OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Congratulations - that earned a real laugh from me.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.
I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.
As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.
Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.
Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?
What?
Let's take even just the first claim you made - that Christianity preaches slavery to Christ. Quick sanity check here.
John 15:15 - "I do not call you servants [douloi] any longer, because the servant [doulos]does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."
Galatians 4:7 - "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God."
(See also the entire allegory of Hagar and Sarah to follow, in which Christians are identified with the children of the free woman, not of the slave.)
Galatians 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
1 Peter 2:16 - "As servants [douloi] of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil."
2 Peter 2:19-20 - "They [the ungodly] promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
It seems pretty clear to me. I've recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Screwtape Letters, and its demon narrator's apt description of the natures of Hell and Heaven is, "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
I'm not sure how much more clear it could have been - the goal of Christianity is not subjection to God as a miserable slave, but rather adoption as co-heirs with Christ, sharing in the glory of Christ's own status (cf. Romans 8:29, Christians are "to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family"). This is explicitly contrasted with the image of slavery in the Bible. Thus St. Athanasius summarises (ch. 54), "He was made man that we might be made God". This isn't some hidden secret.
Where images of slavery or servanthood appear in a positive context (e.g. Galatians 5:13), it is reconfigured in a deliberately surprising way - "through love become slaves to one another". The image of a voluntary mutual 'slavery' where each person genuinely seeks the other's good is striking and noticeably not the same thing as the domination of a master over chattel.
Let's go on:
Does Christianity counsel slaves to uphold the institution of slavery? I can only assume you are referring to 1 Corinthians 7:21-24. But this does not at all tell slaves to uphold slavery, or to recommend slavery as a practice. Rather, it is the position I just described - that slavery is irrelevant. He doesn't even tell slaves not to become free, if they get the chance. Paul's counsel is that worldly status just doesn't matter. This is supported by, as I noted in that previous message, what we see in Philemon - Paul isn't an outright abolitionist (as indeed would be pretty impossible in the first century), but his advice to the Christian master is to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother".
It seems worth adding to this, well, the subsequent two thousand years in which Christianity and Christians seem to have been quite well-positioned as regards the abolition of slavery. Sometimes this was in the form of large organised movements, as in Britain, but other times it has been slower. Privately I find something inspiring in the history of slavery in the Byzantine Empire - there was no society-wide war against it, no great battle. Rather, they just... slowly... stopped. Laws were passed against abuse of slaves, and then reducing slaveholders' power, and eventually it just faded away. The tempering aspect of Christianity here seems evident. By contrast the Teutonic pagans you describe were much more enthusiastic slavers.
What's next? Does Christianity counsel submission to greater powers? Well, define 'power'. It certainly counsels obedience and love to God, who is naturally the greatest power, and from there it recommends peaceful coexistence with earthly authorities to the extent that it is possible without disobeying God. But when that is not possible, it recommends protest. I hate to invoke the stereotype here, but you are saying that the tradition that encouraged people to peacefully yet defiantly become martyrs, steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the compulsion of the Roman state even to the point of being torn apart by lions, is a tradition that "counsels submission... to Rome". Does that not seem even the slightest bit off, to you?
If you argue that Christianity counsels obedience to God, certainly. No one's going to dispute that. But this is hardly unusual. If you want to make the Teutonic comparison again, it is not at all clear that a Teutonic tribesman's submission to the chieftain is qualitatively different to that of a Roman citizen's submission to the emperor - not least because, in Christian Rome in particular, the emperor's authority was contingent upon being accepted by the citizen body. That was why there could be so many revolutions in Constantinople, for, while the emperor's power was at least partly theocratic, it was also something held from the republic and there could be revoked, should the emperor be a tyrant. You can see this kind of legacy also in English-speaking Christian traditions - in Britain, where parliament claimed the power to overthrow and replace the king if necessary, and even more radically in America. The evolution of Christian views towards autocratic authority is definitely complex. I'm not going to say that there are no Christian bootlickers, whether historically (de Maistre etc.) or today (the caesarism of someone like Stephen Wolfe, say); but I am saying that a view of Christianity as uniquely servile in its understanding of politics is absurdly mistaken.
