The two most recent books I have read are Antony Beevor's The Second World War, and Empire of the Summer Moon. These two books are radically different in scope, one covering the biggest and most intense conflict in human history, the other a series of tiny skirmishes fought over decades in a near-empty wilderness. And yet they have one thing in common: they make you aware, in no uncertain terms, of the absolutely extraordinary extent of "man's inhumanity to man".
In Beevor's book we read of SS men at Treblinka picking young children up by their ankles and swinging them down like mallets to dash their brains out on rocks, Red Army soldiers gang raping and murdering Russian women who were enslaved by Germans and who they had just "liberated" on their invasion of East Prussia, Japanese soldiers from different units abducting each other to cannibalise, Soviet officers who have done nothing wrong being summarily shot by their superiors to instil discipline into others, Allied bombers flattening Dresden just because it was the only city in Germany they hadn't flattened, the USAAF judging the success of its missions in Japan on how many innocent Japanese women and children it had burned to death, citizens of Leningrad abducting and killing their own neighbours' children to eat during the winter of 1941....and so on and so on.
In Gwynne's, we read of Comanche raiders gang raping and scalping pregnant women; slicing off rival tribe members' noses, arms and legs and then burning them alive; cutting off the bottoms of captives' feet and making them walk around for their own amusement; Texan militiamen shooting Cheyenne women and children who surrender to them and then mutilating their corpses in horrific ways; Texas rangers killing thousands of head of horses in cold blood to stop them falling into Comanche hands; Ute women bludgeoning helpless octogenarian Comanches to death with axes...and so on and so on.
It's enough to make one wonder: if this is the kind of thing human beings routinely do to one another in certain circumstances, what kind of stuff would orcs do? And let alone orcs - what would demons and devils do? What, indeed, does "evil" really even mean, given what we know about history?
This is the main reason why I lean increasingly towards humans as the key protagonists and antagonists in my campaign settings. Anything an orc can do, we can do better. And who needs a goblin when the thought of being tortured to death by a fellow human being is so much more plausible and disturbing?
Perhaps we use orcs because they *only* do those awful things, where most humans have some redeeming qualities that makes butchering them wholesale problematic.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I mostly use demons and devils and troglodytes and the like as antagonists because thinking about weird creatures is fun. Also I run a pretty lighthearted game, so making things more "plausible and disturbing" is not high on the priority list.
Thinking about weird creatures is fun, that's true.
DeleteWhat I like about goblins is that they're alien. Same for other humanoid species. It's not about them being more evil than humans, it's about them being something the PCs don't fully understand. They don't even have to be particularly different from humans, so long as they're different enough that you can't be sure when human psychology applies. It makes them unsettling in a completely different way to evil humans.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about demons and devils is that they're irredeemably bad. Similarly, they don't have to do particularly evil stuff; they can be superficially witty and charming, but they have literally not one single positive ethical quality. Evil humans always inspire some measure of contempt, but you can't feel contempt towards something that doesn't even remotely share your frame of reference. So they're just unsettling, in a different way again. It goes back to that post you made about different types of evil in the dungeon - I use that CS Lewis creature as a greater or lesser model for pretty much all my demons.
Yeah, I agree. It's not like I don't like a good monster or weird fucked up creature. It's just that the main movers and shakers in terms of "the baddies" are human.
DeleteJeez, man, weren't you just writing about desensitization? And then you're reading these books?
ReplyDeleteOne thing you might want to consider in your games is the role of religion. We know, historically, that Catholicism was responsible for a lot of atrocities, but most of these were done in the name of 'bringing folks to Christ (a generally stand up guy)' or 'turning folks from the devil (the opposition).' The stuff you are describing is non-religious violence of the worst sort...the kind of thing perpetrated by cultures that fear no spiritual repercussions.
In a pseudo-medieval game, there ought to be a pseudo-medieval theology that keeps (most) humans from acting like orks...and I would limit such 'mass atrocities' as you describe to only vile godless, soulless, Chaotic creatures as orks and goblins and demons, etc...at least in my fantasy game.
