sistermagpie | Unconscious moral instructions

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Unconscious moral instructions

lunacy helpfully linked to about five differnt interesting things in her last post, one of which led to this really interesting essay about Ender's Game. I've never read Ender's Game, but the essay is basically about how all of Ender's battles are set up along the same lines in the books, and how this all seems to feed into Orson Scott Card's overriding ethic. The author concludes:

God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It's almost as good as having a nuclear device.

The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It's a good thing I didn't have access to a nuclear device. It's a good thing I didn't grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse-I didn't deserve to be hurt-but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.
We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. ... As Elaine Radford has said, “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special-especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.”

But that's a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card's fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.

I can't really add anything to the essay itself about this book, but was really intrigued by the quote that starts it off--a quote from OSC that says:

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of.

But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

--Orson Scott Card

It's almost too obvious to even say it, but there's always something flat about an author trying to put across a moral lesson in a book, and yet moral lessons put across are often what make books so compelling. The trick isn't in the moral lesson necessarily being good, but just in its being believed on some level by the author enough that it becomes a good story. A sign of that, it often seems to me, is that you're going to get contradictions within that story.

I remember once, for instance, somebody on TORC complaining about Peter Jackson adding certain things to the movies that were disgustingly anti-Tolkien and one of these things was Legolas and Gimli having a contest to see how many people they can kill in battle. Of course everyone jumped in to tell the person that was in the original book--it's something people often remember really clearly. Yet at the same time you could see how this person found it anti-Tolkien: how do you have a climax that hinges on compassion, even compassion for a person who hasn't earned it and is your enemy, and then have these other guys cheerfully picking off the enemy? The answer is probably just that humans, no matter how hard they try and how hard they think about ethical beliefs, probably never live up to them. They just don't always act according to one philosophy. They don't always do something because they think it's the right thing to do, and anyway thinking something is right usually really means feeling it's right, and your feelings aren't always responding to the same things even in similar situations.

Some people find the ending of LOTR to be a Deus ex Machina. I never felt that way. To me what happens to Gollum always seemed logical and inevitable given what came before, and I think part of the reason for that is that Tolkien himself probably feels it that way. So the ending doesn't feel like the author stepping out to tell us boys and girls the moral of the story, it's just part of his story instinct--this is what happened next. It just so happens that the same man who thought that responded very differently to a rousing battle scene where Legolas and Gimli are just good soldiers showing off their abilities. The same man also could have Sam Gamgee look at a fallen soldier and think about where he came from.

The contradictions shouldn't disqualify Tolkien from saying anything about life. In fact, the contradictions are almost what make him persuasive because he sounds so human. It's somehow better that while we admire the friendship of Frodo and Sam we can recognize a romanticized class system. It's part of the realness of it somehow, and it's also what leaves us something to talk about in the story. I'd say that's doubly true for Harry Potter. There are points in the story where Rowling seems to be consciously making a moral point, like when Dumbledore is dealing with Draco in HBP, even though these moral points don't always seem to be reflected in other parts of the book. But that's not to say that Rowling is being herself when she writes Draco as repulsive and enjoys punishing him, then snaps into compassionate mode when she's making a point like a child straightening up when the teacher enters the room. What makes the story work, I think, is that she does seem to absolutely believe in both stances. If a reader sees a contradiction that's our problem as it probably isn't for her at all. (That goes of course for all the contradictions--our choices make us who we are yet Tom Riddle was a sociopath from birth? Obviously not a problem for the author any more than Ender the innocent mass murder is a problem for OSC.)

What tends to hold this stuff together isn't that it always adds up to something ethically airtight. Ethically airtight on the contrary often makes for something less believable and more flat. What puts it across is more how much the author likes to tell a story, so how logical story-wise it seems to him/her. For instance, after HBP it seemed like JKR really loved the story of the young man who joined the DEs but got cold feet later. She wrote it three times in different ways with Snape, Regulus and Draco. In Rowling's case this doesn't seem to be a story of someone who turned out to be "good" instead of "bad" like a DE, more just that this is what happens when she puts a human character (instead of one of the monsters) into that position. Anyway, it seems like Rowling is drawn to something in this story, but is it because of any ethical point? Possibly the only ethical point might be another way of punishing the characters further for being jerks or proving the good characters' superior choices better once again--who knows? What makes the story compelling is I suspect more the persuasiveness of the emotion in the way it's written. As Card might get off on Ender accidentally killing his enemies and feeling badly about it even though it was obviously the enemies' fault Rowling probably gets satisfaction out of Harry's dealings with his Slytherin foes.

And as readers I think we get more satisfaction out of the potential holes in the way it's presented. It's good that both Rowling's and Tolkien's presentations of the world can annoy some readers or strike the right emotional buttons with other readers. In the end what makes something a good story is really that you can't reduce it to what it's saying (I'm still waiting around for something I consider an example of the good guys much "doing what is right over what is easy" in HP), you have to just dump this big pile of story out and say "what do you think of this?" Then let fans go crazy based on what pings them.

