alien and ahistorical moralities

[Mathis Waters]

As inspired by the digression from the communist exploitation lit thread (and, so some extent, the gender thread): what fictional worlds have you encountered where the characters' moral outlook was neither modern, nor the copy of some historical outlook, nor the copy of some historical outlook with enough changes made for the protagonists to be sympathetic?

If the characters were humans, did you find the moral outlook plausible, given their social context?

[Liadin]

Is it possible to create a human society whose values don't resemble the values ever held by any real human society? There's just so many commonalities among human value systems: different societies have different exceptions to "Don't kill people," but how could a functioning society exist without any inhibition against killing (at least, killing members of the in-group)?

And then, every once in awhile I come across a moral principle I don't recognize, but which may well come from some society I'm just not familiar with, along the lines of "Don't kill people with long-range weapons."

We'll need to look to SF for most of the alien moral systems out there. Brave New World might count. Not wholly alien, but intended as a warning rather than a representation of reality.

[Mentat]

As inspired by the digression from the communist exploitation lit thread (and, so some extent, the gender thread): what fictional worlds have you encountered where the characters' moral outlook was neither modern, nor the copy of some historical outlook, nor the copy of some historical outlook with enough changes made for the protagonists to be sympathetic?

If the characters were humans, did you find the moral outlook plausible, given their social context?

It's a good question... but I'm not sure this can be done properly. I read an interesting book (very classic sci-fi, can't remember the title...) where a society of bidimensional creatures living on a neutron star's surface and which live at an extremely accelerated rate (so that many of their generations pass in a year of our time) discover the earth, and try to (and eventually succeed in) making contact with humans. Well, these creatures are relateable. The book was written by a human, and trying to describe the totally alien is like trying to conceive the unconceivable. You just can't. You need to use familiarity to link the reader with what he's reading (or even your own thought).

A society with morals such as you describe would seem completely irrational to us. There'd be no apparent casual link between character's actions. Things would seem to happen at random, as if the author rolled a many sided die to decide what his character did next.

On a lesser level, though, this should be possible. In The Culture, for instance, sex changes are as simple as dying your hair, so your gender would be perceived as a cosmetic feature, and gender dinamics would be non-existant. Self replicating IAs rule supreme and there is no scarcity, so concepts such as politics and economics would be generally meaningless (unless you work in SC...). I think it's impossible to reflect accurately how a person in such a society would think, but since Ian M. Bank's guess is as good as ours, it doesn't really matter, provided we look at the flashy space opera battles and try not to dwell on it too much.

[Mathis Waters]

To be clear, I wasn't thinking of anything as wacky as random killing being acceptable. More like something as different from agricultural or industrial civilization's moralities as they are from each other. The Culture is in fact a decent example.

[Peadar]

I'm always on the lookout for this sort of thing too, as I find it very interesting. Some books that I believe strive to do this sort of thing are:

Brother Termite by Patricia Anthony.

Happy Policeman by Patricia Anthony. You could say she specialized in this sort of thing back when she wrote SF. She's a huge loss to the genre as far as I'm concerned.

Ted Chiang's magnificent short story "Story of your life"

Paul Park's Strarbridge Chronicles with its crazy religious outlook comes pretty close too IMHO.

I'm sure others will come to me :)

[jurble]

The Inchoroi from Bakker's Prince of Nothing books have an alien morality.

[sologdin]

would the outlook of the garuda at the end of perdido street station count?

[Happy Ent]

The Garuda counts, as do the Inchoroi.

But what I would like is a good guy with premodern sentiments.

To throw two ideas out there: I would have liked Ned to routinely spank his children, without him or anybody else thinking anything about that. Because that's what grownups do, and certainly what they used to do in the past. (To his credit, GRRM sometimes comes close to mentioning this. Dunk apparently has been routinely spanked by Ser Arlan.) I'd also like so see wife-beating as a normal, society-sanctioned part of marriage, performed by non-evil people. Did Robert have to feel bad about hitting Cersei?

Or, even more ambitiously, I would like it if Brandon's trip to Kings Landing was to (1) confront Rhaegar, possibly in a duel, and (2) kill Lyanna, in accordance with some Northern honour code. (These codes are alive and well in many societies today. Why not in the Westerosi North?) Ned of course would have taken over Brandon's responsibility and looked for Lyanna. In order to kill her, of course.

(Mind you, my interpretation of the Tower of Joy incident is not that Ned wanted to kill her, and the kingsguard tried to prevent him. But it's still fun to think about.)

But what would be important to me is that an otherwise good character believably follows a pre-modern set of rules in a way that is not used to taint his character. The Inchoroi are indistinguishable from unspeakable evil, exactly because of their extreme hedonism. And the Garuda is even more modern that we are because of the Garudean ideas of choice theft.