I mean, D&D is partly an escape from these ugly realities right? Let me dream a little bit!
; )
I was talking about movies, not really books, with that post!
DeleteThe theology point is interesting, but then you think...well, the Colorado militiamen gunning down Cheyenne women and children and then mutilating their corpses in horrendous ways at Sand Creek were well aware of the Christian prohibitions against that sort of behaviour.
Out in the frontier wilderness, the trappings of civilization (and the judgement of society) often fell by the wayside...plus, it was the post-Enlightenment 19th century that saw more and more of shift towards a view of religion = (or near =) to superstition. One can see a correlation between one's detachment from the act of violence (cannon, machine guns, bombs, etc.) and one's detachment from ethical or moral behavior.
DeleteJust sayin'...
; )
I just use orcs and goblins to do some of the things humans do; I think it's a way to make atrocity more palatable by keeping it at one remove.
ReplyDeleteBTW have you read Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature'? He makes a pretty good argument that violence has declined over time, though there are some fairly obvious flaws in his arguments as to exactly why that has occurred.
BTW looking at your examples, it seems notable that many of the Russians' worst atrocities were against fellow Russians!
Which is the big flaw in lumping people into groups.
DeleteYou can say its "Russian on Russian", but I don't think they ever cared about abstract concepts like nationality when it came down to the act. In the end there are only two groups of people. "You and yours" and "Others". Demographic groups you may share identifiable traits with really don't matter a rats ass when its down to primal animal nature.
I've read other books of Pinker's, so I know the body of research he is referring to: rates of murder and violence in hunter gatherer societies are many orders of magnitude higher than they are in modern societies - even very violent ones like Honduras or South Africa.
DeleteI think my intuitive feeling about the reason for that is that in those societies revenge is the only deterrent. If people don't have a legal system to dispense justice if they feel they are wronged, all they can do is hit back twice as hard. And so on.
Regarding the Russians, some of the worst episodes in that Second World War book come in the latter stages, as the Red Army invaded German territory. Millions of Russians POWs of the Germans were released, but usually that meant that all the female ones were raped and the male ones shot or sent to the gulag - by their own liberators.
I like a mix. Monsters let the players tee off guilt free, whereas frequent human opponents turn every encounter into a nerve wracking affair; 'are these approaching torch lights in the dark robbers or potential allies?'. Similarly, the moral reproach is reserved for the other humans that are doing the murder-hobo thing to each other. it's been working pretty well to keep things off-balance.
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ReplyDeleteThis is why I dislike the idea that fictions can have a deleterious moral effect that we should be worrying about: If you can't take a fiction presented as fiction critically and learn from it only what can be logically assumed, how the hell are you going to handle fiction presented as reality (which we see every day in anyone with a propaganda axe to grind) or handle reality itself?
ReplyDeleteIf you can't see that a fictional Dwarf who happens to stand in for people of a given ethnicity isn't a stand-in for all people of that ethnicity, how the fuck are you going to deal with the fact that a real person who acts like an asshole of a given ethnicity does not represent everyone of that ethnicity?
If fiction teaches us to be distanced, that distance is GOOD. Fiction may well have survived as an adaptation because it teaches people to be skeptical and critical of what they see, rather than teaching them what;s what about the universe they live in in descriptive detail.
yes.
DeleteBut fiction doesn't teach us to be distanced. The best and most effective fiction makes us to engage and identify with the characters and the situation. You could equally say that fiction may have survived as an adaptation because it teaches people how to think like other people and understand other points of view.
DeleteEffective fiction, in other words, blurs with reality. It makes you feel as if what you are reading, or watching, or hearing, is real. This is what has a desensitising effect when some people watch a very violent film: it's because they get involved in the situation and, subconsciously, it feels "real" (if it is effectively done).
but then it ends and we are comforted to return to our own small problems. Hopefully it teaches us, at that moment of reflection after our disbelief is re-established, to be more critical and selective in our handling of information and sensations. To distinguish between what we must do in the world and what we can imagine.
