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The Slow Culture War

He seems to start well enough.  At the opening of his book he writes:

“If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution.  Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous.  And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense.  It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent.  The stakes are high.”

Cripes!  Culture war!  That sounds unpleasant.  Of course – it’s not as though Harris has said anything new here.  And when I say “not new” – I’m talking biblically.  The concern that a lack of free will would undermine our concepts of praise and blame has been around for a long time.  The earliest direct statement that I can find comes from early Christian apologetics (although I’d be very surprised if a Greek had not said something earlier).  From  St. Irenaeus (130-200 AD) in his work “Against Heresies“  comes the quote:

“But if some had been made by nature bad, and others good, these latter would not be deserving of praise for being good, for such were they created; nor would the former be reprehensible, for thus they were made [originally]. But since all men are of the same nature, able both to hold fast and to do what is good; and, on the other hand, having also the power to cast it from them and not to do it,—some do justly receive praise even among men who are under the control of good laws (and much more from God), and obtain deserved testimony of their choice of good in general, and of persevering therein; but the others are blamed, and receive a just condemnation, because of their rejection of what is fair and good. And therefore the prophets used to exhort men to what was good, to act justly and to work righteousness, as I have so largely demonstrated, because it is in our power so to do, and because by excessive negligence we might become forgetful, and thus stand in need of that good counsel which the good God has given us to know by means of the prophets.”

If this concern about the relationship between praise, blame and free will was known two thousand years ago, one might wonder why the coming culture war has taken so long.  Philosophers have been arguing about free will for a very long time – but the development of our cultural mores that include notions of praise and blame have progressed regardless.  This fact needs explanation.  Why is it only now that a culture war should be imminent? The beginnings of an answer come from the contrast provided by these two quotes themselves.

When you look at them closely you notice a reverse symmetry existing between the two quotes that is quite extraordinary when you consider that they were written almost two thousand years apart.  For instance – take a look at the role played by the notions of praise and blame.  Both writers accept the logical link between free will and our notions of praise and blame.  If there is no free will, goes the argument, then no one can be blamed or praised for anything.  Yet, despite this similarity, the link is used in completely opposite ways.  For St Irenaeus, the link forms part of an argument for free will since he sees the conclusion that everyone is without culpability as untenable.  It plays no such role in Harris’ thinking.  The lack of culpability is just a conclusion that has to be accepted (though he tries to salvage as much as he can later on).

Both writers make mention of an authority of some sort.  St Irenaeus talks about the prophets while Harris mentions the scientific community.  How curious that both discussions about free will would need to invoke these disparate and historically opposed authorities.  But the symmetry is reversed here as well.  St Irenaeus is here discussing the existence of free will as a defence of the prophets and their influence.  It’s because people are free that they need the prophets to remind them to be good and noble.  St Irenaeus is using free will as a way to defend the power of his nascent church and its leaders (“Against Heresies” was itself designed to defend the church against a rival sect known as the Gnostics who did not believe in free will).  Harris on the other hand does not use the presumed lack of free will to defend the authority of the scientific community.   Rather it’s the authority of the scientific community which he suggests might undermine free-will.

So what we see is that each quote moves in the opposite direction to the other.  While St Irenaeus defends free will in order to provide support to his authority of choice, Harris takes the authority of science as a given and moves the other way towards the denial of free will.  This is significant.  What it shows is how science doesn’t rely on metaphysical polemic for its authority.  Religion does.

It’s not like the scientific community is threatened by the possibility of free will.  It achieved its authority independently through its successes in advancing our understanding of the world, not through the provision of metaphysical polemic.  Having said that – the scientific community is directly threatened by contemporary religious institutions and anti-scientific thought in general.  And if the philosophical perspectives of the Christian Church were developed as part of a polemical defence of its ascendant power at the time, then it’s not surprising that some components of the scientific community would be seeking to challenge those ideas as part of a wider battle.

Given this we can now say something about the slow onset of Harris’ culture war.  What we see is that this culture war is not precipitated by the clash of ideas as such – but in the clash between the institutional powers that disseminate them.  If the clash of ideas itself really mattered, then humanity would have been waiting with baited breath for the outcome of philosophical arguments over the existence of free-will.  The culture war would have been on from the very beginning.  It only matters now because an institutional structure has arisen that directly challenges the status quo.  St Irenaeus cared about free will because the Gnostics didn’t believe in it – and the Gnostics were a threat to the traditional church.  There’s only going to be a war over free will now because the scientific community – a very influential and powerful institution – may be marshalling against it.  In actual fact, it will be at most one small battle in a larger war between secular and religious ideology that has been going on since the discovery of the scientific method.  The fact that generations of dis-empowered philosophers have been fighting over free will for thousands of years  is neither here nor there.  Nobody cares about them.

(Of course – religion actually doesn’t get a mention in Harris’s book.  But it doesn’t matter.  Religion clearly has a huge stake in this game.  And they are the sorts of folks that would marshal troops against the likes of Harris in the new battle.  Insofar as you are secular in your beliefs and yet still believe in free will, is really just representative of the fact that you haven’t been purged yet of all your anti-scientific thinking presumably.)

So – no.  The question of free will itself has no REAL historical urgency.  It is the institutional struggle between religious thinking and science that is driving this supposed coming culture war.  In fact, were you to take a trip to the battle line to survey the armies arrayed on each side, you would currently find no one actually there besides a few curious looking philosophers.  No one is yet fighting this battle.  It’s not like Harris is identifying an existing historical tendency and giving it a name.  What he is doing is trying to manufacture this battle.  He wants people to pick up their weapons and march to the front line.  He wants us to fight.  Why?

If you’re expecting a cynical answer to this question – then you’re dead on!

We Don’t Care About Free Will – and We Never Have

The question of why Harris would be interested in starting a war over free will becomes even more curious when you consider that in fact we actually don’t care about free will very much at all.

Consider again Harris’s example in the quote I made above.  He says that if there is no such thing as free-will then people aren’t praise-worthy or blame-worthy of anything they do.  Is this correct?  Suppose I point out to you a person who has worked really hard and has become successful as a result.  Next I ask why that person deserves their success?  Would you seriously answer: “because they have free will”?  Only the most philosophically asinine would.  No, you would answer that they deserve their success because they worked hard.  Whether or not they have free-will drops out as irrelevant.

Another example that Harris provided in his talk not too long ago at the Sydney Opera House (for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas) concerns the difference in our reaction between being attacked by an alligator and being punched by a human.  When we get attacked by an alligator we tend not to get angry at the alligator, but instead we just try to run away.  We don’t resent the animal because it’s just an alligator.  However, if we are punched by a fellow human being we tend to resent that human.  This difference in feeling Harris attributes to the notion of free will that guides us.  We think that the animal can’t help do what it does, but we do think the person attacking us can.  So, according to Harris, we resent things that we believe to have free will.

Is this really plausible?   Again, it’s instructive to ask to the causes.  Imagine yourself as the person who just got punched by the other human being.  If someone asked you why you resent them – what would your answer be?  Would you honestly answer that it’s because they have free will?  Perhaps we’re not phrasing the question properly.  Say that instead you were asked why you resented being hit by that person?  Well you might enter into a series of answers.  ”Because I didn’t deserve to be hit.”  Why?  ”Because I didn’t do anything harmful to that person.” etc…  At what point does this questioning ever terminate in the answer: ‘I resent him because he has free will”.

But still, Harris would counter, none of this explains why we give a different set of responses with respect to the alligator.  In fact, when we are asked why we don’t resent the alligator we tend to naturally say things that do seem to touch on its agency, or lack thereof.  Here’s a rather cute example of a person doing just this after being attacked by a kangaroo:

http://youtu.be/Z0u7e-7AR8A?t=19m47s

So what’s interesting about this is that we make references in cases where we naturally would think agency is lacking – but we don’t tend to make references to it where we would ordinarily say agency is present.  Why is this?  And is the fact that we do reference agency in at least one set of cases, if not both, helpful to Harris’ claim that the concept of free-will really matters?  Let’s look at another set of examples:

The first is a modified version of an example provided by Harris.  He labels his example ’4′ so I’ll borrow that convention.

4a) A 25-year-old man shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it”.

Most people would feel outraged by such a deed.  Again, when we ask why they feel outraged, issues of agency likely wouldn’t come into it.  You would say things like – I am outraged because murder is a horrible act that causes a great deal of pain and heartache and misery to the families of the deceased and no one should feel that this is something that can be thought of as fun.

But now consider the next example (also slightly modified from Harris’ example):

5a) A 25-year-old man shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it”.  An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioural impulses).

The implication of the example is that the tumour caused his action to shoot the woman as well as report his reasons for so doing as being just for fun.  In such a case we typically feel sorry for this person.  When we are asked why we feel sorry we tend to reference the fact that he has a lack of agency.  He can’t help what he does – he got a bad deal from the genetic deck of the cards.  So again, we tend to reference agency in cases where we are explaining our reactions to things that don’t have it.  Harris includes these two examples to argue for the importance of the concept of free will.  If we get rid of the concept, he says, then we have to react in the same way to both examples.  We have to feel as sorry for the guy in 4a) as we do for the guy in 4b).

But what is really interesting is that even though we originally wouldn’t have bothered to reference the agency of the person in 4a when considered in isolation, when we are asked to make a comparison between the two cases – when we are asked to explain why we are outraged in the first cased but not in the second – then the agency of both people becomes salient.  We tend to say: because the first guy had a choice not to, but not the second.  Same goes for the alligator vs human example.  Considered in isolation we would never reference agency when saying why we resent the person who hit us – but when we have to explain why we resent the person but not the alligator, then agency comes to the fore.  We then will typically say that we resent people but not alligators because one has agency but not the other.

Note also that we seem to care about agency when it is included saliently in the example itself.  Harris’ original un-modified examples are as follows:

4b) A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it”.

5b) A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it”.  An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioural impulses).

Now I think it’s quite likely that even when we consider 4b) by itself we would likely make reference to the agency of the person in question – because it is so integral to example itself.  Now what matters is that the guy had no excuse, because that it what the example directs us to think about.

(I’d be interested if anyone can find some proper empirical testing of these responses – I can’t.  But I’m pretty confident that my intuitions about how people would react are accurate).

The Dilemma of Moral Self-Reporting

So what to make of all of this?  We seem to have a dilemma.  Either we say that beliefs about agency do cause the types of reactions we have to various examples – in which case we have to explain why we DON’T  typically self report such beliefs in the cases where agency is thought to be operant; or we say that beliefs about agency do not cause the types of reactions that we have to various examples – in which case we have to explain we we DO typically self report such beliefs in cases where agency is not thought to be operant or in cases where we are making comparisons.

A good answer to this dilemma should provide a replacement explanation as to our responses that is consistent across both domains.  And it should also provide an explanation as to why we report our beliefs as we do.  Here’s my attempt at such an answer.

We can get ourselves a replacement explanation of our responses to these sorts of examples by asking why we evolved these responses in the first place?  Why did we evolve a brain state that underpins the feelings of resentment or outrage we feel at examples like 4a?  Well – what does the feeling of outrage motivate you to do?  It motivates you to punish that person, to hit them back, to bitch about them behind their back, to take them to court, etc.  When it’s an animal that can’t help what it is doing – you don’t feel resentment and thus you aren’t motivated to punish it, or ruin its reputation or whatever.  So why did we evolve to be motivated in this way in some cases and not others?  Because in some cases there is clearly a selective benefit when you are motivated to engage in punishing behaviour – namely where punishment has a chance to affect the behaviour of the punished, or has a chance to improve the esteem of your own behaviour in the group (i.e.  my behaviour is the opposite of his, his is bad, therefore my behaviour is good – love me!).  On the other hand, punishing something that cannot adapt its behaviour in light of the punishment is a waste of energy.  No benefit is conferred by doing it.  So our capacity for resentment evolved to engage only in circumstances where it was typically useful.  That’s why we evolved to feel resentful at humans in general but not most other animals, because humans in general are capable of adapting to punishment mechanisms, but most animals are not.

This explanation fits Harris’ example.  There is nothing in 4a to suggest that the person isn’t receptive to punishment mechanisms (unless you believe that such behaviour is itself indicative of psychopathy).  So naturally we feel outraged and until we are given concrete reasons why the mechanisms in his brain that respond to punishment aren’t working – we are quite rational to remain outraged.  And we don’t feel outrage in 4b because we have a good reason to suppose his punishment mechanisms are broken.

So why do we report our beliefs about these examples as we do?  And why our these reports asymmetric in the way just discussed?  It is because when we are outraged, we are engaged in an act of trying to modify the behaviour of that person as well as other people around us.  We want them to fear the outrage/punishment and adapt their behaviour  to suit – and we want them to because our ancestors got a benefit from so doing.  But when you are asked to justify your outrage, how effective would it be to tell them that you are outraged because you evolved a mechanism that tries to effect a beneficial change of behaviour in those around you?  Not  very!  So we construct various edifices of justification in order to convince people that our outrage is warranted.  We say things like – I am outraged because I didn’t deserve to be punched in the face.

We typically don’t reference free will in such cases because it’s redundant.  If I was trying to convince someone that we should be outraged that a person was harmlessly sitting in a chair – citing the fact that they have free will isn’t going to illicit any sympathy at all.

But when it comes to a case where punishment is ineffective – we don’t need to play this game.  We aren’t outraged.  We don’t feel resentment.  So we just say that the animal (or whatever) doesn’t have free will – which is another way to say that the animal wouldn’t respond to our outrage and tools of punishment.  But hang on, you might ask.  Why don’t we instead say this literally – that we don’t resent animals because they aren’t receptive to our outrage?  Why do we need the specific concept of free will at all?  What’s more we still need to answer why it is that we swap from giving our big, grand edifices or justification when we compare examples like 4a and 5a, and focus instead on free will exclusively as a justification of our outrage or lack of it.

The answer again comes from the fact that when we are outraged we are engaged in a game of trying to get people to do what we want them to do.  But it doesn’t look good if your answers are inconsistent.  So if in a case like 5a where you have no outrage and you reported that you don’t because the person in question isn’t responsive to outrage and punishment, you are obliged out of consistency to say that you are outraged in cases like 4a because of the opposite – that they are responsive to you trying to get your own way.  But that would undermine the big, grand edifice of justification you just built!  It would reveal that you aren’t really outraged because of whatever it was you came up with, you would reveal that your outraged merely because you are threatened in some way.

Enter the concept of free will.  It allows us to remain consistent while at the same time obfuscate the real reasons we report our beliefs as we do.  I can say that I don’t care about the alligator attacking me because it doesn’t have free will.  And at the same time I can still engage in the game of trying to get what I want by being outraged and punishing people by not talking about free will at all.  But when I’m asked to compare examples like 4a and 5a I can swap to talking about free will in both cases without drawing attention to the fact that I’m engaged in this behaviour of selfishly trying to get what I want out of people.  Referring to free will doesn’t undermine anything I previously would have said about why some action was worthy of my outrage – it doesn’t make it obvious that I’m just trying to get my own way.  Rather it just sits there as an additional reason.

You could imagine that the introduction of a term like ‘free will’ was originally just a stand in for what it was replacing, namely “the ability to respond to outrage and punishment”.  You can think of it as just a random mutation in linguistic expression which has the immediate effect of obscuring by virtue of it’s form alone what it was representing.  When people were asked to provide a definition of the term, they would have resisted giving the definition suggested by its etymological history because that would have revealed their selfish motives.  So instead they just abstracted a little.  What does it mean to be amenable to punishment?  Well it means that your behaviour can be caused by an external force of some kind (namely you).  So we get the concept of free will –  free will is where your behaviour is not caused by anything external to yourself.

So Why Now A Culture War?

Friedrich Nietzsche made the claim that every philosopher’s moral edifice was merely a construct of his innate “Will to Power”.  Considerations like the above seem to support his view.  Philosophers are the type of person who make an art of coming up with answers to questions like ‘what is free-will?’  Most of us have enough of an answer to just get by – to do the job the concept is meant to do in the first place – hide the fact that we are all just trying to get our own way.  But philosophers possess a kind of anxiety.  It’s as though they are worried that they will be found out in the lie, so they construct grand metaphysical edifices that refine the concept ever more precisely, until it requires a PhD to fully understand all the ins and outs of the discussion.  Other people don’t want some to get away with the story that they’ve conducted, so they became philosophers in order to rationally tear down the metaphysical edifices of the others and replace them with their own.

This might be why there is never any philosophical progress on concepts like free-will.  After two thousand years of argument you would think we would get some agreement as to whether or not there is free will.  But we won’t – because the concept is just an empty abstraction that is neither negated nor affirmed by the reality of the world in any way (as far as we can tell).  Philosophers keep arguing over it because of an overdeveloped instinct for trying to get their own way.  But most people aren’t philosophical – thankfully – so the relevance of philosophical discussion to the wider community has always remained low.

So there is no real reason to have a culture war now other than Harris’ own sense of outrage at the prevalence of unscientific thinking.    For really he is just behaving as philosophers do – trying to gain acceptance for his way of behaving by engaging in exaggerated conceptual argumentation.  He’s just a little smarter than most philosophers.  Most philosophers ironically take themselves out of the game because of their extremely refined and difficult conceptual discussions.  No one can generally understand what the hell they are talking about.   But the original point of the game is to get as many people on your side as possible – to have as many people share your outrage as you can.  Harris has done this by presenting the material simply enough to appeal to a much wider market.

In general I would be on his side – since I tend to think that more people should think scientifically.  Except he’s not actually succeeding in this aim.  The problem is that nothing actually hangs on whether or not there is free will or not.  It won’t, nor should it, change whether we should feel outraged in a given circumstance.  To be scientific in this circumstance would be to ensure that you only get outraged when a) someone’s behaviour does actually hurt you, and b) your outrage can help you do something about their behaviour.  It would be to go beyond your instinctual responses and to scientifically determine what is the truth of a) and b) in such cases.  But focusing on free will doesn’t help you do this at all.  In fact, if you are convinced by Harris, it causes you to fail to be outraged when you have every reason to.  For instance – given that in example 4a we haven’t been given any evidence to suggest that the person (or people around us) wouldn’t be influenced by our outrage and punishment, then our outrage is actually a pretty sane reaction.  Harris’ suggestion that we should feel pity for the person in 4a is patently insane.

What’s more, if you’re aim is to stop people feeling outraged when their interests are harmed (not sure we would really want to do this) – then you’re not going to succeed in that project generally by throwing metaphysical arguments at them.  Invent a pill that changes brain states so that we don’t.  That is what the scientific way suggests.  Disrupt the actual causal pathways that make us behave that way.

So this culture war is completely unnecessary.  It would just be a small bunch of influential over-thinking types making other people miserable for no reason at all.  By waging this war, all we’re going to do is to further upset people who have a genuine right to be upset when their loved ones have been murdered in some horrible fashion by someone who should have known better.  We’ll give Harris the job of telling all such people that their resentment and desire for justice is unjustified.

But hey – far be it from me to stand in the way of a good war – and all the thousands of books Harris would sell as its chief proselytizer.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A few years ago a study by researchers (Acevedo, Aron, Fisher, Brown) from Stony Brook university made the claim that a small percentage of mated couples (10%) indefinitely maintain a brain state similar to that found in most couples during the early ‘honeymoon’ stage of their relationship.  Consequently these “swan” couples displayed a passion and devotion to one another that is uncommon in long term relationships generally.  Unfortunately, for most of us the love chemicals fade – and if our relationship survives at all, then at best we learn to settle for an unexciting, yet comfortable rut.

So then – here’s the question: what if you and your partner could take a honeymoon pill that would allow you both to maintain the swan-like brain state permanently?  Would you take it?

I’ve been shopping this hypothetical question around to as many people  as I can find recently – and if this sample is anything to go by, then almost all of you are going to answer this question with a emphatic no (about 90%).  Despite this near universal agreement, I’m going to argue that we shouldn’t be so sure of our intuitions.  The honeymoon pill may not be so heinous a concept as many of you will suppose.

The Honeymoon Phase – Some Facts and Assumptions

The honeymoon phase of a relationship will be familiar to most adult readers.  It typically lasts from 12-15 months, involves a high degree of intensity, passion and euphoria, engagement and sexual activity.  It also often involves what psychologists refer to as ‘limerance’ – the sometimes obsessive and disruptive nature of the relationship.  After this period, the passion typically fades and the relationship at best achieves more of a friendship kind of relationship.

There is strong evidence that we aren’t just imagining this kind of relationship progression.  A 2005 studyby the Stony Brook research group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the activation of reward centres in the brain when subjects in the honeymoon phase viewed images of their beloved.  Those reporting a high degree of romantic passion for their partners displayed group activation “dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation, namely the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus.”  What the Stony Brook group hypothesised is that these longer term couples reporting the same high degree of passion for the partners would also display group activation in the same reward centres of the brain.  This turned out to be true.

There are a couple of questions we have to settle about the honeymoon pill one way or another for the purposes of the thought experiment.  First of all, would the kind of brain state produced by the pill be exactly like those couple in the early phase of their relationship?  Would they also display the negative limerance like qualities as well?  It turns out that despite displaying the same kind of passion for the partners as the short term couple, longer term couples typically did not suffer from obsessive or intrusive thoughts about their partner.  So we should assume that our pill won’t cause these negative effects either.

We will also want to know a bit more about what causes these brain states in longer term swan couples.  Are they just genetically blessed?  Was it behaviourally instilled in them as children? Or has it something to do with the choices they made as a couple – are they somehow ‘better’ people than the rest of us?  If the latter is true, then we are probably going to want to adopt behavioural therapies before we start swallowing pills.  As far as I am aware there is not a huge literature on what causes the honeymoon state in short or long term couples (although I’m not an expert in the field).  Aron from the Stony Brook group suggests a model called expansion theory where the high degree of passion is caused by an expansion of self when getting to know a new partner.  By continually learning new things and engaging in challenging activities together a couple can maintain this sense of expansion indefinitely.  If this account is true then I think we shouldn’t be taking the honeymoon pill.  But I won’t be challenging this view directly – instead I’ll be exploring a darker path into the nature of romantic attachment.  But readers should bear in mind that alternative points of view are out there.

I’ll also be assuming that the pill has no other adverse side effects – that it doesn’t cause addiction or that sort of thing.  In our scenario it can’t be forced on the subject.  It can’t be given to them surreptitiously.  In real life – it’s rare that a drug that messes around with the reward centres in our brain doesn’t cause some kind of side effects.  But for our purposes we can leave these sorts of issues aside.  There will be a few more assumptions that will be made about the use of this pill – but I’ll make these clear as we progress.

Why No Love for the Honeymoon Pill?

The first thing we need to understand is why it is we are so intuitively repulsed by the idea of a honeymoon pill?  The main concern that people cite is that the authenticity of the relationship is somehow threatened by the pill.  It turns your love into a lie.  There is something compelling and deeply intuitive about this reaction.  We naturally recoil from the idea of artificial love.  But in what way is the authenticity of a relationship actually threatened?  And why does this really bother us?  What we need to explain here is why the vast majority of people have this negative reaction to the idea of the honeymoon pill.  Citing a concern about authenticity isn’t actually enough to explain it.  After all, there are plenty of contexts in life where a significant number of people will accept some form of in-authenticity or another.  And some of those contexts make it hard to discern sometimes just what the value of authenticity in a relationship is supposed to be.