[Shryke]

We were having a bit of discussion about this in the "Male Author/Female Character" thread.

I think there's just alot of people who don't like reading that kind of thing. They don't like to read about people who they are supposed to cheer for not being people they can agree with and like. (You see it sometimes with complaints that people didn't like book X because they didn't like the protagonist.)

And it's pretty much down to their political/moral/etc beliefs from the readers own personal lives. Because the incongruities are always things that are still applicable to modern life.

The hero being a monarchist is ok, cause that's just laughable these days.

The hero being a sexist or racist though? That's just not alright. Too close to reality.

Basically, it's ok to be a cool anti-hero who kills lots of people, but it doesn't seem to be ok to be an upstanding honorable hero who beats his wife.

Which isn't to place ALL the blame on the reader since I think many (most?) authors are equally guilty of this too. They themselves don't seem to want to imagine "hero" characters too far outside their own moral compass.

[Mentat]

To throw two ideas out there: I would have liked Ned to routinely spank his children, without him or anybody else thinking anything about that. Because that's what grownups do, and certainly what they used to do in the past.

Yoren spanks Arya at the beginning of ACOK (for hitting some other child with her wooden sword) and nobody gives that a second thought (nor is Yoren really maligned in these threads that I have noticed...).

I'd also like so see wife-beating as a normal, society-sanctioned part of marriage, performed by non-evil people.

Why would you like to see this? A wife beating in a book would make me feel uncomfortable, even if performed by some character we were supposed to hate (Stephen King's IT comes to mind).

Did Robert have to feel bad about hitting Cersei?

Had he enjoyed it he would have done it more often, which would have lead to an early confrontation between Cersei/Jaime and Robert which would have altered the initial status quo in the series. Anyway, whichever way you look at it contemporary books cater to contemporary sensibilities. If an author wants to paint a character as sympathetic it's a temerity to make him a regular wife beater. If you write a series where the fare of women is too bad, you end up with a Scott Bakker scenario where you are accused of being a sexist and alienate female readers (regardless of your actual intentions, as you may portray them, and of the historical accuracy of said fare).

But what would be important to me is that an otherwise good character believably follows a pre-modern set of rules in a way that is not used to taint his character. The Inchoroi are indistinguishable from unspeakable evil, exactly because of their extreme hedonism. And the Garuda is even more modern that we are because of the Garudean ideas of choice theft.

I think this is extremely well done in Rome. Think of Titus Pullo, who bashes an innocent man's skull against a column for wanting to marry the slave he fancies, or murders Cicero in cold blood though he has done him no harm, he's still seen as a very sympathetic character. The way Roman people treat (and dehumanize) slaves is something we (well, I at any rate...) grow used to and quickly stop thinking of how it reflects on the character's character.

[Shryke]

I think this is extremely well done in Rome. Think of Titus Pullo, who bashes an innocent man's skull against a column for wanting to marry the slave he fancies, or murders Cicero in cold blood though he has done him no harm, he's still seen as a very sympathetic character. The way Roman people treat (and dehumanize) slaves is something we (well, I at any rate...) grow used to and quickly stop thinking of how it reflects on the character's character.

Yeah, but I think, as I said above, this is because it's too far outside our normal experiences in modern life to have any real emotional effect on us.

[Happy Ent]

Why would you like to see this? A wife beating in a book would make me feel uncomfortable, even if performed by some character we were supposed to hate (Stephen King's IT comes to mind).

That’s one of my reasons for reading. I want to be in somebody else’s mind. This is why I enjoy GRRM—he does it with Theon, putting me in the mind of somebody who is very far removed from anything resembling my own psychology, and completely pulls it off, and almost pulls it off with Cersei. When reading secondary-world fantasy or historical fiction I want not only to see the vistas. I want the mindset. Currently, Bakker does this better than anybody else. Remember when you were Conphas, or Serwë. What privileges!

Had he enjoyed it […]

I don’t want Robert enjoying hitting his wife. I want it to be utterly unremarkable. Or maybe fret about having hit her in the face. (Mind you, she’s a queen, and from a major house. So hitting her regularly would be difficult for political reasons instead.)

All of this (1) for aesthetic reasons: to improve my reading experience, and (2) for political reasons: to remind myself about the uniqueness of the culture we live in.

[jurble]

Remember when you were Conphas, or Serwë.

Maybe Serwë, but reading Conphas was like reading my journal.

[Mentat]

Yeah, but I think, as I said above, this is because it's too far outside our normal experiences in modern life to have any real emotional effect on us.

Well it is, but it's still very accurate historical fiction, so it's probably more 'inside' our normal experiences than most SFF.