And... that's it. Those are all the specific points you make.
You're just, well, wrong.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
[...]
To the rest I say—I and not the Lord—that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. And if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
[...]
Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband. Husband, for all you know, you might save your wife.
[...]
The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband.
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'd tend to agree with this, yes. It's been cited far too many times before, but the old woke versus racist skit still rings true. In some cases the overlap is even stronger.
I recently found myself reading Yasmin Nair on Palestine, and was struck by this line:
Liberal Zionists are, I believe, taken aback by constant reminders that their pallid views are now exposed as insufficient for these times, as the world literally marches past them, losing patience with their weak discourse about concepts like “human rights” and “freedom of expression.”
I'm sure I don't even need to say what it resembles. The portrayal of liberalism as weak and self-defeating, the obsession with a putative Jewish conspiracy controlling the nation, the call for violent revolution - ultimately it reminds me of many of the Motte's own far-right posters. Even on the psychological level, when we find themes like the validation of anger, praise of strength and aggression, the sense of the whole culture as a kind of malicious conspiracy against one, the felt sense of solidarity with an almost-wholly-imagined public, even an online culture that's saturated with memes, affected irony, and deliberate overstatement to either signal in-group loyalty or trigger propriety-obsessed centrists...
The mirror is there. The far-left and far-right share basic values, even if they're sitting in different camps.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Well, yes, Paul isn't denying that people are still Jewish or Greek or barbarian or Scythian in a literal sense.
He's denying that Jewishness or Greekness or barbarianness or Scythianness are relevant to one's identity in Christ. Those things do not matter, which is why Christianity thus tends to resist politics that are premised on asserting their importance, and why attempts to reconcile Christianity with overtly racialist politics can only function by mutilating or perverting Christianity.
You can try to draw a worldly/spiritual distinction, but I think that's perilous in practice and often ends merely in the assertion of a double standard. The worldly or political life of a Christian must be shaped by his or her spiritual life also - neither Jesus nor Paul confine their teachings to an abstract realm of the inward spirit, but rather understand that their spiritual teachings have profound consequences for the way one lives and interacts with others. Thus, for instance, when Peter refrains from joining Gentiles for meals in Galatians 2, Paul rebukes him to his face. The spiritual equality of all people in Christ has obliterated the kind of distinctions that might have justified Peter shunning his Gentile brothers and sisters.
Which is to say that the spiritual does have bearing on the political. How could it ever not?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.
I would have said most of them are, to be honest. There are a bunch of... well, the language I use here will be controversial, but I would say racialist, anti-semitic, alt-right or neo-Nazi type posters and it is entirely unsurprising to me that those people hate Christianity. It is in their interests to try to roll Christianity together with other movements, in order to promote rejection of Christianity.
I find it morbidly absurd sometimes. The woke hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is patriarchal, homophobic, deeply linked to white supremacy, and so on. They only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of those supposedly far-right-supporting elements. On the other end of the spectrum, the far-right also hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is weak, universalist, over-compassionate, the source of the cultural rot and hatred of strength and vitality that is enervating the West, and so on. They in turn can only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of these supposedly far-left slave-morality elements.
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist. Judith Butler writes a whole chapter of Gender Trouble condemning the pope and attacking that retrograde Christianity, and then you pop over here and it's all about how Christianity is destroying the West because it doesn't hate Jews and/or black people enough. Quite a surreal experience.
Once again I'm reminded of a bit from Chesterton, from chapter VI of Orthodoxy:
A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
[...]
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.
(I have omitted Chesterton's specific examples - he has half a dozen or so - for reasons of space, but you can easily check them.)
It's as if the same pattern plays out again. Christianity is both too racist and not racist enough, too Western and not Western enough, too Jewish and yet also too anti-semitic, and so on, in every category, both far-left and far-right beat it with the same stick.
Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
...I think this might be using 'slave' in an idiosyncratic way, fully detached from any concept of slavery in the traditional sense, i.e. the owning of human beings.