Delete...even if at the same time it does unmentionable things to our delicate flower subconscious selves behind the bike sheds of reason. After all, isn't that splitting and doubling of the self exactly what Freud's subconscious is all about - being able simultaneously to feel and to be critical of that feeling?
That presupposes human beings are rational. We're not even remotely rational.
Deleteand yet here you are, critically observing that.
DeleteIn an irrational fashion, because I suspect in the final analysis anyone's opinion on this issue is based entirely on their gut feeling.
DeleteMy notion is based on the idea that fiction has survived in many dispersed societies through the centuries (despite being unnecessary) and so is apparently survival-positive. Also, the fact that when I meet irrational people (who are generally irrational) and they go back and dissect their actions they DO confuse fiction and reality and when I meet rational people, they don't. Or at least are aware when they do. Relentless pragmatism and fact-checking seems fairly common in people who are smart, despite the fact that they devour fiction at an alarming rate.
DeleteI agree that fiction is survival positive, but my own entirely conjectural theory for why that is, is that fiction helps us understand other people and thus get a better handle on how to predict their behaviour; it also probably helps us entertain counter factuals and think abstractly about problems.
DeleteI agree with you inasmuch as I think that the more educated you are, the more easy you find it to critique fiction, and your own reactions to it. I disagree that smart people check facts and behave pragmatically: if anything I think they are better at convincing themselves of idiotic things and then defending them vociferously and eloquently. You only have to talk to any randomly selected Professor of Sociology to realise that. I also don't think that intelligence stops you from having an emotional life that can be influenced without you knowing it.
I don't equate educated with smart at all. I mean smart. I mean: any distance between their goals and their achievements is down to factors beyond their control.
DeleteNeurotically contorted academics certainly do not count as "smart".
@ Zak - You wrote:
Delete"Fiction may well have survived as an adaptation because it teaches people to be skeptical and critical of what they see, rather than teaching them what;s what about the universe they live in in descriptive detail."
and:
"My notion is based on the idea that fiction has survived in many dispersed societies through the centuries (despite being unnecessary) and so is apparently survival-positive."
I would caution that just because it appears with survivors doesn't mean that it helped in the survival. It could be a byproduct of the nature that allows us to survive, maybe in itself slowing us down.
But why argue only "because it teaches people to be skeptical and critical"? Is scepticism and critical thinking a boon to survival, in the sense of survival over generations rather than that of the individual or a coexistent group? What is or has been the cost of scepticism and critical thinking? I'm not sure the jury even has the tools to come back in on that.
noisms sets out an interesting contrast, writing:
"... fiction doesn't teach us to be distanced. The best and most effective fiction makes us to engage and identify with the characters and the situation. You could equally say that fiction may have survived as an adaptation because it teaches people how to think like other people and understand other points of view."
But I think his later point takes us closer, with the final line being more a blend of both approaches:
"... is that fiction helps us understand other people and thus get a better handle on how to predict their behaviour; it also probably helps us entertain counter factuals and think abstractly about problems."
If so, we could go further and say that fiction may provide a drive, or boost to the drives, maybe even a reason to live. That is to say, it could be a means of filtering an order from apparent chaos, whittling the mass of detail down to those that which makes us feel good, or stimulates the parts that can be stimulated, acquainting us with them, or honing them, irrationally. It could be a version of reality with today's difficult bits edited out, or with the painful errors justified as aids to learning. It could be a higher level of communication of concepts difficult to express for us even now, with an emergent direction for better or worse.
I seriously doubt it's _all_ that. Sounds very very very like the logocentric "stories give us meaning" kind of thing that mostly only people who manipulate words for a living would believe.
DeleteWhile I do think predicting behavior and extending the imaginative capacity are survival-positive and plausible uses of fiction, I do not think noisms point about "smart people" was talking about the same thing as me and my point was addressed to that.
I doubt it's all that too, if only because it's unlikely we could get it all spot on here.
