about whether the ring should be destroyed; the readers know, and Frodo knows: it must be destroyed. What the story is about is about how difficult it can be to do the things we know must be done; how much we long to give in. Doubt lies not in the duty itself, but in our ability to carry out the duty.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, slaying is supposed to be the same way. We’re never supposed to doubt that someone must slay. We are only meant to empathize that the call of slaying must lie with her, the sacrifices she must make in order to do it.

That’s why the writers/creators made Spike’s “choice” ambiguous. They did not want to deal with the consequences of changing the entire premise of the show. They did not want to go back and question every single thing Buffy had ever done, every vampire that died at her hands. They did not want to go through the trouble of really defining “soul”, or tear down everything they had built with Angel. They didn’t want to sully their black and white.

Who would? That would be a lot of work.

Battlestar Galactica, that’s who. Maybe the creators planned from the beginning to make us question whether the destruction of Cylons is actually murder. If they did, they didn’t quite let the viewers in on it from the beginning. (Even though the Cylons, er, “had a plan.”)

The premise for the show in the beginning, despite the Cylons’ pretensions to godliness, is that the robots are evil. This makes sense instinctively, because instinctively we feel that robots are soulless. When we talk about “soul” we’re talking about humanity. Even if we think of it as biological fact, as I do when I say that it’s an idea applied to biological and evolutionary impulses—well, robots aren’t biologic, and didn’t evolve. Robots don’t have souls. Robots are evil. It’s a fact.

Boomer, of course, is the initial exception; she is a Cylon, a robot, but she isn’t like the rest. All the other robots killed all the rest of humanity, but Boomer wasn’t a part of that. She doesn’t know she’s a robot; she feels like a human. That makes her different.

If this seems like twisted reasoning, it is. It’s also fairly typical. The recipe for your awesome Good Versus Evil fiction is to have a Big Bad, and then a Big Bad’s Henchman or Turncoat who provides the morally gray. Gollum, Darth Vader, Snape and/or Draco, Angel.  I could go on, but really I’m working with the broadest of broad references, here.

We recognize the truths Gollum and Angel gives us—evil is not in just some entity completely outside ourselves. It is within us all. Luke could become Anakin, if he did not resist at the crucial moment. Frodo can become Gollum; Harry can become Voldemort, and we could all be Boomer. What we must do is use our “soul” to resist the force of evil.

But over the course of the series, Battlestar Galactica becomes less and less about resistance, and more and more about understanding the Cylons. The Cylons almost destroying the human race, then hunting them down, then enslaving them in order to live peaceably with them, then sequestering themselves away from them, then returning to work together to find an Earth we can live on in peace is very much how more than one race of humans has behaved in the past.

And somewhere along the line, we have to ask that question again: what separates us from them? We assume at the beginning of the series that humans have a soul and the robots don’t, but as the pieces unfold, it becomes clear that nothing is so clear. We still don’t know what a soul is; we don’t know how to say who has one. We don’t know what evil is, or if it exists. The creators of this universe does not make evil the premise of this universe—or, actually, they did, and tore it down, revealing that absolutist constructs are part of the problem.

What juxtaposing these two shows against each other does for me is show something lots of mainstream speculative fiction does—even somewhat laudable fantasy, such as Buffy—versus what almost no mainstream speculative fiction does—except Battlestar Galactica, and other key exceptions.  A lot of mainstream speculative fiction these days is constructing morally absolute circumstances, waving a hazy hand that suggests there might be morally gray somewhere, and in the end, the bad guys die, the good guys win, the end.

Of course, I am using the term “mainstream” loosely.  The most popular show on television is still (I think?) American Idol—which, I suppose, one can argue broaches all kinds of questions about morality and evil, but frankly I’m not equipped to approach such questions.  And speculative fiction has always had a very large corner on addressing questions about moral absolutism and relativism, the definition of humanity, the composition of the soul and the quality of mercy—and the very best of speculative fiction does so very well.

However, it is impossible to deny that even just the last decade or so has seen a remarkable increase in popularity of speculative fiction, which is noticeable in particular on television and the big screen.  As a fan of speculative fiction myself, I’m pretty happy about this, but find myself considerably disappointed by the handling of questions that are so often central to speculative fiction.

We could talk now about the moral obligation of art, but I do think a purpose is served through beauty. Beauty can make as much a difference in someone’s life as asking them to question can. Sometimes, beauty itself is purpose enough; asking beauty to serve any other purpose than to be beautiful misses the one truth we know for certain above all in this existence. We don’t know why we’re here, or what we should do, but we know this truth, and it is both heart-rending and full of joy: we are.

The model of good versus evil in literature isn’t wrong. It seems that there is a tradition in literature, of which the Christian Bible is just one element, of this good versus evil, black and white, Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey. Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are purposeful reflections on this tradition, explorations of an essential story which resonates deeply within us all, or said story would not have survived so long. Exploring this tradition and continuing to riff on it is vital, I think.

But I also think it is vital to question this tradition, and to find out with what inside us it resonates. There are stories which use the binary model and then break it, and we need those stories too.

Of course, there are plenty of stories that don’t even reference that model. All modern literature has gone morally gray. Hello Madam Bovary; where have you been?  Post-modern literature is even more bleak than modern, and no doubt contemporary literature is even more bleak than when I was reading Flaubert. But I think there’s something to be said for stories that set up the binary and then proceed to tear it down, especially now, because of the preponderance of the binary—not just in literature, but in current thinking, politically and culturally.