For instance, consider courtship as it is commonly practised in western cultures.  Many of us are happy to ply ourselves with alcohol in order to make it easier to get laid – yet baulk at the prospect of taking chemical aids later on in the relationship.  We wear beautiful masks for superficial introductions, then let it all hang out, warts and all in front of the people we love.  Our authenticity – that which we would so cheaply trade for a night with a drunken stranger proves more valuable than those in which we invest the best years of our lives.  Think about this for a while and then ask: – what then it’s value?  Might it make more sense to be as honest as possible to those with whom we have weak ties – so that we have better information about possible longer term compatibility?  And then later engage in selective forms of in-authenticity in order to protect the investments in people that we’ve made?  The honeymoon pill scenario respects the intuition that authenticity is more important to the selection process than the already committed relationship.  It’s not like the traditional love potion that causes people to fall in love.  It assumes that selection has already taken place – and presumably with as little artificial interference as possible.  So if the love made possible by a honeymoon pill is a lie, then it’s a lie in a different sense.

Considerations like these suggest to me that we need to think harder about our instinctive reaction to the honeymoon pill.  Presumably there are some features we value in authentic long term relationships and that we think that they are jeopardised by the honeymoon pill.  Going forward I will refer to this as the Principle of Lovage:

The Principle of  Lovage:  There are desirable features possessed by authentic, long-term relationships which are threatened by the ingestion of a honeymoon pill.

The difficult thing is in understanding just what these desirable features are.  To see if this principle is valid, we’re going to need to explore some candidates to see if any can be deployed in defence of our original intuition.

Agency

Often a claim about a lack of authenticity is made because of a compromise of the agency of the people involved.  At first sight this looks like a good candidate.  Agency is something that often recognised as something desirable.  And it is also something that you could argue is threatened by taking the honeymoon pill.

For sake of argument lets assume having agency is a good thing in itself.  We want to avoid any deep discussions about the value of free-will and all that sort of thing.  Let’s just say that if the case can be made that our agency is significantly compromised then we have a good argument for not taking the pill.

Is our agency significantly compromised?  As mentioned previously – it’s not as though anyone is made to fall in love on account of the pill.  Furthermore, no one is being forced to take it.  The decision to do so is a mutually agreed upon choice by both partners.  Once medicated, we can assume that there is nothing chemical stopping them from choosing to not re-administer the drug.  We assume there are no withdrawal symptoms or anything like that.  If they continue to re-administer, all we can say is that they prefer being in the swan state to being out of it.

But hang on, you might reply, their preferences have been altered by the pill.  Once they take the pill, their preferences are no longer their own.  They are no longer free to change back.  So their agency has been still be compromised in this sense.  Except – they chose to change their preferences in this way.  What sense are we to make of this?

There is another way to frame the same question.  We assume that if a non-swan couple never opted to take the honeymoon pill then their relationship would face certain tests it otherwise wouldn’t.  When facing such tests we assume that people would be forced to make a choice one way or another: to persist with the relationship, or to end it.  But if you take the pill, then you no longer have to face these tests.  You might argue that you haven’t really made the choice unless you face the test for real.  Is this argument valid?

Consider the following analogy.  A subject is placed in a test chamber.  At some point he is presented with a bowl of nutritious, yet mediocre tasting cereal and a bowl of tasty, yet unhealthy candy and is asked to choose between the two (with full knowledge of the qualities of each).  The subject is tempted toward eating the candy but knows he should  probably eat the cereal for the sake of his health.  He is compelled to consume one of the items.  He makes his choice in whatever way he does.

Next he is moved to a second test chamber.  Before he enters he is told that he will face a similar choice between something desirable yet bad and something undesirable, yet good.  He is not told exactly what he will be choosing between.  He is also told that before entering the chamber he can indicate a preference for the good yet undesirable option ahead of time (he isn’t given the option to indicate a preference for the bad yet desirable option).  If he does indicate this preference – then when he enters the chamber that will the only option with which he is presented.  He will never learn what exactly he gave up.  If he doesn’t indicate a preference for the good yet undesirable option,  then he will face both options when he enters the chamber.  At which point he will then have to make his choice.  As per the first test chamber he has to consume at most one of the items by the end of the exercise.

To sharpen your intuitions a little bit – imagine he is told that his information deficit might be significant.  Maybe the good item is massively good in the sense that it grants everlasting life – but only tastes as bad as a cap of Listerine; or maybe it is incredibly foul tasting but only increases one’s life span by one minute.  Maybe the bad item grants ecstatic pleasure beyond imagining but only reduces the lifespan of the subject by one minute; maybe the pleasure granted is mild but reduces his lifespan by several years.  The subject could be facing any number of possible combinations of these choices – with varying cost-benefits in each.  The point being that the information deficit that he will have if he chooses to indicate a preference prior to entering the box might be significant.  It might not.  He might get a test chamber exactly like the first – where nothing life changing is presented to him.  This is what he is told.  But the reality is that he is going to be subjected to a very costly, yet very tempting option if he indicates no preference for the good (yet undesirable) option.  So the benefit of providing an indication prior to entering the chamber is that you can choose to avoid the possibility of temptation entirely if you like.

The question I want you to ask about the analogy is whether or not you think he has greater agency in the first test chamber or the second?  It seems clear by any measure he has more agency in the second scenario.  In the second scenario he actually gets to choose whether or not to subject himself to temptation – he doesn’t in the first.  You can’t argue that his agency is reduced in the second test chamber on account of having his information restricted about the choice he is making in the first instance – because he can choose not to indicate a preference and thereby gain full information once he steps into the chamber.

You might be able to argue that he has less agency in the second test chamber once he indicates a preference since he has made a choice on reduced information and doesn’t know what he is now going to miss out on.  But even here it’s hard to argue the case definitively – because while you can argue that knowledge increases in some sense the degree of your agency, it can also be argued that temptation in some sense decreases your agency.  And it’s part of the second test chamber that he will in fact be subjected to a very costly, yet very powerful temptation.

My claim is that the analogy is much like our honeymoon pill situation.  Being given the choice to take the pill is like taking the option to indicate a preference before you know exactly what it is you will likely face in the future.  As far as you know you might face some great challenge to your relationship, you might not.   Before we face this challenge we make the assumption that the relationship is a good that we currently wish to maintain – but recognise that in the future it might cease to be as pleasurable on account of the challenges it might face (some disagreement, lack of passion or whatever), while still retaining its essential good.  By taking the pill you make the choice ahead of time to maintain the relationship – this good thing – by preventing the relationship from being subjected to any of these sorts of challenges.  The challenge itself is like the costly temptation in the test chambers. The temptation is to give up the relationship for a more pleasurable existence devoid of conflict or the passionless routine your relationship has become.  The temptation is costly because if you succumb to it, you lose the relationship.  By taking the pill you avoid ever having to face this temptation to end the relationship.  Many people, I think would relate to this – while on the one hand their current experience of the relationship is miserable and they are tempted to end it – nevertheless, they fight to hold on to it because of the value they still attach to the relationship overall.  It’s exactly for this reason that ‘breaking up is hard to do’.

The analogy between the two holds quite well.  If decisions made with full knowledge have a higher agency than those made without it, and if facing temptation reduces agency - then at worst by taking the pill you are just trading one form of freedom for another.

Nozick and the Experience Machine

So I don’t feel we can cite agency as one of the desirable qualities of authentic relationships that are threatened by the honeymoon pill – as per the Principle of Lovage.  So what other candidates are there?  Well, an authentic relationship is not just one which involves the agency of the participants.  Their experiences of one another have to be real as well.  For instance, if I believe a large number of things about my partner which are not true – then the love I bear is also false in some sense.  So an authentic relationship has a veridical component as well.  This could be the candidate quality for which we are looking.  For you might think that the experiences we have of the relationship are made unreal in some sense on account of taking the pill.

To get clearer one why we might value this veridical component, it’s useful to compare the honeymoon pill scenaro to another thought experiment - ‘The Experience Machine‘ by the famous philosopher Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia.  In this thought experiment, psychologists invent a machine that can perfectly simulate experience in the mind of anyone who enters it – and this machine produces for us all the pleasurable and desirable experiences that we could want.  The question Nozick then asks is whether or not we would prefer to live out our lives in an unreal, but otherwise perfect existence.

In reaction to this thought experiment most of us intuitively recoil from the idea of living out our lives in the experience machine – just as most of us do with respect to the possibility of taking the honeymoon pill.  Nozick used this intuitive reaction as an argument against a philosophical view known as utilitarianism, which advocated that we should judge our behaviours on the basis of how much pleasure they collectively bring.  The fact that most of us would choose a comparatively miserable, yet real existence over a perfectively pleasurable, yet unreal one was evidence for Nozick that pleasure is not the only thing that is important to us, and thus shouldn’t be the only component of our moral foundations.

Many will see a clear analogy between the Experience Machine and the honeymoon pill.  The most obvious motivation for taking the pill is the pleasurable relationship that will result – as opposed to the passionless and ordinary sort of relationship that most of us must endure.  We also intuitively feel that by taking the pill we are running away from reality in some way.  And since we believe that a pleasurable existence has no value if not real, as demonstrated by the idea of the experience machine, so to do we feel that a pleasurable relationship has no value if it is not real.

But in fact we still aren’t any closer to understanding what is meant by ‘unreal’ when mentioned in the context of the honeymoon pill.   In Nozick’s thought experiment it IS clear what is meant by an experience being unreal.  It exists only in the mind of the person plugged into the machine.  This is not the case in the honeymoon pill hypothetical.  Both of you are in the swan like brain state.  Your romance continues in the real world.  Everyone else around you can observe your happiness.  It is not a merely subjective reality that you experience.  So when we claim that the love made possible by the honeymoon pill is ‘unreal’ – we can’t mean it in the same way.  So what do we mean?

It  could be that the honeymoon pill causes us to straight up perceive our partners in ways that are false.  But for the purpose of this thought experiment, we’re just going to assume that this is not the case.  The honeymoon pill doesn’t alter your perceptions in anyway – it just alters your preferences.  You still notice all the hair he leaves in the shower – you just don’t mind it like you once did.  You don’t feel the need to nag him as you would have in the past.

Maybe it has more to do with what is causing those brain states.  We have an intuition that there should be a certain set of real-world events and experiences that can cause the sorts of feelings people have in romantic relationships – just as there should be a certain set of real world experiences that cause feelings of accomplishment and pleasure as per Nozick’s thought experiment.  And we clearly should not include experience machines and honeymoon pills in that set of real world things that should legitimately cause these brain states.  A feeling of accomplishment should be caused by a real accomplishment; just as a deep, romantic attachment should be the product of a long process of getting to know one another and learning to resolve the natural conflicts that arise.

If the argument in favour of the honeymoon pill is ultimately to be defeated – I think this is the argument that has the best shot at doing it.  In fact, I think that it must be at least partly correct.  It’s difficult to deny that only through suffering setbacks and facing challenges in life do we learn and grow to be better people.  For example, it’s not an accident that only children are known to be self-absorbed.  It’s because they never had to learn to negotiate with a sibling.  They miss out on crucial opportunities to learn conflict resolution techniques.  So it’s reasonable to believe that by taking the honeymoon pill you might be retarding your growth in the same way.

And yet, there is an assumption behind this belief that I think may well turn out to be wrong.  The assumption has to do with what people commonly assume spousal conflict is all about.  New ideas in the field of evolutionary psychology may some day prove these assumptions false.

Strategic Interference

Most people opposed to the honeymoon pill would likely see spousal conflict along the lines I just described – something which we must all go through in order to become better human beings.  The assumption is that the conflict in romantic contexts is about the sorts of things that cause conflict in other forms of human relationships.  Typically we assume some kind of character flaw is in play which must be overcome  in some way for the conflict to be resolved.  Maybe one person is selfish and needs to learn how to care more about the needs of their partner.  Maybe they have a temper and need to learn to control it.  They could be prone to deception and need to learn the value of honesty.  The list goes on…

There is no doubt that all of these sorts of things cause conflicts in romantic relationships just as they do in other kinds of relationships.  But there is reason to think that romance faces challenges over and above the previously listed conflicts.  In evolutionary psychology there is a theory proposed by David Buss known as strategic interference.  The basic idea is as follows.  Because of their different roles in reproduction, men and women have  faced different adaptive problems in the quest to successfully reproduce.  This has led to the evolution of different reproductive strategies employed by the sexes.  Strategic interference theory predicts that conflict will likely occur in a relationship where these varying reproductive strategies interfere with one another.

The different problems that men and women would have faced in the past are fairly well understood.  One faced by women would have been ensuring that the resources required to carry an expensive nine month pregnancy, whereas men would have been able to just get up and leave during the pregnancy if it suited them.  Hence women would likely have sought to solve this problem by selecting high status men with access to resources, who are also willing to commit these resources over the longer term.  Men, on the other hand are not so constrained.  It’s far cheaper for them to have multiple partners and so they have often adopted the strategy of spreading their seed as widely as possible.  Here is a natural point at which male and female reproductive strategies conflict with one another.  If a man feigns long term interest in a female, only to discard her once he has knocked her up, he would be directly interfering with her strategy of securing a long term supportive partner.

Here is another example.  It happens to be the case that the trait of being high status and economically powerful often don’t cohere with being supportive and loyal.  High status likely means that you have more options and more temptation.  So there is less incentive to stick with just one woman.  As such, there is an incentive for women to obtain a fitness benefit for her offspring by selecting the most powerful male she can with whom to mate – while at the same time securing another male as a partner to help raise and support the child during its development.  Because of this threat of cuckoldry men developed various mitigation strategies in order to minimise this risk.  The main strategy employed is simply psychological, behavioural and physical control to prevent women from successfully mating with other men.  Women don’t have this problem since they know intimately whether or not they are the mother of their child.  But they do have to worry about men diverting economic resources to other mates.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection predicts that those who successfully evolved mechanisms to deal with strategic interference were more likely to successfully reproduce than those who didn’t.  Buss offered the hypothesis that we evolved various negative emotional reactions (jealousy, anxiety, anger etc) primarily as a defence against strategic interference.  This subjective distress is proposed to solve four functions:

 (a) drawing attention to interfering events, (b) marking those events for storage in memory, (c) motivating actions that reduce or eliminate the source of strategic interference, and (d) motivating memorial retrieval and hence subsequent avoidance of contexts producing future interference.  From Buss et al 2004.

Buss tested the hypothesis by measuring the differences in the reported negative affect between the sexes as caused by various forms of strategic interference.  For instance, the theory predicted that women overall would report a greater degree of negative affect when sexual interest was signalled by the other when not desired by the subject.  It makes this prediction because early displays of sexual interest signal short term mating strategies.  The empirical results of Buss’ study confirmed this prediction.

The fact that humans also evolved a honeymoon period in a relationship fits neatly with this picture (although I’m not sure if Buss talks about it).  The selection and courtship phase of a relationship would naturally involve a high degree of strategic interference mitigation in order to ensure that adequate selections are made in the first instance  - hence the high degree of negative emotional affect associated with this phase.  That’s why women so often get upset if you hit on them sooner than they want it.  That’s why men get so upset when a woman flirts but then withholds sex.  But once the selection is made, then it would have been important for couples to keep it together long enough for gestation.  Twelve months – the average length of the honeymoon phase – is just long enough to get a girl pregnant and keep the male around long enough while the female is at her most vulnerable during the pregnancy.  The honeymoon period serves to put strategic interference mitigation strategies out of play to ensure the key act of gestation is not threatened by couple dis-union.  But after that – it’s game on once again.  Some forms of strategic interference occur only during the courtship phase (like deceptive signalling about long term intentions) – but other forms remain a risk throughout the entire duration of a relationship, like cuckoldry and cheating.  So it makes sense that the honeymoon period should end.  Individuals who exited the honeymoon phase did better reproductively than those who didn’t.  And that’s probably why swan like couples are a relatively rare phenomenon today.

The upshot of all this is that we evolved to be miserable in our relationships.  We are hard wired to be on the look out for signs of strategic interference by the people with whom we have chosen to be most intimate.  And when we detect them we get upset.  This loss in subjective well-being in turn creates stress on the relationship as a whole.  This story contradicts our intuition that we suffer through our relationships to learn a lesson about life and become better partners and better people.  Rather, a large proportion of spousal conflict is caused by an evolutionary arms race that’s been going on for million of years.  You’re not supposed to overcome these aspects of your nature.  You’re not supposed to grow as a person.  If your ancestors had overcome these instincts – then they would likely not had the success in reproduction that they did.

Dumping the Evolutionary Ball and Chain

Now – obviously these traits evolved for good reason.  They proved essential in the continual reproductive arms race.  And if it were the case that these evolved traits were as relevant today as they were back in the day when our ancestors first developed them then I’d argue that they should be left well alone.  But I think there are good reasons to suppose that these traits are no longer relevant.

It is a common belief that modern society is changing the environment around us faster than evolution can keep up.  As a result we are not ideally adapted to our environment and this is having a lot of negative consequences. An obvious example concerns the way we evolved to cope with an environment where access to caloric energy was difficult.    Access to calories is now much easier for most of us.  But we haven’t evolved to deal with this environment.  Hence you could argue that this is the primary reason why many western societies are facing an obesity epidemic today.

Similarly, with respect to sexual selection it is clear that we no longer face the same selective pressures as we once did.  In many western societies a male is legally compelled to economically support his offspring – reducing his incentive to engage in short term relationships.  Another disincentive for men to engage in short term mating strategies comes from laws surrounding marriage and de facto relationships which ensure economic assets are distributed fairly upon separation.  Furthermore, women have greater access to education and economic power.  Consequently there is less incentive for women to worry about men diverting their resources to other partners and there is less incentive for them to engage in cuckoldry.  Men have less reason to worry about cuckoldry since DNA related technology has made it possible to determine male paternity beyond any doubt.  In general, as the wealth and technological capabilities of our society increase we should expect our naturally evolved tendencies to become less and less relevant since evolution in humans does not keep pace with the rate of societal and technological change.

Interestingly, evidence for this thesis comes from the fact that we probably began drinking alcohol at around the same time that we made a massive economic leap from a hunter gather society to an agrarian one.  Alcohol, as we noted earlier, interferes with normal mate selection procedures and typically makes people less discerning.  Drinking alcohol would ordinarily have been too much of a risk in hunter gatherer society since the risks of choosing bad partners would have been too high (as well as the other bad effects it causes).  Hunter gatherers lived too close to the economic edge for this to be an acceptable risk.  Ethnographic evidence suggests that alcohol was not a significant component of the daily caloric intake of our Palaeolithic ancestors, as compared to the 7 to 10 percent that it contributes to the average American’s intake.  But as we got richer those risks decreased – presumably to the point where drinking alcohol actually became a selective advantage.

Further – it seems to me that it’s no accident that alcohol would be so commonly associated with religious ritual since religious institutions served to further decrease selection risks.  The blood of Christ was wine.  You imbibed his blood as a symbol of your allegiance to the institution which insisted that you pair bonded for life.  This meant you could afford to be less rigorous in your mate selection, because the church existed as an institution to provide an external constraint on infidelity.  But you can’t just simply choose to be less selective.  It’s hard wired into us.  You needed chemical assistance.  You needed the blood of Christ – alcohol – to interrupt the natural chemical processes in the brain. A neat example of how our traditions have developed through a combination of our evolutionary and economic heritage.

Note that the ways in which alcohol reduce inhibition may be subtle and complex.  For instance – women under the influence of alcohol show decreased inhibition with respect to mate selection only toward high value, yet risky males.  That is – alcohol only causes them to drop their guard toward men that signal high fitness characteristics – but also short term mating strategies (see this paper).  If this is true then alcohol may not act so much to disrupt selection strategies entirely – but simply cause individuals to favour some strategies over others.  As a vehicle for cuckoldry this would partly undermine the story I told about alcohol being a means to more easily establish long term pair bonds.  But insofar as the affair becomes public, the religious institution would have provided  some mechanism to enforce marriage and therefore mitigate risk.

Also – arguments have been made to suggest that the dis-inhibiting effects of alcohol are not chemically produced – but culturally.  This isn’t as bad for the story I’ve just told as you might think.  It doesn’t matter whether it is alcohol as such which disrupts selection strategies in a causal sense or the cultural institutions that surround its use.  It just means that our brain states are more susceptible to being changed by cultural contexts than we thought.  It doesn’t change the fact that we are still hard wired in some sense to pursue our various selection strategies.  It just means that this wiring itself is sensitive to environmental changes and those changes didn’t occur until we were rich enough to develop religion and brew beer.

In any case – all this suggests that we have already begun the process of dismantling the evolutionary defences bequeathed to us by our ancestors.  Given this, it makes it harder to suppose that there is any reason to halt the progression of this disarmament short of societal collapse.  Where alcohol or surrounding cultural practice interrupts selection related strategic interference processes at the early, courtship phase of a relationship, then a honeymoon pill would serve to perform the same role for strategic interference strategies that occur during late stage, mature relationships.  If we’re not yet at a point where society is rich and well organised enough to allow for further dismantling of our evolutionary defences, then it doesn’t look far off.  There may in fact be plenty of fitness benefits to be gained from taking the honeymoon pill that wouldn’t have existed in a pre-industrial society.  People in happy, healthy relationships live longer.  The offspring of such unions do better as well.  Children that suffer the divorce of their parents, for instance, are more likely suffer from many psychological impairments later in life.

Some Unanswered Questions

As I see it – we haven’t been able to find a good candidate quality to underpin the lovage principle as I outlined it above.  But we’ve only looked at two of the most obvious candidates.  What’s more, I think there are plenty of questions that still need to be answered.  For instance, how do we ensure that any real life honeymoon pill doesn’t trap us in what we would otherwise measure as a bad relationship?  I’ve been assuming hitherto that if the relationship was abusive, then at least one partner would never assent to taking the pill.  People in the honeymoon phase are more willing to tolerate flaws in their partners.  Would the pill then cause a sufferer of abuse to simply become more amenable to abuse?  Or would it cause the abuser to cease their abusive behaviour?  Or both?

Even if you knew that it would eliminate the abusive behaviour would you ever want to take the honeymoon pill with such a person?  You might not feel the pain of the previous abuse any more – but you would probably still remember it.  The cognitive dissonance caused by the intellectual understanding that the abuse has occurred versus the emotional ambivalence resulting from the pill might be extreme and uncomfortable.  Does the pill erase the uncomfortable memories as well?  Now we’re on a slippery slope toward the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind.  None of the arguments I’ve put forward here for the honeymoon pill will transfer over easily to memory erasure and control.  At least, I have no intention of trying to make such a case.