I know this is just a riff on Nietzsche, but it bears noting that Nietzsche's master-slave morality is itself idiosyncratic to him and I'd argue a very implausible way of understanding the history of Western civilisation.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I think this is glossing over a substantial amount of Islamic history - in particular, the Umayyads were moderately Arab-supremacist, and Islam made a much stronger universalist turn with the victory of the Abbasids, who were non-Arab and therefore strongly inclined to an interpretation of Islam in which ethnic or tribal identity is irrelevant.
In the case of Christianity, I think it's going to be important here to clarify 'anti-racist', since the term admits to so many interpretations today. I think one could fairly assert that at least from Paul (the historical Jesus being less clearly accessible), Christianity is a *non-*racist religion, in the sense that race or ethnic identity is simply irrelevant. The big early leap is going from Christianity as internal to Jews to Christianity for all people, but once that leap was made - and it appears to have been made extremely early - it was set. Thus in the New Testament we see conversions of everyone from Ethiopians to Macedonians, divine revelations to indicate a universal call (Acts 10), preaching to all people (Acts 17, all of Paul's career), and a theology in which "there is no longer Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian". We even find this universalist language put into the mouth of Jesus (e.g. John 10:16), whether you think that's historical or not.
However, none of that is the same thing as 'anti-racism' in the dogmatic modern sense. The traditional Christian position going back as far as the New Testament is that race/ethnicity/cultural-identity/ancestry is irrelevant, and what matters is personal faith, such that one who believes is the true descendant of the patriarchs (cf. Matthew 3:9, Galatians 3:6-7), even taking priority over the flesh (Philippians 3:2-7). This is obviously quite different to anti-racism in the modern sense, which remains deeply interested in race as a moral and ethical category.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
You made a claim about the British colonisation of India and the Aztec response to Cortez. Both of those claims are false, and you were challenged on them, and your response is to... what? Assert that the Indo-Aryans somehow prove it as well? Despite not presenting anything that would plausibly indicate that?
And then you somehow pivot to ancient Greece, where Apollo is actually a deity of many things (including prophecy, music, light, disease, archery, healing, etc.), and the only arguments you make are firstly that one of Apollo's many epithets relates to the founding of cities (never mind that that is also true of many other deities), and that... you think one statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur? Okay? This isn't even considering that an ancient Greek 'colony' is something very different to British India.
This is all, frankly, bullshit. You have some sort of general theory about superior racial archetypes - it's basically just a recapitulation of the old Nordic/Aryan category you get from people like Gobineau - but whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.
Let's try to clarify this a bit.
Motte: More attractive, more physically capable people are more likely to successfully reproduce.
Bailey: There is a well-defined Aryo-Nordic race that is recognised across many cultures for its superior beauty and intellectual capacity.
The motte is true, sure. But the position you're arguing for overall is under-specified, you haven't made any actual argument for it beyond gesturing at a handful of isolated observations that fail to cohere into a theory, and whenever any one of those observations is indicated to be false, you ignore it and immediately jump to a completely different observation, often centuries or even millennia away. This is not a real argument.
What are the actual points of evidence here? Some guy on YouTube makes videos of himself flirting with girls around the world. The British colonised India. The Aztecs thought Cortez was a god. Indo-Aryan peoples conquered northern India around four thousand years ago. Apollo was revered as a founder of cities. One statue of Apollo has a similar nose shape to some guy. Even if all these points were true, they don't cohere into a plausible macrohistorical theory. Anyone could, with a similarly arbitrary process of selection, cobble together a theory of racial superiority from the same random noise. There is no rigour to this hypothesis.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I accept your compliment!
OliveTapenade
14d ago
This is actually also my experience being an (Australian) tourist in Europe.
I doubt it says anything about race, because English people, who are by any definition the same race as me, were also enthusiastically inviting me to stay in their homes and to give me meals and to take me to the places they felt were most important to them.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Why would you see anything unflattering on Caz's channel? The channel is curated. Obviously he's not going to post things that make him look bad. Indeed, why would you think that you can draw general conclusions about anything from this? The videos are not unvarnished reality.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I'm another Australian and I'm also on the anti-city side, actually. I don't live all the way out in the country, but on the fringe of a city, and I cannot imagine living somewhere that isn't within walking distance of nature. I really value the ability to walk somewhere and just experience... silence. Or not even silence, but rather the absence of artificial sound. Take away the sounds of the human-created world and there is still sound, but wind, water, birds, the creaking of trees, it's all of a different character.
