Inspired by Joy DeLyria’s post about Evil in Speculative Fiction, Charles Reece and I have been engaged in a knock-down/drag-out about the relative morality of Buffy’s vision of vampires and Twilight’s vision of vampires. It’s been pretty enjoyable, so I thought I’d highlight it in a post. My comments are in italics; Charles is in plain text.
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Noah: 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.
Charles: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).
Noah: 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.)
Charles: 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.
Noah: 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.
Charles: 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.
Noah: 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.
Charles:
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.
Noah: 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.
Charles:
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.
Noah: 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?
Charles: 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.
Noah: 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.
Charles:
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.
And what is Carlyle if he’s not pragmatic? That’s the position your defending, not me.
Noah: 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.
Noah, you’re spot on about the the no-soul thing in Buffy as a convenient plot point. If you want to (a) have a show about folks running around killing vampires but (b) have the vampires retain human character traits, you’d better have *some* explanation for why it’s okay to kill them. Otherwise Buffy is a straight-up mass murderer — albeit of irredeemable bad guys — which is Pretty Uncool…although a show about The Punisher as a teenage girl would have been kind of funny, too. The show gives the vampires humanity with one hand (all their human-seeming personality traits) and then takes it away with the other (good thing they don’t have souls!).
Compare Battlestar Galactica: at least at the start of the show, it’s perfectly acceptable for the humans to blow up hundreds of centurion ships, because they’re just “toasters”. It would play much more uncomfortably if they read as “persons”.
All that said, I never actually thought their lack of souls would make an iota of difference to the moral acceptability of murdering vampires. Other than the — admittedly important! — virtuous traits, they retain all the personality traits they had when human; they retain their memories; they’re intelligent and rational (under at least some specifications of “rationality”); they clearly have desires, and hopes and fears for the future; and they can feel pain, if not under the same conditions as humans. Even if they’re missing the extra-special added ingredient of a soul, that seems enough to make it uncool to slaughter them…but feel free, Noah, to lambaste me as a morally corrupted materialist.
oh shit, that was me. For some reason, even though we have never been modern, I am Modernity.
Hey Jones. That’s really funny…especially since I initially saw only your second comment, and was deeply, deeply confused.
I’m not actually a Christian, and don’t really believe in souls for anyone, so I’m not in any position to lambast you for materialism. I think your point is a good one though; that is, if it behaves in every way like a human, then human morality really needs to apply.
I think in both Buffy and Twilight, the soul becomes a way to talk about that issue. That is, Buffy denies vamps souls because it wants to deny their humanity; Twilight gives vampires souls because it believes in their humanity. I think “soul” is a useful way to sum all the things that go into treating humans as moral creatures — which involves conscience and intelligence and choice, but also includes something beyond that (it’s not moral to kill people who have less intelligence, it’s not moral to kill people who don’t have a conscience but aren’t doing any harm; it’s not moral to kill people who make bad choices or who are in some situations robbed of choice.)
The no-soul thing *does* make possible what I found the best metaphor in the whole show viz. that immediately after Buffy has sex with her sensitive, brooding boyfriend for the first time, he turns into an evil, soulless monster who hates her. Talk about your metaphors for adolescence!
Oh, yeah, that’s a pretty great sequence. The whole high school as hell thing is brilliant too. Buffy definitely had its moments.
For me, what I liked wasn’t quite “high school as hell” so much as the way seasons 2 and 3 really literalised the self-romanticising of adolescence. The teen angst in those seasons feels like The End of the World because it *is* The End of the World.
I never understood the compulsion to compare vampires to humans v. animals. Vampires were people first, and depending on the writer, always retain some inkling of humanity, whether it be superficial or deeply moral. In most vampire texts, there are a group of “good” vampires in a world of “bad” vamps; it doesn’t seem strange at all to assume that some would have a problem with reconciling their past with their present.
