Thursday 19 March 2015

Fantasy Dolphins and Failures of Imagination

People find dolphins charming. This is not news. It's rather odd, though, as in real life dolphins can be murderous vagabonds and brutal sadists: perpetrators of sexual violence who also enjoy torturing their innocent victims for their own personal satisfaction. They may seem like they are friendly and playful, almost laughing along with you as you watch their acrobatic leaps, but look at the eyes: the eyes are studious and mean; the eyes contain depths of contempt; the eyes never laugh. To look into the eyes of a dolphin is to look into the cold, calculating eyes of a sea-dwelling sociopath. They are the eyes of a predator.

But small girls think they're cute, so "swimming with dolphins" ends up on most people's bucket list.

In fantasy too, people have more or less universally fallen for the myth that dolphins are on the side of the angels. Friendly allies, or even super-intelligent founders of underwater civilisations. This reached its apogee in the 2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Manual, in which dolphins are Lawful Good, have an intelligence of 11-12 (bear in mind the human average is 9-12), and are described as "benign" and "inherently peaceful". One suspects the AD&D Monstrous Manual would not have been written that way if it had been created by mackerel.

We have a failure of imagination when it comes to cute or intelligent animals. We have a natural tendency to impute them with emotions and ideas that are not their own. Animal lovers (I count myself one) are especially guilty of this. It's odd that the more time one spends thinking about and looking at animals, the more one tends to develop this blind spot about them. It often does them a disservice: it infantilises them. It reduces their complex and fundamentally alien nature.

I don't have a great deal of time for Wittgenstein, but he was on to something with his famous remark about the lion. If a dolphin could talk we could not understand him. Or, if we could translate all those clicks and hisses and supersonic squeaks, we could still not understand them. Wittgenstein meant that to understand language you needed to understand the social context; like a lot of philosophers he wasn't thinking very clearly - the problem with an animal isn't the different social context so much as it's the different biological one. A dolphin brain is not a human one. Their thoughts are not of a human nature, and in fact the act of trying to make them understandable to humans necessarily reduces them and transforms them into something they are not. It denies the richness of an individual of another species' lived experience and the possibility of true difference.

That's not to say that it isn't fun to try, though. What thoughts would you think if you were an intelligent, efficient predator who grew up in the sea and had never gone on land and indeed hated it and was terrified by it? What if you had no idea where the next meal was coming from and lived in a perpetual state of searching with your extended family for sustenance? What if you were one of the great swimmers, an ocean-going nomad, who was still tied to the air as if there was an invisible leash constantly dragging you back to the surface? As if you could never be truly free? (Or to spin that last thought on its head: imagine if every 10 minutes you had to go and dip your head in the ocean in order to stay alive.) What if every so often big brutish cold hard objects, which you had no words for, and crawling with mewling, jabbering creatures, churned the ocean surface above you? What if sometimes those big objects were dragging great webs between them which threatened to tangle everything in the sea up inside them?

Now think of a hawk, or an ant, or a pig, or an ape, or a crocodile. What would you think if you were one?

42 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. And yet I still find myself forgetting mid-shower whether I washed my hair already.

      Delete
  2. I'm a bit too late into the night to deal with the gloss on Wittgenstein you have there (although I think that ultimately the question of language he brings up supersedes even the issue of biologically different brains) but have you ever read Nagel's "What it's Like to be a Bat?" It's a pretty nice thing to get the imagination going along these same lines of questioning mental states and experience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I haven't read it, but I've heard of it. I'll give it a look.

      Delete
  3. The cute dolphins idea seems kind of like the modern-day counterpart of the howlers to be found in medieval bestiaries. The common thread being that the animals are speaking an allegory relevant to some human concern.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah it's ironic, in rushing to "the moral of the story", they skip out anything that could actually be learned from them, leaving them just symbols of the stuff the monks were spending the rest of their days on. I bet their treatment of plants and birds was better, as they actually had them in their gardens.