I've travelled a bit and lived in small villages for a time, and I enjoy them much more. I generally find that the extent to which I enjoy being in a settlement in another country is inversely proportional to that settlement's size. New York, London, etc., contained things I wanted to see, but the cities themselves were fundamentally unpleasant places to be. By contrast, living in a small, lightly-settled area for a time has something rejuvenating about it.
One thing I might suggest - have you ever visited a monastic community? Some monasteries, abbeys, etc., host guests, often if their religious tradition values hospitality. They're usually built in quiet places away from major population centres, and you can stay for a week in the guest room. Better yet, they're also often cut off from the internet or telecommunications, so even those distractions are removed. I find it an experience that really helps to restore me to myself, if that makes sense? For the first day or two it can be a bit difficult, but by the seventh I can feel almost a bit brokenhearted to have to go back into the world.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Yes, that makes sense to me - there's an audience of people who like the idea of D&D more than they like D&D itself, and by 'idea of D&D' what I mean is a bunch of colourful zany characters quipping and having lighthearted adventures in a fantasy world.
One of the things I find most striking about D&D fans today is the level of, well, historical amnesia many of them seem to have? In theory one of the selling points of D&D 5e was the idea of legacy. The thing that makes D&D different and special, compared to competitor fantasy RPGs, is its history. D&D has been going since the 70s and it has a tremendous history to draw on. 5e core was definitely trying to evoke a lot of that history.
But if I look at talk around D&D today, I am regularly shocked by ignorance of that history. I don't even mean things like the way that Gygax-era D&D was closer to a wargame, had very little characterisation, and would have four GMs and twenty players around the same table all playing in real time, but even quite broad things in living memory. I recently watched Noah Gervais' take on Diablo and something that shocked me, in the section on the first game, is the way he blandly asserts, "Today the focus of something like D&D is much more about the imaginative aspects, the performative aspects. 90s D&D, AD&D, hewed closer to its name - dungeon-crawling, monster-hunting, complicated rules to facilitate each."
And that's not only incorrect, it's the exact opposite of correct. AD&D2e is the edition that games like Baldur's Gate were trying to evoke. It was the era when story was absolute king, when the game was played via these extremely story-heavy railroaded modules, where every campaign setting under the sun was getting incredibly detailed write-ups, and recurring characters were at their most popular. It's the era of the Drizzt craze, when approximately a million Dragonlance novels were published (based on published adventure modules from the 80s!), and every player had their own good-hearted rebel drow or half-elf archer with a troubled past. The story and setting and continuity got so elaborate that when 3rd edition came around in the early 2000s, it was marketed as a back-to-basics game, dropping all the increasingly-inaccessible storytelling in favour of a return to just kicking down doors and killing monsters. Late 80s and 90s AD&D is the most story-obsessed D&D has ever been.
But this is something that you only know, it seems, if you were around and played D&D in the 90s. I feel like now we have a crop of players who believe that story only started with 5e or with those streamed gameplay sessions, and who mentally write off everything before it as a dark age of decontextualised dungeon-crawling.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I'm in group two. I'm all right with real-time - I didn't mind the later Dragon Age games - but I really don't like the tone and aesthetic of 5e D&D. It's hard to find an actual word for this, but there's the snarky tone, there's a kind of millennial/Gen-Z atmosphere of taking nothing too seriously, and the prominent presence of things like tieflings. (Yes, Haer'Dalis was a tiefling in BG2, but I mean the very standard sexy red-skin-and-tail-and-horns tiefling design that's everywhere now.) I can't define it all that well, but anything pre-3e wasn't afraid to be sincere or even corny, and I find that tone is missing.
BG1 and BG2 contained jokes. I can't deny that. But there's a sensibility that I struggle to put into words. Maybe this sensibility is related to streamers like Critical Role. I don't know, because I've never watched an RPG stream, and frankly think the idea sounds awful and unpleasant. But maybe they were a contributor to a shift like that?
