This is the first of a possibly continuing, irregular series of moral musings. Part of it was brought about by the usual miscreants poking me and asking “hey, why don’t you do THIS” and it strikes me as worthwhile, because ultimately that’s what storytellers deal in: the good, the evil, the sin, the punishment and the redemption.
Stories are imperfect vehicles for a moral vision, of course. Much easier to just throw it all out as commandments but I don’t even climb mountains much and the last time I saw a burning bush was the Colorado wild fires – in other words, I don’t have any moral authority and can’t order the world around. Not and have them obey. And those that do and have an army… well, hopefully I’ll get around to covering that under the shades of “evil.” So, stories are all I have.
And before someone brings religion into it (further) let me establish at the outset that yes, I’m a believer. Some of you even know what I believe in, and some of you know what I struggle with. Those of you who know are friends and those who don’t know don’t need to, because, here’s the thing—
When I face the world at large, which is what I hope to do with my stories, I’m not dealing only with a sect of people who believe what is written in a book or a set of books. I’m not dealing with people who accept one law.
We are, whether you like it or not, a plural society when it comes to belief. Probably still majority Judeo-Christian but the infinite shadings of those make things a little fuzzy around the edges. (Okay, very fuzzy. As fuzzy as Havelock when he hasn’t been groomed in a while, and that cat is a Turkish van.)
I do occasionally read fiction intended for a Christian and/or Jewish audience. Mostly since I got a Kindle and the ability to download. My requirements for it are exactly the same as any other story. It has to carry the load of the story and make me feel the good/evil/horror/redemption/etc. without recourse to a single incident/moment which is entirely religious-law based.
I don’t know if I’m making much sense here. It’s not that I don’t share the beliefs in those stories (most of them at any rate. My background is definitely Judeo-Christian as are my beliefs) BUT that for the story to have an impact it needs to do more than point to the law and go “And he was a good person, because—”
Look, I have this issue with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. I was never as confronted with how views of morality have changed as when reading it last time. In the book it is very clear that not only do the characters believe in life after death, but that the passage through Earth is a sojourn. This is clear because the solution to the sinning character’s infraction is not the one that would make the rest of her life (possibly sixty years or so, since she is a very young woman) and that of her co-conspirators “whole” in the sense we’d think of it: i.e. getting to marry again and hush up the scandal, but the one that costs her, her family and everyone around (except the rather odd couple who gets pushed together by this) the most, but prevents – probably – giving a bad example to others.
If you want a view into two completely different sets of morals and into how much society has changed on that, read Austen’s Mansfield Park and Heyer’s Venetia back to back.
I will confess my view of it is closer to Heyer’s. While I trust in life after death, I believe in forgiving and making things as whole as we can on Earth. Perhaps that’s a lack of faith. It probably is, but I’m not going to go there or get lost in those particular weeds. The point is that Heyer’s story, while also about sinning and repentance and ultimate redemption will reach a modern audience much faster than Austen’s (unabridged. If you’re going by the movie, you’re not even close to the original book.) It’s more understandable to the rather pragmatic sense of good and evil we’ve developed in a society where people have highly individualized beliefs. In fact in some of Mansfield Park (the theatricals!) one often feels like they’re playing from a rule book that’s hidden from us.
All this to say that because rules change, it is not a matter of whether I believe a book of rules or not. It’s a matter of whether I can communicate that book of rules to the audience I hope to reach without making them go “Oh, come on now. You’re just preaching to me.” Or “You’re playing inside baseball.”
Is it possible? Oh, heck yeah. Look, most of the code of honor by which Ancient Greece played is now opaque to us, but their plays still grab us and make us experience what they wanted us to, if not in the exact way they wanted us to, then not very far off.
My middle schooler fell in love with the classical Greek playwrights before he had the slightest notion what was at the back of it (which he’s still studying.) [Of course being an engineer by inclination, his attention was immediately diverted to seeing what mechanical contraptions they used for staging the plays then studying how that influenced the plays themselves. He wrote a paper about it, that’s lying around somewhere.]
So, it can be done. And in my opinion it is the job of the story teller: to make the reader/viewer experience emotions so strong that the story becomes a part of him or her.
If you think on how false memories are created — how it’s possible, through vivid story telling, to tell a story that people believe they’ve experienced – you realize how important a tool the storytellers have at their fingertips (literally) and what I mean, in the long run, that the storyteller have not only a good notion of good and evil, but also of what is good and evil in his society. The first will give force to the narrative, the second will allow it to reach its audience.
And so we go back, way way back to the first notions of good and evil. And let me tell you, children, they had it easy back then.
When you’re the story teller to a tribe of a hundred people or so and you all have the same taboos, then all you have to do is violate that taboo, and oooh. Power.
Therefore you can make a story about how Oog went into the forest at night, which is a taboo, and everyone immediately feels Oog’s daring, his sacrilege and is then primed for redemption and punishment.
The first morals, in either human society or in individual humans development are group-based rules. Because we’re social animals, that’s our default mode. “Evil” becomes what would get us cast out of the tribe. If you think back, really far in your life – say if you’re one of those people (yeah, I am) who has memories before the age of six or so – you’ll remember the first few times going outside your family and experiencing a change in how things are done as a sort of moral violation. Say your friend’s mom folds the dish towel “Wrong” – you’ll experience as strong a sense of revulsion as if they violated a moral rule. (Having been raised mostly around/by my paternal grandparents, when my poor maternal grandparents agreed to house-and-Sarah sit for a few months while I was in high school and my parents were away, I was a pain in the neck to them mostly because everything my maternal grandmother did was subtly “wrong.” Nothing major, but just out of kilter, and since we were in my parents’ house, I experienced all of it as a violation of rules, from the way she boiled milk, to the way she did dishes. I hope where she is she has forgiven me for being sullen and nasty beyond even the bounds of teenager behavior. At the time – and for many years after – I had no clue what made me so cross with her. But it was that “violation of how things are done.”)