      Delete
  4. Doing research for my Amazonian game, I was surprised to find that Amazonian river dolphins are not trusted by the people who live there. They are supposed to be tricksters, something akin to the fox in North American folklore. Apparently they live in utopias under the rivers where they never have to work, and they change into human form to attend human parties, where they get too drunk, impregnate a village woman, and then take off before morning.

    I was struck by how different this is from the modern US "peaceful cute gentle" dolphin ideal. It still clearly anthropomorphizes the dolphin, but in a very different way.

    Of course, the way that river dolphins look probably has something to do with it: http://images5.alphacoders.com/438/438742.jpg

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Missed this before. I've been putting together a sort of supplement for myself to help me run a LotFP game set on the Amazon river in the late 1540s, where the players are exploring a particular unexplored tributary. You can find info on my blog, I should have an actual play report up soon.

      http://spectology.blogspot.com/search/label/rivercrawl

      Delete
  5. I really hate the dolphin entry in monster manuals - one entry for all cetaceans or just stick to oldschool taxonamy and put them under fish

    ReplyDelete
  6. One of my favorite series is Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space; at one point (in _Chasm City_, I think) part of the plot revolves around a generation ship, hurtling through space from Earth to Epsilon Eridani. It's staffed and populated with humans, of course, but there's also a tank full of dolphins.

    Dolphins are meant to have considerably more space than the tank provides, though, and they've been inbreeding since Day 1: resulting in a pod of nothing but psychotic, murderous dolphins.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The "Lisa-Frankification" [google image search: "Lisa Frank Dolphin"] of certain creatures always bothered me. Unicorns are victimized by this too (when the medieval interpretation is ripe with eminently game-able content for some kitchen tables and groups).
    I'd much rather go with the alien/strange/unpredictable whenever possible, and base the behavior more on the randomized reaction roll than some arbitrarily assigned, trope-y text.
    Dolphins as ruthless paragons of the Lawful Alignment Axis has some merit for re-skinning though. Can you imagine the immaculately arranged corals and sea shells? Swimming through a meticulously manicured kelp forest? Encountering entire shoals of sprats with only their heads bitten off, floating listlessly in geometric shapes? Call them Lawphins or something. They save sailors from shipwrecks because their bones ruin their ritualistic decorating. When it's finally finished a once flooded world will flood once more, and they will return to their thrones as the true rulers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice idea. The way the MM describes them they are definitely Neutral Good by my definition, which is yet another example of what a movable feast alignments are.

      What's the natural enemy of the lawphin? The chaoctopus?

      Delete
  8. It was very popular and timely in the 1970s to think that dolphins were this benevolent species secretly more intelligent (or wiser) than humans. What you're seeing in the Monstrous Manual is the natural fallout of that meme. (It's also why William Gibson had brilliant dolphins wired into the matrix in his early cyberpunk.) Simpler times...

    ReplyDelete
  9. This bears directly on the project I'm currently developing. -- http://greatandsmallrpg.blogspot.com/

    The best works of animal fantasy fiction are those that zo-omorphize the reader's imagination more than they anthropomorphize the animal characters. It's a subtle trick that few people notice. If you look carefully at "Watership Down," for instance, you'll notice little things like the environment being described through smell more often that sight, or that the social interactions are based on real rabbit behavior instead of just being humans with the serial numbers filed off.

    David Brin does a pretty good trick of it in his Uplift novels, too (which feature dolphin characters who aren't all cute and cuddly)... although the animal characters there have been purposefully anthropomorphized to a degree through genetics.

    As for dolphins themselves, I'd love to see them put to a more evil use in a game product. In fact, that gives me a couple of ideas....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, "Watership Down" does a good job of straddling the boundary between having believably animal animals, and having characters you can identify with. It's an age since I read them, but the "Duncton Wood" books do it with moles as well.

      Delete
    2. I loved "Duncton Wood," as well, but also haven't read it in ages. It's in my queue again, along with tons of other animal fantasy stories.