Though I will say, having written this I think Rowling is maybe exceptionally slippery in this regard. It really does seem that in places her ideas about different kinds of people trump the right and wrong aspect, so she really does have her good guys be part of the problem without making the bad guys really the good guys. I think a lot of the time it may just be that she gets a kick out of writing bad behavior and isn't always bothered by it as much as other people. I sometimes wonder if maybe in fiction at least she just enjoys letting her inner bully have fun. It's probably not a coincidence that her protagonist's guiding good spirit is the form of James Potter, who seems to be the absolute perfect symbol of bully-who-will-always-be-the-hero, thus the perfect nemesis for Snape, our hero-who-will-always-be-the-bully. It's interesting to me to try to figure just where Rowling is really coming from a lot of the time, and that's what puts me in fandom. It's cool to try to map out those unquestioned beliefs that show up in the writing, even when they're potentially weird ones.

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James Potter, who seems to be the absolute perfect symbol of bully-who-will-always-be-the-hero, thus the perfect nemesis for Snape, our hero-who-will-always-be-the-bully.

Ahahaha, that's brilliant!

A very interesting essay, as always. I don't have anything to add -- I haven't been inspired to discuss or even think about canon.

JKR is fascinating in this regard because as you say, she is so slippery: i'm always reminded of when she referred to Draco as "an imperfect character" and I thought that she'd missed the point somewhat: a believable character is always imperfect, they exist in the grey area, the 'human' bracket. I think this is why she's inconsistent, even though she's often clever: perhaps the ferret scene being the best example. The readers gasped in horror whilst the heroes laughed: They were nearly undone and deceived by their own malice in taking joy in the punishment of an enemy and not recognising the evil that was perpetrated by their aggressor.
You're right of course, we've never seen a good example of our 'heroes' choosing right over easy (except perhaps in Dumbledore sacrificing his existence)but frequently see it in the 'enemy', and the ambiguous. We see it in Bellatrix even, as she trails her sister to Spinners end, surely knowing the danger of being seen to be conspiring against a Voldemort who's already displeased with her.

And as readers I think we get more satisfaction out of the potential holes in the way it's presented. It's good that both Rowling's and Tolkien's presentations of the world can annoy some readers or strike the right emotional buttons with other readers.

Yes, definitely! Its far more satifying to read a book that may niggle, irritate and occasionally offend you rather than one that so decidedly literary and airtight in its conventions. Life is unfair, inconsistent and never predictable - rather like the moral relativism of a good book...

By the way, it's not entirely clear to me what exactly your link-hopping path was - obviously it wasn't the same as mine since I started out making fun of Glenn Reynolds - but if you didn't see it, and you'd like more background behind the 'Ender=Hitler' thing, there's some here.

Thanks for the link! Ender's Game is one of my favorite books--in fact, I met all of my offline friends via OSC's website!--so I've printed out both the essay and your comments to read on the bus tonight. I'll let you know my thoughts.

Oh my, this essay is dynamite. I did read Ender's Game when I was a 7 grader, so this is me reeling. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Back to HP now... there's a lot of weir stuff in JKR's characterization regarding morality, but I'm not as quick as many to think she means her characters always act like rolemodels. However, there definitly are dissonnances. But in a way, I wonder if that's not because JKR excuses (by manipulating the story so as to let them appear innocent and repetent) her heroes less than Card does. Isn't it because JKR lets them take the blame of this bad actions? James isn't actually excused of bullying Snape, Remus of not acting when he should have, Harry of bullying Draco... no greater appeal to their good intentions are made. They are simply flawed characters - which JKR still sees as sympathetic as such.
There's still the Dursleys, alas. Where the shift of blame is similar to what the essay describes (except without feeling of guilt from Harry and Dumbledore... maybe why it appears as more obvious?)

However in many ways, I wonder... how much is JKR pulling an 'Ender' with Snape? At least, definitly; many fanficcers come back from her book writing Snape this way : Of all of the fics which dealt with the issue of Snape's murdering Dumbledore (or other acts commited as DE), how many dealt with the blame of it beyond whether or not he had intention to do them and whether he was loyal to Dumbledore? And of those that don't, how many simply glorified in the amorality of Snape? How many's left? I can think of a few, no more.

Oh! Interesting. I actually did find Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead intriguing, though I don't think I agreed with the morality (from what I dimly remember). Which is to say, I find intention important, but only as a factor, not as the whole. The effect and the consequences also matter. Accidental genocide is still genocide, incidental genocide is still genocide.

Thanks for the link. Very, very fascinating reading.