Nowadays… not so much. Not when you hope to reach an audience of millions. (And more so with kindle and a worldwide audience.)
You can still work with the rules of your tribe/your received handbook, but you’d best use the story to convince us why that is indeed evil. And you’d best learn to distinguish the important, big Good/Evil questions from the ones that are merely the rules of your tribe.
This might present even more of a problem if you are a post modern kind of person, because they’ve gone around the other way and don’t seek moral justifications for their internal taboos, just enshrine those, so that they become a tribe of one and “evil is what violates my principles.” There’s danger there because, say, if you are a fervent green type of person, you’ll experience SUVs as evil and you’ll totally fail to explain the taboo to someone like me who lives in CO (four wheel drive) and who often transports large/heavy furniture. This increases the chances your book will get deleted and/or thrown against a wall, depending on the format I’m reading you in.
So, where do you go to find the source of Good and Evil, if you discard the simple answer of “to this scroll” or “to that rule book”?
How do you connect to it? How do you connect it to your reader?
The ancient Greeks still connect, so clearly there is a way to do it.
Where is your tree of Good and Evil?
(…to be continued. And religious in-fighting in the comments will be met with a baseball bat to the forehead. I’m writing a novel, so keep the screaming to a low roar, please. And, btw, I’m not saying I have any definite answers — this is by way of being an exploration for me as well as for, hopefully, others.)
According To Hoyt 
I go to myself and my experiences. I’ve read various religious works, but I take them for what they are – wonderful books when read prayerfully, but not something that means the same to each person.
A novel I intend to publish in a couple of years called Salvation Day is big on the themes, although hopefully without being too preachy. The key is to weave it into the story and not lecture. To have to allude to the moral and allow your readers to draw their own conclusions, even if they’re different from yours.
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Do you have a baseball bat hard enough for Dragons? [Wink]
Seriously, I think C. S. Lewis had some interesting thoughts on this in his _Mere Christianity_.
One thought he had was “what’s more *evil* something that causes you harm by accident or something deliberate that fails to cause you harm (you spotted it and avoided being harmed)”.
IMO any thinking person should ponder these and other questions about “Good and Evil”.
Like Sarah, I don’t claim to know all the answers.
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What I found very interesting (in light of Sarah’s question) is how, in _Mere Christianity_, Lewis tried to address this in the context of Apologetics in the chapter, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.”
In that chapter Lewis points out that no matter how different human cultures can be, some things _cannot_ be virtues because they are counter-group-survival (for example, cowardice.)
So while I don’t belive that we can be completely reductive, we can start to look in that direction.
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I have very early memories, going back to diaper age. I do not remember the sense of wrong that you do. Then again, though I have a personally developed moral code, I have always been somewhat amoral
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I have very early memories too.
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My earliest memory is before my sister was born … one year and 13 days after my birth. So it is possible it was before my first birthday (Mom and Dad are not sure themselves of when it was). Oddly, I rarely had the “wrongness” reactions Sarah talks about throughout life. I wonder what was wrong with me often times throughout life, on the other hand.
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I’ve been thinking about this, and I suggest that it’s possible that the strictness of the adherence to a particular way of doing things, combined by the person’s own level of need for order in their life to avoid cognitive disarray would be a strong influence in this feeling.
I use as an extreme example (without making any connections to anyone here, so don’t throw anything at me), autistic individuals. Many of these need very high levels of predictability and order in their lives, or they can become very disturbed.
As far as memories go, I have few memories before the age of 10, but I DO remember feeling a sense of wrongness, pretty much in ANYONE else’s house.
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A lot of us SF/F people are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I don’t think I am and I have a love-hate relationship with routine. There are things I don’t like messed with. My morning routine, for instance. I can change it, but once it’s set up, I want it to stay as is. My brain in its low-caffeine mode just can’t cope with the unexpected. when a morning paper was part of the routine, I could have the day ruined by a late delivery. OTOH part of my problem with honest workTM is that I hate going in and doing the same thing every day. (Something my job never puts me at risk for. Well, superficially, but not really.) I like to be able to say “I’ve done word count, I’m going to take the rest of the day off and go to the art museum.” Mind you, it rarely happens, but I like being able to.)
I think the “wrongness” thing — and my earliest memory is of being taken outside in my crib when I was less than six months old (we traced it by a song I remember in conjunction with it — might require a very stable infancy/childhood and perhaps a family who — for whatever reason — does routine things in ways that are very different from the surrounding culture, both of which my family met. (Though my maternal grandmother’s ‘different’ ways had more to do with her house lacking modern conveniences. My mother had adapted to doing things a certain way given a much more comfortable house, and grandma had no idea. Also, she unwittingly interfered with my morning routine by being asleep when I left for school, which meant I had to tiptoe and make no noise — truly, my levels of resentment were unwarranted, and I must have been evil enough that they never volunteered to stay with me again. From then on, even if totally alone for weeks, I was left ALONE. Mom might ask that I have a friend over to spend the night, but that was about it.)
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Oh – I was mostly talking about routine at a young age, rather than later. As for the routine at work thing, well, work is for the most part impersonal, and routine at home is very personal. Besides, you might think that you didn’t like a work routine, but if someone came along and tried to get you to change the routine, THEN would be when the problems came along.
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I was struck by your feelings when you stayed with your grandmother. Those “subtly wrong feelings” that drove you slightly hormonal.
Anyway it reminded me that at that time I lived in a home where nothing I did was right so it was a relief to go to my grandmother’s house (my dad’s mother). It was so different. It was so quiet. I didn’t mind washing dishes for my grandmother. But in my own home I resented every dish. Of course by the time you finished handwashing all the dishes it was time to start making the next meal and then wash the next group of dishes… and so forth. (There were ten people plus whomever my parents invited to stay with us. It could get crowded.)