      I do disagree with you, though, that animal minds are fundamentally alien. Most of the *human* mind is the product of brain structures and processes that are shared with other mammals, and in some cases with even more taxa of animals beyond. It's obviously not an exact match, but it is possible to plausibly infer what it's like to be a bat, for instance, because bats are also mammals like us and thus have many of the same mammalian motivations.

      I think the problem isn't so much that people project human feelings onto other animals as it is that they fail to recognize how much like us other animals really are. We portray dolphins the way we wish they were based on their "smiles," which makes us ignore that, like us, they are actually violent, murderous assholes. Not all the time, though. Also like us.

      Delete
  10. Here's an interesting thing about cetacean psychology, and why they tend to be torturers. Not sure if it's accurate, but I'll tell you the story anyway:

    Imagine you live in a world of glass, an empty open field for miles around. There are trees, but they are smooth unclimbable things that stretch out a wide canopy above you, and if you jump you can occasionally reach it.

    In these fields you sometimes find deer, and you can coordinate to chase them down and catch them, but once you start to eat them, they fade apart into the air. Soon you are left again in an open field with no tools, nothing to do but run and chase and talk.

    But one day you catch a deer, and instead of killing it, you wound it, and for the last seconds of it's life, while it is around, you have an object you can do something with. You can scratch the ground with it's antlers, you can knock it about between you. It'll suffer, but you'll have a bit of variety.

    Like cats and crows and other intelligent creatures, dolphins like to play, but their world is one noticeably devoid of small objects. There's no dice stacking or writing or crafts for them, unless it's something they catch, and as they break apart, they will drift down into the depths. So it makes sense to stun or immobilise their prey, and then they have the core objects for their games.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Technically we do give them alternatives though.

      Delete
    2. That may be true. Or they might just lack empathy and simply enjoy it. There's a certain school of thought that empathy beyond the clan group has to be learned: humans in hunter-gatherer societies seem to have gleefully tortured people captured from neighbouring communities in much the way a dolphin might.

      Delete
  11. Everything will be fine if you just don't anthropomorphize the animals (read human qualities into them). Nobody is truly cute. To treat anyone is cute or beautiful is the first step to objectification, opposite of true love and respect.

    Animals think. More so than people are aware. Cats play with mice. Tigers used to play with humans in South Asia, and those who did, were called Maneaters, and they lay the foundations for the myth of Raksheesh (Indian demon). Tigers didn't just chase and wound terrified peasants between field and village. They howled, and they were aware, that they terrified the Man, and they would stalk a person, or a mother for a period of days, before carrying away her infant. Anyway, Cats play with Mice, Tigers with Men, and Social Orders with human beings. So what?

    BTW, I did some research on Cephalopods, the apogee of evil in the Monster Manual. It turns out that the Octopi are the most intelligent of the Invetebrae, likely among the most intelligent animal on earth. See, they have a sense of humor and they are truly alien. Each tentacle that a giant octopus has, has its own brain essentially. Say the Octopus wants to climb on top of a rock. Each tentacle will curl and sway and think of the best way to solve the problem. Also, the intelligence of the Octopi is nothing sinister like the Mind Flayers. Scientists study Octopi and Octopi like to poke the Scientist to see what it would do. Like if a Scientist leaves a pencil near the edge of the aquarium, the lazy, almost motionless, Octopus will hide it when no one is looking. Scientist will look around and pick another pencil and leave it near the aquarium. Octopus hides the pencil and watches again. One day at the aquarium, one of the lamps was out. Scientists call maintenance and tell them to replace the burnt out bulb. Next day they come in and yell at maintenance, because the bulb has not been replaced. The Maintenance sputters and swears that they did. Third day, the bulb is out again. Someone puts the lab under video surveillance. What they saw, was that when everyone left, the Octopus spit a jet of water at the lamp and blew it out. Was it having fun or what? Talk about an active intellect, and you can't train an Octopus. Gygaxian Mind Flayer is shallow in comparison.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I've heard that about octopuses. Crows are also super-intelligent and can remember and recognise human faces. If you wrong one, it will seek revenge.