We all long for some form of escape, from time to time, and for some of us that means absolutism, or worlds where evil is actual, like cement.  There are some very loud voices saying, “No, you have it all wrong!” to those who would apply such absolutism to our world.  At times it can be more effective—both in literature and real life—to say, instead of, “That world does not exist”—

“We live in your world full of cement.  We walk upon it; we live within it; we eat it; we breathe it.  I understand it as you do, and yet, of a yellow evening, walking down the street, there’s a strange taste in my mouth—it tastes like dust.  I eat dust.  I live dust; I walk on dust, and look down to find that the cement is a fine powder, and I have breathed it in, and so have you.  And then I look around me, and see that the world of cement doesn’t exist at all.”

It never did.

44 thoughts on “On the Evils of Speculative Fiction

  1. Some thought-provoking arguments here; but, oy! This beginning was like a chicken-bone stuck crossways in my throat:

    ————————–
    On the Evils of Speculative Fiction

    On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, et al.
    —————————

    Eesh, is that all that “Speculative Fiction” is for youngsters these days? With Star Wars and Independence Day tossed in? (Philip K. Dick is quoted, at least. Being trendy helping earn him a spot among the greats…)

    —————————-
    At the end of season six, Spike goes to Africa and earns his soul back. Later, the show suggests that he did not choose to get a soul, that he thought he was getting a chip in his brain removed when he went to Africa.
    —————————–

    (Sound of one jaw dropping) “I’ve got a soul now? Darn those surgical side-effects!”

    Am further reminded of how incomprehensible I find all this Buffy-worship…

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    The model of good versus evil in literature isn’t wrong. It seems that there is a tradition in literature, of which the Christian Bible is just one element, of this good versus evil, black and white, Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey.
    ——————————-

    Mostly in stupid, simplistic “literature,” as opposed to fantasy, where the Bible solidly belongs. (The Bard crafted some memorable baddies, though: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/shakespearevillains.html )

    And, the Hero’s Journey ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth ) is hardly simplistically “good and evil.” Even though Lucas cited it as an inspiration…

  2. Come to think of it, George Lucas himself has said he considered Star Wars as fantasy rather than SF.

    Elsewhere we read…

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    …let me tell you a story. Long ago in a magical kingdom, a young farmboy was raised by his aunt and uncle, not knowing he had a destiny of greatness. He is soon taken under the wing of an old wizard who teaches him to become a gallant knight and to understand his own magical powers. Along the way, he rescues a princess, is almost eaten by a monster, is visited by ghosts, and saves the kingdom from a wicked sorcerer.

    Obviously this is the story of the original Star Wars trilogy stripped down to its most basic elements. But from this synopsis we can see that no major plot points hang on science of any kind. In fact, the most iconic weapon in all of Star Wars is not a technological device of any kind, but instead that weapon that screams fantasy: a sword.

    So let’s break it down. Magic? Check. Swordfights? Mm-hmm. Wizards and knights and princesses? Yup. The epic battle between good and evil? Oh, you betcha. Hell, if you squint, Jabba the Hutt is pretty much a dragon sitting on a pile of gold (not to mention a rancor!)…
    ——————————-
    http://thetorchonline.com/latest/what-the-hell-is-star-wars-anyway-science-fiction-or-fantasy/

    The debate continues! From Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time:

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    The six charges brought to court are, in order: 1) The Politics of Star Wars Are Anti-Democratic and Elitist; 2) While Claiming Mythic Significance, Star Wars Portrays No Admirable Religious or Ethical Beliefs; 3) Star Wars Novels Are Poor Substitutes for Real Science Fiction and Are Driving Real SF off the Shelves; 4) Science Fiction Filmmaking Has Been Reduced by Star Wars to Poorly Written Special Effects Extravaganzas.; 5) Star Wars Has Dumbed Down the Perception of Science Fiction in the Popular Imagination; 6) Star Wars Pretends to Be Science Fiction, but Is Really Fantasy; 7) Women in Star Wars Are Portrayed as Fundamentally Weak; 8) The Plot Holes and Logical Gaps in Star Wars Make It Ill-Suited for an Intelligent Viewer.

    Each charge is argued in separate essays, both for the prosecution and the defense…
    ——————————–
    http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Trial-Science-Fiction/dp/193210089X

  3. It’s maybe relevant to note that the initial quotation from PKD isn’t referencing a fantasy or sci-fi setting. Man In the High Castle is an alternate earth story in which the Nazis won. The revelation that evil is real, like cement, is (I’m pretty sure) made by a Japanese man living in conquered Los Angeles who is contemplating Nazi atrocities (including, in his earth, the systematic execution of everyone in Africa.) So the evil that is real like cement isn’t a fantasy evil, it’s an evil that we’ve experienced, looked at from a slightly different perspective, but not different in kind.

    Along those lines…I don’t know that I exactly agree with you that evil isn’t real, or that it’s more realistic to see things as grey. Saying that people can choose evil or good is different than saying that evil and good aren’t real. The problem with Buffy is not that there’s insufficient grey, but that it never figures out, or deals with, the problem of labeling intelligent creatures as innately evil as a group. Lord of the Rings does this too with the orcs and such…though not with Sauron, who seems to have chosen (or with Saruman, who is really a lovely depiction of corruption.)

  4. Interesting study.

    I think the grey goes much further than issues of Angel and Spike having a soul as a vampire. The show is very determined not to definitely define it.

    Buffy says the soul is completely gone and the vampire is nothing like the person who existed before. Angel attempts to correct her and stops. He wanted to particularly comment on personality changes, because as Angelus, his soul was 100% removed, as the Judge demonstrated.

    Whereas the Judge wiped out the vampire who thought and felt quite easily, because he retained something human. Same goes for Spike, and to a lesser extent, Drusilla.

    The Scoobies just fail to recognize the moral implications in the differences between Angel and Spike. Perhaps this is why they are so vehemently anti-Spike, no matter what he does.