What’s more, the pill itself doesn’t change our underlying genetic code.  If we have partnered with someone who has bad features that we would ordinarily not select for, then presumably there is a chance that these traits will be passed on to your offspring.  That’s fine if your offspring also will have access to honeymoon pills – but you’re taking a risk that the societal superstructure will remain as it is in the very long run.  And unfortunately, in the very long run, societal collapse does happen and will probably happen again.

Another concern is that we want the honeymoon pill to only to inhibit negative emotional affect in cases where sexual strategic interference is at play.  We still want to get upset when people are selfish, dishonest, irascible, irrational etc.  And we still want people to get upset with us when we behave that way.  We want this because we still want to learn all the important life lessons about how not to be bad in these ways – and we don’t want to be walked all over by people who haven’t yet learnt these lessons.  But how do we ensure that the honeymoon pill selects correctly?  You might just think that it’s a matter of accurate enough brain imaging.  But I doubt very much that this will prove to be the case.  The problem is that you’re probably  not always empirically going to be able to tell whether a given case of negative emotional affect is caused by strategic interference or just normal a-sexual human conflict.  So this will complicate the mapping from brain states to behaviour that will be necessary to ensure the pill is properly targeted.

And finally – I think it’s important to ask yourself the following question before swallowing the honeymoon pill.  What if you discover one day that your happy, perfect relationship was a result of your partner secretly slipping you the pill in your food?  Would you choose to keep taking it?  Would you even be bothered by it?  For you see, the act of slipping the pill would be an act of strategic interference by your partner of the highest order.  Yet the whole point of the honeymoon pill is to disable your strategic interference defence systems.  In this case your preferences would have been changed externally – and we have to wonder whether you would have the ability to change them back.  The potential for abuse seems high.

I don’t think anyone should be claiming they can make a definitive case for or against such the honeymoon pill.  But what we should realise is that our default intuitions aren’t equipped to properly respond to choice should it ever be presented to us.  I offer the above as a start on the development of better tools for thinking about these sorts of issues.

So first of all I’m going to have to make the case that the new ads aren’t all that different from the old ads.  Well – lets start by working through Sean Oliver’s criticisms.

1) They don’t show the product.

Neither did the Get a Mac campaign.  Incidentally – you can see a Mac in the Mayday commercial.

2) They don’t explain the product.

Oliver acknowledges that the Get a Mac campaign didn’t show the product either – but argues that they focused on a discrete feature set and explained how they work.  Oliver writes:

In the ad above, the Genius asks the shopper, “It came loaded with all the great apps like iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband… Not ringing a bell?” The consumer at whom this ad is targeted doesn’t know what these apps are. As a result, he doesn’t know why he should care that he doesn’t have them. And if the ad doesn’t tell him that, he’s just going to hear marketing noise and tune out.

This may well be a valid criticism.  But then – it should apply equally to this ad from the Get Mac Campaign.  Which is essentially the SAME ad.

In fact these three new ads all focus on the cool apps.  The first introduces them generally.  The second explains some of the things you can do with them.  This is actually more information about what these apps are than was provided by the Get a Mac campaign.

3) They make the target audience feel stupid

What you mean – everyone who owned a PC at the time of the Get a Mac campaign didn’t feel completely patronised?  Not only were those who had bought a PC stupid in those ads, they were also completely ineffectual dorks.  Why wasn’t this a problem?

4) They make the Geniuses look like an unsupportive know-it-all

While he is a bit of a know at all – it’s not correct to say he’s not supportive.  Actually – the character is very supportive.  He helps the dude get his wife to the hospital.  And he helps the plane passenger create a movie for his wife.  In fact – he never chastises the customer – ever.  He doesn’t imply their questions are stupid as Oliver claims.  He totally absorbs himself in their problems at the expense of his own comfort.  And even if you still do insist on detecting a horrible patronising know-it-all in this character – have another look at the Get a Mac ad I just linked to above.  Listen to the completely transparent put-down at the end of the ad.  This is a character that repeatedly pretends to be encouraging and supportive to the PC guy but then always ends up bitch slapping him.

Yet we all liked him more.  Why?

5) There’s no clear call to action

Again – this goes as well for the Get a Mac ads.  It’s not like any of them ended with ‘Go out and buy your mac today!’

So none of these reasons really seem to explain the hatred people have for these advertisements.  In fact – they are in fact post-hoc rationalisations of what is a far more primal and instinctive reaction.

The Problem of the Beta Male

The marketing guys at Apple probably thought they were doing no wrong when they created this campaign.  After all – the genius guy is probably most accurately described as a less threatening, less patronising (though still somewhat patronising) version of the Mac guy in the Get a Mac campaign.  Since the most obvious criticism of the latter campaign was that the Mac guy came off as a bit of a prick, the marketers probably thought they were keeping the best of old campaign while removing its chief flaw.

So what’s going on then?

The reason why we liked the old ads and not the new ads has to do with how we psychologically react tot he genius character.  Even though he is very similar to the Mac character from the old campaign – his evolution has nevertheless turned him into one of the most despised character archetypes: the beta male who doesn’t even know he is beta.

Let’s start with the fact that he is  a beta male.

He’s a dork.  And he’s a dork because of his choices.  He’s reasonably good looking – but short and of slim build.  While a disadvantage to the would be alpha – it’s not a fundamental problem.  Plenty of small dudes do well with the ladies.  His problem is that he’s wearing a corporate branded t-shirt.  The t-shirt in itself lacks style.  But by dressing in a corporate branded t-shirt signals that he has no identity beyond being a corporate schmoe.  Of course, corporate executives love this idea that people have no identity beyond their little house of group think.  But to most people – it just signals that you have no individuality, no strong sense of self.  And that’s just how we perceive beta males.

He’s servile.  He drops everything to help others.  This is what low status males do.  Thinking they will win the heart of their beloved – they end up either appearing creepy or just weak.  It’s just not how you signal value.  This is one of those sad truths about human sociality and courtship that many of us don’t want to admit.  But it’s well understood enough to be a cliché - girls don’t get with nice guys.

He’s indirect.  When he notices that people are doing stupid stuff – like buying bad computers, or focusing on tech when they should be getting their pregnant wife to the hospital.  He doesn’t ever come out and tell them that they are being stupid.  Alpha males generally have no problem with directness.  That’s why alpha males are often also seen as being arseholes.

But at the same time – he doesn’t seem to know he’s beta.  Why?

He thinks he knows better.  In all three ads he demonstrates that he knows better than the people he is interacting with.  In the first one he knows better because he understands what a Mac computer really is.  In the second ad he knows better because he thinks (obviously correctly) that the customer should be focusing on his wife rather than the tech.  And in the third he knows better because he gives the customer various creative tips as opposed to just helping him use the software.

We don’t like this because we interpret it as a beta male trying to act outside the hierarchical structures with which we are ordinarily comfortable.  Once we have someone pegged as beta – that’s how we want them to remain.

He is too confident.  In the middle of a crowded plane he stands up and answers the call for a helpful tech dude.  He’s not shy.  But we instinctively think he should be.  After all, he’s dressed like a dork and keeps acting in a servile way.  Such confidence would ordinarily be the mark of an alpha personality.  But in this case we just cringe.  When an alpha male behaves confidently and draws attention to himself – it’s called being charismatic.  When a beta male does it – it’s called making a fool out of yourself.

We don’t like such characters.  It signals that they haven’t figured out what is a socially acceptable form of extroverted behaviour.  If you’re going to be loud and proud – you need to be able to play guitar really well, you know – be a rockstar,or something like that.  Being good at tech support is not one of those things.

Ignorant Betas in Narrative

Being a beta male is not the worst thing you can be.  Beta males are in fact well liked.  They are helpful, kind – and they don’t try and shove their opinions down your throat.  But no one likes a beta male that doesn’t know he’s beta.  In the context of seeing such characters in a narrative – we only respond well to them if they are positioned clearly as a bad guy.  The classic example is that of Grima Wormtongue from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

He has all the features of the classic beta male – but has usurped power from the King of Rohan by magical means.  He whispers in the King’s ears  with his own opinions of what should be done, when instead he should be under the King’s command.  That is to say – he doesn’t know he’s beta.

From the point of view of a good story this is all fine – because he’s a bad guy.  We don’t mind watching such characters if they are positioned in this way.  The Genius character in Apple’s ads is not.  He’s positioned as the good guy.  This causes in us a great deal of cognitive dissonance.  We don’t want to publicly show ourselves as hating on the good guy.  So instead we turn our hatred toward the story instead.  And that’s essentially why folks hate the advertisement so much.

Loving that Alpha

So if that’s why we hated the new Mac ads.  Why did we love the old ones so much?  Because we love watching true alpha males do what they do to be alpha.  In fact, the Mac character epitomises the perfect modern alpha male.

He has his own dress style.  It’s casual – but not dorky.  But most importantly he is being who he is without trying too hard; as opposed to just some creepy personification of a corporate brand – the fantasy of a bunch of corporate executives.  In the Get a Mac campaign the brand borrows from this confident identity.  The character doesn’t borrow his identity from the brand.

He’s not servile.  When does the Mac guy go out of his own way to help people.  He certainly doesn’t exist merely to help other people the way the Apple Genius guy does.

But now for the most important aspect.  The modern alpha male is a master at signalling that other males are in fact beta while at the same time appearing supportive and non-aggressive – and this is just what the Mac character does.  This is one of the key arts of the modern alpha male – and a very subtle one.  But if you pull it off – then the girls will go nuts for you.  It has this power because on the one hand you demonstrate your superior fitness, while at the same time demonstrating that you will use your dominant position to maintain and encourage social cohesion.  This is why the girls adore it.  They love strong males – but they love social cohesion more.

(One might argue that because women selected for this trait over straightforwardly aggressive and violent males is perhaps why modern society was able to develop.  Go women!)

But it’s a delicate art – like walking a tight rope.  If you are too aggressive or obvious in your put down, then you will come across as mean.  There are a couple of ways to mitigate this danger.  Make the subject of your attack some obvious character flaw of the target – something that everyone else already perceives and agrees with.  Alternatively, just be extremely witty in your delivery.  People will end up laughing at your joke because they can’t help themselves.  Irrespective of how you deliver this attack, you still need to also demonstrate that you nevertheless want harmony – of a sort – between you and this male.  This isn’t easy to do when you’re making fun of them.

Check out how the Mac character does it in the ad below.

Notice how he acknowledges the strength of the PC before delivering the criticism.  Implicit in his delivery is the idea that Macs are better at the stuff that we really care about – you know – life stuff.  But he doesn’t say that openly.  He doesn’t need to.  Notice also how the put down comes right at the end of the clip.  He chastises PC guy by asking him ‘what other kind of better’ was he thinking about?  He isn’t too aggressive.  He doesn’t just say the PC guy is full of crap.  He uses a rhetorical question to make it salient to everyone that PC guy is being evasive in acknowledging the strength of the Mac.  Thus the put down goes after an obvious character flaw of the PC guy.  Mac guy is alpha not just because he is better at the stuff that matters (his apps) – but because he can admit the strength of others without feeling threatened.

This is perfect modern alpha male behaviour and that’s why we love to watch it.  We are evolutionarily designed to like watching it.  We evolved to be able to pick out such people and notice them.  Good marketers know this.  Because they know we’ll transfer the associated desires onto the product.

Transcending Narratives

So that’s why we liked the old ads but not the new.  This explanation won’t be convincing to just about anyone who reacted so strongly to both ads.  We all want to believe that our reactions to such narratives are rational and well thought out.  We don’t want to believe that the causes of our reactions to narratives aren’t transparent to us.

It’s an idea that I’ve been exploring quite a bit lately (see previous link) – because I believe it’s really important that we start believing it. I don’t like the fact that our natural instincts get co-opted in this way to sell merchandise.  And neither should you.  It’s not that it’s unethical (though it probably is) – it’s because it means people will end up buying stuff not because the products actually meet their needs in the best way for the lowest possible price.  They end up buying stuff because they are satisfying various primal fantasies.  This is bad for society.  It’s inefficient and wasteful.

One of the reasons I write these articles on this blog is because I believe that a small amount of training in narrative technique insulates you a great deal from this sort of manipulation.  Think about it – only a small degree of education in the population at large would be required to render these sorts of marketing campaigns a complete waste of time.  This would be a great thing for capitalism.

Of course you have to be convinced first that our reactions are seldom as rational as we suppose.  There will be more posts on this matter soon.

Why is it broken and what is to be done about it?

Sexist Narratives

So why should you believe our interpretative faculty is broken?  Let me start with an example.  Consider the following video and ask yourself whether you think it is sexist toward women.

Plenty of people believe that it is sexist toward women.  The argument they will usual offer is that it presents the woman in the story as being superficial in her  character. She seems to be interested in the man only for his material worth, whereas the man himself seems to be completely devoted to her irrespective of what her material desires of him may be.  If you want an example of people interpreting the video in such a manner, then consider this Google+ discussion.

A lot of you won’t be convinced.  Many will try to explain away the apparent sexism in various ways.  Maybe you’ll argue that a narrative isn’t sexist if its accurately presenting what women actually do.  Maybe there is some other intent behind her circling practices for which we could argue.  If you are tempted in these directions – that’s okay.  You can at least see why a lot of people would consider it sexist.  That’s all we’re going to need for this demonstration.

Now watch the following advertisement for Coke Zero.  Again ask yourself if it’s sexist toward women.

Most people are going to agree that this advertisement really is sexist toward women.  Look at how the women simply exist to gratify the man’s sexual desires.  Surely if this anything is sexist toward women – then this video is.

A large percentage of people will indeed claim that both videos are sexist toward women.  The problem with this is that the narrative structure of the two videos is essentially the same – with the roles reversed.  In the first video, the woman objectifies the man since she is only interested in him insofar as he can satisfy her (material) desires.  In the second video the man is objectifying the woman because he is interested in her only insofar as she satisfies his (sexual) desires.  So if you use the same logic applied to the first video that had it fall out that it was sexist toward women, then the only consistent interpretation is that the second video is sexist toward men!  This is because the logic applied to the first video was that it was sexist toward women because it depicted them as being superficial through their objectification of men – well that’s just how the man is behaving toward the woman in the second video.

Many of you who found both videos to be sexist toward women will be scrambling now to qualify your rationale.  That’s okay – but that’s not the point of my demonstration.  I don’t want to convince anyone that either video is correctly interpreted in one way or the other.  All I want to point out is that reasons we give for our interpretations in the first instance  - very often don’t cohere with one another.  What’s more, being able to refine your rationale after the inconsistency has been pointed out doesn’t make your original intepretation any more rational.  Or to put it more precisely – it doesn’t confer any greater rationality on the brain state you possessed when you made your original interpretation.  This is because it is very unlikely this refined rationale had occurred to your brain when you first offered your interpretations.  Thus it was never a cause of your interpretation.

In fact – there are lots of examples where our interpretations switch from one case to another – even though the cases in question are structurally very similar.  Given that we can flip our beliefs in such an arbitrary manner – it seems very unlikely that the reasons we offer for believing what we do ever have anything to do with why we believe what we do.

The Trolley Problem

Consider a moral problem developed by philosopher Philippa Foot called ‘The Trolley Problem’.  One formulation by Judith Jarvis Thomson is as follows:

A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

A study by Robert Kurzban showed that eighty seven percent of people would answer negatively to this question.  I’m going to assume that you the reader are one of these 87 percent.  Now consider the following example:

You are exploring a seemingly abandoned house when you stumble upon a room containing 6 people and a mechanical contraption with a sign and a button.  Five of the people are locked together in a transparent box of some kind in one corner of the room.  Locked by himself in the opposite corner is the other one of the 6 people.  It is impossible to free any of the hostages.  The sign explains that if you don’t press the button then the man by himself will be injected with nutrients sufficient to meet his caloric needs for that day but not the other five.  If you do press it then the five people will be similarly fed but not the single man.  No one will starve either way (this day at least).  They’ll just suffer the mild fate of being malnourished for a day.

If you’re like me – then you would press the button in this second example – but you wouldn’t throw the guy off the bridge in the first.  Yet the two cases are structurally similar.  Perform a certain action, then cause a harm to one instead of the many.  Remain passive, then harm is performed to the many instead of one.  But in this case, I bet most of us would push the button.  May as well have five well fed instead of one.

Some of you might not want to press the button.  You might think that because no permanent harm is coming to the five people, then just walking away isn’t going to have any significant effect on the world.  Others will try and view the two examples as structurally different because of degree of harm at stake in each is so different.  If you fall into either of these two groups then extend the example in the following way:

After making your choice it occurs to you that if you don’t return each day to press the button, the man by himself will live, but the other five will eventually starve.  In fact – the sign explains that once one group has starved to death, the box of the other will be opened and the people (or person) will be allowed to go free.  If you try to keep both alive by pressing the button one day but not the next in an alternating fashion then all six will eventually starve, albeit at a slower rate which extends their suffering.  Do you keep pressing the button and save the five people?  Or do never come back and let the man by himself live?

I’d press the button repeatedly until the single guy is dead and the group of five are free.  But I wouldn’t throw a guy off a bridge.

Now again – maybe with a bit of work you’ll figure out what is different between my starvation example and the original Trolley Problem.  But it doesn’t really matter.  The fact is we have these intuitive responses to these imagined scenarios and the reasons we initially offer lack consistency.  As such, our initial belief states which cause us to respond as we do don’t seem likely to be the result of the reasons we offer.

Jon Haidt, a psychologist from the University of Virginia described our responses to these sorts of moral problems as ‘Moral Dumbfounding“.  He observed that in the end most people (except philosophers) eventually give up trying to justify their moral choices in the face of these sorts of examples, but nevertheless stay true to their original view.

GPA and Income Re-distribution

Here’s another example I found on Robin Hanson’s blog – Overcoming Bias.  Have a watch of the following video.  In it, college students are asked why income re-distribution is okay but not GPA re-distribution.  The college students struggle to come up with any good reasons.

I’m not going to explain this example in depth.  You can read a discussion of it over at Overcoming Bias.  Just ask yourself –  as you try and defend your position that likely riles against re-distributing GPAs while supporting income re-distribution – do your further rationalisations really have anything to do with why you believe what you do?  And if not – why are you putting so much effort into developing these additional rationalisations anyway?

Our Broken Narrative Faculty

I see the way we respond to these sorts of cases as a form of narrative interpretation.  We get told various little stories and are asked to respond to them.  Then we present the reasons why we responded as we did.  In these reasons, we find an interpretation of the narrative presented.  We give an account of what it is about, its structural features – how it’s similar or dissimilar to various other cases.  By responding to these various little stories we gradually build a map of how we navigate the world.  This map should be able to give us some information about how we would act when faced with any given situation.  But examples like the ones above should cast considerable doubt on the usefulness of any such map.

And what about the stories we tell about the world?  Think about it – we tell stories every day: when we relate something that happened to us on a previous occasion, when we gossip about other people in our group, there are all sorts of occasions that we employ our capacity for story-telling.  But if it’s likely that our capacity for interpreting stories is broken – then it’s likely our capacity for telling them is broken as well.  If our interpretation of narrative is supposed to provide a map of how we would respond to the world, then our narratives serve as the primary means by which we describe that world.  So not only are we responding badly to the narratives that are presented to us, the narratives that get told to and by us, aren’t that crash hot in the first place.  Truth seems to lie behind a doubly thick veil.

So the question is – if our capacity for interpreting and creating narratives is broken – then why are we so invested in them?  Why do we never seem able to give them up?  Why are we so concerned with justifying them at all?

There are a few theories out there and I’ll be looking at them in a future post.

If any of you out there can’t wait and want to get some answers now – then one interesting theory is offered by Robert Kurzban in his book: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Disclosure, this is an affiliate link). This is a very interesting book that offers a modular theory of mind as an explanation to the sorts of questions I raised above. It’s written for a non-technical audience and is a pretty easy and entertaining read. I’ll be talking about his theory in my next post.

Oh – but hang on a moment…  which Batman were you thinking of:- the 1960′s version starring Adam West?  Well I wasn’t.  I was thinking of the 1989 version played by Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton.

Those who were around when that Batman film was released in 1989 might be surprised that I would say such things.  Burton’s vision of Batman was praised for its edgy, noire aesthetic.  Writers such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Steve Englehart had already taken the comic books in a dark direction years before Burton’s “re-interpretation” was released.  Burton had felt compelled to follow their lead – to the great consternation of the fans of the 60s version – and to even take it to the next level.  So where do I get off calling Burton’s Batman dated and campy?

I’ll make the case in a moment.   But once you’re convinced you might be interested in exploring some further questions:

Why do these films seem to date as they do?  Is it the subject matter?  Is super-hero fantasy doomed to age poorly?   What about the more recent films by Christopher Nolan?  Will we look back at them and cringe in twenty years as well?  Why couldn’t those films have appeared twenty years before their time?

What is really fascinating is that it is the modern phenomenon of corporate driven “iterative fiction” that has thrown new light on just what these questions mean.  You most likely are familiar with the phenomenon of iterative fiction through the Hollywood reboot – where some franchise or another is rebooted over and over again – just like the Batman character.  These iterations of the same characters and worlds make salient a kind of meta-narrative which spans the breadth of the different incarnations.  In the meta-narrative the old significations and iconographies are put to the death and new ones are brought into being.  The characters, heroes and villains – now freed of their tired clichés can electrify our imaginations just like they had a generation before.  In the meta-narrative we find a lingua franca that spans across time – a way to understand who we were when in the 1960s we found the campy Batman so entertaining who we became when Tim Burton reinvented Batman thirty years later and who we are now as Christopher Nolan blows our minds once again.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Batman – I can’t recommend Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (sponsored link) highly enough. I relied upon it a great deal when doing the research for this post.

In Search of Camp

Okay – so first of all, has the 1989 Batman really dated like I claim?  Well – in the end it’s going to be a matter of subjective judgement and not all of you will agree.  But when you watch this scene remember that this movie was praised and criticised for being so edgy and dark.  Nicholson’s rendition of the Joker was not something you took your kids to see.  He blew everyone’s mind for being so intense and frightening.

How was this thought of as being so dark and edgy?  Now that we’ve been exposed to Heath Ledger’s Joker, this feels silly and tame.

The difference between the two renditions is so stark to modern eyes that it’s difficult to see at first glance just in what respect analysis of any kind is needed.  Ledger’s version seems genuinely disturbing – Nicholson’s is just silly.  Certainly, it’s not as silly as the old 1960′s version.  As you’ll see in the clip below (watch as much or as little as you like) the Joker back then was hardly threatening at all.  He was cowardly and hides behind his henchmen – whereas Nicholson’s version was certainly more menacing than this.