As for the major evils– our society has had a few shocks in the last century. I am sure that there has been some great genocides between tribes (it still happens in Africa today) before the twentieth century. However, we had supposedly gone beyond the need to kill others for their beliefs (or use of resources.) Then Hitler exterminations, and Khmer Rouge, and even China– Somalia– etc.
When I was in South Africa I used to talk to an old Army guy who patrolled the northern South African border. Some of the things he told and had seen were pretty awful … how some tribes killed and mutilated their enemies.
But I just saw a recent evil– a young girl who has two mothers decided that their child should be a lesbian. The girl because she didn’t want to have any trouble took another girl to the prom. (I am not saying that homosexuality is evil, but what the mothers did next is evil in my opinion.) When she met a boy, and liked him, it ruffled their feathers. When she decided to leave home and go to college, they cut off all monies (they said because she wasn’t going to the college they chose), all communication, and took away the car they gave her for graduation. They called the parents of her boyfriend and told them NOT to feed her. And that she needed to learn a lesson.
The girl has risen to this occasion. She is working. She is finding other ways to pay for college. She is NOT going home. She contacted her father whom the mothers wouldn’t let her see after she turned 13. For the first time she is having a good relationship with an adult.
So in a way an evil is turning her into a responsible adult. It doesn’t make the mothers good though.
Some evils help… most hinder… it is hard to say when we should intervene either as individuals or as a nation. I do try to intervene when a child is involved though. It doesn’t always do good because in our State the child is given back to the offending party more often than not which is very discouraging.
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Actually, I see a need for another great genocide :( The Islamic way of life has declared war upon the western way. We cannot win without some equivalent of genocide because their way includes lying being good, so long as it is used to further their religious aims.We are left with only two options as I see it. Genocide against a way of life, or eventual destruction. There lies true evil because if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us. And if we destroy them, the act will probably destroy us. I weep for our future as a species
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Hmmm.
The BIG Evil. The one everyone can agree on.
Can’t think of one.
So . . . how about one that a majority of cultures can agree on?
Well, as you say, we’re social animals, so the biggest evils would be those that are dangerous to the whole group.
So, never fail to bar the gate when night falls.
Or lock the door. Throw the dead bolt before going to bed.
That just doesn’t sound like a bad enough sin . . .
Okay, we got killing people, generally in the form of Thou Shalt not Murder pretty much pervasive in the Christian regions. But that leaves an awful lot of leeway for legally killing people. And a history of sacrifices and infanticide and governments disappearing people or starving them or . . . Right, so what ought to be a Big one, doesn’t seem to be there, in practice. That’s . . . a bit disturbing.
The multicultural aspects are important, as I realized as I signed my books up for Amazon.com’s entry into India. A population roughly four times the USA’s, even with only 12% or so speakers of English, that’s like adding half the population of the US to the pool of “has easy access to my books.”
You know, maybe I ought not have made the only character clearly identified as “Indian sub-continent phenotype” so unsympathetic . . .
Or will she even seem bad to readers of a different culture? Will the really, seriously, Bad Characters seem bad, or just “That’s how employers behave, it beats starving out in the country?”
Hmm. Guess I’d better go lock the door. I think that commandment will stand, and I am a sinner.
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“The BIG Evil. The one everyone can agree on.
Can’t think of one.”
I submit to you that killing other human beings for the purpose of eating them is considered EVIL in all cultures.
A few killed people to sacrifice to gods. Maybe one in South America ate parts of their most revered dead after they had died of natural causes. But, I don’t think that we have any cultures that eat themselves and still managed to exist as a culture.
There are probably other things of that level of repugnance that fit the BIG Evil description.
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Actually killing and eating ones enemies has a long history among mankind. There have even been cases where it was acceptable to kill and eat a fellow tribe member in order to gain his strength. Nope, doesn’t pass the test, though it comes closer than most
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A long history, I’m afraid, which was to a considerable extent invented by credulous anthropologists. A lot of the reports of ritual cannibalism turn out to be based on, ‘Oh, of course we don’t do that, that would be utterly wrong and disgusting, but you should see this other tribe over the next hill. . . .’
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well, prions seem to make it unlikely a lot of cannibals would survive.
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Thing about evil is that while we would like to think that because it is evil we would naturally not do it, this is sadly not so. Unfortunately people have a way of justifying their own behavior, so that they may even acknowledge that it might be generally wrong, but in their case it was acceptable.
Warning I am the child of a lawyer –
Like the difference between rectangles and squares there is a difference between killing and murder. If, by defending a child from an attacker using the least force possible, I still render that attacker dead have I committed murder? Would concluding that what I had done in this case was not evil, even though someone was killed, mean that any other taking of lives is not a great evil?
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It is evil, but sometimes we must do evil to achieve good as in your example of killing the attacker of a child. I am reminded of the training a soldier gets in bootcamp and beyond so that he (or she) can kill. I read somewhere that they have to break down and build up because it is such a taboo to kill in our society. It may have changed with this new generation… or not.
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Evil is what you do to me, not what I do to you. What I do to you is justified.
Soldiers have to surrender their power of judgment of Good and Evil, subordinating to higher authority.
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However “I was just following orders” is not a defense anymore.
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This is why we train our troops, in particular our NCO’s, on our own rules of warfare.
For instance. If you’re doing an assault on an enemy position and are under no orders to secure prisoners, you sweep through, shooting even those that are down. However, when you come back through, you are required to treat any remaining alive as POW.
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Excellent point. Given that an evil may be need to be done to prevent another evil, life begins to get complicated. No wonder that young people get so angry as they move from a simpler world understanding to one more aligned to what is actually on the ground.
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Another factor in the good evil balance, moral beliefs about the relative value of life. If you rape my Grandaughter, you had better hide and pray. Her quality of life is more important that the value of your life. This isn’t just revenge as some may think, it is also seeking justice in a land where we have a legal system, not a justice system. If I found such a scumbag, would it be murder? In this country , maybe . It would be legally murder but, if I had a jury made up of parents, I might walk.