    Is the soul just taken away in pieces or whole? Because nothing else really accounts for Spike still being so full of love – for his mother, for Drusilla, for Buffy. Spike always has morals, empathy, and remorse. He has distinct opinions about romance, and quite hates Dru flirting with Angelus, he is quite careful and caring towards a sick Dru, he has always been plagued by what happened with his mother, just to name a few.

  5. Buffy spin-off Angel does, I think, a better job of handling these issues. Perhaps, partly, because it starts from a point where the writers/show-runners were already past the “evil is evil all the time” issue that Buffy started with.

  6. I remember wishing in the series that after that idiot (was he Buffy’s boyfriend at that point? whatever…) came after him and tried to kill him, that he had just gone ahead and killed him, even though he had a soul. It seemed like he probably would, and, after all, people with souls kill each other all the time…. It seemed like it would have complicated the spike redemption line…

    The truth is that Buffy was often incoherent, and the writing was really dicey. It’s probably just inevitable for a television show in most instances, but I think their failure to take a stand on vampire souls, or on theology in general, hurt the show in a lot of ways.

  7. This is a way in which Twilight is much superior to Buffy, I think. Twilight vampires can choose good or evil just like the rest of us. Most of them choose evil because they need to drink blood and they’re very powerful, but it doesn’t have to be that way, as Carlisle and his family show.

    This complicates the criticism that Bella should kill vampires the way Buffy does too. Vampires have souls in Twilight; killing them is as morally repugnant as killing people. Of course, they’re mass murderers too, many of them…but extrajudicial killing even of murderers is not morally neutral.

  8. As someone who doesn’t think theism is inherently stupid, I would like to point out that Battlestar Galactica is pretty lame in the first three or four episodes, before it gets all preachy– I presume, since I didn’t watch any more of it.

    Re: extrajudicial murder of murderers– Terminaator (sans sequels 3 and 4) is my go-to apocalypse about how evil works– both humans and cyborgs are slaughtering each other based on being threatened with annihilation– Skynet originally reacted to panicking humans trying to pull its plug. And John Connor reprograms Terminators to protect humans– kind of like insurgents trained to be police. Although, that moral ambiguity is avoided as long as the apocalypse is being forestalled. Anyhow, the relationship of intelligence and evil is the point– evil is the supreme moral abstraction to justify the most basic desires.

  9. The muddled Buffy cosmology has always been an issue.

    In the Season 2 episode “Lie to Me,” Buffy explains to Ford that when you’re turned into a vampire you die — period — and a demon, a creature of pure malice, possesses your body and usurps your memories.

    Angel’s circumstance was, at this time, conceived up as the reverse — his soul was returned to his body and usurped the memories of the demon — and the guilt that that implied.

    In the hands of, say, Gene Wolfe, the blurring of the lines between body, soul, and memory this implies would’ve been something pretty incredible.

    (The extent to which the Christian Bible is a “good against evil” story is, I think, overstated here. The Book of Revelation has elements of high-fantasy-esque good against evil…the rest of it is mostly about being kind to the poor and not being so concerned about yourself.)

  10. Theism is incoherent, but I meant the theism of the show was stupid, not theism in general (although it did reflect much of really existing theism, e.g., a personal god that cares about the outcome of wars, the Grammys and football games). Anyway, I was pretty wrapped up in it for the first 2 seasons, then kablooey.

    I think the veggie vampire idea is pretty dumb, too, certainly worse than Buffy’s problems. They’re a master race who are expected to treat us as equals. Yeah, bullshit. They might argue over whether they should breed us without legs and keep us in cages, though. If we were lucky, a Peter Singer would be turned. True Blood, as dumb as it is, is probably a more realistic depiction. They don’t eat us for pragmatic reasons, as a matter of realpolitik. We outnumber them and move about in the daylight (a problem that makes Twilight even dumber for getting rid of it).

  11. I don’t really get your objection, Charles. You argue that they’re stupid because they’re not acting like a master race…but it’s you who is arguing that they’re a master race. That’s really not Meyer. She sees them as having souls. To the extent that the veggie vampires are better than us, it’s because they’re vegetarian. Suffering and renunciation makes you superior, not strength. I guess lots of people think that’s inherently stupider than realpolitik, but I strongly, strongly disagree.

    Buffy raises theological issues (why are vampires hurt by crosses?) that it is completely unwilling to answer. Twilight is much more ready to confront them — by, for example, getting rid of the cross nonsense and talking explicitly about theology. Where Twilight’s world falls apart is not in the logic of the vampires per se, but with its secret world conceit. Vampires kill way too many people; either they would have been discovered, or else all of humanity would have been dead a long time ago. The mechanics just don’t work. (Buffy has this problem too…but it tends to get around it by just treating the whole thing as a joke. People just conveniently forget after they meet vampires, which is treated as a goof. This points to one of Buffy’s big strengths over Twilight, which is that the writing is much wittier and smarter on the microlevel, even if a lot of the big issue plotting is less thought through.)

  12. It’s a bit unfair, I think, to compare the kind of plotting one does in a serialized television show to the kind of plotting one does in a series of YA novels.

    Twilight’s real problem, morally speaking, as has been pointed out many times, is that being a vampire vegetarian is bound up with being stronger and prettier and also richer than everyone else, while also being gifted with other magic powers.

    That mixing of “strength” and “goodness” is a pretty dangerous thing — and it also, you know, more or less does away with the notion that Twilight is about “vampires.”

  13. Noah,

    By “soul”, I assume you mean a “conscience,” which we have, too, but if something’s deemed a lower form of life, we apply different rules. That’s why I think vegetarian vampirism is an inherently dumb idea, not necessarily the characters themselves for not eating humans. Basically, it’s a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. That’s pure bullshit.