Certainly I’m not doing justice to Burton’s version by playing what is probably the worst scene in the movie.  But even when the Joker is doing something really evil it remains more comical to our sensibilities than shocking:

Compared to the scaredy cat in the 1960′s version – this is certainly gruesome.  But the style of the murder is still largely cartoonish.  It takes the gag of the electric shock handshake – and amplifies it.  These days it’s hard to feel shocked (pun intended) by the scene given that cheesy hum sound in the back ground – or the cheap looking burnt corpse that is the result.  Yet I imagine this scene was pretty shocking back in the day to most people.  Although the corpse looks tame to us now – consider the way Burton adds so much emphasis in the revealing of it.  The camera pulls back dramatically – as though in revulsion – while the light pours in from behind at the exact same moment.  We were supposed to be shocked by it.  I don’t think that the choice of death by electric shock was accidental either.  It mirrors what was supposed to be a revelation to an audience that was used to a much tamer experience.  It’s like Burton is directly saying to the audience – you think you know what the Batman story is all about?  Well how’s about this to blow your mind!

Nevertheless – the museum scene – and plenty others throughout the movie reveal that Burton hadn’t gotten so far from the camp ancestry of the story.  If he wanted it to be dark and edgy – why did he leave so much camp stuff in?  Part of the answer is that he made the film as dark and edgy as was needed to for audiences at the time.  It was enough to shock and exhilarate them.

Another part of the answer is that it is likely that most people back then wouldn’t have been capable of enjoying something more like Christoper Nolan’s version.  We needed to be gradually introduced to the story that has taken shape under Nolan’s direction.  Evidence for this is that Tim Burton’s sequel to his Batman movie was considerably darker and edgier than the first – yet it performed so badly at the Box Office that the studio was moved to return the Batman back to the campy aesthetic.  Bruce Wayne is portrayed as an incredibly messed up individual – his love interest Cat Woman  is a psychopath.  For the most part they really relate to one another.  This just didn’t go down very well for audiences.  They were ready for the increased violence and nastier bad guys – but they didn’t like to be confused.  They still wanted a straight up hero that gets the bombshell girl at the end of the film.

But also – and I think this forms the largest part of the answer to the question of why Burton’s version is still pretty campy – I don’t think it was possible for Burton to even conceive of something like Nolan’s vision – not through any individual lack on his part as a creative director – but because there were still too many compents of the older story which had yet to be unmade or overcome.  What do I mean by this?  To understand – we’re going to have to look in detail at the concept of narrative iteration.  For it is through process of iteration that various concepts, meanings and symbols are unmade and it is through this process that new ones are brought into being.

Fit the Product to the Market

Iterative fiction is a process where a given story or set of stories is repeated in order to refine the content to satisfy a market.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I take a strong interest in artistic modes that incorporate hacker sensibilities.  A love of iteration is one of the core hacker virtues.  It is born of two key starting points: the first being a desire to produce something of value to people, the second is a belief that you won’t know what people value until you try something.  Through iteration, the product is refined – new elements are introduced, some are discarded – until the intended audience is willing to shell out their hard earned for the product.

This is exactly what Detective Comics did with its product in the late 1930s and early 1940s.    Although it is not the sort of company we commonly associate with hacker sensibility – its culture and methodology adopted much of what we consider to be true of hacker sensibility today. It was a young start-up company that continually experimented with different characters and ideas in order to establish its audience and define its market.  They were, first and foremost, seeking to create something that people valued.

But while the hacker seeks to build a product that people want, they also have a penchant for risk that established companies can’t abide.  To this extent – hackers are willing to experiment with new ideas and test them against the market.  Here there is room for artistic vision – which always runs ahead of common sensibility.  This is true of the early “Detective Comics’.  The original Batman created by Bob Kane was much closer to the dark vision we see today in Christopher Nolan’s films than the campy mass market version of the 60s.  He was a somewhat amoral anti-hero that took pleasure in killing criminals because of the death of his parents.  He did good not out of a desire to be good – but out of a twisted sense of revenge.  This was the image of the tragically alone vigilante – brought into being by a cruel and evil world – like a cellular anti-body that has but one, grim purpose.  In many ways the original remains the darkest vision of the Batman character that has yet been produced.  Such a vision was possible because Kane and his co-writers were left relatively free to explore an artistic purpose.  The young company was looking for something new and Batman fit the bill.  It wasn’t long, however, before market reality tore away at a large part of the artistic vision that Kane and the other early writers bequeathed.

They realised, for instance, that most of their audience consisted of young boys.  So Batman was paired with his “boy wonder” side kick Robin – a way for young boys to imagine themselves as part of the story and more effectively live out their ego/id satisfaction.  Thus Batman was transformed from the amoral, loner vigilante to the closet family man and father figure.  Another problem with having young boys as your primary audience is that young boys – unlike Batman and Robin – are governed by their mothers.  And many – in their day – were unhappy with their children being influenced by such amoral filth.  After a wave of moral hysteria, DC comics introduced a code of conduct for its characters.  Batman became an honorary member of the police force as opposed to an outlaw, and he swore off killing his enemies as was his previous want.  The Joker, who was originally a psychopathic murderer, became the campy trickster that survived up until the 70s.

Hence, through the process of iteration – the product was rapidly made to fit its market.  This is a process that happens relatively quickly.  Over the course of a couple of years he became a relatively straightforward super hero – with a little bit of darkness and pathos thrown in – but not a lot.  This was what people could understand, relate to and enjoy.  The bad guys were bad/scary enough.  The Batman was as evil as could be tolerated (this wasn’t much).   But eventually this changed.  The hordes would flock to see Christopher Nolan’s dark, realist vision of the hero.  But how is this possible?  It’s not enough to say simply that times change – that audiences change.  That’s just restating what is obvious.  Why did they change?

Fit the Market to the Product

Iteration allows you to quickly fit your product to your market.  But interestingly, it also allows you – over time – to mould your audience to your product.  In the case of narrative iteration – there are various concrete methods by which the meanings and ideas of previous iterations are unmade and left without their dramatic power to move, entertain and instruct us.  From the ashes of this conceptual destruction arise a new set of symbols, concepts and iconography that refresh anew  our passions for the subject matter.

Thus over time the audience’s ability to engage with these symbols and narrative structures is gradually altered over time.  Audiences can be made to fit to the product.  Of course – it’s not just one cultural product causing these cultural shifts.  The destruction of one type of narrative style in one product can affect the audience’s ability to appreciate it in another.  But it’s still instructive to see how this destruction occurs in the microcosm of a single meta-narrative such as the Batman stories.

So how does this evolution occur?  There are a number of different components.

Backward and Creeping Realism

Perhaps the most important – an aspect which acts as a kind of umbrella to a number of different sub-aspects – is a Creeping Realism which you find in just about all forms of  iterative, fantasy fiction.  If you look at the trends in the fantasy genre you’ll often see that a drift toward realism over time.  Fantastical elements are made less salient, and the remaining ones are given more sophisticated explanations in terms of more modern concepts.  (It doesn’t just happen iteratively within a single franchise – it happens across texts as well.  Make a comparison, for example, between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Martin’s Game of Thrones.  The latter is currently enjoying enormous success because of the increased realism it brings to the genre.) 

It is this creeping realism which in part makes previous iterations unwatchable.  The realism in later iterations forces us to retract the suspension of disbelief that we granted to the previous versions.  

In the Batman franchise one of the aspects that has received the most development has been with respect to the psychology explaining the characters.  Tim Burton was most interested in  the psychology behind a dude that would dress up in bat costume.  He writes in his book Burton on Burton:

Part of what interested me was that it’s a human character who dresses up in the most extremely vulgar costumes.  The first treatment of Batman, the Mankiewicz script, was basically Superman, only the names had been changed.  It had the same jokey tone, as the story followed Bruce Wayne from childhood through to his beginnings as a crime fighter.  They didn’t acknowledge any of the freakish nature of it, and I found it the most frightening thing I’d ever read.  They didn’t acknowledge that he was a man who puts on a costume.  They just treated it as if he’s doing it for good and that was it.  You can’t do that.

In this quote Burton applies a specific technique of creeping realism that I like to call – Backward Realism.  It works like this.  Start with some narrative element with which you have been bequeathed – some element that is at once fantastic in nature yet also impossible to remove.  In this case we’re talking about the fact that Bruce Wayne dresses up in a bat costume in order to fight crime.  This element is at once strange and yet, in the context of Batman, can’t be removed.  You can’t have a Batman story without the man who dresses like a bat.

Next ask the question – what if this element was real?  Begin a thought experiment where you imagine the possible world that is closest to our own – yet still includes Batman.  What else would HAVE to be different?  What could you keep the same?   What would the causal history of the world have to have been in order to bring such a person into existence?  How can we explain such a person assuming that we keep constant as much about the world as we already understand – i.e. various laws of nature and psychology?

This is why I call it backwards realism.  You work backward from the narrative element that you are trying to include in order to create a reality as similar to our own as possible.  In this way you move the story to a possible world much closer to the real one.  The key to the success of an attempt at backwards realism is that whatever elements you end up introducing by means of it should both bring the story closer to the real world and also serve some kind of significant role in the development of the story.  Something of consequence has to hang off it.

(As an aside – if you want an example of a really poor attempt at backwards realism then consider the use of the concept of Midi-chlorians in the Star Wars prequel as a way to explain the concept of the Force.  The reason why it doesn’t work is because it doesn’t actually move the Star Wars universe very much closer to our own possible world (because while it changes the force into something that is not entirely magical – it’s still pretty damn magical) and nothing particularly significant in the plot line ever hangs on it.  The only thing that matters to the story is that Anakin Skywalker is strong with the force – not that he’s got lots of midi-chlorians in his cells.) 

In Burton’s case, he focussed on the psychological profile of a person that dresses as a bat.  He came to the conclusion that such a person would have to be suffering from a borderline pathology – a loner with a split personality with which Bruce Wayne seems to struggle mightily.   Burton explains many of the choices in the movie follow logically from this choice of backwards realism.  For instance – it made working in the Robin character impossible because in the possible world that they had singled out, it just didn’t make sense for this disturbed loner to be hanging out with a kid while fighting crime.  The movie is so much better for this choice.

But whether or not you would draw up the backwards realism in the same way with respect to Batman’s psychology – it’s pretty hard to deny that overall Burton’s attempt is less than successful.  The reasons for this are legion.  First of all – while he includes the classic Batman origin story (with some changes) – where Batman’s parents are killed.  He took out the rest of the origin story about how Batman came to be.  Since we are denied the details of the causal story that leads to him having the psychological profile that he does, his character remains somewhat shallow and impenetrable – a complaint that many raised about the movie at the time of its release.

But what is worse is that while Burton at least tried to explore a backwards realism of the Batman psychology – he failed in his exposition of any of the other traditional elements of the Batman story.  We do get an origin story of the Joker – but it doesn’t explain anything.  Why does falling into a vat of chemicals turn a seemingly ordinary gangster into a super criminal that likes to turn his criminal activities into jokes?  And this is despite the fact that Burton had read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke.  In this version, the Joker is given an origin story where he is an out of work comedian trying to support his wife and unborn child and turns to crime to do so.  But before he can carry out his first robbery, his wife dies in an accident.  Yet the gangsters with which he has involved himself force him to go through with the crime anyway – even though his only reason for so doing it is gone.  Things go wrong during the robbery, he falls into the chemical goop and is horribly disfigured in the way that we all know.  The experience drives him mad and so he becomes the Joker.  (Moore’s version, on the other hand, struggles to explain how a cowardly comedian could become so criminally adept, whereas Burton’s version doesn’t have this problem since he starts out as a gangster – this is a tension that I explore below in greater detail).

Alan Moore's Joker shares his frustrations with his wife before he became the Joker

The idea that Moore was exploring was whether or not anyone would go similarly insane after having such a bad day.  The origin story of the Joker is important in Moore’s treatment because it explains why the Joker does what he does.  It gives us that kind of causal link between events.  In the rest of the story he kidnaps Commissioner Gordon and his daughter and proceeds to torture Gordon while showing him photos of his daughter being violated.  Why is he doing this?  Because he wants to see the best and most noble man in Gotham go insane on account of having one bad day.  The Joker wants to justify his actions and show the world that there is nothing exceptional about his evil nature – that anyone could be similarly affected by such horrible circumstances.

Burton’s vision had none of this.  It does increase the realism in the respect that the Joker is a gangster prior to becoming the Joker – so he penchant for violence at least has some kind of explanation, and this is something that Moore’s version lacks.  But beyond this – Burton’s origin story adds nothing to the Raison d’être of the character.

The other problem is that besides the two main characters Burton’s version doesn’t treat most of the remaining elements with any sort of backward realism.  The gadgets are given no explanation.  The Joker’s talents are not explained.  His henchmen are just kind of there and don’t make any sense at all.  They are simply filler.  He also deliberately introduces a noir, cartoony treatment of Gotham city because he thought this was what you had to do to stay true to the comic.  Mind you – it needs to be pointed out that Moore’s Joker is still very comic-like in many respects.  While he nails the psychology really well – the joker still has his joker venom for instance.  This is evidence of how realism creeps forward at different rates through different elements of the meta-narrative.

Nolan’s Batman improves on Burton’s because of the way backwards realism is applied to so many of the traditional elements of the Batman story.  And if they can’t be explained, they are often removed (like the Joker poison that turns everyone into a dead clown).   He uses real locations as his sets.  Batman’s gadgets often have some kind of military back story to them and we see a great deal behind the process of their creation.  The Joker’s henchmen are described as being mentally insane – the kind of people that are attracted to the Joker because of his own seeming insanity (as opposed to them just hanging around for no reason).  Batman gets a proper origin story that explains his amazing skills and abilities – as well as his decision to use the Batman costume.  In Nolan’s version he is trained by a secret order of ninja assassins and he has a mentor that explains to him how the ninja uses theatrics to frighten, threaten and confuse his enemies.

So that’s backward and creeping realism.  Each version tries to fill the gaps the other versions failed to fill – and with each iteration they are able to do it a little better than the earlier ones.  Now that we’ve seen Nolan’s Batman – we can’t go back to Burton’s and enjoy it like we once did.  Previously we were able to suspend our disbelief when confronted with the various explanatory gaps we came across.  But these gaps begin to feel like vast chasms once we are exposed to an iteration that does more work to bridge the chasm for us.  When compared to Burton’s version, Nolan’s Batman asks us to take much smaller jumps.  It requires far less effort for us to suspend our disbelief and lose ourself in his world.  We now refuse to do the work that Burton’s lazier version requires of us.  As a result, we can’t lose ourselves in the story any more.  We can only look at it now from the outside – as a kind of historical artefact.

One of the interesting aspects of creeping realism is the fact that in order to work – it has to be… well… creeping.  In general audiences don’t like a fast pace of change.  Certain expectations about what they are going to receive have to be met.  You can only blow minds gradually.  If people go to the cinema looking for a popcorn Sunday super-hero feature and you give them a 70s style, slow moving psychological portrait; with a central character – played by Gene Hackman – who wears a batman costume to symbolise how his richness has led to his existential estrangement from Gotham’s citizens – or some crap like that:- then you’re going to annoy your audience.  Maybe someday audiences will be ready for a such a product – but it clearly won’t be for a while.

If you gradually fill in the gaps of the previous versions of the story – then you can, over time, mould your audience and change their sensibility.  If you do it right, the audience doesn’t have a choice in the matter.  The gradual filling of the explanatory gaps with the various realist elements is like the movement of a slowly closing vice.  As I said earlier – this forms part of the answer to the question I raised earlier about why Burton couldn’t go further in his treatment of the Batman story.  Audiences simply weren’t ready for it.  Realism hadn’t crept far enough.  But we still haven’t seen yet in what way he was conceptually blocked from taking the story further.  The old symbols and meanings had to be swept away first.  So we next have to look at the concrete ways in which this happens.

Killing Concepts with Repetition

Even though it is the case that iteration must introduce change slowly – it is also true that no change at all will result in boredom.  A somewhat obvious aspect of iteration is the fact that various narrative and conceptual features are repeated from one iteration to the next.  Music is another example where repetition leads to boredom.  When we first hear a piece of music that we love – our brain is ecstatic in the pleasure that it feels.  But this decreases over time until the music has no power to move us as it once did.  Certainly this is a fact caused by various neurological processes in our brain.  It would be interesting to discover whether the same processes causing this increasing boredom from repetition in music does so for our experience of narrative.

In essence this is a feature of human psychology that forces change in the creators of the Batman story, rather than the consumers.  Iteration is driven by corporate need – a desire to continue producing product that studios and publishers are confident will lead to sales.  But in order to successfully continue doing this – they have to innovate to some degree or our boredom with repetitive material will eventually make the product worthless.

Yet – if used correctly, repetition itself can be a tool that authors can use to shape and mould audiences.  If audiences have some idea of a concept or symbol that you think is holding them back from appreciating the awesomeness of your vision, then you can use repetition to deliberately destroy the hold this idea has over them.  The technique is simply to introduce repetition of this element within your story – often with people in the story chastising or mocking this element.  From the perspective of the meta-narrative, what we are witnessing in such cases is the death of a piece of symbolism.  It’s analogous to seeing a character being killed off – but instead it’s a bit of ‘meaning’ that is dying.

There is a fantastic example of this in Tim Burton’s Batman movie.  Watch this scene starring Jack Palance and Jack Nicholson.

In it we see two bad guys manoeuvring against each other.  Jack Palance is the head of a Mafia type organisation and he wants to kill Jack Nicholson because he has discovered that Nicholson is sleeping with his girl.  Later, once Nicholson has changed into the Joker, he comes back and kills Jack Palance in a showdown-at-noon style confrontation.  But what we are witnessing is not just the death of Palance’s character – but the death of a style of “bad guy” that had been around for years in the Western genre.  Batman, of course, borrows many elements from Westerns.  Such tales would often involve a solitary hero that would do battle against a lawless and amoral bad guy.  Jack Palance – in fact – often played that bad guy.  Here’s an example (again – watch as much or as little as you like):

The Western Bad Guy was often presented as tribal pack leader that would presumably arise in contexts where institutionalised law hadn’t yet taken root.  Their motivations were often selfish – they committed crime in order to satisfy their greed or lust.  One of the key aspects of the Western Bad Guy is a lack of honour – they often display a lack of willingness to face off against their foes in a fair fight.  You’ll see an example of this if you keep watching the Palance movie above for long enough – one of the bad guys murders another man by knifing him in the back.  These features often serve to underpin our sympathies for the hero who – as a lone and noble figure – manages to triumph over the bad guy even though he is out-numbered and his enemy won’t fight fair.

The Grissom character that Palance plays in Burton’s Batman is a throwback to this Western style bad guy.  As the head of a group of bad guys, he has that same pack leader mentality.  He resorts to killing his enemies using devious and underhanded methods – such as he tries to employ on Nicholson.  His aims are traditional – he wants revenge, money and power.  But he is not the true villain of the story – he’s a stepping stone for the Joker.  He’s a way for Burton to show that the Joker is something new that they won’t be able to understand unless they get this old bad guy image out of their heads first.

In order to help audiences adapt to the new kind of bad guy represented by the Joker, Burton uses repetition and parody of the Grissom character.  He does it so overtly he completely smashes the audience over the head with it:

And thus we laugh along at the silly exaggerated manner that Palance brought to his bad guy act.  In this way we overcome that concept that dominated our sensibilities for so long.  This paves the way for us to be able to appreciate the new style of villain that the Joker represents.  In many iterations the Joker really is something different from the traditional Western villain.  In Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke – for instance – the Joker’s aim is not greed or lust – nor power – but a perverted desire to have people empathise with his madness.  His henchmen aren’t your standard thugs, but insane circus freaks; a strange perversion of the standard tribal allusion.  Nolan presents a similar aim for the Joker in The Dark Knight.   He tries to convince Batman that people will murder each other ‘when the chips are down’ – and devises an elaborate game theoretic experiment where two boats full of people have to blow up the other boat or be blown up themselves by the Joker.  As in Moore’s version – the Joker fails and Batman suggests that in fact that the Joker is alone in his madness.

Joker's henchmen in Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke"

Nolan actually presents another vision of the Joker in the same movie that also deviates from the Western tradition.  For the first half of the movie the Joker is presented as having aimlessness itself as his aim.  The character distinguishes himself from being crazy on account of the fact that it’s not that he is without aims – he is deliberately without aims.  It’s in this choice to be aimless that he distinguishes himself from the standard crazy person.  As a result, he proves himself to be a villain that Batman struggles to understand.  Insofar as Batman is a standard western hero – he continues to be outfoxed by the Joker.  Batman only manages to beat the Joker in the end by allowing himself to take the blame for Harvey Dent’s crimes – a kind of inversion of the sort of Western heroism you would have seen in films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – where the hero (in this case John Wayne) allows someone else to take the credit for shooting the bad guy.  As such – Batman has to be a new kind of hero – a non-hero so to speak – in order to defeat this new kind of villain.  (That Nolan can’t decide exactly on what his vision of the Joker is supposed to be is a glaring problem with the film that few people actually picked up upon.)

Returning to Burton’s Joker, it’s somewhat ironic that although Burton does the work of de-constructing the old notions of villainy – the joker himself doesn’t manage to transcend it all that successfully.  While Jack Nicholon parodies Jack Palance, his own portrayal of villainy is itself ripe for parody.  It is full of silly and exaggerated  affectations – just as Palance’s performance was.  What’s more, he seems to be motivated by fame and a desire for notoriety more than anything else.  This is not a great deviation from the old Western bad guy.  He even has his henchmen – which haven’t been ironically inverted into crazy circus people as we saw in Moore’s version.  They are just normal henchmen.

These observations make the question about why it is that Burton wasn’t able to go further all the more compelling.  As I intimated earlier, Burton and the studio execs  perhaps thought that in the end the Joker had to remain close in substance to the old Western bad guy so that audiences wouldn’t feel too challenged.  I think that actually this was the right decision from a commercial point of view.  Everyone loved Jack Nicholson as the Joker at the time.  His performance was commended.  The movie did very well.  But just a few years later, Burton tried again with his sequel and this time tried to take the concept of the villain further away from the traditional western concept.  Both the Penguin and Catwoman were villains that moved considerably further away from the traditional bad guy (notice the circus freaks make an appearance in this film).  The movie, as a result, is considerably better than Burton’s first.  It has aged much better as well.  I could personally watch this movie without cringing nearly as much as I did watching Burton’s first film.  Yet at the time – it did extremely poorly at the box office.  Audiences weren’t ready for it.

The studio folks misread this as thinking that audiences would prefer the old campy style – and the next two films (directed by Joel Schumacher) removed every single one of the innovations that had evolved in the Batman franchise since the 70s.  Audiences briefly believed that this was what they wanted as well.  Schumacher’s first film did really well at the box office.  His follow up – which in substance was in no way different to his first – did so poorly it was credited with killing the franchise.  Ultimately, the studio got it wrong.  It wasn’t that audiences wanted to see the campy Batman again.  It’s just that the speed of innovation was too fast for them.

It’s arguable that Burton’s version of Batman made it possible for Nolan’s vision to be commercially viable.  Burton performed the necessary creative destruction of old ideas.  It just took a little bit of time for this destruction to work its way through the consciousness of the audience.