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Hmmm I want to read the boy’s paper! (Seriously.)
I would say Evil to me is being forced (not coerced but forced) to do something against your will; except that this falls down almost immediately as I’ve never met a baby or a cat that liked being put in the bath, especially the first time. Cat’s and babies can learn to like it, but not that first time.
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Hmmm. In “the novel,” the reader first realizes just how evil the villain is after his actions push another character into doing something that inadvertently kills a whole lot of people. Yes, she took the final step and yes, her grip on sanity is loose, but the villain’s actions and diktats drove her over the edge. And then his greed nearly finishes what she started.
To me evil is both selfishness and deliberate malice. I’ve mentioned before that one reason Navajo Skinwalkers are treated so seriously is because everyone knows that the witch knows the rules, knows the consequences for breaking them, and chooses to do so anyway. That gives the Skinwalker a great deal of spiritual power, albeit of a very negative kind. And much that I would call “evil” is selfishness, to the point that the evil individual destroys a person who spurns, excels in some way, or otherwise refuses to submit to the evil one.
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Most definitions of Evil involve a form of destructiveness, yes. Certainly it is expressed this way in Ayn Rand’s work, and it isn’t as if she has problems with selfishness.
There are times it would be useful to have common agreement on sin and vice. Nowadays people who fret over such things are decried as puritanical, but there were reasons Envy and Gluttony made the top seven list. Nowadays all we get are twaddle like sexist, racist, homophobe, conservative as if those were self-evidently bad things, without any rationale as to why they are double-plus ungood.
When you write a story, make your characters real and eschew “black hat” “white hat” simplistic signalling. That means, do not tell us your character is in a white hat (is gay, is female, is Aryan) and avoiding all character development; give us the character’s thoughts and reasoning.
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While I haven’t actually read Ayn Rand’s work, I have read about how she talks about “selfishness” being a virtue, but I would argue that in today’s parlance, at least, a better term would be “self-interest”, leaving “selfishness” to be a term for someone who cares for their self-interest without regard to its impact on others. Thus, getting “all the traffic will bear”, while a bit mercenary, is yet merely self-interest, while taking something that is someone else’s just because you want it is selfish (taking it to give to another without the owner’s permission is also selfishness, in a way).
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As an example of putting a black hat on your character, consider Frank Herbert’s depiction of Baron Harkonnen in Dune. Sloth, gluttony and pedophilia — might just as well put a neon “BAD GUY” arrow pointing at him.
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Though I haven’t reread Dune in mumblmumble years I seem to remember that it was homosexual pedophilia. A recurrent theme for bad guys. I wonder why it is almost never hetero pedophilia
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decadent Roman Emperors
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Mao was a hetero pedophilia (got that info from a professor who left China as a young boy during the revolution)– Of course that is Eastern – Romans and Greeks … well more our history … etc.
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I am aware that the Romans tended to prefer that perversion, I just know that abusing a little girl would anger the typical American as much. And that make me wonder why it is almost never the black hat marker
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Mostly because we all grew up on stories of decadent Roman emperors.
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A homosexual pedophile is not only outraging a child, he is grooming that child to become a copy of himself. A man who rapes little girls is not in a position to teach them how to become women who rape little boys; the situation lacks symmetry.
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I think if you insert a moral component into that statement, or limit it to adults (defining adult as one capable of moral actions; that is, actions based upon moral imperative, capable of distinguishing between Right & Wrong) you may have the beginning of a working definition. Cats and babies are amoral — which is not to say they are incapable of being mistreated.
Evil in this definition becomes a matter of corruption, then?
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Keep it subtle, Sarah – of course. If you’re not subtle, the intended victims of brainwashing (ie, our potential readers) will notice what we’re up to, and put the book down/throw it against the wall.
Even when rearing children, subtlety helps.
The best way to make a point is to show, don’t tell: create characters. Make them sympathetic. Show the consequences of their choices; make those consequences both believable and moral (according to whatever moral points you want to make).
If you do it well, readers will at least have a good chance of agreeing with you that your morals have value. If you’re clutzy at it, only those who already believe (your choir) will agree with you, since you’re preaching to them.
Hide the pills inside chocolate.
I once made a list of the moral themes in the WIP, and found myself listing over 20 things I believed are true. A worldview, if you please. Not one of these is explicitly stated anywhere (phew!) – all of them affect the outcome.
That’s both the fun of writing, and inevitable: you write what you are. Fortunately, it is also complex enough to allow all kinds of interesting characters and their stories: every character I write has gobs of me in there somewhere, so I can truly get into their pov to write them. They are not ME – and they are not the complete ME – but they have a chunk. In one sense, the characters are a reenactment of my own inner struggles, an attempt on my part to give credence to the value of all the different ideas, but the resolution of the story has to be what I truly believe, and that should show.
On another level, is has to be very entertaining – or no one will get to the end to find out if they agree or not with the worldview.
Kind of part of the fun, isn’t it.
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Having a moral view inevitably puts the characters in ethical quandries, forced to choose between competing moral imperatives. Sure, it is cheap tension, but it helps keep your stories from dissolving into grey goo.
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I experience SUVs as evil because of how so many of them behave on the road, personally. Alongside the folks who do need some feature or other of an SUV, there are the people who bought them because they’re BIG. And those people tend to cut in traffic, run red lights, and generally behave like jerks. Jerks in really big vehicles.
They stand out. Even the best of them are opaque in a way that smaller cars aren’t.
(‘Round here in northern New England, Subaru four-wheel-drive works as well or better than that of a top-heavy SUV. *beth huggles her wagon*)
Mind, I haven’t trusted white cars in general, either, after Hellride ’91 or whenever that was. The Georgia Spitter nearly running me off the road, without even glancing in their rear-view mirror, left an impression. So White Cars are Evil Until Proven Otherwise, And I’m Keeping An Eye On Them Just In Case.