I think the Cullens aren’t so much stressing humanity, as much as aspects of action. If a human has a specific trait that appeals, the vampire might think fondly of the human, but always with a very exaggerated sense of distance. Bella is only saved because Edward loved her. The rest fall in line because Meyer decides to make her vamps fall irrevocably in love; the rest of the Cullens realize he can’t change his feelings and deal with it. The rest of the people are tolerated. Most of the vamps couldn’t even care if some humans die.
As for Carlisle, he’s a pretty interesting mix because he has deep morals for what HE feels vampires and humans should act like, but also this complete acceptance that others don’t agree with him. He will do whatever he can to save humans himself, because he believes they are worthy, but refuses to force that view on others, outside those living under his roof needing to be veg. Though I’m not even sure he would kick out someone who slipped.. They are many allusions to most of the Cullens having had human blood.
Jones and Noah:
Interesting that the moment you two really love is the moment Mutant Enemy intricately planned to play out that way. Considering how many times they wimp out of their message over the seasons, or don’t bother to answer things, it makes me wonder how the show would’ve been different if they carefully planned all of the metaphors and real-world links.
I am seriously in favor of a morality that says, “I am going to act peacefully and lead others to peace by example, not by hitting them.” I don’t think it’s perfect in every way or anything, and obviously you can find historical examples where that wouldn’t have worked so great, but it’s just extremely rare for it to be represented as a viable option at all in pop culture.
Re: Buffy — I think it was a show that was way more about its head than its heart. It did much better when it thought things through.
“considering how many times they wimp out of their message over the seasons”
I’m curious as to what you think are examples of this?
Jones-
In the first few seasons there was a direct correlation between high school life and the demons they faced. Everything was a metaphor to make the fantastical relatable. As the seasons continued, soap opera trumped message, except for the rare times that the arc seemed to make them ruminate on life, like Hush or Conversations with Dead People. Of course, these are the ones that seem to resonate most with the audience.
I find it hard to analyze later seasons because so many episodes and arcs go against what they swear they are. If this is a feminist show about empowering the least likely people, what planning or consideration went into Xander’s continual and increasing sexism? (which was awarded in the comics by him becoming a lead, go-to guy) Why was Buffy blamed for Riley’s infidelity? etc. After the early seasons set up such a careful consideration of metaphor and message, I wonder how such obvious problems were overlooked.
The Buffy being blamed for Riley’s infidelity arc was absolutely contemptible, as far as I was concerned.
The arc where they were using Willow’s witchcraft as a metaphor for drug addiction was a mess, I thought — sort of confirmed by the fact that they eventually backed off of that without ever really working out why it was now not like drug addiction.
Monika’s supposed to be working on a Buffy piece for us, so hopefully we’ll get to hear about her take at some length….
I think applying Noah’s moral concerns to the demonworld in Buffy was already done. It’s called Legend of the Overfiend. It’s not the lack of souls in BSG or Buffy that justifies using any means necessary to stop the Cylons or demonspawn, it’s the fact that these others are out to slaughter, eat or enslave us humans. The Buffy writers could’ve put in a scene showing the gentleness with which a vampire treats one of his own (in fact, they did do this with Spike and Drusilla), but I’m still on Buffy’s side when it comes to staking them. Similarly, I’m all for killing the vampires in Twilight who’ll eat me even though they have a soul. Likewise, I prefer Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the “powers-that-be” in the Catholic Church who compromised with the Nazis.
Right; you’re saying that appeasement is always bad and we should always kill our enemies. Which worked very well for Bush.
And an eye for eye isn’t pragmatic, it’s retributive, but I’m not sure that accurately describes Buffy’s morality. She’s trying to stop an imperialist horde from destroying us, not making sure justice is done.
“you’re saying that appeasement is always bad and we should always kill our enemies”
Noah, I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying within these fantastic worlds, I’m more sympathetic to Buffy than Carlyle.
Sure…but the imperialist horde isn’t real. They’re aren’t really vampires with no souls hell bent on killing us. It’s a story; the parameters of the conflict are defined by the writers.
As such, it is a deliberate choice to make it so that there is no possibility of compromise, and that the enemy is pure evil, so that killing them has no moral consequences. Showing that the vampires have some human feelings doesn’t really change the fact that they’re all evil and horrible. There are no civilians to collaterally damage in this fight, for example.
