Mike Mearls, Moral Philosopher

I recently came across this video on t'internet. In it, Mike Mearls does his best to look very serious and thoughtful while he talks about alignment. But what he has to say is not only devoid of anything resembling insight; it tells us a great deal about some particular problems that lie at the heart of modern D&D as I see it:

The crucial section of the video comes in at the 2:30 mark. In it, Mearls advances what we might call the Raistlin-from-Dragonlance Gambit. Here, I paraphrase slightly:

'In the vastness of the D&D cosmos there isn't one right answer...the way I like to think of it is this: what if Mount Celestia, the forces of law and good, just conquered the entire cosmos. Well, they're lawful and good, they'd expect everybody to be lawful and good. So the chaotic good people would be the last ones into the prison. That's kind of how I think of it. Any alignment that gets out of hand would start doing things that the other alignments would see as awful.'

Mearls has a look about him - one might even call it an aesthetic - that seems carefully cultivated: part hobbit, part nerd, part college professor, part scientist. And he speaks eloquently. If one were 14 years old, one might indeed take his ideas to be worthy of attention. But the vision of moral reality he here advances is, I hope it goes without saying, rather silly. It suggests that all of the different D&D alignments are just, in essence, differences of opinion. And therefore what matters is not one of them winning or losing the cosmic conflict, but that they are all kept in reasonable balance. 

We find this notion appealing in some sense, because, being inhabitants (largely) of democratic polities where it is recognised within reason that a plurality of viewpoints and ways of life need to co-exist peacefully, we feel as though indeed it would be bad if one viewpoint or way of life was forced upon literally everybody. And this idea has been bleeding into D&D for a long time: I think Planescape, with its factions and its eternal struggle between infinite planes defined by philosophy as much as geography, was probably the apogee of this strange conflation of real world politics and fantasy world cosmology.

But you just have to think about it for 10 seconds to realise how silly this idea is when transposed into a fantasy setting: real-world political differences arise because different people have different ideas about what is best - in other words, because everybody thinks themselves to be basically lawful and good. Our differences are therefore between competing conceptions of the lawful and the good. They aren't differences between people who are actually good and people who are actually evil (despite what much of modern political discourse, as shrill and perpetually outraged as it is, would have you believe). 

The alignments-as-differences-of-opinion model which Mearls advances, in other words, is not really an alignment system. It's a political system. Nothing wrong of course with a fantasy political system - designing such a thing is an interesting experiment of the imagination. But it's different to an alignment system, which is predicated on the actual existence of good, evil, law and chaos.

The Mearlsian way of thinking infects a lot of modern fantasy (Mearls keeps citing Game of Thrones as his exemplar, and he is right to do so). No doubt this is because modernity is increasingly defined by a rejection of the idea that there are such things as good and evil (let alone law and chaos), even if we unconsciously still hold quite closely to their existence (just witness the debate on both sides of any issue concerning deeply held convictions, such as abortion or euthenasia, if you need evidence of this). But it is not a remotely satisfying or inspiring way to concieve of an actual cosmic conflict. 

The inspiring way to imagine cosmic conflict is that it matters: that it is winner-takes-all. And the only way to sensibly understand that is on the basis that there is in fact such a thing as law and such a thing as chaos, and/or such a thing as good and such a thing as evil, and that they represent not differences of opinion but irreconcilable and antagonistic oppositions between competing approaches to reality. Chaos is the hatred of law and vice versa; evil is the hatred of good. And it matters deeply which side wins, because existence itself is at stake in that question. It is not that the final victory of lawful good would be that everybody has to be lawful good or be sent to prison. It is that without law and good, chaos and evil will triumph, and that will mean the complete destruction of anything and everything that is founded in law and goodness: love, family life, commerce, cooperation, friendship, and all the rest. That is what I think a truly inspiring descripion of cosmic alignment conflict would really require - not balance, but eternal, tooth-and-nail struggle. 

This is why in recent years I return again and again to the position that D&D somewhere took a deeply unattractive turn in its 'humanisation' of orcs. The result of this was the reduction of the distinction between alignments to what is basically now an aesthetic choice: my character is a bit zany and hippyish so he is chaotic good; mine is selfish so he is neutral evil; mine is sadistic and nasty so he's chaotic evil; mine is a pedant and a stickler for rules so he's lawful netural; and so on. This is a recipe for blandness (although since this. of course is what 5th edition seems to be all about, perhaps that is the point). A reality defined by the existence of actual cosmic conflict is a thousand times more interesting. But to describe and embrace it as the 'proper' way to think of alignment you would have to accept that the aesthetic choices of some players ('But I really want to be an orc!') would have to be overridden.

The only really sensible approach, I think, if you want a relativistic universe, is not to have an alignment system at all - a perfectly justifiable proposition, and far superior to the unsatisfactory half-way house that we have arrived at. Either make alignments matter, or don't - and if they don't, do away with them entirely.