DeleteI do think you're unkind to logocentrism though, and to those people you've singled out. Manipulating representations, and not least words, is something you and I could also do, and may do, in that most people presumably need a paying audience for the work they create and have minimal levels of subsistence; if push comes to shove, pliability tends to get useful, and the wider consequences be damned.
Which takes us more or less back to where we started, us being scarier than the orcs and goblins, the wizards with their schemes, the 'bad guys'.
"Neurotically contorted academics certainly do not count as "smart"."
DeleteThey are smart, although they're not wise.
However I would agree that the very smartest ones tend not to be the 'Neurotically contorted' ones. The very smartest tend to have a playful sort of joie de vivre, even though they may be politically far-left also, they have a degree of amused detachment. The second tier ones are still smart, (much smarter than the general population) but suffer from a feeling of inferiority, this results in the certain type Noisms identified.
I don't think it's about being overeducated, Zak. My honest feeling is that intelligence doesn't help you behave more pragmatically or skeptically - I think it's more often the case that intelligence just helps you defend your own irrational beliefs more coherently and eloquently, and thus convince yourself that you are right about something. One of my favourite quotes is by Michael Shermer and goes something like "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending conclusions they arrived at for non-smart reasons". I think that is one of the most accurate descriptions of, basically, the entirety of the Western intellectual elite, not restricted to academics but including politicians, scientists, religious leaders, etc. etc.
DeleteI also don't think that being able to think rationally and intelligently about fiction stops you being affected by it emotionally either - so, to go back to my earlier post, just because you can watch The Human Centipede 2 and distance yourself from it, critique it, etc., that doesn't mean it doesn't also have a desensitising effect on you. (If that isn't too many double negatives.)
Noisms, look at Zak's definition of intelligence. It is highly idiosyncratic. You're just talking about different things.
DeleteZak, there's a difference between being "confused" by the difference between fiction and reality and being subtly influenced by fiction. It would be bizarre if good fiction didn't influence people's thoughts and opinions about all sorts of topics. Once you accept that fiction has the capacity to change peoples' minds, then it seems pretty incontrovertible that fiction can change peoples minds in ways noisms might consider negative (i.e., in favor of more violent solutions to conflicts).
Are you perhaps in an Upton Sinclair sort of a place? "It is nearly impossible to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
How are we talking about different things? I think we're both talking about intelligence. It seems Zak believes intelligence allows you to distance yourself from fiction and critique it, whereas I think that's an illusion.
DeleteZak said: "I mean smart. I mean: any distance between their goals and their achievements is down to factors beyond their control."
DeleteThis seems to me a very nonstandard definition of "smart," and at the very least different from the definition you appear to be using (people with a high level ability to form cogent and persuasive arguments).
Zak's definition is highly unusual but useful. More practically useful than other definitions I've met.
Delete@ richard - The definition fails where smart people don't have goals. It's possible the truly smart don't, at least in the way we generally understand them. Beyond even that, it seems to presume the idea of smartness associates with goals to a significant degree, which if we accept it - and I think many of us probably do - could also be taken as a measure of our often cramped thinking. But a view as nuanced as that Zak's definition avoids, and Zak's accompanying term "neurotically contorted academics" - and the word "certainly" - suggests nuance is something even the best of us can lack when the viscera react.
DeleteThat raises more questions than it answers. How on earth can anyone possibly know whether, and to what extent, the distance between anybody's goals and achievements is down to factors beyond their control?
Delete@Porky: Wittgenstein and Heisenberg have absolved us from discussing what we cannot observe - sure, you can't judge the success with which people achieve their goals if they don't state any. There's an old saw about that, right? Better to stay quiet and have people suspect you are a fool than open your mouth and remove any doubt. ;)
Delete@Noisms: are you saying our tools for assessing human potential are crappy? I'm shocked!
Zak's definition for "smart" seems to map pretty well onto wisdom, rather than intelligence, per se: the ability to avoid getting in your own way and defeating your own goals. If you observe someone actively screwing up their own interests, that's not smart.