Comfortable Repetition and Compositional Narrative

Of course there is a flip side to repetition that reveals a somewhat contradictory aspect of our psychology – and I just alluded to this at the end of the previous section.  While continued repetition will lead to boredom in your audience, nevertheless repetition is needed in order for audiences to be comfortable with what they are watching.  If every aspect of a given story was completely new – then it would be almost impossible for anyone to understand anything at all.  You see this problem in artistic works that attempt to be too novel in their presentation.  The avante garde fetishises novelty and mistakes it for greatness – the tragedy for those entranced by such a movement being that their output is never commercially viable and very seldom infused with any greatness.  They end up missing out on any of art’s rewards.

Certainly anything which hopes to be commercially viable has to use a great number of ideas and symbols that have occurred a zillion times before in previous iterations.  This I call Comfortable Repetition.  Any commercially viable product has to be comfortably repetitive.  However – anyone who relies upon it too much soon faces a dilemma, since – as we saw above – too much repetition leads to boredom.  The great dilemma for those seeking to attain commercial success is to find that sweet spot between comfort and novelty.  They must be repetitive – but not too much.  Yet sometimes audiences aren’t ready for the new concepts you want to introduce.  So authors often find themselves between a rock and a hard place.  How to fix this?

There is another structural feature of narrative construction which, when combined with comfortable repetition, allows skilled authors to push their audiences toward new ideas and solve the above mentioned dilemma.  The structural feature of narrative  construction has to do with the fact that Narrative is Compositional.  What this means is that you can dissemble different narratives into their component parts and put them back together again in different ways to make brand new narratives – like pieces of Lego.  And while not every combination results in a work of genius – nevertheless there are very few hard constraints in what you can do with the pieces.  You can just about slap them together in any old way you like.  This freedom is why you get works like ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space‘ – a film where the combination of narrative elements is so disparate and bizarre it has gone down in history as a famous example.

So – you like the campy Batman but the serious Joker?  There is nothing at all preventing you from writing a story that includes these two.   However, not every possible combination of elements will be necessarily satisfying, or even commercially viable – but nevertheless the fact remains that narratives consist of various disparate pieces that can be detached and connected with one another in ways that are relatively unconstrained.

Skilled authors can use these two features – comfortable repetition and compositional narrative – in order to solve the dilemma posed by audiences who are bored with what they know yet are still not ready for something new.  The trick is to keep most elements of your story the same to what has come immediately before – yet swap in just a couple of new elements that the audience hasn’t yet seen before.  It’s the fact that narrative is compositional that makes this possible.

But one can still wonder about how many new elements can you introduce at one time?  The general rule of thumb is – as few as possible.  The easiest way to think about it is again in terms of possible worlds.  If the meta-narrative had previously come to rest on one particular possible world – then you want to choose a possible world which is right next to the previous one – where closeness represents the degree of similarity between possible worlds.  When the movement from one world to the next indicates a creeping realism – then the movement is generally headed toward the real world, one hop at a time.  This adds further light on what was preventing Burton from evolving the Batman story at a faster pace.  Audiences don’t permit large hops.  Small hops are not only permissible - but necessary if the product is to stay vital and fresh.

In this way the use of comfortable repetition becomes a kind of a trap that skilled authors will use to guide their audiences toward new ideas.  The repetition of old material will be the honey that convinces audiences that they are getting exactly what they paid for – the insertion of the new material is the toy surprise at the centre of the candy.

A great example of this is the plot line in Steve Englehart’s famous Detective Comics series #469-476.  He starts the narrative using all the well worn clichés of the superhero genre.  A new super-villain appears on the scene – and Batman mobilises to defeat him.  In this case – the villain is called Dr Phosphorus – a man that was involved in some sort of tragic nuclear accident and has the matter of his body transformed into radioactive phosphorus.  Because he is a new villain – Batman is initially unable to defeat him.  The challenge is the standard one for the super-hero: – figure out some way to neutralize the previously un-encountered super-powers of the new villain.  So far this is standard super-villain/hero stuff – and we’ve seen it ten thousand times before.   Thus any reader of Englehart’s story – at the time it was written – would have been settling in for a bit of standard superhero fare.

Dr Phosphorus introduces himself to Batman in Detective Comics #469

But at the start of the next issue 470# something interesting happens.  Batman gets served with a subpoena.  We learn that rather than confronting Batman directly, Dr Phosphorous has gone after various corrupt city officials and businessmen led by a man name Rupert Thorne – a crime boss and corrupt city council member.  Dr Phosphorous had invested money in a nuclear power plant that they were building.  He went to inspect his investment when the accident  occurred that transformed him into a super villain.  Rather than killing the people he blamed for transforming him – he instructs them to get rid of Batman.  And since Rupert Thorne controls the local law enforcement institutions – he goes after Batman by serving him with a legal notice.

What Englehart is doing is pushing Batman back toward the vigilante figure that operated on the wrong side of the law – as the character was originally conceived.  Englehart’s treatment is incredibly skilled.  In order to introduce this new twist – he changes as little as possible in the surrounding narrative.  He still has a traditionally over the top bad guy to kill.  And it’s not as though Batman has just woken up and decided to become the enemy of the police in his single minded quest for justice.  Rather he is positioned into a fugitive role by corrupt politicians.  Thus we don’t have to confront a Batman that is a full anti-hero – he’s still the same good guy Batman.  He is still on the same side as traditional law and order.  It’s just that the institutions that generally protect law and order have been co-opted by bad people.  Thus Englehart is not introducing a story element that would challenge audiences of the day too much.

It would have been a different story if it were a case where the institutions of law and order were working as per normal – yet Batman nevertheless felt driven to work against them in order to pursue justice.  Such a narrative would imply a tension between the notions of justice on the one hand, and law and order on the other.  This would be a considerably more seditious and challenging thesis – and it’s arguable that Englehart’s audience wasn’t ready for it.

Batman gets served a subpoena in Detective Comics #470

Over time, however, the Batman story has been pushed further and further in this sort of direction.  Most readers would be familiar with Nolan’s approach in The Dark Knight – where Batman finds himself on the wrong side of law; not because the corrupt elements of society have manoeuvred him there, but because he does it to protect the reputation of Harvey Dent.   This is another stage in the evolution of the character toward the anti-hero role.  In this case Batman hasn’t done anything fundamentally oppositional to the institutions of law and order (although he skirts along the edge at times) – he chooses to allow people to believe he has.

Frank’s Miller’s work “The Dark Knight Returns” – though pre-dating Nolan’s film by 30 years (market realities allows print media to iterate at a much faster pace) takes the Batman character fully over the edge of the divide – and presents us with a Batman that stands in opposition to the institutions of law and order.  It’s not that those institutions are corrupt as such – it’s that Miller has recognised that they can be without corruption per se – yet nevertheless serve the interests of a regime that marginalises various people and groups – and thus not be on the side of justice.  In this world, all superheroes, including Superman have been asked to retire or directly serve the interests (often imperialist) of the state.  Batman declines – and so becomes the enemy.  At the end of the series, he even does battle with Superman – who is almost the bad guy because of his willingness to serve as the tool of imperialist technocrats. (Interested boffins will see an obvious comparison with Alan Moore’s – The Watchmen)

Returning to Englehart’s treatment – he likely wouldn’t have been able to get away with what Frank Miller was able to do.  In many ways he paved the way – made the conception of this anti-hero Batman possible.  He did this using the technique I have just described.  He changed a few elements – but left the rest as close to what had come before as possible.

Hegelian Joker

Englehart was constrained by his audience in what he could do with the Batman story.  The market realities that force a relatively slow pace on the sort of innovation that can come through iteration would have made it difficult for him to push the boundaries further.  But we have to wonder if it was even possible for someone like him to conceive of the sorts of ideas that Miller and others would come up with ten years later.  I asked this question earlier with respect to why Burton was still so constrained by the campy image of the Joker.  My claim is that it is genuinely difficult to conceive of these innovations before the meta-narrative has evolved to a point that makes their conception possible.  Many writers (like Allyn Gibson for instance) have wondered why it is that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Moore’s The Watchmen – both extremely similar in theme – would arrived on the scene in the exact same year.  Well my claim about the meta-narrative is meant as an explanation for this sort of phenomena as well.  Both Miller and Moore were hooked into the meta-narrative that had evolved to a point where the themes they came to explore had become salient.

But how does the current state of the meta-narrative actually block the genesis of new ideas?  How does its evolution suddenly make these innovations possible?  How does this concretely happen?  It has to do the process of narrative combination we just looked at.  As I just mentioned – the introduction of new elements often produces failures: stories that for one reason or another just don’t work.  This can happen even when the evolution is gradual.  It can even happen because the evolution is TOO gradual.  What happens is that while one element is changed – the author will sometimes fall into the trap of keeping everything else in the narrative too similar to what has come before.  The intentions behind such a mistake are usually sound – and the results can still be commercially successful.  As I said above – the general rule of thumb of such innovation is to change as little as possible – so as to not upset your audiences too much.  But if you are too rigid in your application of this rule, you can introduce internal inconsistencies in the narrative that in a way ruin its structure.  Audiences of the day may likely not care at the time because you have kept things similar enough to their established tastes – but over time the inconsistencies will become more and more glaring and the work will date quickly.

The idea I’m elucidating here is difficult – so an example will be instructive.  The easiest one to understand concerns the evolution of the Joker character.  Tim Burton wanted to introduce to movie audiences a Joker that was more like the crazed psychopathic criminal of the comics in the 70s and 80s.  But as per the general rule of thumb – he tried to keep as many of the other elements of the Joker the same as the campy version.  He still wears the perfectly manicured dandy suits.  His face is chemically bleached and he still looks like a clown.  He still uses the perverted gag devices like the shock button and the flower that squirts acid.  As we saw in those videos above – he demeanour remains clownish.

But this introduces a contradiction in the character that most people didn’t realise when they first saw Burton’s movie – even though it is completely obvious to a modern sensibility.  The contradiction to which I refer can be conveniently labelled The Scary Clown Contradiction.  It goes like this: – you want to have a bad guy that is scary and menacing; a true threat to the hero that makes the audience genuinely concerned.  But you’ve chosen as your bad guy a character type which in essence is the opposite of those things – a clown.  To resolve the contradiction you have to find way to make it so that the clown satisfies the requirement of providing a genuine threat to the hero.  Somehow you have to make them represent a concept that is dark, evil and disturbing.  Certainly – someone would only make such a choice in the first place because it is meant as a kind of ironic inversion of traditional “clown” iconography.  But just because it’s intended to be ironic doesn’t grant you use of the evil clown for free.  You still have to make it work in a satisifying way.

One of the biggest problems with Burton’s Batman movie is that he doesn’t solve this contradiction in any way that is satisfactory.  Previous iterations didn’t have this problem because it was acceptable for the campy Joker to be more of a clown than a threat.  Since Burton was going for an edgier aesthetic he ramped up the psychotic profile of the joker – but left in all the various campy elements which constantly undermine him as a credible enemy.

My key point, however, is that until someone like Burton (and also Englehart as you’ll see below) had introduced us to this version of the character, until he had made the tweak and put it up on the big screen – the contradiction didn’t exist in most people’s mind as a problem that needed to be solved.  The meta-narrative just hadn’t evolved that far.  Audiences at the time lapped up Nicholson’s Joker because it obeyed the golden rule of changing things as little as possible.  But after a little reflection we see that Burton’s Joker just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The reason why no one came up with an evil joker that doesn’t suffer from this problem was because before this, when the Joker was campy and intended to present little genuine threat to Batman (as per the tame sensitivities of audiences at the time) – there just wasn’t a salient contradiction that needed to be resolved.

Sometimes it can take a long time for the contradiction to be noticed.  Steve Englehart’s rendition of the Joker in Detective Comics #475 (The Laughing Fish) suffers from the same problem as Burton’s – indicating that the contradiction had been around for a long time.  Since he was the first, I think, to return the Joker as a psychopathic killer – it’s possible that he was the one to introduce the contradiction.  (Arguably it wasn’t solved until Moore published The Killing Joke in 1988.)   In Englehart’s story, the Joker is much like the later Burton version.  The Joker is psychopathic, murderous – but still silly, with all the same gag weapons like the acid flower (although it’s a cop badge in this version).  His scheme is to poison all the fish with Joker venom so that they have his face.  And because the fish all now have his face he demands that he should receive a copyright royalty from every fish sold.  When his demand isn’t met – he starts killing copyright bureaucrats until they change their minds.

The Joker outlines his crazy copyright scheme in the The Laughing Fish - Detective Comics #475

While this plot line is impressively prescient of the copyright absurdities that plague us in modern times – still, it doesn’t solve the Scary Clown Contradiction.  It’s just too silly.  More importantly – the nature of his scheme doesn’t involve any kind of threat above and beyond the more traditional threat that he employs against his enemies – straightforward murder.  The clownishness does not constitute the threat at all.  It’s not the essence of his character as a clown that is threatening.  He could have just threatened to kill some people if they didn’t give him money – the copyright scheme is ancillary.

Alan Moore solved the scary clown contradiction in an interesting way.  As we saw above,  the violence of Moore’s Joker follows a perverted logic that issues from his very genesis and origin story.  He kidnaps Commissioner Gordon and his daughter as a part of his plan to prove that is own insanity is something that anyone else could relate to if they suffered as much as he had previously suffered.  This works much better because the nature and purpose of his violence stems directly from his identity as the Joker – i.e. what it is that made him into the Joker.

To get it to work – Moore cleverly employs a variant meaning of  the word “joke”.  The traditionally campy version of the Joker relied on our understanding of a joke as something that is harmless and makes us laugh.  The concept generally has no negative connotations.  Englehart’s version does as well.  By demanding copyright royalties from fish sales – he is playing what is on the face of it a relatively harmless joke – which without the threat of attendant violence would in itself be laughable.  For this reason – the Joker’s nature in Englehart’s version is ancillary to his violent nature.

But there are other uses of the term ‘joke’ which have far more negative connotations.  Consider when we say something like:  ”That man is a joke.”  In this context we actually mean something that is quite derogatory.  Sure – such a man is still thought to be harmless like an ordinary joke – but we take no pleasure in the fact.  When we say such things we are pointing out that they are an ineffectual failure – and that their failure has come about in a way that elicits little sympathy – through their own inability to take responsibility for their own mistakes.  Moore’s Joker starts out as a person we would be quick to label as such.   He is an unsuccessful comedian that gave up his job for the dream and now can’t support his family.  We might feel some sympathy for a person that tried to live the dream and failed – if it weren’t for the fact that he is blind to the fact that his wife still loves him even though he is a failure.  This failure to appreciate his wife’s love for him is what leads him to make a deal with the crime gang that directly results in him falling into the vat of chemicals that turn him into the Joker.

As a super villain these same traits are just amplified in their intensity.  By trying to turn Gordon insane – he is trying to prove that he is a product of external forces that turned him into what he is.  But all he succeeds in proving is that he remains blind to the real source of his problems – himself.  What he is trying to prove is that it is life that is the joke – not him.  This is a mirror concept to the one employed when saying a person is a joke.  When a person is a joke it’s because of their own failings as a person and their inability to take any sort of responsibility for them.  When life is a joke, the person fails because of the random injustice that one finds in life.  In such a case they are genuinely not responsible for what has happened to them.

What’s quite moving about the story is that Batman tries to reach out to the Joker to convince him of his mistake.  If the Joker could just accept responsibility for what happened to him – then he could begin the process of rehabilitating himself.  Batman can partly relate to him because he also suffered great trauma in his life.  The fact that he dresses up as a bat means that he also treads the fine line between reason and insanity – and he’s aware of this.  His hope is that he can use that bridge of empathy to help the Joker cross to the world of the sane.  The Joker responds with a joke which demonstrates neatly why Batman’s offer could never work:

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum… and one night, one night they decide they don’t like living in an asylum any more. They decide they’re going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moon light… stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend didn’t dare make the leap. Y’see… Y’see, he’s afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea… He says ‘Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!’ B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says… He says ‘Wh-what do you think I am? Crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across!

The flash light beam is Batman’s offer to help cure the Joker of his insanity.  Batman can only make this offer on the basis that he does to some extent empathise with the Joker.  But if this is true – if you do empathise with a mad man – your help can only be further offers of madness: a beam of light across the rooftops.  If the Joker accepted the offer – he’d surely fail and destroy himself in the process.  Yet this is not the reason why the Joker refuses the offer.  It’s because he can’t bring himself to trust the sincerity of Batman’s offer.  Either way the Joker is doomed – the irony is that if he took Batman up on his offer he would at least prove his contention that it is the world that is the cruel joke.  Because then it would be his trust in others that had let him down (remember that he couldn’t even trust his own wife when she told him she still loved him even though he was a failure).

By including this joke at the end of the narrative – Moore shows that we’ve come full circle.  He successfully connects the dots between humour and madness – and shows how the logic of one, when taken far enough, takes us to the heart of the other.   The fact that Batman begins to laugh at the joke while strangling the Joker out of pure frustration shows how something could be genuinely humorous, yet completely dark, broken and insane in its essence.  Thus the contradiction at the heart of the character is resolved.

Nolan’s Joker in the Dark Knight film also solves the contradiction – but by a different method.  (He does borrow a lot from Moore’s joker – but as I said above, he doesn’t do this in a consistent way.)  Nolan avoids the scary clown contradiction by removing the humorous aspects almost entirely.  He turns the joker into something that is barely recognisable as a clown.  All the gag toys are removed and he relies on traditional weapons like guns and grenade launchers.  Perhaps the only extent to which he remains clown-like (besides the make up and dandy suit) is the way that he is always laughing at events as they unfold around him.  It’s as though he finds life to be a joke – much like Moore’s version, but unlike the latter is not concerned to let us in on it.  Because of this, there is no onus on Nolan to demonstrate how it is that something humorous and amusing can be dark and threatening.  He’s just telling a story about someone that is dark and scary that happens to find humour in the world around him.  I don’t find the story as sophisticated or as satisfying as Moore’s – but in terms of solving the contradiction it gets the job done.

In any case, the key point is that without the work of Englehart and Burton – it’s unlikely that these versions of the Joker character would have ever have been conceived.  The contradiction needed to reveal itself first before it could be overcome.  Of course it might have happened that some artist – by iterating many versions of the Batman/Joker story by himself would have eventually gotten there.  But if the meta-narrative had not kept pace it’s unlikely that he would have been able to find a publisher.  It’s unlikely that audiences would have ever been exposed to it – and even if they had, it’s unlikely many of them would have been able to appreciate it without first having been exposed to that contradiction first.

But to understand this – we’ll have to go deep into the story of ASOIAF.  As per usual – spoilers follow.  Go read the books first if you like suspense in your stories.

You can buy them at Amazon (sponsored) here:

A Song of Ice and Fire, Books 1-4 (A Game of Thrones / A Feast for Crows / A Storm of Swords / Clash of Kings)

Part One:  Choose Your Honour

One of the most obvious criticisms of honour culture concerns the tensions that arise because of the different layers of society that accrue over time.  We started out living in tribal communities where there was little potential for conflicted loyalty.  But as a society grows larger, as a tribe becomes just one integrated unit within a larger hierarchy of organisations – how does the individual deal with conflicts that arise between the multiple groups of which he is a member?   ASOIAF can be read as an essay of the multiple ways in which individuals seek to navigate through these sorts of conflicts.

When we follow their choices in this respect, Martin shows us something very important about the concept of honour – and the relationship of the individual to it.  We get a concrete demonstration of how it is that the individual is constituted by the choices they make.  When they choose one group over another, we’ll see that they are choosing some notion of honour over another.  I said in my previous post that honour is a cultural force which serves to bind groups and individuals together.  But it’s more than just this – it determines who a person is relative to the connections they have with others.  Thus, an individual is not an isolated Cartesian island that stands alone – the individual is directly constituted by the choices they make with respect to other people.  Insofar as individuals come into conflict with one another, it’s often because of their differing choices and stances toward the concept of honour.  And it’s because of these varying perspectives that the concept of honour fails to do what it is supposed to do – bind the realm together and ensure peace.

So what are these choices?  You can provide a neat index of the kind of choices that individual characters face by looking at the varying levels of abstraction at which the concept of honour operates – corresponding to the level of institutional group existing in the society.

Family, Friends, Kings and the Realm

At the very lowest level of abstraction comes the family – this is the unit that is closest to us and most immediate.   It’s the group to which the concept of acting honourably and loyally is first learnt.  At some point thought, for every major character in the story, the loyalty toward the family is tested by callings of a higher order duty.  How each character deals with this choice reveals key facets of their nature.

Right at the beginning of the first book – A Game of Thrones – Lord Eddard Stark  of Winterfell (Ned) is asked by King Robert Baratheon to serve as his hand, a kind of second in charge that looks after all the day to day practicalities of running the kingdom.  Accepting this post means leaving Winterfell and his family to live in Kings Landing, half a world away.   Ned chooses to obey the command of his King and leave his family, leaving his wife Catelyn to rule in his stead.

But in actual fact, this is not just a simple choice between serving the King and being with his family.  In the book, Ned is on the verge of refusing the request – citing his duty to Winterfell and his family.  It’s his wife that impresses upon him the importance of obeying the King and the great honour being offered the position of the King’s hand.  When they learn from Catelyn’s sister that the previous hand was murdered and that there are threats on the King’s life, Catelyn emphasises Ned’s close friendship with Robert and argues that he can’t forsake such friendship.  This is the argument that seemingly sways him.  Thus Ned is revealed to be a character that values his family above his loyalty to the realm – and only chooses the realm because his wife, his closest confidant insists upon it, and because of his close friendship with Robert.

The recent HBO series “Game of Thrones” changes this – and I think it’s a mistake – but an instructive one.  In this version, Catelyn wants Ned to refuse the offer, but Ned impresses upon her the status of the King and the fact that he cannot be disobeyed.  And when they learn of the threats against the King, this only hardens Catelyn against Ned’s leaving since he will be put in the firing line – to the detriment of his own family.  At the point Maester Luwin impresses upon Ned the oath that Ned swore to serve his king and it’s this which seemingly clinches the argument.

The book version is actually more consistent with Ned’s overall history.  Although he is an extremely honourable man – his loyalty to his family and friends always superseded his loyalty to the crown – since he was a willing participant in the insurrection against the mad king – the war which placed Robert Baratheon on the throne.  It is also consistent with his final choice to give up his loyalty to Robert’s brother Stannis after Robert dies.  He gives up this honour in order to protect his children.

But the HBO version is not uninteresting.  It reveals a tension between family, and those to which we share a strong bond and are not family – our friends.   At the centre of this conflict is a dynamic that most would relate to today.  The woman resents the loyalty her husband shows to his friends, and feels neglected because of the attention he pays them at her expense.  This is a refrain that many modern men and women would understand well – and it’s likely the reason why the HBO series changed it.  HBO’s version also echoes the choice that Robert makes in valuing his friendship with Ned over any kind of intimacy with his brothers.