      Delete
  12. I sympathize on your thoughts, and I usually enjoy reading your blog, but I want to point out your serious failure of context for the tradition involving dolphins (hopefully you did this only for the sake of reducing space?).

    In a number of myth/folklore systems, dolphins were seen as inherently benign and peaceful in the ancient myths of many seagoing folk -- a classic example would be the depiction of dolphins in Greeky mythology. The original inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons and for the fantasy which inspired Dungeons and Dragons were directly and/or indirectly ages-old European folklore and mythology.

    So dolphins are innately benign and peaceful in many fantasy games for the same reason that spiders are insanely evil (as opposed to a vital part of our ecosystem), sharks are cunning sociopaths (as opposed to an admirably adept sort of creature), eagles are noble and demi-divine, etc. -- because that is how they are in the ancient sources which inspired.

    So dolphins are a highly intelligent Lawful Good "race" in so many fantasy RPGs for the same reason that fire is an element, the seasons can be altered and then repaired without cataclysmic ecological catastrophe, the earth lies on the back of a gigantic turtle swimming through the void, etc. -- because that is how they are in the ancient sources which inspired.

    This does not mean you can not change it according to your tastes; the ancient tales were inspiration, not shackles.

    However, to object to the depiction of dolphins on purely zoological grounds in a world with magic, gods, dryads and dwarves and beholders and owlbears, is as tediously obnoxious a breach of suspension of disbelief and audience integrity as objecting to healing potions in a kitchen sink fantasy setting such as D&D because of modern medical pathology or objecting to the children of half-elves due to hybrid sterility issues or fixating on the impossibility of winged horses actually flying.

    Your rant reminds me of a man I knew in high school who would disrupt every fantasy gaming session which had giant arachnids or insects by sputtering about the square-cube law and refuse to join us in fighting the monsters, only repeatedly state ad nauseum he was making disbelief rolls while glaring at the dungeon master for daring to use giant arthropods. Your rant reminds me of an economics major I knew in college who couldn't handle D&D sorts of fantasy gaming because he was almost driven to tears by the fact that no tonnage of gold unloaded by player-characters ever reduced gold's value or destabilized the economy and the fact that the marketplaces in most small towns violated even basic economics.

    You have some good points about how we could look at dolphins today. But please don't assume the original imagery was based entirely on ignorance about zoology any more than you would assume that campaigns with dryads are based entirely on an ignorance about botany or that only people with no grasp of physics could tolerate the existence in fantasy games of giant eagles, winged horses, and gryphons.

    We can not intelligently correct flaws whose origin and original purposes we never bother to understand.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Blimey. How dare I try to write an interesting entry about putting a new spin on thinking about animals? I'll know better next time.

      Delete
    2. Sarcasm is a poor substitute for reason and fails entirely as a substitute for wit. I'd expected better of someone who claims to have some grasp of Wittgenstein.

      Dehumanizing people's actions as odd rather than trying to understand them is a poor tactic as well. Your callow dismissal of anyone who thinks differently from you as "odd" came across as smug, as does your petulant response above.

      I wrote quite sincerely that I sympathized on your thoughts, and that I usually enjoyed reading your blog, though not any more -- but I do not sympathize with so puerile a response, however, nor its trite play at insincerity. I expected better.



      Delete
    3. For heaven's sake. You made a patronising comment misconstruing the point of the entry and calling it "tediously obnoxious" and a "rant", compounded it by making a really bad faith comparison with stupid nerds you knew in high school, and now you think you're upset because I didn't do what exactly? Crawl on my belly and apologise for not recognising your superior intelligence?

      This blog has 960+ published entries and many thousands of comments. I've got a pretty good sense by now for when people are making comments in good faith and when they aren't. Good faith comments get good faith responses. You might want to try it out some time.