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DeleteNot being Gary Gygax, I am unconcerned with the difference between Int and Wis.
DeleteBasically: the degree to which fiction influences your thinking unconsciously is a degree to which you are _unconscious of something_ . Un-conscious: that's one of the things "not smart" means.
Consciousness meaning merely: aware of the self. Intelligence meaning: aware of stuff generally.
So lack of consciousness about something that influences you is a subset of lack of consciousness about you which is a subset of lack of knowledge which is exactly what not-smart is all about.
_
What things to become conscious of? Those that might further your goals (nearly anything, especially stuff about you and your environment).
How to test your smartness? Achievement of said goals.
Now sometimes external factors are going to get in the way of those goals, but evolution gave us brains to get stuff done.
If you can't lift it, you are not strong or something beyond your control is preventing you.
If you can't get it to happen, you are not smart or something beyond your control is preventing you.
@ richard - But then why make goals the measure? Are goals common or desirable enough to justify the choice?
DeleteMaybe to people like us, the kind of people willing to debate what 'smart' means. Goals are at least observable - and more observable of course to people with the appropriate training, especially if they need to justify that training - and they may seem objective enough - to people who need a thing to be objective for the purpose of measurement - but does the real world care what we see or don't see?
Maybe to people like us too the possibility that a thing can be measured is an end in itself, or rather feeds a thing that could be an end in itself, research say, or blogging. The bills need to be paid; the next post won't write itself.
Anyway, why measure smartness at all? We're only discussing it because Zak wrote:
"Relentless pragmatism and fact-checking seems fairly common in people who are smart ..."
which already suggests a question begged, but this was followed by:
"I mean smart. I mean: any distance between their goals and their achievements is down to factors beyond their control."
"Un-conscious: that's one of the things "not smart" means."
"What things to become conscious of? Those that might further your goals (nearly anything, especially stuff about you and your environment).
"How to test your smartness? Achievement of said goals."
Dizzying stuff. The answer to "What things..." makes me wonder whether this might be an attempt to win a game the rules of which are being made up as we go; that maybe a goal was set of persuading us that smartness is precisely achieving goals, and that by achieving that goal the achiever was proved not only smart as we might usually think of it, but smart according to the created measure too. Even the idea of it makes me smile. If so, the game is at least great fun - while it's being played among the consenting.
still @ richard - A line that makes me think we're missing the point - and missing it on a large scale - is this:
Delete"Now sometimes external factors are going to get in the way of those goals, but evolution gave us brains to get stuff done."
Getting stuff done is not the same as planning stuff then getting it done. Evolution as generally understood - currently - is more passive, with variation appearing unintended and all, some or none of it being worn away. There's a more memorable clarification in the penultimate paragraph here:
http://www.slightfoxing.blogspot.com/2010/03/epigenetics-nurture-of-our-natures.html
'Brains' is also a potentially misleading term - the link between the physical organ and the power and detail of its function is still hazy.
Is consciousness the point? Is intelligence? It might look that way to us, in this age of hominid history, to us commenting in this thread. They may seem to be among the most precious things we have, from our perspective, this handful of us typing here and those like us.
As with so much, it could be a merry dance we're being led, albeit by great minds. But I'm betting we're all smart enough to see this possibility, and that if it is a dance, that we are merry and enjoy the motion, that we feel it, and feel it deep. I imagine we are that smart. But how many of us entered this discussion with any specific, measurable goal?
On a related point, re Wittgenstein and Heisenburg, they've only absolved us if we accept their work - in more than one sense - if we let the figurative wave function of theories collapse and allow the superposition to become the one single position proposed. Just one position. One position for a simple world. Right? A world as simple as we seem to need it to be.
If their work is falsifiable, we might never be able prove it right, but we can always prove it wrong - all science is tentative. In fact, one other measure of smartness - if we really do need one, for the sake of argument at least - might be our ability to keep the plates of thought spinning; and if nothing else, when we seem no longer to need any of the plates, that we lift it off and keep it for later rather than let it fall and smash.
