Wednesday 31 August 2022

Chaos and History


To paraphrase Edmund Burke, what separates human beings from flies is that human beings live their lives at the end of a vast chain of culture and tradition that connects them to the very distant past, and which they will pass on to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on in their turn - and perhaps, if they are lucky, even add to. Flies simply repeat the biological lives of their parents in more or less identical fashion. 

To put it slightly over-simplistically, humans have a history and flies do not. 

It follows that if you can eliminate from human beings a sense of historical continuity and any tie to the past then you can essentially abolish humanity as a distinct category - they will be a mere animal species like any other, living out their lives in meaningless repetition of biological exercises. 

This, it seems to me, is the unstated goal of the forces of Chaos, whether in its Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Fighting Fantasy, early D&Dish or Moorcockian guise. Chaos is the pursuit of sheer, unbridled whim - or, alternatively, devotion to the excess of vice. In this, it actively militates against history, culture, and tradition. The goal (or perhaps I should say the byproduct) of Chaos is in other words to achieve Burke's nightmare: a world in which human beings are no different from the 'flies of a summer' except perhaps by virtue of the fact that what they do is a little bit more complicated than mating, buzzing around aimlessly and feeding on shit. 

In case there is any doubt about this, think about Chaos's opposite, which is Law. Law (and here I am riffing on the work of Maurice Hauriou, among others) is inescapably and indelibly historical in the deepest and most profound sense. Most obviously, law is a product of the past; the moment after a law is created it is literally in the past, of course, but more significantly the most basic laws in any society - the prohibition of theft and murder; the enforceability of promises intended to be binding; the remediation of unjust enrichment, etc. - always derive from very ancient rules that are essentially unchanged over thousands of years. And at the same time no law is created without the intention that it should also regulate conduct not just now but into the future, and ideally far into the future - law does not reside in a museum, but continually informs human behaviour like a 'living instrument'. In this sense, law acts to bind the past, present and future of any society which possesses such a concept - the rules which the parents created are binding on the children, and will continue to be binding on their children in turn. It is one of the means by which continuity is assured. 

The existence of law necessarily therefore involves an understanding of history and the continued existence of a culture. Where law exists human beings are absolutely distinct from flies. It therefore follows that Chaos can be understood as the insistence that there should be no law (perhaps I should write 'Law'), and therefore no continuous basis for the regulation of human conduct and the disintegration of the distinction between human and mere biological life. 

So there.

20 comments:

  1. Surprised there are no comments. Great idea/perspective for building an axis of cosmic alignment in one’s game.

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    1. August is a very slow month for blog comments.

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  2. I really like this approach. My friend and I are working in a setting where Chaos and Law have a lot of weight and this article will help to give more substance to this conflict.

    Thanks!

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  3. gods have no history existing out of the time.

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    1. They have personal history (memory).

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    2. Which leads us to one question. Do the Chaos gods have memory? It's said that Tzeentch sees the future and the past, but does he remember?
      Like he sees the past, like we see the present, but he does not know what he did.

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  4. to add to the alignment graph idea, i could see the orthogonal axis being Nature vs Thought: chaos/order derives from history, so these are about intention, with nature being purely instinctual, the latter being purely rational.

    I guess a generic demon would be Natural Chaos, with no history and no consciousness, chaotic hunans would be further down the thought axis, and something like an angel would be natural law, where history is followed blindly and, for lack if a better term, civilizational ideas and practices are followed automatically

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    1. Interesting idea. I would make it Nature vs Reason, though.

