Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics. In Marvel comics, Thor has to be worthy of his hammer, and he proves his worth with moral qualities. But in ancient myth, Thor is a god with powers and motives beyond any such idea as ‘worthiness’.Obligatory quote from Braveheart :
"Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage; so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble."And back to Aeon :
Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime?... The situation is more complex in epics such as The Iliad, which does have two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the world from the other team. They don’t symbolise anything but themselves and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the reason to fight the good fight.Which reminds me of Plato's Atlantis. If you hear about it second hand, you've likely heard it as a morality tale where the gods flood the Atlanteans because of their hubris. This doesn't happen in the original, where the flood is a global natural disaster : it drowns a whole bunch of people, including the Athenians who've fought off the invading Atlanteans. And there are moral tales in the Iliad and the Odyssey, though often different from (but by no means exclusive of) the "us against them" mentality.
Most folklore scholarship since the Second World War has been concerned with archetypes or commonalities among folktales, the implicit drive being that if the myths and stories of all nations had more in common than divided them, then people of all nations could likewise have more in common than divides us. It was a radical idea, when earlier folktales had been published specifically to show how people in one nation were unlike those in another.And yet, there's plenty of modern myths and "folklore", a.k.a. science fiction, wherein there are no good or bad guys. Or there are protagonists with no adversary to fight. Star Trek is full of episodes where the holodeck breaks or a shuttle crash lands. Doctor Who has tonnes of times where something just breaks or some "monsters" turn out to be predatory animals trying to survive. Stargate SG1, in particular, almost always featured aliens who were highly factionalised, with elements of society having varying moral ideologies.
Or consider the legend of King Arthur. In the 12th century, poets writing about him were often French, like Chrétien de Troyes, because King Arthur wasn’t yet closely associated with the soul of Britain. What’s more, his adversaries were often, literally, monsters, rather than people who symbolised moral weaknesses.See books by Dan Jones on how Arthur was originally a Welsh hero fighting off the oppressive Saxon invaders. As for monsters, well, didn't they symbolise a declining pagan era ? And we've got tonnes of modern monsters which are just simply monsters, as well as ones where they symbolise something deeper.
When the Grimm brothers wrote down their local folktales in the 19th century, their aim was to use them to define the German Volk, and unite the German people into a modern nation... Von Herder and the Grimms were proponents of the then-new idea that the citizens of a nation should be bound by a common set of values, not by kinship or land use.Well, I'm not sure it was entirely new, though it may well have been novel at the time. The Roman Empire managed to incorporate many different cultures and values, yet clearly defined its own citizens as being Romans while everyone else was a barbarian. Though, perhaps this is an exception that proves the rule : IIRC (it's been I while since I read the Aeneid), Aeneas is much more of a modern hero than the those of the ancient Greeks.
Bad guys change their minds and become good in exactly the same way in countless, ostensibly folkloric, modern stories: The Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), the Harry Potter series (1997-2007). When a bad character has a change of heart, it’s always a cathartic emotional moment – since what’s at stake for a character is losing the central part of his identity.Yes, but this is to read LOTR by itself without considering the Silmarilion, which is absolutely chock-full of protagonists who are good, evil, somewhere in between, and often just defined by which race or faction they belong to rather than their (often whimsically) transient values.
Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. Their values feel like morality, and the association with folklore and mythology lends them a patina of legitimacy, but still, they don’t arise from a moral vision. They are rooted instead in a political vision, which is why they don’t help us deliberate, or think more deeply about the meanings of our actions. Like the original Grimm stories, they’re a political tool designed to bind nations together.On the contrary, perhaps good/evil narratives are so compelling precisely because they have far more moral sophistication than the earlier trope of having characters act almost at random (see, in particular, the Mabinogion). These stories don't just "feel like morality", they express the author's idea of morality and definitely arise from a moral vision. That makes them intrinsically much more interesting. Yes, they may also contain a political element : but politics and morality are not so easily separated. Stories are the means by which we examine our own values and teach them to others. One may fairly question whether the "us against them" standard is a good way of doing this, but I don't think it's fair to ascribe all such narratives as purely political tools.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil
I guess I’m on the other side of this one: I agree with the broad thesis but not the details: the propagandistic messages of Hollywood blockbuster movies are depressingly consisent and have prominent hooks for fascists to hang onto - so much so that we’re several steps past self-parody and into territory I can only describe as “operatic” these days.
