Tag Archives: evil

Speak Softly and Carry a Warhead

Posted on by

This ran a while back on Splice Today.
_______

1011_politicalevilEvil is a force, possibly metaphysical, but certainly rhetorical. To identify evil is to change the world, first perceptually and then politically. We say “evil,” and bombs fall on the Middle East; we refuse to say “evil” and machetes fall across Rwanda. Evil, then, is not just a serpent in our hearts; it’s a statement of purpose.

If evil is, in part, a rhetoric, then it is important to name it correctly. This is why Alan Wolfe’s new book, Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It, places the definition first in its subtitle. Wolfe’s argument is that we have become confused about evil, and especially about its political character. As a result, we name political evil incorrectly, and so fail to control it. What we need, he argues, is a more careful language, and a more thoughtful understanding of political evil if we are to confront it effectively.

Wolfe’s a long time wonk — an editor of the Nation and later of the New Republic — and his prescription is one that appeals powerfully to the wonky hind brain. To contain evil, his argument suggests, we need, not faith or forgiveness or spiritual transformation, but better monographs.

Be that as it may, Wolfe’s particular monograph is for the most part insightful and convincing. His main point, that political evil is so devastating because of its political character, seems inarguable. Hitler was so dangerous not because he was a hideous, hateful madman (of which there are certainly no shortage in the world) but because he was a politically talented hateful madman who was able to take advantage of a particularly volatile historical period. Wolfe’s conclusion is that, to stop political evil, it’s vital to pay attention not just to the evil, but to the politics as well. You must understand the difference between the nationalistic impetus which fueled ethnic cleansing between Serbs and Croats and the ethnic hatred which fueled genocidal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis. If you don’t understand those differences, you will be unable to stop political evil, and will very likely make things worse. As, Wolfe argues, we managed to do in both Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Wolfe, then, advocates complexity and careful distinctions. In that vein, he lays out four kinds of political evil: “terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a reliance on means such as torture to fight back against evil.” These forms of political evil, he argues, are those which have “grabbed the greatest amount of our attention.”

This does raise the question though — who exactly is this “our” whose attention has been grabbed? Nobody would deny (or certainly I wouldn’t) that terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and torture are all examples of political evil. But it seems like you could come up with some other examples as well that have played an important part in history if you wanted. What about, for example, imperialism? Apartheid, whether the American, South African, or (arguably) Israeli versions? What about war-mongering? Is it politically evil to build up a gigantic stockpile of weapons which could destroy the world twenty times over? For that matter, where does, say, China’s state-sponsored repression fit in Wolfe’s schema?

Wolfe does call China politically evil a number of times, and he doesn’t say his list is meant to be exhaustive. But it’s focus is telling. The evil that has grabbed the greatest amount of “our” attention is evil perpetrated against the West (terrorism) or by those outside the West (genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia) or by the West as a direct reaction to evil committed against us (torture, or Israel’s actions against Gaza.) Wolfe even refers to the overreaction to terror by a specific name to separate it from the other acts of evil. He calls it counterevil — which, no doubt unintentionally, sounds suspiciously like it might mean “good”.

Wolfe unambiguously believes that counterevil is itself a form of evil. But the way in which his neologism turns on him is telling, I think. For while Wolfe is willing to condemn the US and Israel, it’s always for errors of judgment and understanding rather than for errors of the heart. There’s one particularly revealing passage in which he declares:

“Israel’s decision to clear out Arabs from areas of Palestine it was determined to incorporate within its new state ought to caution us against denouncing ethnic cleansing for the goals it seeks, since those goals are so widely shared.”

In other words, we can’t condemn the goals of ethnic cleansing because Israel engaged in ethnic cleansing, and while Israel’s methods may be damnable, its goals never are. And furthermore, in regards to ethnic nationalism, if everyone does it, it must be okay— an argument dear to many a 6-year-old, but not the more convincing for that.

At the end of the book, Wolfe turns, somewhat inevitably, to Niebuhr, advocating a principled, pragmatic opposition to evil tempered by humility.

“The appreciation of our inherent weakness, and its corresponding warning never to commit the sin of imagining oneself to possess all the power at God’s disposal, are routinely ignored by those who argue that one should refuse all engagement with terrorists, or that radical Islam inherited its totalitarian nature from Nazi Germany […] Underlying all these flawed attempts to respond to political evil is the conviction that human beings can know with certainty which side is always the good one and which one the bad.”

It is not a refutation of that point, but a confirmation of it, to suggest that Wolfe could as easily apply it to himself as to the others he cites. It is Wolfe, after all, who confidently lists the forms of political evil we should pay attention to, presenting them as naturally or clearly the most important, as if his Western, pundit’s perspective gives him a God’s eye view of the world’s sins. And it’s Wolfe who invokes that tireless shibboleth of punditry, “moral seriousness,” and drapes it, with beaming pride, across his call for greater humility.