Besides - on the subject of observation generally - the possibility that we can't observe a thing surely ought to be our own red rag. After all, isn't the observable world all too easy a field of play?
@ Zak - Re:
Delete"I mean smart. I mean: any distance between their goals and their achievements is down to factors beyond their control."
and:
"Un-conscious: that's one of the things "not smart" means."
and:
"So lack of consciousness about something that influences you is a subset of lack of consciousness about you which is a subset of lack of knowledge which is exactly what not-smart is all about."
A lack of consciousness, in the form of the unconscious - that is, things beyond a person's control, directly maybe totally - could also help close the gap between goal and achievement, rather than only help cause that gap. How often do you lose critical working time towards your targets because you stepped out in front of traffic? Probably not too often. Routines, oversights - maybe parapraxes - and intuitions derived from atavistic or ingrained responses can all be of material benefit, even assets.
@Porky: I'm not in this for a dance or to win anything, I'm merely curious about why Zak and Noisms disagree about whether fiction can be dangerous. The subtopic came up, regarding what Zak means by "smart" and I thought Zak's definition was interesting because it just might yield testable, falsifiable results (unlike many definitions of "smart" or "intelligent" and almost all definitions of "wise"). That is all.
DeleteI now think both guys have explained their positions adequately - at least to satisfy my own curiosity, so I'm out. As far as intelligence/smarts/wisdom are concerned in general, I'm interested in discussions that might yield testable results we could all agree on, but not much in abstract talking about the topics (at least today).
"A lack of consciousness, in the form of the unconscious - that is, things beyond a person's control, directly maybe totally - could also help close the gap between goal and achievement, rather than only help cause that gap. How often do you lose critical working time towards your targets because you stepped out in front of traffic? Probably not too often. Routines, oversights - maybe parapraxes - and intuitions derived from atavistic or ingrained responses can all be of material benefit, even assets."
DeleteInstinctive and unconscious are not the same in the context I am using. I am not using it as a synonym for "autonomic".
You can perform a task automatically without thinking and be unconscious of why you did it or you can perform a task automatically without thinking and be conscious of why you did it.
To return to the whole point of this to begin with: if someone forms a whole argument instinctively and then goes back and can understand why, that's good. If they can't go back and figure out why, that's worse.
In general, instincts and emotions can be very useful--they are smeary shorthands for thoughts and they exist because they Usually Work Most Of The Time (that's how they became instinctual).
DeleteBut not being ABLE to become aware of them and how they work and why can lead to bad places.
You don't have to be self-conscious in the moment, but being able to analyze things after they happened (or before) is useful.
I think about this with respect to my Flashing Blades campaign and the nightmares of the Thirty Years War. I'm not good at horror because I don't really like graphic violence, but I also want to capture the period as part of the campaign.
ReplyDeleteI struggle with it.
Dammit, Noisms, sometimes you write posts that would require a huge essay for me to respond to them properly. And, y'know, actual thinking.
ReplyDeleteSo I wroted you an essay, over here. It only tackles the least challenging strand in what you started in this post - why have monsters?
Just finished Empire of the Summer Moon myself and so have been having many of the same reflections. Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, Noisms.
ReplyDeleteJust think, though, Demons are the ghosts of Nephilim, and Devils are fallen angels. Neither need materialise, and both can affect a mortal creature to act in terrible ways, animal and human alike.
It is more of a horrifying puppet show with all of the inmates shanking each other for the amusement of the captors.
Good thing the gates of hell shall not withstand, as it were...
Interesting thoughts. And I mostly agree with you noisms, as my preferred "flavour" of fantasy is "pure" Sword & Sorcery, and it doesn't need orcs et al. at all. Look at Howard's tales, for example.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I hate most, gaming wise, is the "mellowing" of evil, making it appear almost desirable or at least not completely despicable; like the portrayal of evil gods simply as guys who had a bad day.