ReplyDeleteObjections in detail:
1. there have been several generations of movies now and lumping Thor:Ragnarok in with Snow White or The Great Dictator is like insisting Gregorian Chant must be basically like Rock n Roll because they’re both music. The critique that movies promote simple, tribalistic morality is heard everywhere in Hollywood and is played with in big budget scripts. The relationship between a script, its writers and the audience is as complex as anything in Homer.
2. it’s often said that nationalism is a 19th century invention but rarely explained how it differs from earlier forms of solidarism. To claim it’s novel to base a polity on a shared moral sense is to forget the history of religions.
3. one common nationalist trope is that origins are lost in antiquity: things were always thus, the nation is eternal. This article repeatedly refers to “folklore” that “was always” or “was never” and then cites specific texts from the 12th, 19th and 20th centuries as though they were all parts of the same eternal object. The contention is (ahem) not demonstrated.
4. Arthur’s been British at least since 12th century Geoffrey of Monmouth.
en.m.wikipedia.org - Matter of Britain - Wikipedia
The debate at the time was partly about who else was British - we know Chretien de Troyes as French because Troyes’ national status was worked out over the next 2 centuries. The larger point is, history is contingent and propaganda stories use its characters to suit current ends. And obviously so does this article.
Probably I don't have enough knowledge to say something certain here, but I remember that various heroes of the past, from Iliad, Odyssey, and even begining of the medieval era, was mainly a persons with abilities. They identified itself as part of the thread just choosing his side. For example Odyssos persuaded Achilles to get part of Greek army against Ilium. He persuaded to his as a hero who want to be remembered because of his brave and abilities. There is no persuasion to his religious or moral feel.
ReplyDeleteIn ancient times people frequently fight for gold, wealth etc. It was business which part of conflicts do you choose, and even if you changed party, it was not moral values connected to this happening...
Richard G I actually think there may be something in this, I'm just unconvinced it's true rather than convinced it's not true. I'm a little unclear what the claim it's trying to make here is. Is it supposed to be that there's simply too much black-and-white storytelling these days (I give that some reasonable credence) or, as is my impressions, that there was been a qualitative and quantitative shift away from the older style towards what the author considers to be a more modern, simpler style (I'm less convinced of that - I don't think it can be properly answered without numbers) ?
ReplyDeleteI accept that stories can have a powerful influence on society, but I'm a long way from the implication that deliberately fictitious stories are driving a nationalistic fervour. If there's any single root cause of that, I'd point the finger far more in the direction of the journalists turning facts into fiction. I do think it's a very interesting idea, though.
It's perhaps also worth mentioning that several notable rebellions against Rome did experiment with nationalism, e.g. Boudica and Armenius. They weren't very successful, mind you, and were perhaps more against Rome than pro non-Roman, but there was an element to it.
Kazimierz Kurz I think you're spot on with Achilles and the other Greek heroes : they were very distinctly called heroes only because of their abilities, with nothing much relating them in terms of morals. The same extends to the gods, too. They were pretty much just very powerful humans prone to extreme vice and pettiness (note that Plato explored a far more sophisticated theology, but AFAIK it never caught on in the general public).
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor in those times, concept that someone may be "incorrect God's" believer, that is she believes in God which is incorrect was not known. It was a very few monoteistic religions, Zoroastrian, and Jahve cult among them, which probably take such ideas and take very dualistic world view. Most people of the time, and most barbarians later ( for example pagans in medieval era, Slavic nations for example or Celts) have a lot of Gods, and accepted other culture Gods and natural phenomena ( I am believer of Perun, You are believer of Wodan. It is completely normal everyone has its own Gods.).
ReplyDeleteIt was a matter of fighting Christianity which changes a lot of this relations during conquer of new areas.
So there are several complexities to the issue that the article barely brushes against - like the real message of a work is hardly ever stated up front but is left as an exercise for the audience (it's more powerful that way, because it feels like a truth you've figured out for yourself). Or it's an assumption in the background, something all the characters take for granted and build their plans around, so obvious that it doesn't need to be stated (so that the viewer likewise accepts this assumption or, if they can name it and see it directly, so that they wonder why they are deficient, not like the rest of the characters up there on the screen). And then the stated message that gets repeated in every film turns out to be a continuo line through a publisher's works, a thing that each individual content creator has to work around.
ReplyDeleteFWIW I agree with the one point it makes - that supposedly moral contests are really tribal contests in disguise. I'd add that most movies aimed at teen audiences dramatize some threat to the status quo and victory consists of restoring that status quo.
I can't assess whether the gamut of fiction has become more or less moralising over time and neither can the article's author - we'd have to decide on defensible criteria and then get hold of a representative sample of stories. Arguing from a couple of sources regarding what they don't do limits the claims that can be supported.