My recent podcast with Sridhar raised some eyebrows over at Daniel Stride’s blog, A Phuulish Fellow. Given that Daniel has been a guest (twice!) on the podcast, and that his is a perspective I very much respect, I thought it would be remiss of me not to write a response to his recent entry on Tolkien, Martin, and how I might have misrepresented the latter author. For background, I suggest you give Daniel’s blog a read at the very least, as he summarises my position quite well, but we would naturally love it if you also listen to the episode and give us a follow here and wherever you listen to your podcasts.
It might be good to admit up front that Daniel is right – at least in the sense that if we impute to Martin some of what I said during the course of my discussion with Sridhar, accusations of misrepresentation might be valid. It probably doesn’t help that, at a number of points in the podcast, I refer interchangeably to either ‘Martin’ or ‘Martin’s fans’, not to mention the confusion, never fully addressed in the podcast, between the show and the books that inspired it. So insofar as I was confusing these categories needlessly, well, mea culpa. I do think, though, that a great deal of what I said can at least be taken as representative with regard to how Martin’s (and the show’s) worldview is received by its most ardent fans. Even if we were to stipulate that Martin is not himself a nihilist, nor the books completely amoral in their outlook, certain of his fans certainly take his books to be imputing something like this, or, as Daniel puts it:
Essentially, Martin is presented as serving up and celebrating raw political cynicism, where to imagine that anyone in power might have moral motives is profoundly naïve. Indeed, Reading Tolkien goes a step further, and decries Martin’s lack of implicit moral positioning – A Song of Ice and Fire supposedly treats all humans as a grey and messy morass, which makes it difficult to take a stance, since the baddies are really just a different manifestation of “us”. Reading Tolkien suggests Martin is so caught up in the celebration of amoral Machiavellian scheming, he is not prepared to properly condemn that which ought to be condemned.
Personally, I think Martin does celebrate raw cynicism at times, but that’s beside the point. I would argue that the books (and certainly the show) were received as though they were imputing as much. Perhaps we cannot blame Martin for this, but there’s little that I can see in interviews or through other media that he does to dispel this notion. Quotes like this even reinforce it:
You don't just have people who wake up in the morning and say, "What evil things can I do today, because I'm Mr. Evil?" People do things for what they think are justified reasons. Everybody is the hero of their own story, and you have to keep that in mind. If you read a lot of history, as I do, even the worst and most monstrous people thought they were the good guys. We're all very tangled knots.
Now, this is a pretty famous piece of rhetoric from Martin, and perhaps all it amounts to is a statement about the moral complexity of history, in some sense. No, it is not always easy to draw moral distinctions between parties in a war, say (although sometimes it is), or between two would be claimants to a throne. But the quote seems to be saying more than that, and this is where I come to one idea that I raised in the podcast: namely that Martin fails to cast judgement on any of his characters, and merely portrays them as ‘doing good by their own lights.’ In some sense then, we are all interchangeable. One might want to argue, as Daniel has, that this is a misreading of a more subtle capacity for moral discernment, that he is merely pointing to the difficulty of wielding power morally, and perhaps that’s true on Martin’s part, but in the quote above Martin seems to insinuate that we really do all have the capacity for heinous moral evil, and are therefore in some sense mere moral avatars of one another. I suggested on the podcast that Martin (or his fans) might seek to offer some nuance here by pointing to context. Perhaps it is not that all people are capable of heinous atrocity in all circumstances, but maybe, given the right conditions (i.e. whilst wielding power), we are all inflicted by a kind of original sin which makes it impossible to wield power responsibly. I might even agree with this idea, and agree with Daniel that Tolkien implies something similar.
But to my mind Martin, and certainly many of his fans, extend this observation to questions of meta-ethics more generally. Characters, whether in positions of power or not, must be ‘grey’, which in the parlance of SF over the past ten – fifteen years really means reprehensible; questions of utility must in all, or most, circumstances be irresolvable, and as I mentioned on the podcast, wider moral questions (e.g., which faction deserves readers’ sympathy) should remain intractable. Whilst we might empathise with the plight of the Starks in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, there are few other factions given such comparatively sympathetic treatment, and readers are left to weigh a morass of competing self-aggrandizing assertions made by twisted and generally unlikeable characters, howsoever ‘fun’ their scheming seems from the ironic distance of 21st century society.
Daniel notes that characters like Littlefinger are treated as villainous, at least in Martin’s novels, and perhaps I can agree with this. Still, there is something tentative about it, as though at any moment we might learn some reason for sympathy, some child-sob story that makes Littlefinger’s behaviour rational in light of sufferings endured. Perhaps this is only an artefact of the show’s treatment of the character, and I would certainly need to revisit his literary incarnation in order to make a proper judgement. Even so, I would stand by my original assertion, as put in the podcast, that at least some of Martins’ fans approach the Song of Ice and Fire books as though it offers an essentially nihilistic worldview, one where questions of moral discernment are made impossible by the complexities of human behaviour, and on some level the sheer crappiness of all human beings. It is a kind of bourgeois misanthropy that one sees indulged, especially on some sections of the Left, *cough* Extinction Rebellion *cough*, for whom human lives are a cancer or virus on the face of the earth.
So, I can agree with Daniel that my ascribing certain ideas to Martin might amount to misrepresentation. Perhaps Martin is not himself a moral cynic. But I still think that his fiction, and certainly its reception by some (often very vocal) fans, tends toward a trendy kind of moral nihilism which has manifested in different ways in recent years, whether on the Environmentalist left (at least when moral questions can be applied to human circumstances) or on the alt-right, where it has arrived by way of a more general 4Chan/Doomer culture.
Needless to say, I think Tolkien is a moral realist in all senses, but I don’t think that implies that his approach to moral questions is juvenile. Quite the contrary; a full and balanced reading of Tolkien’s work should leave no doubt that he was an author capable of thinking about moral questions on any number of levels – through character, through politics, by way or virtue ethics or, as Daniel writes, as a deontologist of sorts. Perhaps he was less of a consequentialist than Martin, and perhaps that explains at least some of the differences between their fictions, but I don’t think it captures everything. For what it’s worth, I hope I have provided some clarity without merely restating my position. This is no doubt a topic I will return to both Rings of Power and House of the Dragon face off on our television screens in a few months’ time.