I think a lot of the time it may just be that she gets a kick out of writing bad behavior and isn't always bothered by it as much as other people.
Haha, yeah, that's pretty much why there's a limit to how seriously I can take it. I can't get worked up about Fred&George or whatever, because the books are just -full- of Boys Acting Badly, like in a cute little 50s movie or something (at the same time there are 'moral lessons' about compassion... it's like two different levels, the child level & the adult level? Something like that). I think it even works for me 'cause I can regress too, though I was more the bullied than a bully, obviously-- I mean, note that the people who tend to have a problem are self-identified Ravenclaws or Slytherins, ahahah. Not saying one -shouldn't- have a problem, but this -is- heavily influenced by temperament, how one perceives/judges these sort of adolescent behaviors.

I mean, I'm not a Gryffindor (...mostly), but I find adolescent boys (or girls), in all their unjustified/wild rambunctious violence and self-righteous youthful zeal, to be... cute. It's a lot more repellent to me in an adult, because one gains experience and stuff by then. When one's 15, it's still inexcusable to be an arrogant bully, but it's a lot less definitive of character-- it's also something about being that age, in that social group (of other boys), especially if they're sporty active boys, etc. Anyway, I think JKR has this sort of affection for the adolescent gittishness of sporty British lads, or something, even as it's overlaid by the 'adult's' perception of ethical boundaries and the need for compassion and all that. I think most people feel and think differently in their ethics-- I mean, there may be convergence, but our instincts aren't equivalent to our higher ideals, obviously, and a lot of times people get zealous about their ideals -because- they're denying what their instincts/memories are saying, too.

I feel that Harry's different though, in her slew of sporty Gryffindor bully types and James and Snape as polar opposites, y'know? He's in the middle-- some of column A, some of column B, and most people (either in the books or in fandom) don't get that duality even though it's central to his nature. Either it's "Harry the victim" or "Harry the aggressor who needs to back the fuck down". I think it's like JKR put the most of her heart/complexity/beliefs into Harry-- he's the most vivid character to me when I read, definitely. Harry does lash out because he feels on the receiving end, but he doesn't go all the way, doesn't just repeat history. It'll be interesting to see what comes of the bathroom incident, but I do think book 7 will be where Harry breaks free of the pattern entirely-- he just has to. Well, has to grow up, leave the world of feckless boyhood behind entirely. Which makes me sad, but. :>

For instance, after HBP it seemed like JKR really loved the story of the young man who joined the DEs but got cold feet later. She wrote it three times in different ways with Snape, Regulus and Draco.

And yet, people like these different characters for very different reasons. For instance: not all Draco fans like Snape; not all Snape fans like Regulus. Despite the fact that all three have the same thematic role in the story, each character appeals to certain readers in his own special way. Even though Draco fans, Regulus fans and Snape fans all relish the DE-who-turned-away story arc;
it's the different circumstances of each, or the personality traits that draw them in. So I guess it comes down to what

lunacy referred to as "different smirks for different folks". Its fascinating to see just what pushes various readers' emotional buttons!

I really like your point about how much better books are when they're a bit ethically messy. When a book insists on a moral on every possible occasion, all the life goes out of the book.

So I guess that the ethical inconsistencies readers find when an author "just dumps this big pile of story out" (I love that!) are a sign of the story's vitality. In Tolkien I think that's definitely true -- Frodo's tough decisions at the end maybe wouldn't seem so tough if every single character in the book had been able to see the humanity of their enemies. To me it makes a lot of sense that two good characters like Legolas and Gimli would make this kind of a bet. If evil characters had done it, that would just show that the characters were evil. Since good characters did it, that shows that goodness is hard in Tolkien's universe, which is much more important and interesting.

Maybe Rowling will prove to be up to the same kind of thing by the time the series is over. It's easy to admire the artfulness of Tolkien's messiness, maybe, because we know how the story turns out, and the implicit ethic of any plot depends so heavily on the ending. With Rowling we're maybe still guessing where she's going to go. I really like the connection you make among the three characters who get cold feet. Maybe the connection will remain just that -- a repeated plot element that doesn't go anywhere. Or maybe the ending will turn this plot element into a quality of evil in Rowling's universe -- it could prove to be the key to Voldemort's weakness if another of his minions (Peter Pettigrew?) gets cold feet at a crucial moment and brings him down.

Hee! This is so strange, because I only read Ender's Game for the first time a week or so ago. I nabbed it off Penelope's shelves, and when she came home I was all 'Now we're going to have over-dinner meta about Orson Scott Card!' And so it was.