But certainly the reason I steered away from BG3 is because I thought it looked like 2020s-WotC-D&D, rather than 1990s-TSR-D&D. It didn't look like Baldur's Gate.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
How would you say it compares to BG1 or BG2? Do you think it would appeal to the kind of person who enjoyed those games in the 90s?
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton passage somewhere about age and fatigue in a society. A society created last week might have very high average age, and be senescent and likely to die soon; a society created a thousand years ago might be full of vigorous members of a young age, and set for the future. I wonder if something similar might apply - the more a people's storytelling is obsessed with the young, the new, the innovation, the deconstructive, the more that's a sign of the people's age and stagnation. Meanwhile retelling the old classics is not a sign of decrepitude, but rather one of vigour.
If nothing else, what types of stories do you tell to children? It's the old classics and the tried-and-true. Daring deconstructions are stories for old, cynical people. The young and vital like to hear the same old thing.
That said, I think there are some older stories out there if you look for them, though sometimes you might have to look to non-Western developers. I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
As regards structural changes in how games are made, I wonder if it would be useful to compare similar works written by the same authors?
To take a straightforward example - has Chris Metzen's writing, for instance, gotten better or worse over time? I'd argue that the original Starcraft has a compelling, well-written plot that serves the needs of its gameplay very well, but that Starcraft II is less well-written. This isn't the case for every mission, and of course some blame might attach to other SC2 authors like Brian Kindregan or James Waugh, but given that SC2's epilogue was all Metzen, and it's by far the worst part of that game's story, and of course he was involved in overall story development, it still seems a reasonable comparison.
Likewise his other franchises - World of Warcraft infamously has a horrible, broken plot, but how does it compare to Metzen's works in the 90s and early 2000s, like Warcraft II or Warcraft III? On the one hand, as much as WC3 is remembered as having a good plot, if you read it with clear eyes it's obvious that its script is extremely rough. (I am generally a big advocate for only judging game stories in the context of gameplay, rather than ripped out and read in isolation, but even just on the line-to-line level, a lot of this dialogue is just bad.) Perhaps you could make a case that Metzen's story writing ability was always relatively mediocre, especially when it comes to naturalistic dialogue (certainly his biggest weakness), and as such the restricted environments of WC2 or SC1 played to his strengths and concealed his weaknesses.
So if we consider a few possibilities, it strikes me as plausible that he hasn't gotten worse, but rather the more high-fidelity environments of modern games have made his shortcomings more evident. There might be something like the shift between theatre and stage - in SC1, for instance, detailed character acting is impossible, so every character speaks in long, hammy monologues, and dramatic speeches and over-the-top voice-acting need to carry most of the personality. Characters cannot emote any other way. Metzen's writing suits this style quite well, or perhaps that style trained him at an early stage to write in this super-broad, hammy way. However, this style is much less well-suited for a game like SC2, which has cutscenes shot much more like an animated TV show.
Anecdotally I feel like I see a similar transition in other game series, even if writers there have changed over time. If I compare the writing in Baldur's Gate II to the writing in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's hard to resist the feeling that there's been a significant step down somewhere. Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse. (Admittedly for setting this might be in part because BG2 was directly based on the extremely-high-quality setting material of AD&D2e, which for my money remains the apogee of D&D worldbuilding.)
Or even if we step away from RPGs - you're correct that going from Marathon to Halo Infinity feels like a major decline, but even within the same series, I'd argue that if you play the original Halo: Combat Evolved today, its writing is remarkably snappy and evocative, and compares favourably to its successors. As the series grew more popular, it also grew more bloated? Continuity bloat in long-running series can be a serious issue - this may also be one of Metzen's issues with WoW.
But I'm not sure continuity bloat can cover everything. If you go from the original Fallout (1997) to Fallout 4 (2015), there's a decline that I don't think you can blame entirely on franchise bloat. It might just be a less competent writing team (especially since New Vegas was so high-quality); I'd buy "Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer are just good writers, and most people aren't as good" as an explanation (cf. recent well-written games by them such as Sawyer's Pentiment) in that specific case, but there may be other industry-wide trends as well.