Wolfe is determined that his book, despite its woeful litany of failed interventions and bungled international war crimes prosecutions, should not be used as an excuse for “throwing up our hands in hopeless resignation.” Such resignation, he says, “allows evil to continue and gives the bloodthirsty what they crave.” He advocates neither reckless interventionism nor isolationism, but rather a humble, thoughtful middle way. Maybe that will work. But personally I have a sinking feeling that political evil comes in more varieties than Wolfe is willing to admit, and that one of the ways it manifests on our shores is through the claim that we are modestly spreading peace by covering the earth with arms.

Monster Fun

Posted on by

“Breaking Bad” is usually discussed in terms of its moral vision, and its unflinching depiction of Walter White’s decent into evil. Chuck Klosterman’s is probably the best-known encapsulation of the argument.

Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters’ morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn’t seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That’s the elevator pitch. But that’s completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man “bad” — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good.

Admittedly, I’m only through season 1 at the moment. But still, I see the trajectory Klosterman is talking about; Walt kills and sells meth and blows people up, and we still root for him.

Klosterman suggests that we root for evil because the show starts us off by sympathizing with Walt. I think that rather misses the point of the genre conventions though. You don’t root for a bad ass despite the fact that he’s a bad ass. You root for him because he’s a bad ass. Rorschach is cool not despite the fact that he shoots a policeman in the chest with a grappling gun, but because he does so. Similarly, when Walt shaves his head, goes into the drug dealers den, and uses his chemical no-how to create a huge explosion and intimidate the heavies — we don’t root for him despite that. We root for him because of it.

The first season of Breaking Bad isn’t coy about this dynamic. On the contrary, it presents good Walt, his good family, and his good milieu as hopelessly square, hypocritical, and ridiculous. Walt’s wife, Skyler, comes across as a moralistic busybody, snooping around after Walt and freaking out over his (supposed) pot use. Hank, Walt’s brother-in-law the DEA agent, is equally ridiculous, trying to scare Walt’s son straight in a painfully embarrassing scene in which he burbles anti-drug war bullshit while callously bullying the random druggies passing by. Walt himself is an ineffectual high-school teacher and a wimpish nonentity, sclubbing along in Hank’s shadow, boring his students, and generally epitomizing castrated middle-class suburban white lameness.

Until, that is, he embraces the dark side. After learning he has cancer and deciding to cook meth to support his family after he’s gone, Walt suddenly starts to become tough, sexy, powerful — a character who demands admiration rather than contempt. He defends his crippled son from bullies; he destroys the car of an insufferable cell-phone yakking stock trader; he faces down drug-dealers; he even starts subtly bullying Hank rather than the other way around. He changes from a colorless nothing to a dark hero — and who, given those options, wouldn’t root for the dark hero, not only because he’s a hero, but because he’s dark?

“Breaking Bad” does show the downsides of White’s choices as well. By stealing from the school science supplies for his meth cooking, he ends up drawing the police down on the saintly Hispanic janitor. The scriptwriters also take care to make a drug-dealer intelligent and thoughtful so we’ll sympathize with him when Walter has to kill him. Yet, the very effort to drive these moral lessons home can’t help but to contradictorily glamorize them. Walt is making Big Decisions with Big Consequences; he moves in a world of Drama and Tragedy. Who wouldn’t rather be Hamlet than Guildenstern?

As a contrast, consider Flannery O’Connor’s collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. All of these stories are about regular people — people like Walter — choosing between good and evil. But in O’Connor’s world, there’s nothing particularly exciting or sexy about going bad. Instead, sin is a small, stupid, sordid business, made up mostly of ingratitude, egotism, stupidity, and willful blindness. It’s not becoming the best damn meth-maker in the county — it’s sneering and taunting your mother as she has a stroke. It’s not killing a sympathetic drug dealer; it’s accidentally strangling your quite unsympathetic 10 year old granddaughter to death because she doesn’t behave enough like you. In O’Connor’s stories, sin makes you smaller than life, not bigger.

This isn’t to say that O’Connor’s stories are definitively better than “Breaking Bad.” Her range is limited — parent and child don’t get along; viciousness is exchanged; an epiphany is achieved just too late to forestall the tragic twist ending. The first time you read it, it can seem like a revelation. By the end of a book, though, it’s become wearisome; the boring scold repeating the same damn harangue for the sixth or seventh run through. At this point I’d probably rather watch another season of Breaking Bad than slog through another collection of the same damn stories by O’Connor.

Which is maybe the point. Evil in O’Connor is boring, which, by definition, prevents it from being interesting. In “Breaking Bad”, on the other hand, evil has the adrenaline rush of its genre conventions — it gives Walter purpose, direction, and emotional heft. “Breaking Bad” feels good, which probably tells you less about evil than it does about entertainment.

Twilight vs. Buffy — Battle to the Death?

Posted on by

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.
_______________________
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.

On the Evils of Speculative Fiction

Posted on by

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.