    I don’t see why masochism makes you more superior than strength. The former perfectly supports the latter.

  14. No; by soul, Meyer means “soul”, not conscience. She’s a Christian. The two concepts aren’t reducible to each other. Buffy uses the former too; it just isn’t willing to think about what that means.

    As for your comments on power — that’s just more realpolitik bullshit. Cynicism sneering at ideology by erasing its own deep commitment to its own ideology. If you think that’s sophisticated thinking, good on you I guess.

    Meyer’s vision of renunciation and suffering is explicitly tied to love. Strength comes out of caring for others and for your family rather than from having super strength. Bella saves everyone she loves through nonviolence. Reducing that to masochism seems fairly myopic…but consistent with cynical realpolitik nonsense, sure.

    It’s not a fantasy that power has no effect on beliefs. It’s a fantasy that human choices matter, and that power alone is not determinative of actions. For many of the vampires, power makes them cruel killers. Carlyle’s power, on the other hand, makes him a better man. It absolutely affects him; it just doesn’t have to make him a monster. If you reject that, you reject free will, and good and evil become meaningless. In that world, owning a gun means you’re inevitably going to start shooting your enemies in the head. I just don’t understand why that’s a complex or even remotely interesting moral vision.

  15. Hey John. That’s a good point. It’s the same problem with superhero stories, pretty much — though Marvel superhero stories, where the powers come with suffering, etc., rather than earlier versions.

    I think it’s still about vampires though as much as Buffy is. Vampires aren’t real after all; if you say you’re using the trope, you’re using the trope, even if you’re varying it.

  16. Thanks to your comment to Charles I am now wondering whether the biggest problem with Twilight is that it’s about Bella rather than Carlyle. A “Twilight: First Class” series could be really, really good — okay, really, really interesting.

  17. Meyer’s always more interesting than good, I think.

    I think you’re right too that her love of glamour is always interfering with her more thoughtful moments. The moral vision and the crass wish fulfillment don’t fit together so easily — as is the case, again, with superheroes.

  18. ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …Twilight vampires can choose good or evil just like the rest of us.
    ————————

    Technically, to some degree, we can “choose”; but does life usually offer clear-cut, moral choices?

    (Well, Mr. A comics do: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kvv3fcoXqVE/Sxluwu7V0ZI/AAAAAAAAFh4/acrZ84KQ_8o/s1600-h/mra.jpg , http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsmuefu7oq1qjgul4o1_500.jpg . And these would be helpful: http://tinyurl.com/6sfzlvt , http://dropoutnation.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/right-way-wrong-way1.jpg )

    Do we — especially these days — have the luxury of turning down a job because that corporation has an unsavory attitude toward workers’ rights?

    Is there a “choice” when we pay our income taxes, thereby financing the propping up and giving of weapons, training in torture techniques, of right-wing dictatorships? When the alternative is to refuse, and end up in prison, with loved ones who depend on us put in dire straits? And our sacrificing of our freedom making no significant effect whatsoever in cutting down help to those tyrants?

    By driving a car, we contribute to the destruction of the environment; yet if we refuse to, with the inadequate and sometimes nonexistent public transport available, many jobs would be inaccessible.

    My wife (who’d started a Humane Society branch in one town she lived in) was a vegetarian for many years, mostly for moral reasons. Yet it turned out she (like her mother) was genetically susceptible to iron deficiency, which supplements could not adequately help. So she’s had to go back to eating red meat. Can that be simplistically described as a “choice”? Why, it’s like the vampire situation: you can “choose” to be debilitated and sicken, maybe die; or you can feed from “cattle.” Mostly blinding yourself to the suffering and destruction of your victims…

    Then there is the result of growing up surrounded by certain attitudes and beliefs, which — human nature being what it is, preferring the easy way — are unthinkingly accepted, taken for granted as the norm rather than criticized. Which leads to “thinking” such as that in this Tim Kreider cartoon:

    http://thepaincomics.com/weekly011212.htm

    And…

    ————————–
    “I can’t understand how all this can happen. It’s enough to make one lose one’s faith in God!”

    Eva Braun, writing to a friend from Hitler’s bunker during the siege and bombing of Berlin in April 1945
    ————————–
    From The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said

    Some assorted stuff I ran across in an unsuccessful search for a hilarious Victorian photocollage (a toga-clad youth hesitates at a fork in the road: at the left, boozing, wenching, and dissolution prevail; at the right, there is studiousness, reverent listening to a discoursing greybeard of a philosopher, thinking of Deep Thoughts) I’d seen ‘way back when…

    Moral quandaries in “A Clockwork Orange”: http://spank-the-monkey.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/repost-a-clockw.html

    Moral choice video games: http://www.uvlist.net/groups/info/moralchoices

  19. The theism in early Battlestar Galactica was actually pretty well done, I thought. Not stupid at all, rather beautiful, and complicated, especially with Balthar and Six (who was my very favorite, along with Agathon and Starbuck). Agathon, the father of the baby, the human half, is a very interesting character himself.

  20. Vom,

    I thought it interesting while it dealt with the question of Balthar’s salvation. When it became pure theistic fantasy, justifying his role in the slaughter of 6 billion people, it became just plain dumb.

    Noah,

    Yes, of course Meyer believes in a soul, but who cares? Many power-mad people believe in a soul. My point to you was that you were setting it up as if it mattered to a godlike species with clearly superior power that they had a soul when it comes to how they’d treat us. What effect, if it’s not as a conscience, does having a soul have on them in that scenario? It would otherwise seem completely useless. Now, granting that (which you do with your talk of a free will), what’s the chance that a master species who needs us as food would treat us better than we treat chickens and cows or even indigenous populations of the past? It’s a fantasy about power, essentially worshipping it — submission, or what you seem to favorably call suffering and renunciation. I’d suggest that the only way the rights of humans would be recognized is through resistance. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to be turned. Even better if you’re turned by the good vampires, who keep their good old fashioned humanistic values, so none of this matters much to the silly narrative.