So while part might be just that I remember good writing from the 90s but not the bad, I would also speculate that the changing nature of game writing due to technological shifts are a factor, as is the natural course of franchise decline and continuity bloat. Most long-running series, and this goes for literature, film, television, etc., decline in quality over time, and games are no different.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
"Never waste a crisis."
The solution to a crisis is always that thing you wanted to do anyway for unrelated reasons. That much just seems like human nature.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
Touché.
Mao seems like a good example of the power of institutional structure and ideology, to be honest. The disaster of the Great Leap Forward didn't happen because Mao was an idiot - or at least, not because Mao had low IQ. Neither did it happen because the Chinese in general are low IQ, or have a racial disposition towards stupidity, laziness, fractious and inability to work together, or anything like that. On the contrary, the usual HBD line is that Han Chinese are unusually intelligent, hard-working, and cooperative. And yet they managed to cause the single greatest human calamity in the 20th century (against some stiff competition), and it was entirely self-inflicted!
If nothing else, it seems like a reminder just that, well, organisation and structure matter, and that bad theory and misaligned incentives can do more harm than any putative lack of intelligence.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
It's also relevant, to the best of my knowledge, that the British didn't even try to conquer China in a similar way to India. They wanted Chinese goods, and for China to be subject to their power, certainly, but when British contact with China really started ramping up in the 19th century, they did not want another India. They explicitly didn't want a second India. One subcontinental Asian empire was enough, and the burdens of trying to directly govern and administer China were more than anyone wanted to assume - especially not when it was viable to instead get everything they wanted from China through less extreme means, going through a subject Chinese government.
There are plenty of reasons why the British didn't conquer China the way they did India, but in addition to China being a unitary reasonably powerful country rather than feuding states, and reaching China almost two centuries after reaching India, I think we have to add the fact that they, as a matter of policy, chose not to try. The expense that would have been involved in trying to conquer China just wasn't worth the potential gain, and that's even before we factor in the other European empires with stakes in China that might have objected. It doesn't seem like we need to rush to racial explanations.
This isn't to say that I am rejecting out of hand the idea that there might be genetic differences between Indians and Chinese. Heck, I'm sure there are lots of genetic differences within each category as well - both 'Indian' and 'Chinese' (even if we restrict ourselves to Han!) include a lot of historically divided subgroups. Rather, I just mean that conquest of one but not the other seems plenty explainable by contingent, non-racial factors.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
I am conscious of the fact, actually, that I probably engage in too much meta-posting. I fear that's a consequence of spending most of my time reading the Motte, rather than writing new posts, which I usually only do when I feel like I have particular knowledge to contribute. I think my biggest contributions were on the Australian Voice to Parliament, which was an issue where I thought I had a lot to add. That's not always the case.
But I am probably guilty of being one of those posters who does spend more time talking about what I want to see in terms of curation than I do actually providing what I want to see. I should make an effort to work on improving the ratio, I guess.
I wonder if it might be worth nuancing 'pro-Intifada', 'pro-Hamas', and so on?
It seems to me that many of these protests are, yes, genuinely opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, and supportive of 'decolonisation' interpreted to mean 'Israel should not exist and all Israeli Jews should leave and find homes in other countries, and if they refuse, they are legitimately the targets of lethal violence'. But the rhetoric and justification given for this is so radically different to the rhetoric and justification of either Hamas or any on-the-ground Palestinian resistance movements that I think the gulf is worthy of recognition. For the American campus protester, what Hamas or Palestinians actually want is close to irrelevant - their politics are not so much pro-Intifada or pro-Hamas they are anti-coloniser. Israel is a 'coloniser', which makes them the bad guys, which makes the opposite of Israel the good guys.
If nothing else, the campus protest ideology is not the ideology of the Hamas charter, or even the revised one. I don't think the protesters are reading that charter and unironically agreeing with it. (Though I grant that the revised, 2017 version seems calculated to appeal more to liberal Westerners.) Almost none of them are Muslims, for a start. It's something different, and must have its own origins and influences.
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