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    2. I was grasping for a better word but couldnt come up with one, Reason is definitely much more appropriate

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  5. The idea that Law should be a living instrument is interesting. It seems to me here, that in some ways that law as you depict it here has a great deal of respect for the force of chaos. If the idea of the law is an understanding of history and a regulation of human behavior it seems to me that only in acknowledging chaos can it avoid being calcified - the old idea that disorder and meaninglessness are the mother of order and meaning. The fear of the "lawful" as it were is that if "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," that all will become disorder and meaninglessness - that there will be no recognition or regard for the past, the constant now. The fear of the "chaotic" might be that all will calcify into order and meaning - that it will always be then and never now, that order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming (and have therefore ceased to live). One way to think of Chaos is as the unfinished piece of art (possibilities are still open), and Law the finished work (which may be beautiful but is static). I think when you talk about the law as a living instrument it is really more a Balance (with a capital B) where the two primal forces exist in a complementary state that acknowledge the existence and necessity of the other. Perhaps the true taxonomy for the forces of the universe are balance and imbalance? But maybe those are just different labels for the same fundamental thing we seem to all understand in our souls. At any rate, very thought provoking!

    All that said, I think you are absolutely right about the way Chaos is depicted in the settings and works you've mentioned (with perhaps some exceptions here and there like like the Liber Chaotica) and about what the law (at least the laws of humanity) both are and should be!

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    1. Yes, ultimately balance is necessary - not to get too Dragonlancey about it. The striving for order and striving for change are two absolutely necessay elements for a human society to survive.

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  6. Alignment systems often identify Chaos and Law with gods or elemental forces. I like your anthropocentric approach. A lot.

    I also like that your analysis shows that Law represents humanity's attempts to control, manipulate or interrupt the natural, cyclical, timeless order of Chaos.

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    1. I increasingly like my fantasy to have humanity at its centre.

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  7. I'm reminded briefly that Moorcock made (less famously than the eight-pointed star of Chaos) the symbol of Law the single arrow, pointing up. Only by Law is there progress or growth or a future or a past - to blatantly repeat the original post.

    It occurs to me in writing this that Henchard's will at the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge could represent a victory of chaos, if a rather more sober and glum one than generally seen in Warhammer.

    (The first time Moorcock and Hardy have been discussed together? Who knows.)

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    1. Interesting point! I have barely read a word of Hardy. That's one era of literature about which I have very little knowledge.

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  8. Excellent approach. To add, one could take a ying/yang approach to it too. For how do goblins learn to make a spear? How to gnolls learn how to make an axe? From whence does the hue and cry come in the city? And where do the senseless deaths in the slums come from?

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  9. Law, especially common law, is based heavily on precedent, so yeah, law is history.

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  10. I agree with you on the depiction of Chaos as generally represented this way in most of Fantasy media. Though I do prefer the rather non-human centered Cosmic Chaos where Chaos is a more Lovecraftian thing, what we perceive as the physical laws of the universe are not laws, just how the universe functions in our neck of the woods, if you stray too far, you find the Sea of Chaos the world was born from.
    I do have an affinity for Chaos and I feel an positive analysis of Chaos is lacking in fantasy fiction, though in a lot of fiction does hint at things being more complex than just Chaos=bad.
    I am sorry but I do lift an eyebrow at that Edmund Burke paraphrase. It seems that paraphrase indicates that Edmund Burke thinks humans are superior to flies, which is an Anthro-centric approach. One could satirize that paraphrase Douglas Adams's style. Edmund Burke thought that humans were superior to flies because humans had history, yet fly philosophers thought their species was superior to humans for exactly the same reasons. Humans had history i.e. war, slavery, and meaningless regulation and preconceptions created by some idiot a 100 years ago, while all the fly did was buzz about in the air, having a good time, and making use of other's waste.
    One could think up a fantasy novel about that where you have a species of winged hobos (The flies) who go around living peaceful, liberated lives yet are considered revolting by other species because they use abandoned furniture and thrown away things and another species of wingless giants (humans) who have a tradition of shackling chains around their young. These chains symbolizes their history and Law, who they go to war with, whom they are enslaved to, how they should regulate their life. The conflict and war between Chaos and Law is when someone tries to input the Winged Hobos' lifestyle to some of the Chained Giants in the hopes of the Giants taking off their chains and revealing the hidden wings they have under them, the war happens when the Chained Giants realize this, then wage an war of extermination against the Winged Hobos who they realized are an existential threat to their chained lifestyle. (Not so subtle symbolism, I know.)

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  11. This is a very excellent take on Chaos/Law, and pretty gameable. I'll probably make use of this in the future.

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