(And for anyone owning a white car… I’m terribly sorry. I hear they can be re-painted, though. ;) )
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The SUVs themselves aren’t evil, though often inappropriate, the owners OTOH…
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well… I didn’t say I WASN’T evil. My car is okay, tho.
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Excuse me, some of the owners. Forex, a resident of Idaho who lives 15 miles from the nearest paved road is simply practical, The idiot that lives in an eastern city and never sees pavement rougher than the mall, and thinks that because he bought a huve vehicle he is better/moreimportant than other drivers… The same thing can be said about any expensive or inappropriate vehicle owner, to some extent. After all, some people just love X
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We live in the city. Paved roads. BUT you’d be amazed how fast/bad the weather can turn in CO. Which is why the sine qua non of boys’ cars is “four wheel” and SUV (small if we can) is useful when you’re a college student and might have to move in it.
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The issue is not so much the vehicle as it is the apparent assumption that other, lesser vehicles don’t matter.
Besides, we all know that SUVs are merely male competition over penis size, and you femmes that drive them are expressing penis envy. ;-P
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Nah. though I’ve been accused of driving with what I DON’T got ;)
actually if you’re a nervous driver — I am — the SUV gives you a leetle more confidence and might make you safer.
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I’ve been told I’m an idiot for not having one where I live. Then again, our hills are so close and many so steep that even that doesn’t help when the weather gets very bad. They close school here for a half inch of snow, or a threat of freezing rain.
I’ve always wondered about the whole “compensation for lack of endowment” thing about muscle cars and big trucks. I’ve never understood how that would work, psychologically. Then again, most psychology doesn’t make sense to me, at least the explanations of why people do some things.
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4×4 and good ground clearance can be Very Nice during the winter, even if you never drive in the county, if you live where you get snow and ice.
I just had to get a new car since my Lada broke down in a way which would have cost too much to repair. Well, new only as in something I didn’t own before, it’s over two decades old Toyota Corolla. Seems to work well, was very, very cheap. No ground clearance to speak of. I’m going to be royally screwed if we get any snow to speak of this winter, considering that I have to go to work before the snow blows usually start working here. I got stuck a couple of times with that Lada too, and it had a much better clearance.
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Hmm, country, not county. Cat decided she wanted to play fetch the toy mouse, I throw it, she brings it back, up to the top of the bureau half of the times. I never tried to teach her that, by the way, she figured it out herself (servant throws the toy again if I bring it back to her, hey, fun!).
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Don’t you know that most SUVs come pre-packaged with DEMONS that POSSESS the otherwise innocent drivers, urging them to make the lesser cars scatter? They are Vehicles of DOOM! Fire, brimstone! Damnation!
Quick, buy a *beth browses* Chevy Spark! They’re cute, and surely don’t have any demons. ;) (Not sure about their rear window visibility, though; that’s a major gripe of mine about recent car designs. It’s like they think no one wants to, y’know, be able to look out the back and see if they’re running over a kid or not.)
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It is a manufacturer’s ploy to sell you on the back-up camera, which provides a rear view video feed to a dashboard monitor (and any potential court orders pertaining to your actions while driving — what? you think they don’t retain the data?)
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If only more of the “teeny porthole out the back” cars had back-up cameras! Yeeeeeg.
*clings to her Subaru wagon s’more, which has pretty good rear visibility*
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Visibility? Did someone say visibility?
http://www.sff.net/people/dburkhead/Cars/miata.htm
Just sayin’
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Somebody also said, crunchy? ;)
We have different definitions of visibility, you look at the convertible with the top down and think it has great visibility. I look at the fact seat is a couple inches off the pavement and think, “ok, he’s almost low enough to see UNDER my truck, man the visibility sucks in that car!”
By the way, I have driven a Miata, they are fun to drive on an empty road, but are terrible IMHO to drive in traffic. There are two main reasons for this, one the complete and utter lack of any visibility past the closest cars to you, and two the small size causes those jackasses that Beth mentioned to try and push you around in their Expeditions and F350s and Silverados :)
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For three years I drove a Sedan in Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs is a city of SUVs. Not being able to see ANYTHING drove me back to an SUV.
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Funnest thing about driving a Miata? Winter, driving past the Suburbans and SUV’s that have slid off the road and gotten stuck. (With it’s balance, the Miata in skilled hands is actually a surprisingly good car in the snow so long as you have real snow tires on it–“all season” radials won’t cut it.) Now, I wouldn’t want to use it for that in the mountains but here in the Midwest?
On a practical level, I did do some studies of the Miata’s crash survivability. Based on actual accidents involving Miatas it’s again surprisingly sturdy for its size. Yes, being wrapped in an extra thousand pounds of steel is more protective but the Miata isn’t bad. Yes, there’s less protection in a rollover but given the Miata’s low CG rollovers are very rare. As a counteracting point the maneuverability, responsiveness, and handling of a Miata mean that, well, there was a great BMW add once involving a driver having all sorts of obstacles suddenly appear and avoiding them with the tag line something like “one safety feature is to redefine what constitutes an unavoidable accident.”
Of course, that’s all “in skilled hands.” The Miata is the “Free Enterprise” of cars. You really have to take personal responsibility for your won safety. ;)
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Oh! You mean they’re like Evil Guns, which possess the owner to go out and cause mayhem?
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Sooo, what does that say about my Chevy Silverado pick up? It is much bigger than an piddly SUV.