  21. Human beings’ relationships with each other are often horrible, but it simply is not universally true that human cultures always in every instance treat neighboring cultures with less power as chickens. It’s not true that everyone with a gun always in every case shoots everyone who doesn’t have one. Suggesting that they do is knee-jerk cynicism. It just further justifies me in my long-held belief that at its heart realpolitik is deeply naive.

    Maybe this confusion is because you haven’t read the books, but…it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed. Bella’s triumph is in forcing the vampires to resolve their problems peacefully. That’s fairly unusual by the standards of pop narrative, and I think meaningful (though not exactly logical.)

    Part of your problem is that you want the vampires to be treated as a strictly materialist other race. Meyer doesn’t do that. The vampires are, among other things, angels; being transformed is a utopian dream of becoming perfected, where perfected means not just more powerful, but also more good, and less willing to use that power (also, and not coincidentally, it means becoming more egalitarian in terms of gender roles.)

    Oh, and having a soul. Soul is really not a concept that can be reduced to material or psychological explanations; if it were, you wouldn’t need or use the concept at all. Lots of people with souls don’t have consciences; whether you can have a conscience without a soul is an interesting theological issue that I’m not up to parsing. Anyway, the point is that the soul is as much about your moral standing as it is about your actions, and as much about your relationship with god as with other people. You comment that lots of people who believe in souls act badly doesn’t actually have anything to do with the conversation, as far as I can tell. As Joy says, the point is that in the moral universe of Buffy, the vampires have no standing. In Twilight they do. That creates a very different ethical world.

    That ethical world is not always thought through very clearly, and as John notes the banal wish fulfillment and the spiritual vision (not to mention sheer cluelessness) get in each other’s way to no small extent. But getting mad at it because it doesn’t embrace pragmatism seems really misguided. There are a lot of things that are silly about Twilight, but its failure to adopt the ethics and outlook of Richard Nixon is simply not one of them.

  22. it’s not the humans who submit and renounce. It’s Carlyle and his coven. The book doesn’t worship or idolize power (or, you know, not especially on the scale of pop culture.) On the contrary, it’s unusually committed to pacifism and resolving conflicts peacefully. Its moral center is occupied by a group which specifically renounces violence and bloodshed.

    I’m not mad at it for being a fantasy like the unrealistic ones Joy is calling for. I’m not mad at all, in fact. I just don’t see it as any more plausible than the Buffyverse. It is, if anything, a step backwards. The only reason the humans don’t have to make the choice between resistance (as in Buffy to some degree) or submission is precisely because the good Twilight vampires choose to renounce their superiority. Basically, your defense is that it’s moral for the good guys to have power. How is that different from a Nixonian worldview? We avoid war because of a show of power against others who have power. Everyone is afraid of too many casualties on their respective sides. There’s your peace. Where we differ is that I find it highly implausible to draw any moral lesson from the narrative, since it relies on the assumption/hope/wish fulfillment that in the case of asymmetrical power, there will be a significant enough resistance against the biological and cultural order of things, “renunciation” of their status, from the haves to save the have-nots. Sure, there were admirable and highly moral people who recognized the rights of the redskins back before America was a country, but look how that turned out. If you insist on drawing a realworld moral analogy, then it fails miserably.

    Regarding the soul, no, we don’t need the concept at all, but since we’re granting the supernatural worlds of these fantasies: Buffy and Twilight don’t much differ on their views. It’s the soul that functions to give an agent the ability to care about humans. Since Buffy’s vamps don’t have souls, it makes the human response more obvious: resist. With Twilight, since the vamps have souls, we have reason to question whether they might share some of our values. Okay, then deal with that. How should we react to them? Trust that enough of them are decent folk who’ll resist their biological urge and their superior power, or prepare for the possibility that they might just give in. Would angels, demons and vampires really be held to same morality as humans? More importantly, would such beings think that the same moral obligations obtain to their status? Meyer just assumes this to be case. I don’t, but I’m not a Christian.

    What’s better about Buffy’s supernaturalism is that it doesn’t much trust in its inherent potential for goodness (I agree that all of these stories are inconsistent). It’s more skeptical of beings with great power. Angel was even more explicit regarding this, but essentially the powers-that-be weren’t obviously humanistic, like the good vampires of Twilight. And look at the guilt experienced by Angel, living off of rats, hiding from everyone for years, feeling remorse for what he did without a soul versus Edward who only fed on bad guys. Meyer really wants to believe in the goodness of power, so much so that she stacks the deck. That way, we don’t have to feel so bad about identifying with a vampire. Why would nonhumans be humanistic? That’s all fanciful nonsense. Fine by me, as long as you treat it as pure fantasy without drawing any realworld morality from it.

  23. Charles, Twilight isn’t about a balance of power being the only way to create peace. Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

    The difference between Buffy and Twilight is that Buffy arbitrarily decides that it’s bad guys are outside the moral order. It says that our enemies don’t have souls. I think that’s pretty profoundly different from saying that yes, your enemies are also people, even if they look and act very differently from you.

    Both Buffy and Twilight are pretty into power. It’s a hard thing to escape in pulp narratives. I mean, can you think of any adventure narratives that unequivocally separate power and goodness? Twilight doesn’t do it entirely, but Carlyle is the book’s moral center, and the reason he is the moral center is not because he’s the best fighter or the most powerful (like Superman or Buffy) but because he chooses to go against his nature and not kill. He makes treaties with the wolves when he can; he doesn’t kill humans; he makes treaties with other vampires when he can.