Constructing conflict in this way makes the genocidal, kill them before they kill us, choice a very easy one. And pop culture almost always sets the conflict up in this way. Which I think is problematic.
I think an eye for an eye is both retributive and pragmatic, for the most part, especially in this context…though I take your point that Buffy is more about saving everybody than administering justice per se. But surely she is also seen as administering justice….
But the reason you’re more sympathetic to Buffy is that you’re claiming that appeasement is bad. Kill the imperialists, do what you have to, don’t worry about the cost in terms of the bodies of your enemies. That’s an argument against appeasement.
Well, I take these fantasies as limit cases, thought experiments. If you can be sure that the guy coming through your window is out to do you harm, then is it okay to kill him? I say yes. But, of course, reality muddies all of this. I’m both opposed to the death penalty and okay with killing the killer of your wife.
I don’t think Carlyle is particularly good as a moral exemplar because he appeases the killers of humans through his compromises. Twilight could’ve made the interesting case that a different morality obtains when considering a different highly intelligent and powerful species. But it doesn’t do that. It’s view of vampires being vampires is no more complex than Buffy’s with the exception that we shouldn’t want to kill them because they have souls. If you start thinking about all those killings out there that are ignored by the narrative’s focus upon a small segment that happens to live among the humans, I don’t see how Carlyle’s approach is the way to go.
See…but if you want it to be a real, limit-case experiment, none of it makes even provisional sense. If Twilight was real, humans would all be pretty much dead. The number of killings she expects you to believe are taking place regularly is simply nonsensical. At the very least, there’s no way the vampires could remain a secret given their supposed numbers and the constant need for new bodies. The same is more or less the case in the Buffyverse; even given the slayer, their are just way, way too many mass murderers out there not to have a significant impact on human population levels, not to mention crime statistics.
Similarly, it’s really unclear what good Carlyle would exactly do by provoking a giant vampire war. I think you could make the argument that there would be huge amounts of collateral damage in such a situation.
I think looking at them as limit cases or thought experiments is kind of silly, honestly. Neither Buffy nor Twilight is that systematic. You have to take the actions and setting as in part metaphoric; not “what would happen if x, y, and z were the case,” but, “what is this saying about the world we have now?” Buffy says fairly clearly that our enemies don’t have souls, and you shouldn’t really think twice about killing them. Twilight says they do have souls, and that they are ethical creatures just like we are.
I think BUFFY clearly says that her enemies don’t have souls, but that could be as much a coping mechanism as it is an explanation she believes in. BtVS as a series increasingly adds grey to the worlds of good and bad, increasingly making Buffy’s kill-the-demon birthright problematic. So perhaps she’s not so much the fighter of evil but the problematic judge/jury/executioner continually making things simple for her own comfort.
Instead of the Willow/Drug/Witchery plot line, I’d much rather have seen a dark season where she struggles to deal with the ambiguity of her calling.
Dudes, you should bring “Being Human” into this discussion.
I don’t even know what Being Human is!
Oh…google tells me it’s some sort of British tv thing. Is it any good?
It’s….pretty average though it has got quite a few raves from the TV critics. A case of decreasing returns – the latest (third) season was not very good. First two were watchable. Can’t tell you about the American remake since I tend to avoid remakes in general.
I presume Andrei’s advice to bring in “Being Human” relates to the way it explicitly addresses the “real” world relationships between humans, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts.
The first two seasons are rather good. George the Jewish Werewolf is reason enough to watch the first series.
It’s interesting in this context because its a show where humans are basically peripheral characters to the internal struggles of the Vamp/Werewolf/Ghost, as opposed to the other way round. The basic line is that the lead characters struggles to ‘be human’ are effectively the same as the struggles of ordinary people to act decently. What Mitchell and co view as normal human behaviour is this idealised notion. In the show, everyone does stupid and bad things regardless of being human/vamp/werewolf etc.
When the show gets away from individual struggles and starts to address the big politics of all of this, it all becomes a bit rubbish.