      Delete
    4. I think you must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, noisms. Anonymous's comment raised a worthwhile point and was well explained. It was a touch patronizing, but it wasn't the sort of ridiculous thing that deserves only a sarcastic remark. Let's be fair, your posts, including this one, are rarely free a sense of argumentative derision. ("small girls think they're cute" "In fantasy too, people have more or less universally fallen for the myth..." "failure of imagination"). I also seem to remember you've frequently taken the attitude--consistent with the tone of this post--that the "good guy dolphins" only make sense from the perspective of a pre-teen girl who's a PETA member. After you suggest that people who disagree with you are immature little girls, I don't know if you can really take offense when he suggests that people who disagree with him are neurotic high-school nerds.

      I do think the discussion is worth having. What's the better dolphin model? Embodiment of savior-dolphins of myth? Vehicle for exploring the alien-ness of other species? I always think about the first when it comes to animals, but the second when it comes to playable races. Why can't dwarves be rangers? For the same reason you can't sprout wings and fly. It's not in their makeup. It's literally incomprehensible to them.

      Delete
    5. The difference, Ivan, is that this is my blog and nobody is forcing anybody to read it. I don't go around making supercilious comments on other people's blogs and I expect the same courtesy in return.

      That said, if people can't tell when I'm making tongue in cheek comments (e.g. PETA girl and remarks about girls thinking dolphins are cute) then public discourse in RPG land is even more ludicrously offence-seeking than I thought.

      Anyway, all that's beside the point, which is this: did you notice how I was including myself in the failure of imagination? That I accused myself of having the same blind spot as everybody else? No? The tone of the post is about we as people who like fantasy, and I thought I was fairly explicit about that.

      Delete
    6. What a silly post. You take bitter offense at fairly innocuous comment, defend your reaction by saying "it's my blog, everybody should be nice to me in comments," then literally one sentence later complain about public discourse in RPG land being "ludicrously offense-seeking"?

      I know this comment is just going to fan the fire, but apparently I'm not strong enough to rise above.

      Delete
    7. I'm not sure what you want me to say? As my previous comment pointed out, my original entry had a point which was willfully misconstrued, I made a flippant sarcastic remark in response, and suddenly I'm taking bitter offense and insisting everybody is nice to me in comments?

      My position is not that everybody should be nice to me in comments. My position is that if you're going to post a comment for the sole, thinly veiled purpose of bragging about how clever and reasonable you are, don't expect a serious reply.

      Delete
    8. I think talking about the last sentence may get us somewhere. I don't think that was his purpose. I think he had a legitimate point to make, and I think he made it in a reasonably civil way.

      I'm really surprised you had such a negative reaction.

      Delete
    9. He was simply trying to lump me in with people who think idiotic things who he knew at high school and who he seems to have a chip on his shoulder about. Either that or he read the first paragraph and assumed I was making some argument he'd heard elsewhere and thought was foolish. And being reasonably civil doesn't mean describing my alleged argument as a tediously obnoxious rant.

      Delete
    10. Actually, and this is my last word on the matter, let me just say that when I write a blog entry I'm not just blathering any old thing into the ether, even if it seems that way. I'm pretty self-critical about what I write, but I like this entry. I think it is thoughtful and interesting. I don't think it should be surprising that an author of any piece of writing would react a little flippantly when presented with somebody deliberately construing it the wrong way.

      Delete
    11. Understood that it is your blog, and your post, which you can justifiably take pride in.

      I don't think he was really attacking you, though. And I don't think there was anything deliberate or malicious about his post--though I concede that "reasonably civil" has a different meaning on the internet....

      Maybe I have an investment in his post because it at least made me think about a contrasting view that has some appeal. Related to your post here. http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-jamesian-and-lovecraftian.html We can choose to view dolphins as alien, unknowable, etc. as you suggest. But that attitude doesn't really ring true because it's inconsistent with thousands of years of cultiral/historical baggage we have built up around dolphins -- not just Lisa Frank cutesyness, but an ancient, strongly held belief developed over thousands of years that dolphins have some kinship with us and want to help us. When dolphins save the PCs, it rings true, and feels right and wholesome (in a similar fashion to the way MR James' horror is effective because it leverages our past, as you discussed in the post I referenced). And that's a good reason to treat dolphins that way in a fantastic setting. Saying dolphins are alien sociopaths, on the other hand, is jarring and difficult to comprehend. Not that that makes it wrong, but it deprives the DM of the powerful tool that is dolphins' cultural resonance. That's an issue not covered in your post, that Anonymous's comment helpfully raised. And (to shamelessly quote you)...