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I was thinking the same of my Ford diesel. ;) Although I have owned a couple of import cars as work cars to drive to work in the summer (great gas mileage), I have always hated them in traffic, and never understood all the people who wanted a little lowslung car to drive in the city. I always preferred four wheel drives (usually compacts) to drive in traffic because you set up and can look over top of all the crunchies (like the Spark ;) ) to see what is happening up ahead. Or when pulling out onto a street with parking on the sides of the road you can see over the parked cars to actually see if there is someone coming you are about to pull out in front of. Granted I need a four wheel drive for where I live and what I do, but even if I lived in a city in a warm area, and didn’t have a use for a four-wheel drive, I think I would want something like the Toyota Prerunner (do they still make those?) which has the height of a four-wheel drive, without the cost and maintenance.
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I drive an expedition. It ain’t piddly.
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Yes, I never thought a 3/4 ton or 1 ton diesel would be what you want to drive in traffic; until I tried one, now if I have to go to town, my Ford is my first choice of vehicle. An expedition sits almost as high, for many of the same advantages, although it doesn’t have quite the unobstructed rearview of an empty pickup, mine seems to always be loaded so it has ZERO visibility out the back window when in traffic. That is one of my big gripes with drivers ed these days, THEY DON’T TEACH PEOPLE TO USE THEIR @#!%$ MIRRORS!
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or their turn signals, etc, etc…
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The ones what annoys me are the ones who don’t know what my turn signals mean. (HINT: they are NOT an invitation to “speed up and close that gap in the lane to the side on which my signal is flashing.”)
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YES! And THEN they give YOU the finger. It’s like “uh?”
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Yes, whenever I would ride with my dad I used to regularly hear the comment, “look at that, a brand new car, and the turn signals broken.” ;)
The other thing that really annoys me is the idiots than don’t know to dim their lights when following someone at night.
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Yeah, but when we got it fifteen years ago, the kids would have protested about being strapped in the pick up bed. PARTICULARLY in snow. :-P Now I think about it, they STILL would.
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Yes, and 4 or 5 people in the front seat of a truck isn’t exactly comfortable. (Unless one is me, and the other 4 are women)
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I’d be happy to teach people how to use their mirrors, side and rear. The community’s proctologists would probably vote me citizen of the year, too.
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My dad hates everyone driving while wearing an Irish Cap (which, mind you he wears one — consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds) because “they’re idiots until proven otherwise.”
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I would point him in the direction of one Dr. Dick Berggren, and one Sir James “Jackie” Stewart….
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It is not so important, as a storyteller, to preach Good from Evil, I think, although failure to distinguish between the two creates grey goo.
What matters is what the characters believe Good and Evil to be, and how that drives their actions. The best known instance of such storytelling is probably Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries, where key information and motivations are hidden in cultural blind spots.
Failure to recognize the motivators of behaviour can be a particular problem with Historical Fiction. Any narrative of America’s founding that fails to understand what the Founders meant when they spoke of maintaining a good character … fails.
N.B., our esteemed hostess has previously expressed this view in regards to Regency Romances in which the characters act according to contemporary mores.
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Culture is often what we fail to notice, what we take for granted as normal and proper. Even so slight a matter as whether to have Turkey or Ham as the centerpiece of the Christmas Dinner can create dissonance. (Besides, everybody knows it should be Lamb, and it is Christmas Supper, served midday.)
At one time being deemed Educated was a matter of knowing and acknowledging the rules of polite society: which fork or spoon to use, how to take one’s seat, the proper etiquette for sending a thank-you note or sympathy card, and millions more. Knowledge of Science, or Mathematics or Engineering or Law was deemed far less important than knowing how to properly wear a tie, and when.
They may well have been right, too. I can make an argument in favor of them, surely, based on recognition, acceptance and conformity to social conventions being the most important part of taking a place in a society. OTOH, it can lead to attending Church because it is expected of one, rather than for the purpose of communing with one’s Deity (which, admittedly, in some “contemporary” faiths is possibly a less good thing.)
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lamb — nods and yep on the time…
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Lamb? Supper? Tisk, tisk. Goose, dinner, shortly after mid-day. With dressing, not stuffing. Stuffing just gets greasy. Lamb before February? *muttermutterbarbariansmutter*
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Heretic!
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Well of course stuffing in a goose would be greasy.
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I had meant earlier to include this in the discussion of morality consisting of abiding by a culture’s rules and rituals. (But what if the culture is EVIL – wouldn’t violating its rules be Good?)
Sadly, the Cyril Ritchard version does not seem available on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXR-XnYm-KI
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Ham. On Christmas Eve. And through the next week. The last bits on a pea soup on New Year’s Eve. Yes. Not proper Joulu otherwise.
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It is obvious to me that ecumenicism is being carried too far. Jihad must be declared on all those defiling the holy day of the Saviour’s birth through false celebration of the event, mocking the arrival of the incarnate whatever the heck he was.
And after we get the folks eating the wrong meat at the wrong time, we go after those singing the wrong damn carols in the wrong languages. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is a vile mockery of Adeste Fidelis and this must be avenged.
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Hah! Just try. :p
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Not one mention of roast beef! You are heretics. ;-)
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Evil is found in the seven deadly sins. As explained here: http://www.deadlysins.com/sins/index.htm
Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.
Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.
Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.
Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.
Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.
Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.
Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.
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Seems to me, in almost all novels, at least one of those attributes is held by the bad guy, and the good guy (or girl) has opposite POV attributes.
Combine a few, and you have real Evil, such as we see in the world around us today. However, there is the contra-evil, or Cardinal Virtues.
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http://www.deadlysins.com/virtues.html
The Seven Contrary Virtues:
humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence
The Contrary Virtues were derived from the Psychomachia (“Battle for the Soul”), an epic poem written by Prudentius (c. 410). Practicing these virtues is alledged to protect one against temptation toward the Seven Deadly Sins: humility against pride, kindness against envy, abstinence against gluttony, chastity against lust, patience against anger, liberality against greed, and diligence against sloth.
The Cardinal Virtues:
prudence, temperance, courage, justice
Classical Greek philosophers considered the foremost virtues to be prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Early Christian Church theologians adopted these virtues and considered them to be equally important to all people, whether they were Christian or not.