    You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices. Again, I find those contentions entirely reasonable ethical descriptions, much more so than a naive mapping of Darwinism onto social interactions. You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

    Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by. Much more so than Hunger Games, though not more than Buffy, largely because Buffy’s desouling of the vampires isn’t grounded in any particular ideology — it’s just a convenient plot point. The show doesn’t really believe in it, so it doesn’t ever really work through the genocidal ethical implications consistently.

  24. Carlyle and his coven choose peace with humans because they believe it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re afraid of humans.

    The balance of power is their acting on the behalf of humans against the bad vampires. They behave with human morality. That’s why they’re good, which brings me to:

    Twilight’s commitment to the idea that people who look and behave differently from each other are still people is why it’s surprisingly queer friendly, by the by.

    This is like those Christian de-queering camps, right? Love the gay as long as he behaves like you do. That’s not a celebration of difference. Good vampires are the humanistic ones who act against their kind.

    You’re objection really is based on your insistence that (a) vampires aren’t human, and (b) the powerful will always prey on the weak. Twilight rejects both of those assumptions, the first because it believes that creatures with souls are creatures with souls and the second because it believes that creatures with souls have the ability to make moral choices.

    Vampires are genetically different. I’m not sure why possessing a soul makes them the same as us. They’re beings of a different order, just like angels. They don’t have to face their mortality for one and need us as food for another. It’s simpleminded to assume they wouldn’t come up with a different morality. While it’s true that I’m not very trusting of power, my objection here has more to do with your belief that a carnivore is being moral only by not being a carnivore. Rather than address this potential conflict of moral systems, Twilight circumvents it with the fantasy of good vampires who’ll save us. Again, True Blood thinks this through a lot better than Twilight.

    You really think you need to be Christian to think that people who look differently from you might have some kind of moral standing?

    Quite the opposite.

  25. The werewolves can’t act like us; they change into werewolves. Twilight is happy with people acting very differently as long as they don’t kill each other. It’s quite queer friendly, and not in a Christian gays-must-be-like-us-way. It’s less so than Buffy, which has actual gay characters and is definitely pro-queer, but much more so than Hunger Games, which peddles gay stereotypes with enthusiasm and equates gayness with decadence and evil.

    Vampires aren’t genetically different. They don’t exist; they’re magic. They’re not carnivores unless they want to be, much like humans. It just seems silly to me to insist that any fantasy that doesn’t ascribe to materialist fantasies about the universal applicability of Darwinism to social situations is necessarily simplistic.

    Also, relativism is not necessarily a more complex or thoughtful moral stand. Murder is wrong; I’m willing to go with that cross-culturally, thanks, even if it means that Aztec culture was really kind of fucked up.

    C.S. Lewis has some really thoughtful things to say about why creatures who are intelligent and have souls are all much more alike than they are different in the first book of his space trilogy. And I believe that applies to angels for him too; angels aren’t different than us in the sense that we have nothing to do with them, so much as they’re different from us because they’re what we could be, or can aspire to. In any case, angels, humans, non-humans — we’re all part of the same moral world.

    Which I really like about Twilight. There are just a lot of fantasy series, from LOTR to Buffy to Priest and on and on, where villains are denied moral status. Body count films can be really fun, but they really do play into the logic of war and genocide in a way that makes their prevalence a little disturbing. I’m happy to have a major megasuccessful series that explicitly rejects that, and says instead that killing is killing, even when the enemy is terrifying and seems so different that you are tempted not to call them human.

    I don’t really get where you see the good vampires fighting on behalf of the humans in Twilight? That’s not the plot at all. The good vampires and the bad vampires are at each other’s throats (as it were) for reason having to do with their own internal politics. They defend Bella, but that’s because she’s family, not because she’s a human. Carlyle doesn’t kill humans, and works as a doctor to help humans, but he doesn’t set himself up as a superhero running around defending random humans from vampires. It’s not a fantasy about superpowered people saving everyone, as in most superhero comics — and, indeed, at the end, all the vampires haven’t been killed, and humans aren’t all “saved”. At least, the books aren’t like that, and the movies I”ve seen don’t seem to be either…I’m not sure where you’re getting that?

  26. Coming in halfway through the comments, for a while I thought Noah was talking about Thomas Carlyle, which actually made a strange sort of sense…

  27. Taking a statement about what is “actual” in The Man in the High Castle at face value is a pretty profound misunderstanding of Dick. For him, the reality of concrete is just as vexed as the reality of evil.

    In part, that line captures the bizarre disbelief one occasionally feels that the Nazis were real. The whole point is that evil is indeed a fictional construct, but one which can be made all too real by people who believe in fantasy stories, like Arianism or the plan (in the novel) to remake Africa. Dick is trying to reclaim that sense that no one would believe in the Nazis if they had not actually happened by imagining a world in which they were even worse, and portraying someone imagining a world in which they had been stopped. The imbrication of reality, speculative fiction (which includes the Nazi worldview), and evil are at the heart of the novel, and to take the evil-is-actual-like-cement statement at face value is to miss the ambivalent nature of evil in the book, the ambivalent nature of actuality, and the complex relation between those two .

  28. Speaking of Nazis and SF:

    —————————
    The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.