In any case, what we see is that Ned’s honour is defined by those choices that concern conflicting loyalties to differing groups.  The tragedy of his story is that it is his loyalty to his wife, family and his closest friend that leads him to serve the realm as the King’s Hand instead – even though his loyalties lie with his family – a choice that ultimately leads to his doom.  Bonds of family and friendship are of a kind that are the most intimate and straightforward, yet serving as the King’s Hand requires great wile and cunning.   Ned is just not capable of playing the Game of Thrones.

Snow’s Choice

A similar, yet different choice is made by Jon Snow – the bastard son of Eddard Stark.  As a member of the Night’s Watch he is sworn to defend the realm against the threats coming from the North.  His oath is sworn for life.  He is not allowed to desert for any reason.  But when he learns that his father is being held captive at King’s Landing and that his brother has marched to war, he has to decide whether or not to support his family, or stay loyal to his oath to the Night’s Watch.

This choice is similar yet different to the one that Eddard is forced to make for some interesting reasons.  Like his father Jon is motivated primarily by his duty to his family.  He initially chooses to break his oath and rides to support his family – much as you would expect Ned to do.  What’s more, an oath to the Night’s Watch is taken to be an oath to the realm – as such it represents a very abstract and high sort of honour.  In this way is Jon’s oath similar to Ned’s oath to the King.

Yet swearing an oath to realm is different to swearing an oath to a King.  Yes, the king and the realm are symbolically meant to be one and the same, yet the Night’s Watch is keenly aware of the distinction.  They see their oath as being even higher than allegiance to any one king.  And the civil war, wherein there are numerous pretenders to the throne, serves as proof of them of this fact.  Their duty to protect the wall transcends any political reality.

It’s probably for this reason that Snow chooses to break his oath to the Night’s Watch.  Like his father, he sees more immediate value in the honour that comes with staying loyal to one’s family.  And interestingly, it’s not the abstract, higher sort of honour involved in serving the realm that changes his mind – it’s the intervention of his friends in the Night’s Watch who convince him not to break his oath.  Thus he is convinced to continue serving the realm – the highest of all these abstractions – by the people closest to him.  In this way his choice exactly mirror’s the one made by his father.

Again we see how the concept of honour determined by their choice defines the individual.  When Jon speaks with Lord Mormont – the commander of the Night’s Watch – after his brief desertion, Mormant is reasonably forgiving.  But he sums up nicely the way in which Jon is a product of the ties to his brothers in the Night’s Watch.  He says:  ’Honour made you leave, and Honour made you come back.”  - as if to say that Jon is at the mercy of the tensions implicit in the concept of honour itself.  When Jon replies that it was his friends that made him come back, Mormont’ reply is perfect: “I didn’t say it was your honour that brought you back”.  Sometimes the choice we end up making transcends who we are as an individual and is borne of the connections we have with other people.  This is the essence of honour.

Love as Honour

Besides the conflict that comes between family and those more abstract forms of honour associated with serving the realm – there is conflict borne of the tensions between honouring individuals that you care about, and those groups  your connection to which are not of family, or friendship, but more pragmatic concerns.  Sometime families must ally themselves with other families in order to achieve a greater strength – usually when confronted with a stronger enemy.  And to do this – they use marriage.

In order to move his army south to do battle with Tywin Lannister, Robb Stark has to secure an alliance with the Frey’s.  To secure this alliance he promises himself in marriage to one of Walder Frey’s daughters after the war.  But Robb is wounded in battle and falls in love with Jayne Westerling who tends his wounds.  One thing leads to another and they end up having sex.

Now, as I explained in my previous post.  A woman’s honour consists in the power she has to unite families through marriage.  This is symbolised by the giving of a woman’s virginity to her husband on their wedding night.  If she is not a virgin, then she loses this power.  Her honour is therefore besmirched.  Now – because Robb takes Jayne’s virginity – he also takes her honour.  He is now faced with a choice – he can marry her, thus saving her honour, or remain true to his oath to marry one of the daughters of Walder Frey in order to protect the alliance.

Robb is, of course, a true son of Eddard Stark, he chooses the more intimate relationship over the higher (or more abstract if you like)  form of honour involved with the alliance between the two houses.  This choice has dire consequences – and ultimately leads to Robb Stark dying and losing the war – even though he never loses a single battle.

The Lannister Way – Not Entirely Different From the Stark Way

It’s tempting to think of the Starks as the good guys and the Lannisters as the bad guys.  But in actual fact they have a lot more in common than you might first suppose.  The key thing that they share is a loyalty to their own family that is put before any loyalty to the realm, the King or their alliances with other houses or families.  And like the Starks, this loyalty to family is what often leads them to calamity.   Of course, the two families are fundamentally different in some key respects – but to really understand how they differ, we first need to understand the ways in which they are similar.

Lannister family loyalty is enforced in the first instance by the Patriarch of the family Tywin Lannister.  All three of his offspring have this loyalty drilled into them and they all start the story intensely loyal to one another.  There are numerous occasions where Tywin encourages his children to dishonour themselves in various ways in order to maintain loyalty to the cause of their family.

For example, there is an occasion when Jaime Lannister spares Ned Stark’s life after the latter is stabbed from behind by one of Jaime’s men.  To kill Ned then wouldn’t have been honourable in the broader sense – since it breaks the conventions employed when combat is used to settle grievances.  Essentially – such fights should be fair.  But Tywin is unimpressed by Jaime’s decision to let Ned Stark live – and calls him a fool.  From Tywin’s point of view, the interests of the Lannister family transcend any higher concepts of honour which are used to arbitrate disputes between families – like trial by combat.

It’s because of Tywin’s influence that all three of his children grow up intensely loyal to their family.  Even Tyrion, who is the most estranged from the others in his family owing to his increased intelligence and diminished stature, nevertheless expresses a strong loyalty to his family.  Although his father never gives him the respect Tyrion wants, still he obeys his father’s commands – fighting for him at Riverrun, accepting Tywin’s directive to become Hand of the King as well as successfully defending King’s Landing against invasion by Stannis Baratheon.

Jaime’s loyalty to his family is unquestionable.  When Tyrion is arrested by Catelyn Stark, Jaime attacks Eddard Stark in the aforementioned episode where he spares Ned’s life.  Jaime is motivated to abandon his post as a member of the King’s Guard to wage war against the Stark’s – a war precipitated in order to secure the release of his brother and defend the honour of his house.  Then there is the incestuous relationship that he has with his sister.  While this relationship represents a perversion of family loyalty – nevertheless, there is no single relationship which better conveys the intensity of Lannister insularity.

So the Starks and the Lannisters aren’t entirely different in this respect.  Nor are they so different when it comes to a willingness to dishonour themselves in various ways in order to preserve their ties to their family.  As we’ve seen with the Starks, Ned was willing to reject the offer to become the King’s Hand and lie about Joffrey being the rightful King, Jon was willing to break his oath to the Night’s watch, and Robb breaks his oath to the Frey’s.

The Lannisters dishonour themselves repeatedly.  Jaime stabs the mad King in the back, breaking his oath as a sworn member of the King’s Guard.  Then there is his affair with his sister.  Since she is married to King Robert – their affair is treasonous and would bring great dishonour to them both as well if it were discovered.  Tywin Lannister only joins Robert Baratheon’s rebellion against the mad king when the day is already won.  His puppet Maester Pycelle convinces the mad King to open the gates of King’s Landing to Tywin’s army.  But Tywin betrays the king and sacks the town – securing a marriage of his daughter to the newly crowned King Robert.

Part Two: Honour and Realpolitik

The conflicts that arise between different groups in large, mature society poses one challenge for honour based cultures.  The failure of the concept of honour to make easy the difficult choices the characters often face when reconciling these conflicts is one reason why the kingdom descends into civil war and chaos.  But this is not the only component of Martin’s critique.  We begin to understand the second component when we consider those aspects which distinguish the Starks and the Lannisters.

So then, in what way are the Stark’s and the Lannisters different?  We intuitively think that the Starks are a nobler breed than the Lannisters – yet as we’ve seen both are willing to act dishonourably in order to protect their family.  So it’s not correct to just say that the Lannisters act dishonourably and the Starks honourably.  This interpretation is way too simplistic.

One difference is that the Starks are less insular overall than the Lannisters.  It’s because of their willingness to forge connections to people outside their family that they often end up choosing the higher forms of honour over their loyalty to their kin.  It’s is Catelyn’s influence that causes Ned to agree to become the hand – and while she is a married Stark, she is born of house Tully.  Having that influence coming into his home from the outside allows him to gain a perspective that takes a broader view.  Jon demonstrates a similar willingness to accept into his circle those who are not his family.  As such, it’s his friends in the Night’s Watch who convince him to stay loyal to the higher concept of honour involved with his oath.  Later on in the books his forms an alliance with the leader of the wildlings – the traditional enemies of the Night’s Watch, and he does so precisely to stay true to his oath to protect the realm from the greater threat that comes from the white walkers.

The Lannisters lack these sorts of connections to those outside their own family.  Part of the reason for this has to do with their power and richness as a family.  Because they are so powerful, they don’t need to form the sorts of connections that the Starks do.  Various houses choose to throw in with the Lannisters precisely because of their power – and this becomes self-reinforcing.  The more power they have, the less they have to do to reach out to secure the alliances they need.

When they need further help – they simply pay for it.  And so they can buy loyalty without having to forge the sorts of connections the Starks do.  Hence the Lannister house motto:  ”A Lannister always pays his debts.”   Tyrion in particular resorts often to buying allegiance from those he encounters in order to bolster his strength.  He buys the protection of Bronn, as well as allegiance of the hill tribes of the vale.  He pays even for the sex he receives from brothels.  Thus he is shielded from having to establish real relationships with people – relationships where he is forced to take their feelings into account.

Jaime relies less on coin than does Tyrion, but that’s because he doesn’t need coin to get by.  He has his looks and he has his prowess with the sword – two features that Tyrion lacks.  As I explained in my previous post – an honour culture is one that uses combat to arbitrate disputes.  Because Jaime can’t defeated in single combat – he doesn’t have to modify his behaviour to fit in with the demands made by those outside his house.  If it ever comes to blows – he has nothing to fear on account of his prowess with the sword.  Add to this prowess the power of his house and Jaime comes to believe that he can act without negative consequence, regardless of how dishonourably he acts.

The Art of Power – Old and New

It’s when we look into the source of power of the two houses that we learn the essence of the difference between them.  And it’s also here that we come to Martin’s most penetrating critique of honour cultures.

The Power of the Starks

The source of Stark power essentially comes from their skill in combat and in war.  As I mentioned earlier – in the war against the Lannisters, Robb Stark is undefeated in all his battles.  He only loses because he is murdered by the Freys when he tries to patch up his alliance with them.  Ned Stark’s skill in war plays no small part in Robert’s victory over the mad king.

As such, the Starks respect the old custom that ties the notion of honour to skill in combat.   As I argued in my previous post – this custom likely originated from the fact that primitive people formed groups around those that could provide physical protection.  Since honour is a concept which binds people together as groups – it was a natural step to use combat to settle disputes since it was the force which allowed groups to form in the first place.  Since greater strength in combat meant a greater ability to protect and defend one’s group – a custom developed wherein the actual process of defence could be skipped if one’s greater strength could be proven.

This is why trial by combat is supposed to be a fair fight.  If poison, or some other kind of treachery is used, then you never really get to find out who is the stronger.  This ‘fair fight’ component of the custom made sense where it remained the case that a greater amount of physical strength really did imply a greater ability at defending the group and maintaining hegemony.

The Starks demonstrate their allegiance to this custom multiple times.  Catelyn Stark allows Tyrion to seek justice by means of a trial by combat.  He is allowed to choose a champion to fight for him – as his small stature would mean that his trial would never be a fair fight.  When his champion wins, Catelyn lets him walk free – even though she is completely convinced of his guilt in the attempted murder of her son.

Another example is when Ned Stark refuses to be involved in the use of assassins to murder Daenarys Targaryen.  He even goes against Robert’s command by giving up his position as hand to the King – because he sees such an act to be completely without honour.  The reason why it’s not honourable is because it’s not a fair fight – it’s not a true test of strength.  (And incidentally – this is why it’s still not cool for men hit women to this day.  It offends our sense of honour.)

Interestingly, the fact that the weak are allowed to choose champions demonstrates neatly how the honour system comes to be torn apart by its internal contradictions.  Combat had to be fair in order to be a true test of strength between combatants.  This made sense because being the stronger in more primitive times was a reliable indicator of your ability to maintain group hegemony.  But when combat comes to be used as a generalised method for settling disputes – the preservation of the fairness component ends up leading to champions being used.  But this means that the disputants no longer are the ones having their strength tested – defeating the raison d’etre of the entire process.  It becomes completely nonsensical.

The source of strength that goes with this sort of honour is an old kind of power.  As society has evolved, physical strength is no longer so valuable an asset.  It’s no accident then that the Starks are worshippers of an old set of gods – ones that are said to have faded in their strength and influence in the world.

Lannister Power

The source of Lannister power is more modern.  In a society with established institutions that keep the peace and provide order, brute strength is no longer as essential.  The pragmatic realities of power shift away from brute strength to cunning, deception and the will to do whatever is necessary to achieve one’s aims.  This is Realpolitik.

Realpolitik is born of a kind of selfishness.  Single combat, as a means of settling disputes, has an efficiency to it that benefits both sides.  Once the stronger is proven the dispute is settled without a large amount of bloodshed.  Realpolitik insists upon gaining as much advantage as possible over your opponent through whatever means.  It is not interested in the greatest good to the greatest number.  Rather, it wants the greatest good for ones own, and the least good for everyone else.

It’s important to emphasise that any tactic is permissible so long as it is the best strategy for the given situation.  Hence there will be times when one must be ruthless and without mercy, but at other times it is better to allow ones opponents to change their loyalties and bend the knee – if it be that your strength is not enough to crush them.

The master of Realpolitik in this story is Tywin Lannister.  He stays out of Robert Baratheon’s war against the Mad King until only the final moment when the latter has already lost the war – ensuring that his own strength is not spent at all.  He is ruthless as well.  Because he comes late to Robert’s cause he needs a way to demonstrate his fealty.  He does this by murdering the wife and children of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, the son of the Mad King Aerys, and presenting the bodies to Robert.  Robert is grateful for this act because it meant he himself would not have to perform such an ignoble act.

The most salient feature of Realpolitik is the clear advantage it affords the practitioner over those who follow the old ways like the Starks.  Time and time again the Starks are outwitted by their enemies because of their predictability and their willingness to assume that everyone else is playing by the same rules.  It’s for this reason that the Lannisters are the most powerful house in the Kingdom.  They are simply better at navigating the pragmatic realities of power than their enemies.

A great example of the advantage of Realpolitik over the honourable is when the sell sword Bronn fights on behalf of Tyrion in his trial by combat.  The champion of Lady Lysa fights honourably in full mail.  He attacks directly expecting sword to meet sword in a true test of strength.  Bronn, however, wearing only light armour, dances out of reach, throws objects in the Knights path, waits from him to tire and then goes in for the killing blow.  Lady Lysa accuses him of not fighting with honour.  Bronn agrees, but then points to his fallen foe and points out that he did – suggesting the obvious stupidity of such an approach.

It’s this difference between the two houses that explains the enmity between them.  And it’s sometimes difficult to understand the choices of the characters without keeping this difference firmly in mind.  There is one scene in particular when Ned Stark meets Jaime Lannister in the throne room when he first arrives at King’s Landing.  Jaime recounts when the Mad King murdered Ned Stark’s father in front of the whole court.  He explains how he thought that his murder of the Mad King was justice for this crime against the Starks.  Yet Ned is not impressed and instead reinforces his contempt for Jaime’s act of dishonour in murdering the man he had sworn to protect.  Jaime is genuinely stung by this rebuke and is somewhat at a loss to come to terms with Ned’s hatred for him.

The scene is difficult to understand because Ned, after all, betrayed the King just as much Jaime did.  They had both sworn fealty to the mad King.  But the difference is that Ned and Robert challenged the power of the King in a fair fight – as per the dictates of honour.  But Jaime stabbed him in the back, robbing the King of an honourable death.  Jaime felt he had to do this to prevent the King from being able to give the orders to burn the city to the ground – but this is irrelevant to Ned (also unknown) since Jaime’s act was not the honourable way to settle the dispute.

Beyond Combat and Realpolitik

The critique of honour culture implicit in Martin’s narrative concerns this tension between the pragmatic realities of power and the traditional use of fairness and strength in order to maintain group hegemony.  Martin’s point is that the desired hegemony and peace cannot obtain while these tensions exist.  What’s more, neither the Stark approach or the Lannister approach is capable of securing the victory that they desire.

This interpretation is borne out by the way events progress in the story.  The two houses are mirror representations of one another – the way a mirror produces an image is the reverse of the other.  While their differing characteristics ensure different paths for each family, the outcomes hitherto are relatively the same.  How the families adapt to reality as it unfolds gives us some insight as to how Martin thinks one might replace the society that is collapsing under the weight of its own self-contradiction.  Let’s look at some examples.

Both families start out as functional family units – loyal and bound tightly together.  Both families end up disintegrating, although the reasons are different in each case.  For the Starks, they remain loyal to one another, but their commitment to the traditional values of honour puts them at the mercy of events.  It is external forces which drive them apart – not a lack of love between them.  Eddard is separated from his family in order to serve as hand as commanded by the King.  Catelyn abandons her sons Bran and Rickon at Winterfell in order to pursue justice against the Lannisters – both in arresting Tyrion and supporting Robb in his war.  Robb marches to war to fight the Lannisters and rescue their father Ned – also abandoning his brothers.  Jon Snow is prevented from helping his kin by his oath to the Night’s Watch.  Sansa becomes the captive of Queen Cersei at King’s Landing after Ned is arrested.  Arya flees King’s Landing, but never makes it back to Winterfell.  She arrives at the castle of the Freys just as her mother and her brother Robb are being murdered.  Even Bran and Rickon are forced to go their separate ways so that they are not caught together.

The Lannister family disintegrates as well but in this case it is because of internal fighting.  While the start out loyal to the family, they all eventually turn on one another.  Tyrion and Cersei begin battling for power while Tyrion serves as the Hand to King Joffrey.   Eventually she has him arrested under suspicion of murdering her son King Joffrey – a crime of which he is entirely innocent.  Jaime comes to mistrust his sister when he learns that she has been having voluntary sex with his cousin Lancel and others.  Tyrion comes to hate both his father and Jaime for their role in deceiving him about his wife.  They convince him that she didn’t marry him out of love, but was a whore that they both hired to teach him a lesson.   Since so few women would ever love a dwarf, Tyrion can’t forgive either for this crime.  He hates his father for it so much that he murders him.  Jaime feels guilt at the role he played in deceiving Tyrion, but can’t forgive the crime Tyrion commits in the murder of their father.  The Lannisters ultimately win the day against their external enemies – but they can’t find a way to protect themselves from each other.

The deaths of the patriarchs of each family is in fact a perfect symbol of the way in which each family comes apart.  Eddard dies at the command of King Joffrey in act act of supreme betrayal, while Tywin dies at the hand of his own son.  Eddard is killed on account of the external forces of Realpolitik working against him, while Tywin dies because of the internal games of Realpolitik that the Lannisters play against one another.

And herein lies the heart of Martin’s criticism against both approaches.  Fighting honourably will cause your family to be at the mercy of your enemies, even while you still love and trust each other.  The adoption of Realpolitik will make it easy to defeat your enemies – but you won’t be able to resist the temptation to employ such arts on your family members in order to achieve personal gain at their expense.

Different Starting Points

There is another feature of the two families that has them start from opposite ends of the spectrum, yet progressing toward a similar, final destination.  This has to do with how connected to the honour culture the different families are.

The Stark children all start out extremely well integrated and not just because their father has drilled his values into them.  Robb is a skilled tactician in combat and well prepared to succeed his father.  Sansa is well suited to play her role as a bride – the way in which women generally get to contribute to the honour of their family.  She is feminine, passive, modest and beautiful – all the qualities desired by prospective partners.  Bran has begun his training and is on track at the start of the novels to become a knight – as is his dream.  Jon and Arya are not quite as well integrated as the other two children – Jon on account of being a bastard, and Arya because she has none of the passive qualities of her sister.  Yet Jon is skilled in combat and makes up for his lack of honour as a bastard by joining the Night’s Watch.  And whether or not Arya likes it, she can still play her role as a potential wife – and she is used to that effect when her brother Robb offers her hand to one of the sons of Walder Frey in exchange for an alliance.

The Lannister children, on the other hand, all start the story at odds with honour – and again, this is not just because of the Realpolitik they learnt from their father.  Cersei is miserable in her loveless marriage to King Robert.  She wants power and wants to rule, but is forever frustrated because of her status as a woman.  Tyrion, on account of his stature, has no skills in combat and so can’t play the traditional role of a man in an honour culture.  Developing his wits and skill at reasoning only further alienates him since he can see clearly all the contradictions and hypocrisies that honour cultures involve.  Jaime is unsurpassed in single combat – but he is forever blocked from having any honour because he murdered the Mad King yet swore an oath to protect him.

It’s worth spending a little bit more time on the starting point of the Lannister children, because it’s easy to just dismiss them as bad people.  But in every case there are extenuating circumstances that makes it understandable that each character would view the honour culture with contempt.

In Cersei’s case it is the fundamental unfairness of the role ascribed to women in the honour system.  They are denied power solely on the basis of their inferior capabilities in combat.  This might make sense in earlier times when society was without the institutions to guarantee security – but in any sort of advanced civilisation, the continual identification of honour with skill in combat becomes farcical and loses it’s rationale – as I pointed out earlier.  Yet the traditions persist and women are denied equality.  From this point of view it’s understandable that Cersei would see it as being entirely permissible to resort to Realpolitik in order to achieve her aims.  She is reacting against what is a fundamental injustice against her sex.

Tyrion’s lack of combat skills is not just what prevents him from participating in the honour culture around him – he is blocked by his father from ever taking his rightful place as the heir of Casterly Rock.  Jaime is the eldest son, but pledged himself to the King’s Guard and so cannot ever claim lands or titles.  So the title should pass to Tyrion.  But Tywin resents Tyrion not only for his stature but because his mother died giving birth to him – so Tywin resolves never to allow Tyrion to claim his seat.  So power is denied him.  To his credit he has developed a more modern sense of justice that is based on reason and truth – much like our own concept today.  But without any direct power, he can’t bring the justice he would like to the realm.  As such he resorts to Realpolitik as much as his siblings in order to try and achieve his aims.  Perhaps the greatest symbol of this is when he murders his father on account of Tywin’s treatment of him.  Tyrion’s position is such that he would never be able to seek true justice for what Tywin has done to him – so he is willing to resort to murder in order to achieve the same.

Jaime is perhaps the most interesting of the three.    He is almost certainly a conscious allusion by Martin to the Sir Launcelot legend.  In my previous post I discussed Mallory’s version of the Sir Launcelot legend.  As we saw – Mallory’s tale gives us insight into the nature of honour culture.  Launcelot betrays King Arthur by sleeping with his wife Guinevere and thus acts dishonourably.  But because he is unmatched in  combat by any other knight, he can preserve his honour by slaying any who would accuse him.  Although everyone knows, or at least suspects the truth, harmony is preserved while Launcelot is able to kill anyone who would dare to make the accusation.