That's one of my reasons for reading. I want to be in somebody else's mind. This is why I enjoy GRRM—he does it with Theon, putting me in the mind of somebody who is very far removed from anything resembling my own psychology, and completely pulls it off, and almost pulls it off with Cersei. When reading secondary-world fantasy or historical fiction I want not only to see the vistas. I want the mindset. Currently, Bakker does this better than anybody else. Remember when you were Conphas, or Serwë. What privileges!

I see what you mean.

I don't want Robert enjoying hitting his wife. I want it to be utterly unremarkable. Or maybe fret about having hit her in the face. (Mind you, she's a queen, and from a major house. So hitting her regularly would be difficult for political reasons instead.)

Yeah, Cersei's maybe a poor example, but again I see what you mean. Again, this is well done in Rome: Mark Anthony rapes a some sort of peasant or washer woman who just has the ill fortune to catch his eye, the troops just look embarassed and the woman just seems to accept her fate and waits for it to end so that she can get on with her business.

All of this (1) for aesthetic reasons: to improve my reading experience, and (2) for political reasons: to remind myself about the uniqueness of the culture we live in.

I think I'd have the same problem with this that I mentioned in the thread which was originally about writing the other gender, and is that SFF rarely delves in the unremarkable. If said spankings and beatings are so much of a routine that nobody thinks about them twice then why wouldn't they be gratuitous? As for Ned wanting to honor-murder Lyanna, that's all well and good, but an author has to remember that we the readers choose what characters we like and dislike, root for and hope die a gruesome death, consider as heroes and antiheroes. If the author's idea is too removed from the reader's, then the book plain won't work.

[Shryke]

Well it is, but it's still very accurate historical fiction, so it's probably more 'inside' our normal experiences than most SFF.

You are missing the point though. Intellectual it's something we can acknowledge happened. But it lacks any serious emotional impact because it's too divorced from our normal lives.

Something like sexism or wife-beating or the like, on the other hand, is an emotionally charged subject for people living right now.

[Liadin]

Something like sexism or wife-beating or the like, on the other hand, is an emotionally charged subject for people living right now.

Which is why I don't think it's an especially good idea to portray heroes who have these values. I think a lot of us fantasy readers would like to see more moral ambiguity when it comes to things that we aren't personally bothered by or passionate about, but when we say something like "I want to see some sympathetically-portrayed slavers" or whatever, we're coming from a position of privilege. It only works as long as the author can convince us to identify more with the perpetrators than with the victims, and people whose life experiences or personalities don't lend themselves to that are going to be horrified, and have every right to feel that way.

Of course, there are things I'd like to see in fantasy too: I'd like to see more sympathetic characters who don't like kids (in particular, mothers who aren't hands-on), and more sympathetic characters who actually want money or (horror!) have ambition. All of which the fantasy mainstream seems to find morally repugnant, although since I don't find them morally repugnant, we may not be talking about the same thing.

[jurble]

Iunno, a hero that was wife-beating, and beat his children would probably turn into anti-hero. It'd be too hard not to keep him from drifting into that. Even if he's portrayed as a great man personally outside of his house, on the battlefield and what have you, like some sort of realistic pre-modern values character, I'd have a hard time not seeing him drift into anti-hero territory. It'd take a really good author to resist turning him (or...her) into one.

Kellhus and the Inchoroi both operate on moralities that are way outside a normal human's frame of reference, but we can deal with them because like Shryke said, they're inherently alien to us. A character so close to a modern soap opera villain, yet portrayed as a hero would just rankle people to the point where they'd probably just put the book down.

[Shryke]

Iunno, a hero that was wife-beating, and beat his children would probably turn into anti-hero. It'd be too hard not to keep him from drifting into that. Even if he's portrayed as a great man personally outside of his house, on the battlefield and what have you, like some sort of realistic pre-modern values character, I'd have a hard time not seeing him drift into anti-hero territory. It'd take a really good author to resist turning him (or...her) into one.

I don't see why.

If you found out Ned hit his children to discipline them, would that suddenly make him an anti-hero?

[jurble]

Nah man, it's not like that he'd be an anti-hero, but that characters that tend to act like that tend to slowly shift into anti-hero-ness. Like Batman. His badass level has accumulated slowly but surely, until it's taken to its logical extremes where he's basically the Night Haunter from W40K. You start to show a good character as having a different set of morals than the reader is accustomed to, and then it just starts to drift.

[Liadin]

I don't know that spanking his kids when they really misbehave would turn Ned into an anti-hero. But, "corporal punishment" on anyone over the age of about 11, whether your spouse or your kids, is definitely problematic. Isn't the idea behind spanking to get the message across to a kid who isn't going to get the message effectively any other way? Whereas, once you reach a certain age, a swat on the butt doesn't make that much difference; you either start actually beating people or you find some other way to get them to do what you want. And I don't think modern readers would, or should, like/respect a protagonist who beats up on the weaker members of his family.