    The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. Spinrad was intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany…
    —————————-
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

    (The Paul Verhoeven film of Starship Troopers playing a similar theme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29 )

    Ursula K. Le Guin on The Iron Dream:

    ——————————-
    Taken as a parody of [Sword and Sorcery], the book hits all its targets. There is the Hero, the Alpha Male with his muscles of steel and his clear eyes and his manifest destiny; there are the Hero’s Friends; there are the vile, subhuman enemies; there is the Hero’s Sword, in this case a truncheon of interesting construction; there are the tests, quests, battles, victories, culminating in a final supernal super-victory of the Superman. There are no women at all, no dirty words, no sex of any kind: the book is a flawless example of clean obscenity. It will pass any censor, except the one that sits within the soul.

    A parody of S&S, however, is self-doomed. You cannot exaggerate what is already witlessly exaggerated; you cannot distort for comic effect something that is already distorted out of all reality. All Spinrad can do is equal the crassest kind of S&S; no one could surpass it. But fortunately he has larger game in mind…

    …We are forced, in so far as we can continue to read the book seriously, to think, not about Adolf Hitler and his historic crimes–Hitler is simply the distancing medium–but to think about ourselves: our moral assumptions, our ideas of heroism, our desires to, lead or to be led, our righteous wars. What Spinrad is trying to tell us is that it is happening here.
    ——————————-
    http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/1/leguin1art.htm

    And… http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×3155635

  29. Hmm. Whatever we think of Spinrad as a writer he was an excellent prophet, Godwinning before the internet was even up and running.

    I think the real issue is that the heroic narrative is very powerful and therefore a great marketing tool. Ideas of almost any sort can be bound up into it and sold en masse. So the narrative should be approached with suspicion, especially when it’s being used in the realm of politics.

    But to the extent that LeGuin or “The Iron Dream” are arguing that the “monomyth” narrative — or Sword and Sorcery, which is not the same thing — is inherently racist or imperialist, well, I’m not impressed. If you need to fill your adventure story with murderable bad guys, you’re going to do some moral flimflam. But lazily equivocating that with the monstrous crimes of Adolf Hitler is pretty clearly a bridge too far.

    It’s also a bit smug, isn’t it? “Those people who like Sword and Sorcery. They’re all stupid racists and they’d love Hitler if he were American.”

  30. JD, that’s a lovely reading of Man in the High Castle. I think I’d just emphasize that Dick’s ambivalence about reality and evil seem to me like real ambivalence…which is to say, I think the book doesn’t necessarily come down saying that evil is only there because we believe in it or believe in fantasy narratives. The statement “evil is real like cement” is questioned, but not necessarily negated, I think.

    It’s really a great book. I should reread it.

    John, I don’t think it’s totally crazy to suggest that narratives which posit absolute good and hordes of absolute evil are, or can, be linked to racism and genocidal fantasies. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is pretty explicitly a rascist fascist dream (though some of its fans disagree.)

    On the other hand, when I think Swords and Sorcery I tend to think of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, which certainly isn’t fascist at all as I remember it. Michael Moorcock neither…. They’re probably thinking of Conan, though, which I have to admit I’ve never been able to read.

    Andrei; alas, not Thomas Carlyle.

  31. I think I said more or less what you said, Noah…or at least I meant to, with my bit about the heroic narrative as a marketing tool that we should be suspicious of.

    I have no doubt that there’s some truly vile stuff out there in sword and sorcery and in heroic fantasy, and that the “moral flimflam” I described is used very regularly to justify violence (in narrative) against people who look different, etc. It’s only the broad brush I’m objecting to.

    The broad brush sucks because it’s lazy — it excuses us from thinking about the thorny issues or evaluating writers on their own actual work.

    I’m also objecting to the loss of scale in comparing “liking Robert E. Howard” to “liking Hitler.” Like Joy DeLyria, I find myself able to enjoy the violence of my preferred pulp narratives without losing the understanding that I am reading fantasy. Enjoying the scene where Buff kills a vampire with a number 2 pencil does not mean I secretly fantasize about extermination camps. It means I like pulp adventure stories.

    Finally, and least significantly, I object to conflation of “sword and sorcery” and “the Campbell narrative,” which I typically think of as totally different things.

    (As for Conan, there’s a few stories where I got pretty uncomfortable.)

  32. The intent of Spinrad was that you have to put down ‘The Iron Dream’ before it´s ending – a goal completely achieved. The book does not say that all readers/writers of fantasy are fascists, it shows how bad some of the stuff is written and that there are sometimes subliminal tendencies to watch. (The book was banned here in Germany after it´s first release, but after realizing that reading it will not be responsable for the next IIIrd Reich on german soil it was no longer indexed.)

  33. Noah,

    As with the vampires, the most moral werewolf is the one obsessed with a human. Jacob is moral for deserting his pack. The good vamps and the good werewolves are brought together over protecting a human. There’s no more of a notion that vampire or werewolves might have moral status outside of being just like humans than there is in Buffy. The essential difference is that Buffy uses her powers to combat evil rather than compromise with it.

    If vampires aren’t genetically different, then why does it matter if Bella is a human or vampire when giving birth? Why do vampires need human blood? Why do vampires sparkle in the sunlight? Etc.. The magic has genetic effects.

    And I’m not really talking about moral relativism, but the new universal biological order that would occur with the introduction of a new species superior to us on the food chain. Is it relativistic to suggest some animals eat other animals and some eat plants, and that affects how they see the world? Is that an excuse for murder? ‘Murder’ would get redefined universally in such a situation. At least, a new definition would have to negotiated.

    And isn’t a major part of the internal conflict of vampires over how they relate to humans? Regardless, the main characters and their story has a lot to do with the vampires that the audience is supposed to sympathize with helping/saving/protecting the main human the audience is supposed to identify with. The more you defend Carlyle, the more he sounds just like the majority of the people on the planet. The family is most important, and he’ll do what he has to protect them, but not much else. Yeah, he’s a decent fellow (from a human perspective, at least), but that’s a pretty average moral center.