      "This capacity for cultural resonance is underrated. You don't have to be religious to appreciate that certain shared myths, stories and artefacts can take on a sense or feeling of the numinous, despite your own agnosticism: they get it not from the fact that they're true, or genuinely 'spiritual', but from something deeper - they've been around a long time, thousands of years in some cases, and when something is around a long time, it tends to grow roots. The Testament of Solomon is spellbinding because these are stories which have their roots in extreme antiquity, and something that old can't help but feel significant. . . . it is just as much true of Greek myth, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, which also have that quality of numinousness arising from their great age and survival, and the meanings and connotations that inevitably accrue whenever something is truly old."

      Delete
    12. Well that's precisely it, isn't it? Anybody who reads this blog and knows what I write about surely knows that I'm not the kind of person who either dismisses myth and folklore or cares about realism, square cube laws or the gold supply. Anyone reading the post who has any awareness of context would know that. The anonymous commenter was giving my post the most unsympathetic reading, it seemed to me, in order to make some smarty pants jibe at me for having opinions I don't have and have never had.

      But in any event, the purpose of the post isn't to say that there is anything wrong with the traditional view of dolphins; I took the opportunity to have a bit of lighthearted fun at the expense of the standard view. The purpose of the post is to say "Isn't it fascinating to try to put yourself into the mind of an animal?" You can simultaneously think that while also being perfectly aware of, and happy with, there being folkloric ideas about them.

      Delete
  13. One thing to keep in mind re. mankind vs animals, is that animal behavior and animal intelligence is a lot more hard-wired into their nervous system, than ours. The real difference between a Croc and a Gator, is that they will behave in opposite directions, if they are at the edge of a parking lot and see a human getting out of the car. Gator's (blunt noses) first instinct is to avoid the human and get away. Crocodile's (sharp noses) instinct is to stand still and pretend to be a log, hoping that a human will not notice and try to step over it - they see humans as food, no matter the consequences. Gators have been known to flip the fisherman's canoe and take the fish and leave the fisherman alone, because attacking the human will bring on the hunters to capture or kill it.

    In D&D, there is a plethora of intelligent creatures, most reduced to monster stereotypes for slaughter, and I like the old school little dogmen Kobolds, Pig Faced Orcs, etc. For a discerning DM, there is a wonderful opportunity to play in a world dominated by competing intelligences and species at the human level. I have weaved that thought into the fabric of my sandbox, and then forbade players from playing anything other than a human character.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think there's definitely a strong case to be made for only having human characters in D&D games - both from the Wittgenstein-type perspective (you can't know what an orc thinks) but also from the fairy-tale perspective (supernatural beings are capricious and weird and you can't predict their behaviour).

      Delete
  14. I am with Wittgenstein. What we have is a major failure of imagination at the D&D franchise, which has reduced elves to skinny aristocratic types with pointy ears and dwarves to bearded boorish types, who like beer and rowdy women.

    Consider the implication of Elves with life spans running to 1000 years. Never mind magic or any other elven accoutrements, can you imagine the sheer power that would accumulate in the hands of the ruling elven families that exist among the much shorter lived humans? And if there were Elves running around among trees, why wouldn't they colonize and rule the humankind. My campaign is a pretty spooky world, where elves are extremely powerful and seldom seen. Woe to anyone, who would steal from them, even in error.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Its a great effort.I like to have a outsourcing business on content development.Can anyone join with us?
    http://www.guiresoutsourcing.com/manual-writing-services/productservice-instruction-manual/

    ReplyDelete
  16. Let me share to you the fantasy books I usually love to read. Those books are written by a New Zealand author named Wendy J Scott.

    ReplyDelete
  17. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete