10 ms·

Why We Fight over Fiction

96 points by exolymph 6y ago

exolymph 6y ago
I'm always surprised by what makes it to the front page (this link is currently there). h/t Gwern's excellent newsletter: • https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2021/01 https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2021/01 • https://gwern.substack.com/p/jan-2021-gwernnet-newsletter https://gwern.substack.com/p/jan-2021-gwernnet-newsletter
hirundo 6y ago
We have a built in illusion that morality is discovered, not invented. But our moral flexibility over time is huge, and can encompass things like slavery and genocide. It could as easily encompass farming and eating live babies, or other horrors up to and including human extinction. To the extent that fiction acknowledges and explores such moral spaces it's natural for it to be contentious. Exploring alternative moralities is necessarily immoral to the prevailing morality. A culture of profound tolerance is required for such explorations, and such cultures are evanescent and poorly distributed.
jrochkind1 6y ago
> This helps to explain why we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors. Is this true? I think story-telling has been generally prioritized by humans at most place and times. It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it. But the OP is some interesting ideas, I'm still trying to figure out the implications. > Our moral evaluations of the main big actions that influence our world today, and that built our world from past worlds, are still up for grabs. And the more we build such shared evaluations, the more we’ll be able to tell satisfying stories set in the world in which we live, rather than set in the fantasy and historical worlds with which we must now make do. Hmm. I think some of the best stories help us work out our moral evaluations and build shared ones. This isn't just something that happens outside of fiction and then affects our consumption of fiction -- fiction, for the reasons the OP outlines in fact, is one of our tools for working it out. We build shared evaluations by telling stories. Story-telling is fundamental to how humans make sense of the world, moral and otherwise, but moral too. I think OP would agree? That is in fact why we fight over it, because we know how powerful it is in this area? Not sure. As a devotee of speculative fiction, I'm a bit offended at the framing that it is something we must "make do" with out of our moral confusion. Like any other genre, there is good and bad, but I think at it's best SF can be a notably valauble tool in helping us self-reflect and develop our moral sensibilities, it is in fact a power that SF has particularly. Sure, there's plenty of lazy SF that avoids reflection or difficult questions, but at it's best it has a particular power to challenge in a way that builds new understandings, precisely by inviting the reader to look at things with fresh eyes instead of the comfort of the familiar and legible.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complications that make the answer to most real moral dilemmas “it’s complicated.”
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    I appreciate the compliment, but your analysis makes me worry! The pesky complications that make things complicated is part of moral reasoning, abstracting them away to simplicity can be a dangerous recipe for immoral and instrumentalizing reasoning! I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!
- tootie 6y ago
  It's actually a major thesis of the book Sapiens that the use of fictive language is what allowed Homo Sapiens to become the dominant species. Shared stories helped solidify social groups and allowed disparate tribes to recognize each other. The most important stories and myths are obviously religious ones. And I think to your point, ancient peoples debating those stories with far more fervor than any flame war on a Star Wars forum. I say this pretty comfortably as an atheist but even if you're a believer than at least everyone else's religious myths are fiction.
  - labster 6y ago
    You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits are true in a dialectic sense. Such is life here in Plato’s Cave. Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.
harimau777 6y ago
I wonder if part of the reason could be copyright. In the past if you thought that Beowulf, King Arthur, or Robin Hood should have ended different you were free to publish a version with your preferred ending. Today, our shared cultural stories are owned by corporations who get to decide who gets to tell them.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  The Bible and other holy books aren't copyrighted. Anyone is free to publish their preferred version of the Bible or the Quran. Yet disagreements over the meaning of these texts have been happening for millenia.
  - initplus 6y ago
    I think the metaphor there is similar. The church did not historically take kindly to individuals publishing "their version" of holy texts without sanction of the church.
  - Teever 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure that most attempts to revise religious texts in the manner you describe lead to schisms and death.
  - Andrex 6y ago
    The Bible doesn't self-classify as fiction.
madrox 6y ago