  34. Wait…I think there is some nonsense in Twilight where she babbles about genetic difference. I had repressed it because it was idiotic….

    It’s supposed to be really difficult for vampires to give up blood. Carlisle was the only one who did it, and he’s attempting to prosletyze other vampires to do it as well, by persuasion rather than by fighting them. Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

    It’s certainly true that the plot revolves around Bella to a ridiculous degree. But I don’t think it’s right to say that Jacob is more moral because he’s more focused on humans. He isn’t more focused on humans; he’s only focused on Bella. And I don’t know that the book really presents him as a moral paragon; he’s pretty clearly a horny teenager, not a moral paragon. The book certainly believes that peace is good and prejudice against others who are different is bad, but again, I’m not really seeing what’s wrong with that or why it’s particularly unrealistic. Again, I just don’t believe that pragmatism is either more moral or more realistic than other philosophical systems, and applying pragmatism to vampires and werewolves seems kind of ridiculous on its face.

  35. Renunciation, self-sacrifice, love, starting with family but including others. I don’t see why that’s a worse morality than, hey, my enemies are absolutely evil, so I should kill as many of them as I can.

    I’ll give this one more go: Renunciation, sacrifice, etc. aren’t inherently good acts. They’re good if done for a good cause (cf., a gay renouncing his desire to be more like — and thereby more accepted by — his conservative Christian family). The vampires are evil unless they act like humans. That’s no different from the Buffyverse. Buffy uses her power to vanquish evil. If your enemies are really absolutely evil, then fighting them is a good act. Instead, Carlyle is attempting to make compromises with those who want to devour us humans. I’d suggest that extremism in defense of not being eaten is no vice.

  36. ——————————
    John says:

    …But to the extent that LeGuin or “The Iron Dream” are arguing that the “monomyth” narrative — or Sword and Sorcery, which is not the same thing — is inherently racist or imperialist, well, I’m not impressed…
    ——————————

    I agree; neither particularly has much to do with Master Races. Re inferior, subhuman types, Tolkien had his Orcs (I rather like these Orc’s point-of-view books: http://www.amazon.com/Orcs-Stan-Nicholls/dp/0316033707 ), but that’s hardly the rule for S&S, either.

    However, Spinrad’s right — if in a more diffused fashion — in that the Nazi “dream” and the way humans tend to dehumanize enemies, see their own group as superior, have a great deal in common.

    Or, the way we see humanity as superior, animals as lacking ability to feel pain, not having souls, with God giving us dominion over them all, therefore it’s OK to do whatever we want to them.

    If an average group of humans were to be turned into vampires, have to kill their former fellows to live, I guarantee most would adapt pretty damn quickly; see humans as contemptible cattle, themselves as superior.

    And, you don’t have to get as exotic as vampires for proof of how mushily malleable most moral codes are; see:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_study

    http://brainz.org/10-psychological-experiments-went-horribly-wrong/

    ——————————-
    If you need to fill your adventure story with murderable bad guys, you’re going to do some moral flimflam…
    ——————————-

    See https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/05/vampires-on-the-prairie/ ; or zombies…

    ——————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Wait…I think there is some nonsense in Twilight where she babbles about genetic difference. I had repressed it because it was idiotic….
    ——————————

    Wish I could do that!

  37. Are you on crack? The pragmatic choice for Carlyle is to accept that he’s a vampire and eat people. He needs blood; he’s a different species (as you’ve said) — surely the Obama solution is to just try to eat as few people as possible and maybe not torture them before finishing them off. Instead, Carlisle renounces his power out of love and decides to suffer so that others won’t be killed. Again, I fail to see why that’s a compromised renunciation.

    And one more time…the vampires don’t act like humans. I mean, there are superficial similarities, but they still do stuff like go hunting with their bare hands and play vampire baseball and have sex for weeks at a time and so on and so forth. They are not unqueer, in various ways. They are seen as good not as long as they act like humans, but as long as they don’t kill people. Which really seems reasonable to me.

    An eye for an eye is still pragmatism. Even so, the claim that genocidal warfare is necessarily safer and less destructive than moderate efforts at peace is neither self-evident nor, as far as I can tell from human history, accurate. Buffy makes genocidal warfare the easy choice by making the enemy utterly inhuman and outside moral strictures. Meyer isn’t willing to do that in the same way. In the Buffyverse, vampires really can’t choose good. In Twilight, they could all potentially stop killing people if they wished. That doesn’t excuse them at all; on the contrary. But it means that killing them isn’t different than killing a human murderer. As I said, I think that that’s a significant, and welcome, difference.

  38. Just.. no.

    That Starwars was deliberately informed by Campbell is a psued’s myth that started in an review and was then embraced by Lucas. When he’d been interviewed earlier about influences eariler Campbell had been absent and the Lensman series very much present.

    As for Buffy: there was nothing in Buffy to suggest that vampires lacked freedom of choice. Instead the soul was very firmly equated with conscience and lack of empathy. For example Spike was able not to kill the policeman at the start of his alliance with Buff – so he had freedom of choice – but working out that it was wrong and therefore something Buffy didn’t want him to do took deliberate mental effort.

    Spike simply made the effort to regain his soul because he loved Buffy – as he had loved Dru previously.

    The show *did* imply – in fact it was more of an explicitly stated – that he and Dru were unusual this way, when the Judge considered destroying them because (pause for google) this made them “stink of humanity.” So I really think Whedon’s ass is doubly covered here.

  39. *me: Spike simply made the effort to regain his soul because he loved Buffy – as he had loved Dru previously.*

    To be explicit: this choice had no *moral* significance; Spike getting his soul for Buffy was no different to his bringing Dru a victim to feed on.

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