The Theological Virtues:
love, hope, faith
St. Paul defined the three chief virtues as love, which was the essential nature of God, hope, and faith. Christian Church authorities called them the three theological virtues because they believed the virtues were not natural to man in his fallen state, but were conferred at Baptism.
The Seven Heavenly Virtues:
faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence
The Heavenly Virtues combine the four Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude — or courage, and justice, with a variation of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. I’m still researching the origins and popular usage of this formulation.
The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy
Continuing the numerological mysticism of Seven, the Christian Church assembled a list of seven good works that was included in medieval catechisms. They are: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, minister to prisoners, and bury the dead.
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And fortunately, most of those virtues are still part of our world today. I don’t know any religion, short of Satanic worship, that does not practice those very virtues in one form or another. Good VS Evil is innate in our human DNA. Not group think, not have and have not, but familial and cultural in conception, Good is always the goal of most, and to end Evil is instinctive.
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Gluttony is not merely “an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.” It can also entail an excessive sensuality. It is expressed equally in eating the perfect chocolate truffle as in eating a pound of chocolate truffles.
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True, modern times makes gluttony a much more serious sin. After all, back in the day, folks were lucky to eat enough that they weren’t hungry one day in seven.
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It is a wonderful world where the president can dine on wagyu beef ($150 – $300 a pound) and attend fundraisers where he and his spouse can dance beneath a quarter-million dollar champagne fountain.
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oh please, don’t get me started on how much a loathe king zero and his wifey. . . I spent four hours on line dealing with folks who make the kool-aid.
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At one early point in Christian history, despair was listed as a deadly sin. TO despair meant that you had given up on G-d and denied that He had the power to aid you. Which feeds back into pride, “by which sin fell the angels.”
Then for a lighter note there’s Modred’s “Seven Deadly Virtues” from the play “Camelot.”
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Actually, despair is still listed as a deadly sin. What is usually mistranslated ‘sloth’ in English is in Latin acedia. It is not about physical work, but about keeping up moral effort. The Catholic Encyclopaedia has this (in part) to say about acedia:
‘A man apprehends the practice of virtue to be beset with difficulties and chafes under the restraints imposed by the service of God. The narrow way stretches wearily before him and his soul grows sluggish and torpid at the thought of the painful life journey. The idea of right living inspires not joy but disgust, because of its laboriousness.’
Despair is, in this context, a subcategory of acedia, which involves the abandonment of all hope that the ‘painful life journey’ can ever be accomplished.
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I agree, and that was how I was taught about despair and sloth. Not Catholic, though. LDS.
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Rats! I forgot to add something, mucho sorry for the double post. From same website. (a million out there, but I like this one. PLUS it has a wonderful reading list too.)
Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins
Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, one of the most influential figures in modern social and political activism, considered these traits to be the most spiritually perilous to humanity.
Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without Sacrifice
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He should have also thought of pacifism without guts. (Sorry, against ANYONE else he’d be “that stain on the pavement” — and his amoral insistence the Jews should have marched into the ovens and achieved “moral victory” over the Nazis is an example of being kind to the cruel and cruel to the kind. He is one of those people it’s fashionable to admire but whose feet — it seems to me — are unbaked clay.)
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Half-baked, I think.
His logic regarding Jews & Ovens makes perfect sense if he truly believes in reincarnation. Which is one reason I do not believe in reincarnation. Reincallalily, OTOH, intrigues me.
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Reincarnation — if it happens, I’ll be considering it again, but for now, assume not… ;)
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I keep saying that if there is reincarnation, I wan’t to be a small chihuahua with my landlady as the owner. She buys special jerky for them … Yumm ;-)
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Really, you two: When discussing the Holocaust, is it *really* a good idea to use any “Baking” metaphors? >;)
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Such a topic should always be leavened with humour, as elsewise all we have is the horrorses and the bitter, Herb.
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“man laughs when he’s too sad to cry” — Robert A. Heinlein
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Darkness knows no laughter because it cannot see beyond its own shadows. We laugh because we know that somewhere the Light still shines.
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Never said I was a believer in Ghandi. But his words dove tail with all issues of good and evil. You can’t get something for nothing and love one another resonates with almost everyone.
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Agreed – the issue is not the moral wisdom he expressed (in this instance) but his moral authority.
I daresay that even Hitler and Stalin had at least one or two utterances with which we could agree. After all, the question of “How many troops can the Pope muster?” is reasonable, and few doubt that “a million deaths is a statistic.”
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Sorry, that was probably unwarranted force. a) it’s one of my hot buttons. b) I’m testy today.
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Happens to all of us. I had a rotten afternoon too. But life is good after a nice moonlight ride on a summer night followed by a vanilla milkshake from Chick fil A.
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Interesting, as with all other moral codes, while the boomer laud Gandhi they pick, chose and interpret the meaning to suit themselves.
Pleasure without Conscience? O, please do not get me started on how this one is being treated! Leave it to say that we have a lot of people who want to have their cake and stay skinny, and that is the least of it. That it looks desirable and you want it neither makes it right or renders it pain free. There are consequences to choices that just cannot be avoided or nullified.
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Hrmm….
When I first finished the article, I was thinking I’d just have to go with “I know it when I see it”. Now that I’ve had time to read down the comments and think some more, I think I’ll go with:
part 1: violating the rights of others (life, liberty, etc). And I mean *rights*, not the silly “I have a right to not be offended by crappy youtube videos” variety.
part 2: the kind of character/beliefs/whathaveyou that creates no compunctions at violating the rights of others (waaay down at the root of which you are likely to find one or more of the entries on that list of 7 deadly sins up there, gone out of control).
That’s nowhere near a complete definition, of course, but I think it’ll do for a starting point.
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dadgum. forgot to check the notification box.