This speaks to me as someone who's critical of many of the hit stories in our popular culture. In the last decade, I've often wondered why our relationship to the future has changed so much since the first days of Star Trek. The easy answer would be to cite all the impending ways the planet is doomed. However, living through the cold war felt, in many ways, more pressingly dire, and Star Trek happened at basically the same time as the cuban missile crisis. In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings. This has the ring of truth to me.
- asiachick 6y ago
  Could it just be luck? Some author writes a hit story. That story influences followers. If the original story was a downer then suddenly there are more downer followers. It becomes a kind of culture or bubble that most people are unaware they're viewing everything through that lens. Further, modern media takes that even further. Plenty of producers, marketing people, people with the purse strings just want more of whatever was popular last year. Which creates a trend to produce more of the same. Yes, real life events are also an influence but similarly, one extremely popular title can influence followers for years/decades. To put it another way, if there was no Walt Disney would there be 150+ famous family oriented feel good animated movies that have influenced so much of our culture OR, would we have some entirely different culture because one artist (or team of artists) works didn't have that particular level of influence.
- smogcutter 6y ago
  Even for its day though, Star Trek was notably utopian.
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  I wonder that as well. When I ask the question out loud, people usually answer "Well, everything looks so much worse now". I don't think that's the real reason -- Star Trek aired as the Vietnam War heated up, during an era of high-profile political assassinations, and it reached mass popularity in the 70s, which no one at the time regarded as a high point. What's changed is that we no longer believe in the future, that the future could be better than the present.
myWindoonn 6y ago
The morality of fictional universes is dictated by how the author constructs the options which their characters might choose. When the characters reflect on their choices and consider the effects of their actions, then they exhibit morality.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  I think you've missed the point of the article, which is that authors usually construct the options in such a way that the morality thereby displayed is ultimately an easy and comfortable one for the reader. The article is a paean to fiction that is uncomfortable and therefore capable of helping us push at the boundaries of our increasingly outdated ideas of morality.
  - myWindoonn 6y ago
    The author and I have different definitions of morality. To the author, morality is only available for humans. However, I subscribe to Pirsig's morality, which means that I believe that atoms are moral too: Their morality is the laws of chemistry. Viewed this way, the typical human is exhorted to "do what they want" (Pirsig's MoQ [0]) or "do what they will" (Discordianism) and the morals which the author is discussing are arbitrary cultural artifacts. Of course, however, Pirsig's morality is neither easy nor comfortable, because it is the morality of pragmatists. To choose to do something is to choose for the effects of what one has done to be real in the world. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Qualit...
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Barrin92 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader. A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.
23B1 6y ago
Kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
monksy 6y ago
Is this a fight or an arguement/disagreement over a story?
skygazer 6y ago
Not addressing the moral relativism of the article, but I’ve seen arguments over dungeons and dragons and Tolkien that share so much in common with religious and political arguments, to the extent that I now suspect political and religious arguments as equally about fictions. Further, once you consider that businesses, money and property are termed “legal fictions,” it is both alarming and impressive how little time and space concrete reality takes in our minds and affairs, comparatively. The rampant falsities flying around the last few years and their diehard adherents made me wonder what percentage of an average persons beliefs are strictly false, but for which there are no negative consequences. In a lot of ways, brains seem to prefer false things, and societies insulate from reality and protect individuals from their false beliefs. Anyway, I suppose the title made me hope for something even more Neo-meets-Morpheus mind-bending.
- qznc 6y ago
  Remind me if Venkatesh Rao where he writes that people over forty are mostly busy organizing meaning games for the young ones. It also connects to Terry Pratchetts Hogfather quote about kids learning the little lies so they will accept the big ones later. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-...
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sriku 6y ago
Based on the title, I was half expecting a treatment of religious texts as fiction and why we fight over them.