I can't see the book as an apology for Hitler, because, uh, the whole plot is as follows 'OMG Can We Possibly Engineer This Kid Into Unintentional Genocide Through Severe Physical and Emotional Abuse'? And if the Weimar Republic was fiendishly pulling Hitler's strings in an attempt to make him slaughter the Jews, well, I feel history should be less silent on the topic. I think it's interesting if Ender's details do conform to Hitler's details, but even that I can see as an author going 'wouldn't it be cool if - but Hitler being a nice kid!' (Ender is a nice kid. He's a total, total psycho, but he's got very good intentions.)

Nevertheless, I also fail to see how anyone could read the books and not go 'OH MY, OSC has terrible problems' right off. Because, uh, really? The homophobia? Not so veiled!

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This dude Bonzo is the only guy we get a lot of physical description for. He's uber hot. Super fine! Ender sees him and wants to follow this beautiful countenance as his leader forevermore.

Bonzo is totally evil however, and plots to kill Ender, and to further this plan they uh. Well, they have a wrestle to the death shower scene! As one does. And then Ender... beats him up till he dies... and then beats up his corpse... some more...

OSC not so subtle on the morality lessons, therefore. I'm not really sure that he can be compared with Tolkien or Rowling, because he is so pamphlety and the world is subservient to my whims-ish. Though actually, for such a didactic book, it is a rather good read.

I find the HP books fascinating even though I usually end up hating most of the message of them. It's because JKR's intentional and non-intentional morality is so complicated and interesting. And usually pretty fucked up.

Yet I'm still stuck on Card. I really wish I had that essay in my hands 10 years ago, when all of my friends were reading him and loved him. I liked the books, too--they are very well written and interesting. But by the end I was annoyed and dissatisfied. I disliked the way Ender always knew what to do, the way he always could pick apart the motives of others and know them better than they knew themselves. It started to piss me off and sounded false. But I didn't have the tools at the time to realize I was being horribly manipulated by the author into accepting false situations. I'm still here cheering that essay because I couldn't have put it into words as well.

Yet I never felt quite the same about Ender's Game. I guess the moral lessons of that book were also pretty screwed up but I had just been watching it from Ender's point of view. I don't think he was a perfect being, the way the book insisted. But I think he was as good as he could be. I think he did the best he could with what he was given.

Hmm you haven't read these so I won't go on and on. I will endeavor to stop now. :)

I read Ender's Game a while ago and enjoyed it. I read the sequels too and I think I saw all the books as raising moral questions rather than answering them. I've never had the urge to re-read them though.

With JKR I think that she likes writing about people, rather than good and evil. So apart from Voldemort, and lunatics like Bellatrix, you don't really have extremely evil people. And the good guys, who she's more interested in, wind up as more complicated and can be good or bad.

I'm not sure I agree with you about Tolkien. When Legolas and Gimli make a bet about who kills more, they are talking mostly about orcs. Every instance of compassion we see in LOTR is about men (like the dead soldier Sam is wondering about) or some other race close to men (like Gollum who comes from a hobbit-like race). It seems that Tolkien has a very clear-cut division between orcs and all the rest. Orcs were created evil - they are like that from birth. Gollum was not born evil, he used to be Smeagol once. Ditto about human soldiers. So, there is no real contradiction.
What really bothers me about LOTR (which I love, by the way) is that the majority of the enemy forces are orcs - evil by definition and therefore OK to kill without any hesitation. This makes the story nice and clear-cut. But I doubt the story would have been so simple had the bulk of the enemy army been humans.

Hey there!

Just wanted to let you know that we're playing that blame game again on my journal here (http://prettyveela.livejournal.com/101601.html), in case you wanted to participate again.

I really think the Hermione/Marietta one is going to be a doozy. :S

Some people find the ending of LOTR to be a Deus ex Machina. I never felt that way. To me what happens to Gollum always seemed logical and inevitable given what came before, and I think part of the reason for that is that Tolkien himself probably feels it that way.

You're sure they were talking Gollum and not the eagles? :P

This is a very late comment, but I've been pondering on your post on and off over the last few days and would like to ramble on a bit about it, and hope you don't mind. I agree enormously with what

lunacy said above. But further on JKR liking bad boys, or a specific type of bad boys, well, I think she likes people, and all people are a bit bad, which maybe will turn out to be important in the end. Is her relish in people - in her characters - really at odds with the purpose of her project, as I think you're saying in your last paragraph? Isn't HP a story whose moral is not some version of 'be good' but rather 'be human'? Voldemort, in his pursuit of immortality by way of murder is denying his humanity. In a way Dumbledore too denied his humanity in devising his plan for Harry. One interesting aspect of the bad or wrong actions of the good guys - or the Gryffindors and Marauders - is that through them we are led to sympathise with the bad guys - to see them as human. Most of fandom gets that Harry needs to understand and sympathise with Draco and Snape before he can vanquish Voldemort, but this is less a question of good and evil, right and wrong than it is of common humanity. The corollary to it would be that Draco and Snape need to understand and sympathise with Harry, or remain forever incomplete.

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