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Every culture has some flavor of a relative handful:
Don’t murder your own kind (what varies here is the rules where it’s permissible to kill one of your own, and how wide the definition of your own actually is – Western cultures were the first to extend the definition to all humans, and are still the most consistent at keeping it there).
Don’t mess with other people’s stuff (for a definition of “people” = “your own kind”).
Don’t diddle close relatives (even animals have this one although not so strongly – cats won’t mate with littermates if there are unrelated cats around).
Don’t lie to other people.
All of them foster group cohesion and minimize harm to group members. The extent of the protection the basic rules proved to outsiders is a measure of the worth of a culture: the Middle Eastern cultures fail spectacularly by failing to provide it to their own women and children (many other tribal cultures have the same failing).
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I don’t even climb mountains much and the last time I saw a burning bush was the Colorado wild fires – in other words, I don’t have any moral authority and can’t order the world around. Not and have them obey.
If I have read the text correctly, even when you do have the moral authority people seem disinclined to obey.
Throughout history we see examples of people trying to work their way around whatever rules with which they do not wish to comply. There is no ethical system that does not recognize that people are inclined to be worse rather than better. The difference lies in the solution offered. At some point in time the inevitable changes occur, and now the wall reads, ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’
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I have a particularly vivid memory of looking up (i.e., from a crib), and not being able to turn over (I had to be remarkably young), of people entering and leaving the space where I was (i.e., probably a darkened nursery/bedroom), seeing “mysterious and wonderful and fascinating things” moving above me (probably a mobile, of the type you would hang above a very young baby’s bed …that I experienced as “geometry” although I would not have known the word until years later), and hearing language (since I can remember this memory from the equally improbable age of knowing what *some* words meant, as I crawled around under a coffee table …but not being able to say words myself), as sounds that sparked a particular color from each source (i.e., the person speaking), and associating those colors with a person …and I already knew one of them was something (i.e., someone) very close to me (presumably, my mother …and to a lesser extent, my father).
Sorry for all the circumlocutions …but the memory (now the memory of the memory: for some “odd” reason, I gave myself instructions at a very early age that I was to “never forget” certain things, and this was the earliest one of those things.) is very old and fixed, but I came to understand when I was somewhat older (around the time I was able to use words as language: hence “improbably young”), what some of those things were (this is also from the age also when I gave myself those “instructions” …though the why of *that*, at least, is long since lost, some six decades later).
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Weird. I remember giving myself the same instructions, and I also remember the shift to thinking in words.
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I was six before I gave myself those instructions. It also had to do with my life plans. I didn’t want to forget them. My earliest memory is standing on the deck of a ferry, my arms wrapped around my dad’s legs as we gazed out at the water. It was a rough day. My mother was inside with my sister. I had to have been around 2 1/2 or 3 at the time. I could talk (my father said I talked early), but I didn’t really think in words yet.
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So, where do you go to find the source of Good and Evil, if you discard the simple answer of “to this scroll” or “to that rule book”?
Simple. The great myths all speak to the things that are all hated and loved by human beings. And the really great stories tweak the tension between those loved and hated things and the tribal rules.
Let’s face it: we’re primates. And our particular species of primate is tribal: a collection of several families into one group. Even before the recent invention of language, which tightened the process, a tribe of critters would have its own way of doing things, repeated by the process of mimesis, which is a big, highfalutin’ Greek word for “monkey see-monkey do”. Go outside the rules, and you are driven outside of the tribe. This is the case whether or not we are talking about the tribes of the Gauls or the Kelts, the tribes of Athenian Greece, or the Twelve Tribes born of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Or even the tribes of modern America.
Now there are certain things that are common to all of our tribes: one tries not to kill or maim children in the tribe. Not if you want the tribe to go on. Same with nursing mothers or females capable of bearing children, for much the same reason. If you quarrel to the point that you kill able-bodied warriors of the tribe, it also weakens the tribe, and that’s generally a no-no, too. But the biggie, the primal fear, the one threat above any other, is a Threat to the Tribe. That’s the mainstay of the storyteller who sings or quietly speaks while everybody is gathered around the dinner table, or the camp fire.
As examples, I cite the Cyclops of The Odyssey, Grendel from Beowulf, Sauron in The Lord of The Rings, and even the vile alien critters from Independence Day. I leave the illustration of other such examples as an exercise for the student.
But seriously, folks, the tension between the unreflective, monkey mind taboo and the thing that is just plain wrong (or even right) is also food for stories. For example, what about a story where a king is seeking to find the cause of a major Threat to his Tribe, a pollution that is killing his people. He asks the local seer to tell him what it is, and is told that it is because a man in his kingdom has killed his own father and mated with his mother, and worse, has had children from that mating. The King seeks out the guilty one, only to find that, without knowing what he was doing at the time, HE was the very one who had broken those taboos.
Or to take another example from more recent literature than Oedipus Rex, how about the tension between the Judeo-Christian maxim of “honor your father and your mother” and the pure, unadulterated malice of Huck’s Pa in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or the tension between the morays of the pre-Civil War South, in which it was unthinkable for someone to help a slave to run away, and Huck, who considers himself to be evil beyond redemption because he wanted to help his friend Jim to do just that?
I think the reason why I am royally sick to the point of puking about most so-called Christian literature is that it is as firmly in the box of the Bible as much as most of the denizens of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: in their dark little place, unable to see the wide, bright world outside. I suppose it might also be because I spent my first eight years raised as a Roman Catholic in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the birthplace of U.S. Christian Fundamentalism, and presently describe myself as an Orthodox Catholic Taoist.
In short, give me Rumer Godden and Flannery O’Connor, or even the Inklings, instead of such as Tim La Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins. But not just now. Now, I’m finishing up my first novel, a SF/Horror romp in the park.
Thanks much for letting me vent. And thanks for your wonderful weblog and writing, Sarah.
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