96 points by exolymph 6y ago

I'm always surprised by what makes it to the front page (this link is currently there). h/t Gwern's excellent newsletter: • https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2021/01 https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2021/01 • https://gwern.substack.com/p/jan-2021-gwernnet-newsletter https://gwern.substack.com/p/jan-2021-gwernnet-newsletter

hirundo 6y ago

We have a built in illusion that morality is discovered, not invented. But our moral flexibility over time is huge, and can encompass things like slavery and genocide. It could as easily encompass farming and eating live babies, or other horrors up to and including human extinction. To the extent that fiction acknowledges and explores such moral spaces it's natural for it to be contentious. Exploring alternative moralities is necessarily immoral to the prevailing morality. A culture of profound tolerance is required for such explorations, and such cultures are evanescent and poorly distributed.

jrochkind1 6y ago

> This helps to explain why we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors. Is this true? I think story-telling has been generally prioritized by humans at most place and times. It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it. But the OP is some interesting ideas, I'm still trying to figure out the implications. > Our moral evaluations of the main big actions that influence our world today, and that built our world from past worlds, are still up for grabs. And the more we build such shared evaluations, the more we’ll be able to tell satisfying stories set in the world in which we live, rather than set in the fantasy and historical worlds with which we must now make do. Hmm. I think some of the best stories help us work out our moral evaluations and build shared ones. This isn't just something that happens outside of fiction and then affects our consumption of fiction -- fiction, for the reasons the OP outlines in fact, is one of our tools for working it out. We build shared evaluations by telling stories. Story-telling is fundamental to how humans make sense of the world, moral and otherwise, but moral too. I think OP would agree? That is in fact why we fight over it, because we know how powerful it is in this area? Not sure. As a devotee of speculative fiction, I'm a bit offended at the framing that it is something we must "make do" with out of our moral confusion. Like any other genre, there is good and bad, but I think at it's best SF can be a notably valauble tool in helping us self-reflect and develop our moral sensibilities, it is in fact a power that SF has particularly. Sure, there's plenty of lazy SF that avoids reflection or difficult questions, but at it's best it has a particular power to challenge in a way that builds new understandings, precisely by inviting the reader to look at things with fresh eyes instead of the comfort of the familiar and legible.

spoonjim 6y ago
One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complications that make the answer to most real moral dilemmas “it’s complicated.”
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  I appreciate the compliment, but your analysis makes me worry! The pesky complications that make things complicated is part of moral reasoning, abstracting them away to simplicity can be a dangerous recipe for immoral and instrumentalizing reasoning! I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!
tootie 6y ago
It's actually a major thesis of the book Sapiens that the use of fictive language is what allowed Homo Sapiens to become the dominant species. Shared stories helped solidify social groups and allowed disparate tribes to recognize each other. The most important stories and myths are obviously religious ones. And I think to your point, ancient peoples debating those stories with far more fervor than any flame war on a Star Wars forum. I say this pretty comfortably as an atheist but even if you're a believer than at least everyone else's religious myths are fiction.
- labster 6y ago
  You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits are true in a dialectic sense. Such is life here in Plato’s Cave. Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.

harimau777 6y ago

I wonder if part of the reason could be copyright. In the past if you thought that Beowulf, King Arthur, or Robin Hood should have ended different you were free to publish a version with your preferred ending. Today, our shared cultural stories are owned by corporations who get to decide who gets to tell them.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
The Bible and other holy books aren't copyrighted. Anyone is free to publish their preferred version of the Bible or the Quran. Yet disagreements over the meaning of these texts have been happening for millenia.
- initplus 6y ago
  I think the metaphor there is similar. The church did not historically take kindly to individuals publishing "their version" of holy texts without sanction of the church.
- Teever 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that most attempts to revise religious texts in the manner you describe lead to schisms and death.
- Andrex 6y ago
  The Bible doesn't self-classify as fiction.

madrox 6y ago

This speaks to me as someone who's critical of many of the hit stories in our popular culture. In the last decade, I've often wondered why our relationship to the future has changed so much since the first days of Star Trek. The easy answer would be to cite all the impending ways the planet is doomed. However, living through the cold war felt, in many ways, more pressingly dire, and Star Trek happened at basically the same time as the cuban missile crisis. In the context of this essay, our moral future is far less certain. The cold war had an old narrative to it, with easy villains. The world of today makes it more difficult to avoid the nuance. It can even explain why so many AAA game titles fall back to derivative, Tolkien-esque settings. This has the ring of truth to me.

asiachick 6y ago
Could it just be luck? Some author writes a hit story. That story influences followers. If the original story was a downer then suddenly there are more downer followers. It becomes a kind of culture or bubble that most people are unaware they're viewing everything through that lens. Further, modern media takes that even further. Plenty of producers, marketing people, people with the purse strings just want more of whatever was popular last year. Which creates a trend to produce more of the same. Yes, real life events are also an influence but similarly, one extremely popular title can influence followers for years/decades. To put it another way, if there was no Walt Disney would there be 150+ famous family oriented feel good animated movies that have influenced so much of our culture OR, would we have some entirely different culture because one artist (or team of artists) works didn't have that particular level of influence.
smogcutter 6y ago
Even for its day though, Star Trek was notably utopian.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
I wonder that as well. When I ask the question out loud, people usually answer "Well, everything looks so much worse now". I don't think that's the real reason -- Star Trek aired as the Vietnam War heated up, during an era of high-profile political assassinations, and it reached mass popularity in the 70s, which no one at the time regarded as a high point. What's changed is that we no longer believe in the future, that the future could be better than the present.

myWindoonn 6y ago

The morality of fictional universes is dictated by how the author constructs the options which their characters might choose. When the characters reflect on their choices and consider the effects of their actions, then they exhibit morality.

Smaug123 6y ago
I think you've missed the point of the article, which is that authors usually construct the options in such a way that the morality thereby displayed is ultimately an easy and comfortable one for the reader. The article is a paean to fiction that is uncomfortable and therefore capable of helping us push at the boundaries of our increasingly outdated ideas of morality.
- myWindoonn 6y ago
  The author and I have different definitions of morality. To the author, morality is only available for humans. However, I subscribe to Pirsig's morality, which means that I believe that atoms are moral too: Their morality is the laws of chemistry. Viewed this way, the typical human is exhorted to "do what they want" (Pirsig's MoQ [0]) or "do what they will" (Discordianism) and the morals which the author is discussing are arbitrary cultural artifacts. Of course, however, Pirsig's morality is neither easy nor comfortable, because it is the morality of pragmatists. To choose to do something is to choose for the effects of what one has done to be real in the world. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_Metaphysics_of_Qualit...

deleted 6y ago

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Barrin92 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader. A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.

23B1 6y ago

Kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783

monksy 6y ago

Is this a fight or an arguement/disagreement over a story?

skygazer 6y ago

Not addressing the moral relativism of the article, but I’ve seen arguments over dungeons and dragons and Tolkien that share so much in common with religious and political arguments, to the extent that I now suspect political and religious arguments as equally about fictions. Further, once you consider that businesses, money and property are termed “legal fictions,” it is both alarming and impressive how little time and space concrete reality takes in our minds and affairs, comparatively. The rampant falsities flying around the last few years and their diehard adherents made me wonder what percentage of an average persons beliefs are strictly false, but for which there are no negative consequences. In a lot of ways, brains seem to prefer false things, and societies insulate from reality and protect individuals from their false beliefs. Anyway, I suppose the title made me hope for something even more Neo-meets-Morpheus mind-bending.

qznc 6y ago
Remind me if Venkatesh Rao where he writes that people over forty are mostly busy organizing meaning games for the young ones. It also connects to Terry Pratchetts Hogfather quote about kids learning the little lies so they will accept the big ones later. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-...

deleted 6y ago

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sriku 6y ago

Based on the title, I was half expecting a treatment of religious texts as fiction and why we fight over them.