I don’t think it’s the lack of a human soul that makes killing vampires so easy to rationalize in Buffy — it’s the fact that vampires are demons, and thus (we’re told) inherently malicious and incompatible with humanity.
We see this clear in the Buffy pilot, when Jesse (Eric Balfour) dies and returns as a vampire. He can’t be reasoned with — his friendship with Xander and his crush on Cordelia can’t be used to restrain him — because it isn’t “Jesse” anymore, it’s a pure evil spirit from Hell in a Jesse-suit with Jesse-memories. It’s not an absence that makes killing vampires okay, it’s a presence.
(I’m not sure what someone like Joss Whedon means when he says “soul,” and it’s possible that a lack of clear thinking on the subject contributed to drift. Frankly most people who believe in souls don’t really know what it is they believe about them, or find it very hard to articulate.)
That’s an interesting take. I don’t think it’s incompatible with what I was saying before exactly….
I think Buffy’s reluctance to deal with theology caused some problems…but also I think Joss Whedon lost interest, right? And it went on too long — it’s the curse of serialized fiction.
Noah,
That seems real nutty to me. They’re silly as thought experiments, but you want to take them as statements of reality? I guess that’s the problem we’re having: Buffy is suggesting what could happen if our enemies didn’t have souls, not that our realworld enemies don’t have souls. (I don’t agree that the reason she’s killing vampires is because they lack souls, though. After all, you don’t see her murdering little bunnies in mass quantities.) Thought experiments control for certain variables making the scenario simpler to get to the point being addressed. Granted, that doesn’t mean either story is a particularly good thought experiment about morality, but I’m certain that both are less silly as such than as direct statements about the real world. (I know you mentioned metaphor, but you’re clearly not taking a metaphorical reading when you read the message ‘it’s okay to kill our (realworld) enemies as long as they don’t have souls’ into Buffy). What is fantasy if not stories asking, “what would happen if x, y, and z were the case”? Nothing about that prevents us from asking how these relate to the world (analogically, allegorically, metaphorically, or whatever).
I have no problem stating I’m against genocide or that I’m opposed to dropping nukes on any country in the world. However, if we ever find ourselves up against the nether regions of Hell itself, and we can stop all the demons from coming into this world and killing us by dropping a hydrogen bomb into their portal, I say do it. Even if they have souls. The problem comes (and you might remember this from our discussion of Priest) when someone tries to take a real human for a demon. I’m not the one reading people into the role of demons on Buffy. The case is simply too extreme for that. (And, since I haven’t mentioned this before, the vampire killing is the dullest part of Buffy. I preferred stuff like the conflict with Faith and episodes like the one where Buffy got a job in fast-food or when her mom died.)
What I’ve been arguing about is whether Twilight presents us with a better reflection of morality regarding how the vampires are treated. Taking Twilight on its own terms where your supposed moral center, Carlyle, ignores the regular occurrence of human slaughter just because vampires have souls is not more moral than when Buffy (again, taking the show on its own terms) slaughters vampires who are out to kill as many humans as possible. Instead, it is more moral to fight such evil than to compromise with it. I don’t see either story’s treatment of vampires as having realistic implications for non-vampires, though.
I guess if there’s a real world moral issue at stake here, it’s whether we should care in dealing with evil if its chosen or determined by nature. Buffy probably has the right idea in the latter case, but what if she crossed-over into the Twilight world? Well, the possibility that vampires might be reformed suggests that she should probably lock all of them up before killing them. But should it be using a Guantanamo Bay kind of reasoning, or should she only lock up the ones who have killed humans? Is a life sentence for an eternal being really more moral than a death sentence? Does she have the right to make sure of what side the vampires are on? Should the Scoobies wiretap all of the vampires to see what their intentions truly are? If Carlyle really had anything to say about moral behavior towards our enemies, he should have to answer such questions, too.
I’m going to let your statement above be the last word, Charles (at least as far as me responding!) Thanks for a fun discussion.
I just went 10 rounds.
Pshaw. I’ve seen you in action before; by your standards, this was barely a skirmish.