The similarities to the Jaime are unmistakable.  Both serve the King in the roles reserved only for the most trusted of knights (Lancelot on the Round Table, Jaime as a member of the King’s Guard).  Both are involved in affairs with their Queen – an act of treason that carries the sentence of death.  Jaime, however, is a strange variation of this arch type.  He is the brother of the Queen and their affair is incestuous.  And while he holds a trusted position in servitude to the King – he is barely trusted at all.  He has no honour because he is the King Slayer.  He is only pardoned for this crime by the usurper Robert Baratheon as a favour to Tywin Lannister (Jaime’s father) – whose support he needed to rule.  So while Lancelot keeps his honour up until the point at which his affair with the Queen is discovered, Jaime has none the whole time during the events of the story because of his history.

So it’s understandable that Jaime would be contemptuous of the honour culture around him, and not just because of the hypocrisy he sees in it.  Because of his skill in combat and his status as Tywin’s son, he lives a life which for all pragmatic purposes is unencumbered by his lack of honour – except perhaps for the occasional look of contempt from his peers.  Why then would he ever value it?  He never has to really feel the alienation a lack of honour brings while his position and skills in combat remain intact.  Of course, then there is the fact that his dishonourable act of murder nevertheless saved King’s Landing from being burnt to the ground.  So then why wouldn’t he see honour as a plastic badge worn by proud and stubborn men?

Same Destination

The Starks and the Lannisters each suffer different kinds of setbacks which force them to compromise their initial values to some degree and become more like one another.  The Lannisters lose those things which makes their lack of honour (beyond their loyalty to one another) irrelevant.  The  Starks, on the other hand, have to learn to embrace various aspects of Realpolitik in order to survive.  The characters that are unable to evolve in this way end up dead – or near to it.

Tyrion becomes a hunted man on account of murdering his father – and so loses access to the wealth that he used to pay for allegiance.  He has to learn to establish relationships with people without it.  He has to learn to hold his tongue, and take other people’s feelings into consideration.  He learns to look out for other people, besides seeing them merely as pawns to use in his games against his sister.

Jaime loses his sword hand – and as a result is forced to re-assess his entire outlook on life.  Without his sword hand he can no longer keep up the pretence of honour that he was once able to.  He feels his alienation deeply and resolves to act honourably from then on.  He refuses his father’s request to leave the King’s Guard, and he helps Brienne in her quest to find the daughters of Catelyn Stark.  He had made an oath to return Catelyn’s daughters in exchange for being released as her prisoner.  But Sansa and Arya had both already escaped King’s Landing by the time he returned.  So he provides Brienne with Eddard Stark’s sword and a bag of gold so as to help her keep her oath and in some way satisfy his own.  Meanwhile he continues to serve in the King’s Guard as is his duty.

Cersei is still a work in progress – but  I suspect she is heading for a gruesome death.  She refuses to be humbled when she is forced to walk naked through the streets as a punishment when she is caught fornicating various people.  She is also aided by Varys.  He murders her uncle Kevan Lannister – who was in the process of undoing much of the mess that she had created.  Without that constraint – she seems unlikely to ever have to change her ways until it is too late.

Turning to the Starks, Bran loses his legs and has to give up his dream of becoming a knight.  Without the Stark skill in combat he has to discover a new role for himself.  He learns to become a shape changer as well as other druidic powers that allow him to access the memories of trees and see visions of people in the present and from the past.  This is not entirely unlike the character Varys who hides in the walls of the castle at Kings Landing – gathering information by listening in on the conversations of all those in the court.   Spying and information gathering is at the heart of Realpolitik.  Bran is learning a version of it which is far more powerful than the ordinary kind.

Arya falls in with a sect of Bravosi Assassins that can change their faces in order to disguise themselves.  She starts down this path when she enlists the aid of a face changer to murder her enemies for her.  While she aspires to being able to fight honourably like her brothers, she realises that as a girl she will never be able to survive that way.  Being able to kill like an assassin gives her a sense of power that allows her to overcome the limitations with which she was born.  It’s not the Stark way, but it has kept her alive so far.

Sansa is rescued from Kings Landing by Lord Petyr Baelish (or Little Finger as he is commonly known) – one perhaps even more cunning than Tywin Lannister.   She pretends to be his bastard daughter so that she is not discovered as the sole remaining heir to Winterfell – a ruse that is just one of the many deceptions and intrigues she learns from her protector.  She becomes Little Finger’s student in the art of political intrigue.  So far this choice has also kept her alive hitherto.

As I said – the characters that fail to adapt in this way seem to be the ones that meet a bad end.  Ned Stark obviously fits this bill, and I’ve already mentioned Tywin Lannister’s end.  Obsessed with obtaining glory for his house, he fails to attend to the needs of those within it – his children.  Thus Tyrion’s act of murder against him is a direct cause of his unwillingness to see beyond the glory of the Lannister name.

In defending the honour of his chosen bride, Robb Stark destroys his alliance with the Freys and ends up losing the war.  Both he and his mother Catelyn are murdered at the wedding of her brother to Walder Frey’s daughter.  Catelyn’s naivety  in this instance is particularly telling since she relies on an old custom that forbids anyone from killing their guests once they have secured the guest right by consuming the food and drink of the host.   Walder Frey – in a supreme act of Realpolitik, provides the food when asked but ignores the custom and murders the entire host regardless.

Waiting for the End

But what is this final destination toward which Martin’s story is heading?  Only he knows.  The saga is not yet finished and we still do not yet know what his final vision is.

The question facing the surviving characters is a profound one:

How does one reconcile the need for honour with a need for the pragmatic dictates of Realpolitik?

This is the essential dilemma of the entire saga.  Without honour – without the force that binds us together, our understanding of Realpolitik causes us to devour one another with schemes and treachery.  Yet without the will to do whatever is necessary we are left exposed to the treachery of others.

This is one of the defining questions of the modern age.  Our governments have to wrestle with it all the time.  They walk a tightrope stretched between honour and Realpolitik and the threads of that rope seem to be fraying.  The war on terror has us entering wars without any declaration, committing acts of torture and detaining enemy combatants without trial.  But can our governments resist the urge to turn their talents against their own populations?  President Obama has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens without trial and he refused to prosecute those who illegally wiretapped American citizens without a warrant.  Dictators around the world are provided material support, even while they suppress and brutalize their own people.  All these crimes and more are justified in the name of Realpolitik.

The rationale for such abuses is just what we’ve seen in Martin’s narrative – if you aren’t willing to do what Realpolitik requires then you will be at the mercy of those who are.  Yet at the same time, to which concept do supporters of these practices return when they try to stem the increasing discord within their own ranks and among the general citizenry?  Honour.  Thus if you didn’t support the war in Iraq, you were not a patriot, you were un-american, you were not one of us.  The same sorts of charges are levelled against those protesting against Wall Street currently.

One wonders how long this can keep us from tearing ourselves apart and falling into an abyss of war and misery.

What About Morality?

Of course, in modern times, the concept of honour is meant to have died out except for various tribalistic societies that haven’t yet upgraded their value stack.  We are supposed to be governed now by appeals to our ‘virtue’ – something we possess inalienably as a result of our actions.  Honour, remember, is not inalienable.  It can be taken from us by the actions of others.   And to be virtuous is to perform actions which are morally correct – that is to say, gain their correctness through appeal to some absolute measure, provided sometimes by God, sometimes by reason.

This is supposed to be the defining narrative of our age – the one that displaced the honour system as a more sophisticated, and less tribalistic one.  And one might think that it provides the solution to the dilemma posed by Martin’s sage.

But here’s the funny thing.  It’s completely impotent as a source of motivation when cast in terms of what being virtuous gets you.  Virtue is something you possess whether other people perceive it or not.  So it is not a public quality in the way that honour is.  Hence it can’t provide the sort of rewards that honour can in terms of connecting you to others.  Nor does it provide the pragmatic advantages that Realpolitik can since it ignores the realities of power and forbids various actions that Realpolitik demands.  So in what sense can morality actually motivate us?  The difficulty in finding an answer to this question is why the phrase:  ”A good deed is its own reward” is so commonly heard.

The ultimate motivation may just be that if we were all moral – we would solve the dilemma presented by Martin’s narrative.  Acting according to universal moral laws would bind us altogether under a common set of rules that we could all trust – the existence of multiple groups within society would no longer require the need for Realpolitik because they would all be moral people.  But assuming that this reasoning is correct – the big problem is that no one agrees really on what being moral is all about.  Whether the justifications for a particular brand of morality has come from Gods or men – there has never been any agreement.  There remains multiple gods that different groups worship.  And even if the gods were rejected and we drank our morality only from the fount of reason – the philosophers have come to no agreement as to how to justify various moral systems.  And they’ve been arguing about it now for over two thousand years.

So it’s a curious thing that morality and virtue has come to dominate the narratives in our modern cultures.  We are governed, and respond more eagerly to the dictates of honour and Realpolitik.  Yet we see ourselves as aspiring to be virtuous people who see both concerns of honour and Realpolitik as beneath.  What extraordinary delusion.  Unless we free ourselves of it – we may never find the real solution to the dilemma that George R.R. Martin presents us.

(Once again – SPOILERS.  If this concerns you – go out and buy the books now and start reading).

George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones 4-Book Boxed Set: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire)

Honour and Morality

Honour consists largely in the obligations we have to the groups to which we belong.  As such, it is a concept that is designed to tie individuals to one another.  It binds people together.

It is not in any sense a moral concept.  What is honourable is not necessarily the ‘right’ thing to do.  Martin demonstrates this neatly with the character Jaime Lannister.  Prior to the events detailed in the books, Jaime takes an oath to defend the King Aerys Targaryen II.  But when the King learns that a major battle in the war against a rebel faction has been lost, he orders that King’s Landing be burnt to the ground, as opposed to being allowed to be captured by the rebels.  Jaime learns of this plot and intercepts the messenger carrying the orders and kills him.  He then proceeds to kill the King.  From then on, Jamie is known as the Kingslayer as a permanent reminder of the failure to keep his oath in protecting the king.

Many would feel that Jamie did the right thing.  The lives of the thousands of innocent people that would have been killed by the fire surely justifies the slaying of the mad king.  Nevertheless, this does not allow Jaime to keep his honour.  His duty to the king is unconditional.  Honour is first and foremost a tie between individuals and groups of individuals – not a way of determining who is right, what is best for the realm, or what in fact is the truth.

Honour and Truth

This is further reinforced by the way the honour system decides guilt or innocence.  Jaime’s dwarf brother Tyrion is twice subjected to trial by combat.  The idea being that if his champion can best the champion of his accuser, then this is enough to prove his innocence.  To modern sensibility this method seems entirely primitive.  How could combat ever decide the truth of any thing besides the skill of the combatants?  But it’s not actually as primitive as we might think when we consider what the true purpose of the honour system was – to bind people together.

When seen this way – trial by combat is an effective way to cure the schism that has arisen between the accuser and accused.  What matters most of all is not the absolute justice concerning the crime as we conceive it nowadays, but that the schism is promptly healed.  And that it is promptly healed is vital, lest the clans of the disputants become involved and cause a much wider conflict.

How does one explain the fact that honour cultures considered this a way of determining the truth?  Why didn’t they just see it as a way of healing rifts between people like I just explained?  As some characters in Martin’s story see it – the gods will intervene on the side of the just combatant – thereby determining what the truth of the conflict actually is.  The answer is that without the pretence of truth, it would be difficult to actually settle the grievances of the various parties involved.  Belief in an absolute arbiter –  a god – makes the decision procedure effective.

A really extreme example of this comes from the first known English version of the Arthurian legend written by Sir Thomas Mallory in the fifteenth century.  James Bowman describes the plot well in his book ‘Honor: A History’:

In Malory’s version of the story, everyone at Arthur’s court acknowledges that Launcelot is the king’s best knight.  He is also generally known to be the adulterous lover of Arthur’s queen, Guenevere, in spite of his oaths of fealty and allegiance to the king.  Malory portrays a system of honor in which what is known privately by everyone nevertheless does not matter or even exist, in some important sense, so long as it is not spoken of publicly.  For anyone to mention the liason would be to invite Launcelot, whose fighting prowess makes him the most honorable of all knights to call him a liar.  The charge of lying against any knight would in turn have obliged that knight to challenge Launcelt to single combat to the death, or else to be forever dishonred himself as one who has allowed himself to be “given the lie”… Since Launcelot is the world’s best (and therefore most honorable) knight, he is sure to kill his accuser or “prove it upon his body,” as the saying goes, that he lies – though of course everyone knows he doesn’t.  But the public nature of truth under an honor system allows launcelot and everyone else to treat his oath to the king as remaining intact, since no one dares to aver the contrary.

I’ll be returning to the Arthurian legend in my next post – when I look at how Martin critiques the concept of honour – but for now it’s worth noting that in some cases the self deception involved in maintaining the honour system can be extraordinary.  Even though everyone knows what the real truth is – the only ‘truth’ that actually matters is the one agreed upon by the group.  In this way does honour trump the notion of truth as we understand it – something which is not determined at all by agreement, but by objective reality.

Honour and Autonomy

Another aspect of  honour culture which seems quite alien to us nowadays is the way in which it can be taken from an individual – irrespective of whether or not that individual is responsible in anyway for that which took the honour away.  It is yet another example of how the concept of honour involves the ties between people.  We are used to thinking of concepts like ‘integrity’ which we think of as being inalienable so long as we behave in the correct way.  But honour doesn’t work like this.

There are countless examples of this in ASIF.  When Tyrion Lannister is arrested by Catelyn Stark his father Tywin starts a war against Riverrun the ancestral home of Catelyn.  Tyrion remarks later to his father:

Nice of you to go to war for me.

His father replies:

You left us no choice.  The honour of the house was at stake.

By accusing Tyrion of murder, Catelyn jeopardises the honour of house Lannister.  In order to defend that honour, Tywin is forced to start a war between the houses.  Part of the problem is that Catelyn doesn’t trust the regime to dispense the proper justice – so she takes Tyrion to her sister in the Vale – far away from Kings Landing.  The trial by combat which takes place is at a great distance – and so the reconciliation that it could achieve is denied.

Accusation is therefore an easy way to steal the honour of a person – if you ignore war or combat as a possible consequence.  But it is not the only way you can steal a person’s honour.  Since it is the tie that binds individuals together, it is also that which binds a lord to those who serve under him.  The honour of a lord demands that he take responsibility for the actions of those he rules.  As such, when a subject dishonours themselves, they rob their lord of his honour.  It is for this reason that Eddard Stark personally beheads a deserter from the Night’s Watch.  As warden of the North it is HIS honour which is at stake.  It is also for this reason that Eddard Stark’s son Robb beheads one of his banner men for murdering some captured Lannister children.  Robb even tells the banner man before he does it that he has been robbed of his honour because of the crime.

Another way in which a person’s honour can be stolen is in the case where a noble born woman is raped.  It is not the man’s honour that is at stake in such a case – but the honour of the woman.  This is perhaps one of the aspects of honour cultures that seems the most barbaric to modern sensibilities.  Not only does a woman have to suffer the horror of rape itself – she is then subjected to the shame and humiliation that a loss of honour involves – which in effect makes the woman an outcast.

There are many places in the world where this sort of thing still occurs regularly.  There is a particularly horrifying example documented by (once again) James Bowman:

On June 22, 2002, in the village of Meerwala near Multan in the Punjab province of Pakistan, a twenty-eigth year old divorcee named Mukhtaran Bibi… of the Gujar tribe was gang-raped on the order of a tribal council dominated by members of the higher-caste Mastoi clan.  The Mastoi had accused her twelve-year-old borther, Abdul Shakur, of an impermissible contact with a Mastoi woman… Miss Mukhtaran went to the council with her father to plead for her brother, whose punishment was as yet undetermined.  Some reports suggest that on this occasion there was talk of a settlement by which her brother would marry Salma Naseen and she would marry one of the Mastoi men.  ”When I appeared before the tribal council,’ she later testified, one of the elders said that “since the girl has come here, therefore, we should pardon her… But suddenly a man stood and said we will rape her.”  The sentence was immediately carried out by Abdul Khaliq and three other men… After the men had raped her, she was forced to walk home nearly naked to the jeers of the assembled villagers to complete her humiliation before the Mastoi and “to avenge their tribal honor.”

The senselessness of this account can be made more understandable (though not more defensible) when we consider in what way a woman possesses honour in these cultures.  Women are used through marriage to seal bonds between different houses.  Since it is in this way that women can tie people together – it is in this way in which they possess honour.

Virginity is often an important component of a woman’s honour as well (although it doesn’t seem as important in the previous example).  In ASIF – the marriage is only legitimate, and the union between houses cemented, only if the man to which the woman is married is able to take her virginity.  Marriages can be annulled where this does not occur.  It’s for this reason that Tywin warns Tyrion because the latter refuses to have sex with Sansa Stark after the two are forced by Tywin to be married.  Similarly, Queen Cersei tries to find evidence that Lady Margaret is not a virgin after she is married to Cersei’s son, the boy king Tommen.  When Cersei can obtain no hard evidence, she hires people to try to seduce Margaret before her son comes of age.

But there is one other example that shows that honour can be something which is completely divorced from individual choice – something that remains out of reach of some people no matter how well or loyal they behave.  This is the lot of the bastards – those born out of wedlock.

There are many bastards in ASIF – but none more sympathetic than Jon Snow – the bastard son of Eddard Stark.  He is as loyal and honourable in practice as his father – but he is without honour.  He does not sit at the same table in the meal hall as the other Stark children.  He is hated by Catelyn (Ned’s wife) because he is a constant reminder of how Ned dishonoured her.  He can’t even carry the name “Stark”.  Officially he is not a part of the family.  He is without honour – the tie that binds him to that group.  It is because of this that he ultimately decides to take the black and join the Night’s Watch.  In this he obtains a kind of honour in servitude to the realm that he never could in serving his family.

All this is not to say that there are no choices to be made when it comes to honour.  Often characters get to choose to whom they will swear their allegiance.  Jaime, for instance, chooses to disappoint his father and give up his inheritance by choosing to become a member of the Gold Cloaks – the elite group of knights that swear direct and lifelong fealty to the King.  They give up all claims of title and inheritance in so doing.  Such a choice is seen as an honourable one by the community because of the higher status involved in servitude to the King – even though it is a kind of betrayal to the house to which Jaime belongs.

Another example is the choice that Jon Stark faces when he learns his brother has marched to war.  He almost breaks his oath to the Night’s Watch before his brothers (from the Night’s Watch) convince him to return.

Honour, Status and Belonging

One thing that confuses people about honour culture is what it is that motivates people to defend their honour so vigorously.    It mostly has to do with the fact that their honour represents their connection to the rest of the group.  If you lose your honour, then you lose that connection.  This might mean the loss of the esteem of your family.  It might mean that your banner men will no longer follow you into battle should you command it.  Those that value these things are the ones that will defend their honour with the greatest vigour.

Interestingly, sometimes things move in the opposite direction.  Tyrion the Imp, the youngest son of Tywin Lanister, is effectively an outcast because of his appearance – even though he exists in a world of extreme privilege.  The worst is always assumed of him and he never manages to earn the respect and good favour of his father – no matter how well he performs the tasks set for him.  As a result, Tyrion assumes a defensive mask that mocks the honourable sensibilities of the culture that has rejected him.  He is frequently rude, lewd and bawdy – and indulges frequently with whores on account of his inability to curry favour from women in any regular fashion.  Because combat is the arbiter of honour, Tyrion is completely ill-suited to participate in an honour culture.  So he develops a shield of wits and reason to protect himself in his day to day life.  Both emotionally and intellectually he is completely estranged from the community in which he is situated.

It could be argued that Tyrion’s rejection of honour culture – his adoption of reason and the lewd – is a direct consequence of his estrangement.  So while for most a loss of honour causes one to be estranged from the community, for Tyrion the estrangement from his community has led to a rejection of the concept of honour.

An interesting comparison can be made with Jon Snow.  Snow is also an outcast, yet he does not reject the honour culture in the way that Tyrion does.  This is probably because of the two key differences between the two characters.  Jon is still loved by his father and most of the rest of his family (with the exception of Catelyn) and he is a very good swordsman.  He is able to act honourably, even if his bastard status block him from being honourable in the eyes of those around him.  Tyrion on the other hand is badly treated by his family and is not capable of participating in combat.

We get a sense that Jon is the sort of man that Tyrion would have been had those two things been different – and this no doubt explains the friendship that develops between the two at the beginning of the first book, even though they belong to two houses in conflict with one another.

Honour and Combat

What about this relationship between honour and combat?  Why are the two so inextricably linked?  It likely has to do with the way early societies managed to develop the sort of cohesion required to form larger societies, institutions and governments.  As Hobbes wrote, life for people in the state of nature was nasty, brutish and short.  People needed protection from all the other tribes that would regularly come along with intent of murder and rapine.  As this desired security was the pre-condition for any other activity whatsoever, the most valued asset among people was physical strength and skill in combat.  Those who possessed this skill could provide security for others and many of them likely did.  When larger groups of people began to form – they likely did around such people.  And hence we have the origins of the feudal system in Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire.  (An example of the fact that humans had to go through the process multiple times before an institutional structure to replace the honour based one could be developed).

As such, the existence of the group itself – depended entirely on the security provided by the warrior class.  It’s for this reason that honour and combat are so intimately connected.  It’s also explains why the honour culture is a masculinist culture.  Men are better at combat.  So they are the ones around which people gathered.  They were the ones that became absolute rulers.

(And if you think that we are so far removed from this reality – remember – we’ve only had a very small number of women in the roles of the highest levels of political authority – and only within the last fifty years.)

This brute fact of life for early peoples might help you understand also the strange conception of truth in the honour system.  Without honour – without your connection to the group, and the lord/chief who kept you safe – you were likely dead.  There was little experience of a reality independent of the ties one had to your tribe.  What sense was there to be made of a reality outside of honour?  It was simply beyond the experience of most people.

 Critiquing Honour

What we begin to see as we explore the concept of honour is that it is a system that developed to facilitate cohesion between groups of people.  In this respect, it was an important advance over the sort of signalling procedures that I examined in an earlier post about Dunbar’s Number.

Martin’s story is not a mere presentation of the concept of honour – it is a critique.  In fact, the entire fantasy saga is best read as an allegory for the collapse of honour culture as it occurred in our own history.  By studying it we learn something of the weaknesses of the honour system and the challenges faced by the concepts of reason, truth and virtue that we used to replace it.  It is to this subject that I will turn in my next post.

For those who don’t know, A Song of Ice and Fire is a planned seven book series of fantasy novels.  The plot is too long and involved to summarize adequately here.  Though you can get a gist of what it’s about by reading this wikipedia entry.  Alternatively you can watch the recently aired first season of Game of Thrones – an excellent adaptation of the books by HBO.  The basic gist is that it’s a story concerning a large medieval style world that falls into a civil war waged between a number of different ruling houses after the death of the King.  Each house has its salient features and notable characters.  But unlike many house saga fantasy stories (think Dune – imo), each character is individually realised and not a mere instantiation of the abstract qualities attributable to the families as a whole.  Meanwhile, to the North and South grow two supernatural forces that threaten to consume the feuding houses and bring about a dark age of wintry horror.

As always, this review is best read by those who have some familiarity with the plot first hand.  Spoilers ahead.  My reviews are for those who want to understand better what they are reading, as opposed to those who are looking for new things to read.  (Alternatively if you require a high degree of proof that something is worth your time – then my reviews may also prove useful in this respect).

I’m going to consider ASIF from four separate critical perspectives: exposition and world building, magic in fantasy, theme and symbolism.  In this post I’ll be looking at the first two of these, the second two will be explored in a post to come.  Some of these will produce negative criticisms of Martin’s work – but others will be more positive.   With respect to the negative,  if we’re going to encourage a higher degree of sophistication in genre fiction, then we need to encourage our beloved authors to take some of these criticisms on the chin.

Exposition and World Building

Interestingly, a consideration of exposition is actually not an element of criticism that really belongs exclusively on the literary side.  There is much more agreement between the literary/genre critical styles than you would think.

Exposition is that part of story telling wherein various elements are told to us – as opposed to shown.  The distinction can break down if you push it hard enough, but the basic idea is that a piece of exposition might say something like:

Samantha was horrified by the zombie.

Whereas a piece of text that sought to show her horror rather than tell it might write something like:

Samantha ran from the zombie screaming at the top of her lungs.  Later she was found in the foetal position, holding a teddy bear while rocking gently back and forth.

Literary fiction has traditionally had no problem at all in employing large amounts of exposition (try Henry James for example) – and sometimes you’ll hear the literati sneer at texts that avoid it.  But it’s actually highly subject to fashion.  Hemmingway popularized a style during the first half of the twentieth century that minimised the use of exposition, for instance.  So it’s not really honest for anyone to complain about a text merely because it uses/doesn’t use exposition.

Typically, those that prefer the showing method, criticise exposition for being too dry, analytical and removed from the drama.  Those that prefer exposition tend to criticise the showing method as being too superficial, lacking in intellectual depth; as well as being too ‘movie-like – as previously mentioned.

But what is almost universally by all genuine critics from all backgrounds is the following maxim:  use as much exposition as is necessary, but no more.  Show as much as needs to be shown, but no more.

How much exposition is the right amount?  It’s usually incredibly difficult to say, and often simply a matter of taste.  It generally depends on what the author is trying to achieve with their story.  They should use as much exposition/showing as required by their own aims.  A critic’s (a good critic – that is) is to try to get a sense of the aims of an author and assess their efforts relative to that understanding.  Not an easy job – but that’s the way it has to be approached if you want to be able to make some allowances for taste in your critique.

Martin, I feel, gets the balance between the two roughly right.  He can write a scene well – and while not every element of every scene can be thought of as a deliberate note in a symphony of meaning – you just can’t apply those sorts of standards to this sort of writing.  Nevertheless a lot of the writing could do with tightening.  Take this passage describing the character Sansa on her wedding night:

Her hands trembled as she began fumbling at her clothes.  She had ten thumbs instead of fingers, and all of them were broken.  Yet somehow she managed the laces and the buttons, and her cloak and gown and girdle and undersilk slid to the floor, until finally she was stepping out of her smallclothes.  Gooseprickles covered her arms and legs.  She kept her eyes on the floor, too shy to  look at him, but when she was done she glanced up and found him staring.  There was hunger in his green eye, it seemed to her, and fury in the black.  Sansa did not know which scared her more.

It gets the job done.  And we get an adequate sense of the apprehension appropriate to the event.  Here’s how I would probably edit this:

Her hands trembled as she took of her clothes.  Gooseprickles covered her arms and legs.  Her eyes were locked to the floor, but when she was naked she found the strength to look.  He was staring at her.  There was hunger in his green eye and fury in the black.  Both were terrifying.

We don’t need all that information about every single piece of clothing that she removes.  If she gets naked in the end – then obviously they are removed.  We’re told earlier in the scene what she is wearing because the process of putting on the clothes is described in as much detail as when they are removed.  I don’t need to know this twice!  What Martin wants to do here is just get across her nervousness, shyness, and the intense dynamic between the two.  All the exposition here is just getting in the way.

But this is what fantasy authors do.  They like building worlds in every single little detail.  And so when it comes to fantasy I often find it pretty hard to do my job as a critic.  Because to my taste, the fantasy genre is too often devoted to enormous projects of world building that just aren’t necessary to the story being told.  Yet, this is almost one of the explicit aims of many fantasy writers.  And I don’t doubt that many fans of the genre find that it is necessary for their immersion and escapist intentions.  Each to their own.

Martin’s work is certainly a world-building epic.  It has even been hailed for the gritty realism that it has brought to this task.  So I have to question whether I’m willing to question the work on it’s own terms and accept it as such.  Well – given the high quality of the work, I might be so willing – if it weren’t for the fact that I think that it conflicts with what I see to be many of Martin’s other goals that he seems to be setting for himself.

The most important of these is the story’s status as allegorical symbol for the real world.  If you’re a person that reads to expand one’s understanding of the real world, then this aim has a far higher value than its aim as escapist fantasy.  What’s more – it’s easy to feel justified in pulling-rank and claiming that the objective value of allegorical work is far higher.  At least, one could certainly adduce a large number of arguments to this effect.

What I want to argue is that even if Martin doesn’t intend it (I’d be surprised if this were the case), his story does have incredibly high value as an allegory.  I’ll be making the case for this throughout this post and my follow up to come.  For me then, its a shame to have to work through such an enormous amount of world-building in order to be able to appreciate that allegory.  Many, I think, would be prevented from such appreciation precisely because of the degree of world building the Martin has undertaken.

To understand the symbolism, as well as the more abstract thematic content, one needs to be able to see it from above.  You need to be able to hold as many details in your head at once in order to be able to see the patterns of connections, the structure of symbolic interplay and meaning.  It’s really hard to do this when you have seven books to work through – each well over a thousand pages each.  This is one of the main reasons why it’s rare to find massive literary epics that span multiple books.  (Proust is an exception I believe.)  It’s just so much harder to pull off a story that fits together as a coherent whole when it’s so large.

Besides being able to see it from above, sometimes there are just features of narrative which require you to have read the whole thing before you can assess it.  A particular plot twist toward the end can throw an entirely different light over everything that has come before –  (consider ‘Fight Club‘ as an example).  Until you’ve swallowed all seven books of ASIF – you never really know if the Martin isn’t just setting us up for a giant mind wipe right at the end.  Since all of the books haven’t been released yet – my analysis may suffer from just this sort of limitation.

Then there’s the problem of sorting out which details are thematically relevant, and which are just part of the detail.   And don’t try to tell me that every single detail in the thousands of pages written so far are all beautiful diamonds of pure thematic resonance.  No one is that good.  (And one day I write why I think Proust isn’t that good either – despite what many say).

So I think I have good reason for saying that Martin has gone too far with his world building – and that it detracts from much of what he is trying to achieve.  I think there is a pressure coming from the fantasy tradition that is perhaps the culprit here.  World building epicness has unfortunately become conflated with serious gravitas in the genre.  Just because it’s long – doesn’t mean it’s good.

Having said that – it’s not the worst of crimes by any measure.  And given that Martin manages to avoid the worst excesses of the genre in other respects – I’m personally willing to give him a pass on this.

Magic and Fantasy

In most fantasy stories there is a power structure that is underwritten by a magical power of some kind or another.  It’s kind of hard to imagine fantasy fiction without magic – so you can’t  criticise the genre for making use of it.  But I think there is good reason to criticise how it’s typically used by many writers in the genre.  There are two main aspects to the way magic is commonly used that detracts from its potential to really achieve a high level of sophistication.  Martin’s treatment avoids the worst of these two aspects (or at least, has the potential to) – and this reveals a lot about the level of sophistication that he has managed to achieve.

One aspect of the way fantasy typically employs magic  - and the most important with respect to the commercial success of the genre – is its use in the growth in power of an individual or group of characters.  The most clichéd and common instance of this is the rise to power of a single protagonist (usually a young, orphaned boy), who from humble beginnings becomes the most powerful magician in the world – a chosen one that saves everyone from some great evil.  This is an ID-satisfaction device that is used  to suck in readers and allow for vicarious desire satisfaction.  The device has been so well honed in modern times that it’s not unreasonable to call the practice exploitative – insofar as it simultaneously compels readers to shell out money to read the next instalment, while getting in the way of the reader actually achieving a real degree of desire satisfaction.  The reader is trapped into a dream of power acquisition that detracts from their potential for genuine achievement.

The problem I have with this aspect (at least with respect to this review) is not its exploitative nature – but really the sorts of constraints that it places on the other elements of the story.  Since it has to follow this rise to (magical) power story, it cuts of all sorts of interesting plot avenues that could throw light on the theme under exploration.  Since most modern fantasy doesn’t have particularly sophisticated thematic aims – this isn’t so much of a problem.  But since  ASIF is quite sophisticated in its thematic material, there is potential for the magic to get in the way.

The rise to magical power narrative isn’t strongly foregrounded at the beginning of the ASIF – but it’s there.  Martin doesn’t rub your face in it – but there are actually a monstrous number of symbolic references to the rise to magical story to come (e.g. Bran’s dream of the three eyed crow and Dany’s penchant for extremely hot baths) It takes a couple of novels to start ramping up, but certain characters do begin to develop magical abilities and others gain control over various magical beasts like dragons and wargs.  The realisation of these powers become the most salient set-pieces of the entire narrative.  Without having seen exactly how these aspects play out (I’m mid-way through the third book) – I fear that this narrative could totally disrupt the subtle exploration of the concept of honour that we’ve seen in the first couple of books.

Having said that, however, there is great potential for Martin to use the rise to magical power narrative in a way that actually enhances his presentation of the thematic material.  As I said earlier, the central theme of the novel revolves around the concept of honour (which I’ll be exploring in greater depth in the next article).  The characters that seem to be most exposed to magical abilities are the ones that in many respects seem to be the most honourable – namely the Starks and Daenerys Targaryen.  As such, the rise to magical power narrative could be in fact be used her by Martin as an allegory for the importance of the existence of honour in society.

There are multiple symbols of this in the early novels besides the growing powers of the Starks and Daenerys.   Characters without much honour are conspicuously absent any great power.  Daenerys Targaryen, for instance, is a character that is cruel, dishonest and controlling – yet he doesn’t inherit his sister’s ability to withstand great amounts of heat.  (The family’s bloodline is said to descend from Dragons).  The history of the Targaryen family also seems to sure up this interpretation.  The source of their power that allows them to conquer the seven kingdoms are the dragons which serve them.  Yet shortly before the events of the novels begin, their reign comes to an end when the king Aerys Targaryen is murdered.  The king is described as being mad and completely bloodthirsty before his reign ends – without honour – and importantly is without any dragons, since they have all died out before the story begins.  The suggestion is that the loss of honour within the Targaryen family is linked to the loss of power gained through their control of the dragons.

When characters stray from an honourable path, their access to their magical powers is often also sniped.  When Sansa Stark lies to protect Prince Joffrey over an altercation with her sister, her warg (a magical wolf-like creature) is put to death.  When Robb Stark betrays his promise to marry the daughter of an allied lord by marring another girl instead, he begins to lose his connection to his warg – by keeping it outside and feeling ashamed of it in front of his new wife.  The same thing happens to Jon Snow when he breaks his oath to the night’s watch and makes love to a wildling (a group of people in the north that don’t accept lords or kings as their masters).  Soon after, he forced to part with his pet warg.

The least honourable family – the Lannisters – seem to have no access to magical abilities at all.  But more than this – they are the family most dismissive of the supernatural evil growing in the north.  If this evil is an allegory for the harm that befalls a community devoid of honour then it would stand to reason that the most dishonourable family would fear it the least.  The Starks – who generally seem to be the most honourable overall – are in fact the most involved in watching over the north for the return of the supernatural bad guys.  For those on the front line of the great northern wall – The Night’s Watch – honour is the chief virtue.  All other aspects of life are sacrificed in its name: lands, title, love and family.   Once again – it seems appropriate that those who most cherish honour are the ones most concerned about the supernatural evil that grows beyond the great wall.

I’m not entirely convinced this sort of symbolism is maintained consistently throughout the narrative – once again a problem of length. (For instance, the Red Priestess that gains control over Stannis Baratheon seems possessed of great magical power – yet she doesn’t seem honourable at all).  But it’s reasonable to assume that it’s consistent enough to be a valid interpretation.  If in fact that’s how Martin intends his use of the magical power narrative to play out then I wholeheartedly endorse this use.  It’s a well sustained and highly sophisticated use of symbolism that sheds a great deal of light on his treatment of his theme.  In general though, fantasy writers are going to need to start avoiding the use of this plot device if they want to improve the sophistication of their stories.  There’s only so many times the same narrative structure can be used to shed new light or understanding on any given topic.

But there is another aspect of the use of magic in fantasy that is worth looking at briefly.  Typically – unless the writing is completely hokey (think  most of Star Trek – as an example) – a particular set of rules is developed for how magic can be used in that world.   Without these rules, resolution of conflict becomes arbitrary and lazy, and the story loses any potential for suspense, since the reader comes to learn that the world can be saved with a handy bit of ‘magic’ at the final moment.  At the end of every episode, the Vulcan re-energises the flux matrix of the warp capacitor, leading to a trans-dimensional bolix spiral that rescues everybody and saves the day.  (Or think of how dissatisfied many Battlestar Galactica fans were when they learned at the end it was all the work of God).

The more sophisticated brands of fantasy writing will apply a much more complex set of rules over the use of magic.  The resolution of suspenseful plot points becomes more challenging since characters will have to find creative, yet coherent solutions when the rules block them from achieving their aims.  The catch-22 of this kind of increased sophistication is that while the increased rigidity and complexity of the magical laws can heighten satisfaction and appreciation at the level of plot and character – it makes it much more difficult to successfully use those magical elements as symbolic representations at the level of the thematic material.

It’s for this reason that where magic appears in literary fiction, it typically is presented without  a coherent set of laws that govern how it is to appear in the narrative.  A good example would be “A Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Marcia Marquez – from the magical realism school.  (I won’t go into detail about this work – but take my word for it – whacky stuff happens and it’s often never explained why according to any kind of rule.)  Literary authors are often less concerned with entertainment, and so aren’t too worried about resolving points of conflict in a suspenseful and satisfying way.  But this raises and interesting question.  If literary fiction doesn’t make use of such laws – why shouldn’t we think of such fiction as being hokey like Star Trek?

The reason is because the aim of such fiction is to use those magical elements to achieve a kind of symbolic  resonance that enhance our appreciation at the level of the theme.  It can often take a great deal of analysis and careful attention to see just how this kind of contribution is made.  And there is a lot of detail I could go into here.  But simply put, literary authors want their use of magic in their stories to mean something.  They don’t care so much if it effectively resolves a particular plot point or not.  This might be to symbolise something abstract concerning the theme – or it might be a symbolisation of a character trait.  In the latter case, this is particularly so when the magic at issue is a power possessed by a character.

The interesting thing about Martin’s use of magic in ASIF is that it strkes me as being much closer to the kind of magic you find in literary fiction as opposed to that found in standard fantasy stories – at least in the first couple of novels.  The small number of magical events at the early stages are left almost completely inexplicable.  If there are rules in operation at all, then they seem to work differently in different circumstances.  Yet, if my preceding analysis is correct, then those magical elements are doing a large amount of symbolic work.

Since Martin is writing popular fiction I get the impression that as the novel’s progress there may well be further fleshing out of the magical laws in operation in his world.  But if he manages to sustain the powerful symbolism established in the first couple of books then he will have achieved that holy grail of artistic achievement – a work that appeals to both the critics and the masses.

Theme and Symbolism

We’ve already seen a lot of reasons why ASIF has a high level of sophistication that warrants significant attention.  But you haven’t seen anything yet.  Ultimately, the success of a work must be judged in terms of the higher ideas that it is exploring, and that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post.  The further into these novels I delve, the more I come to believe that what Martin has achieved in this respect is simply breathtaking.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find all the principles espoused in this book summarized for your convenience.  As I said, it’s hard not to agree with most of it.  Why shouldn’t you be genuinely interested in other people?  Why wouldn’t you try to be a good listener?  Especially when read in isolation, it’s hard to find fault with any of the principles listed.  It’s just a common sense check list of things you can do to be a nice person.

Much of the substance of Carnegie’s writing reflects the seemingly genuine nature of his advice.  He writes:

If we want to make friends, let’s put ourselves out to do things for other people – things that require time, energy, unselfishness and thoughtfulness… If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind:  Become genuinely interested in people.

Again – how could anyone argue with this?  Part of the genius of this book is that you could read it cover to cover and really believe that you’ve learned principles that will help you to not just win friends – but also be a genuinely good and self-sacrificing person.  And you’ll come to believe this of yourself even though in practice you’ll be nothing of the sort.

As you read further – and perhaps read certain sections multiple times, you’ll notice a profound and cynical contradiction that sits right at the heart of this book.  It’s this lack of consistency that to me reveals its insincerity.  For while on the one hand it’s convincing you to be a self-sacrificing and generous person that is interested in others, on the other it’s convincing you that everyone else is a vain, egotistical and selfish bastard.

For instance – near to the beginning, Carnegie writes:

…personally I had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.

This is a deeply cynical point of view – however true it proves to be.  There are plenty of other pessimistic gems scattered throughout the book.  With every skill or virtue the author imparts comes the implication that people in general are not themselves possessed of it.  When it advises you to study the desires of others rather than fixating selfishly on your own, it backhandedly smacks down the whole human race as being fixated on their own selfish desires.  When you are advised to listen attentively to the rants of others, you learn that people in general are self-absorbed and want to rant.

And so while it tells you to genuinely like people, smile at them and show them your interest and love - it does this while simultaneously presenting people as being generally devoid of all the virtues that make them likeable.  Hence the contradiction.

This book is deeply misanthropic at it’s core.  So one has to ask – if Carnegie was really motivated to act in all these ways toward people even when he didn’t actually seem to really like people at all – what actually was the source of his drive?  Well – when you learn that his first profession was as a salesperson, then you begin to see the answer.  He wanted to control people for his own selfish benefit.

So why was this book so successful?  Because it follows one of his precepts to the letter – make people feel important.  How does it do this?  Well – while it convinces you that everyone in the world is horrible, selfish and incapable of following through on the suggestions he offers, it also convinces you that YOU are one of the statistical few that can overcome your evolutionary heritage to ascend to a higher state of being.  But of course, Carnegie didn’t believe this of the great majority of his readers – for the structure of the book itself follows the same cynical marketing principles that the book itself advocates, and those principles assume that you are just one of the statistical majority.

So what of the concept of intimacy in a book that helps you to win friends and influence people?  The term isn’t used once (if a Kindle’s search functionality is accurate).  Neither, for that matter, is the concept of trust.  What’s more, you’re not allowed to engage in any sort of criticism of your friends according to this book – something which I’ve argued sits right at the heart of intimate relationships.

I guess it’s difficult for a salesman to understand the importance of these aspects of genuine friendship.

 A Summary of Carnegie’s Principles

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

Win People Over to Your Way of Thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions.  Never say, “You’re wrong.”
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
6. Let the other person do a great deal of talking.
7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas.
12. Throw down a challenge .

Be a Leader

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing your own.
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5. Let the other person save face.
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.  Be “heartly in your approbation and lavish in your praise”.
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Photo by Samurai

There is a narrative hidden underneath the emergent social networking phenomenon.  It’s a story about our fundamental psychological reality and our absolute potential as a species.  Thousands of pundits are trying to tell it – but none of us really knows how to craft a narrative so epic in scope.  With the release of Google Plus, the story tellers are all out in force once again but largely its an underwhelming cacophony.  The one pure note sounded has been ex-googler Paul Adam’s slideshow – The Real Social Network.  And yet even this effort, I will argue, fails to cast any real light on what is driving the incredible social change that we’re seeing all around us.  We suffer from a lack of vision and an all too fervent pessimism about the possibilities opening out to us.  We need to remove those aspects of our theoretical foundations that are blocking us from uncovering the hidden narrative of social networking.  It’s in this spirit that I present today’s review of the theoretical underpinnings of Google’s new online social network.

There’s a lot to admire about Paul Adams’ research.  A lot of his conclusions about how people interact with one another are undeniable.  Most people do have lots of varied groups with which they interact, for instance – and he was spot on when he claimed that existing online social networks weren’t meeting this need.  His underlying philosophy that we should be building technology that matches the psychological reality of human sociality is also spot on.  An engineering culture which ignores this dictum might as well build hammers for one fingered aliens – we need hammers for human hands!

It’s unfortunate that we only have access to his slide show and that Google blocked publication of his book – because I feel some of the criticisms that follow may we have been considered in detail – and certainly couldn’t be considered in the context of a slideshow.  But in anycase – we can only work with what we have.

My biggest concern is that the presentation seems to conflate the current structural features of the way people interact with one another with the deeper, psychological reality that our evolutionary heritage has bequeathed (It’s hard to say if this mistake is being made from the slides presented – but it does seem to be implicit in the discussion).  You can’t just assume that the empirical snapshot given to us by Adams actually models this psychological reality.  Obviously, as good naturalists we all agree that this empirical snapshot is determined by that reality.  But that doesn’t mean that the current snapshot is a good representation of that reality.  What we need to see are the ways in which social networks are effected by changes in the surrounding context – to examine which features are preserved and which aren’t.  Because it’s clear that the structure of human social networks have changed significantly in various ways since the dawn of man.  We have to get clear on what facets have changed and what have stayed the same.  A particular empirical snapshot taken in one point in time doesn’t give us this.

I only see one data point in Adam’s presentation which seems to invoke research on what features of human social networks have persisted through time and that’s his reference to Dunbar’s Number – the maximum number of weak social connections that we are able to maintain before group social hegemony begins to significantly break down (around 150 connections).   I’ll explain Dunbar’s Number in a little more detail in a moment.  But the basic idea is that this limit has been observed across a wide cross section of cultures and in different periods of history – and so has a wide degree of confirmation.  Such persistence can be thought to be evidence of a component of our fundamental psychological limitations and reality.

Before I get deeper into Dunbar’s number, I want to point out first that the persistence of this data point throughout history doesn’t confer any persistence on the data yielded from the other particular empirical studies conducted on human social networks in the present by Adams and others.  We have to do the work to somehow find the data on this presumed persistence by consulting our palaeontologists, ethnographers, historians… etc.  I don’t see that in Adam’s presentation.  Yes, the research does seem to have been conducted in multiple countries – across multiple cultures – with near universal results.  But without knowing in detail the socio-economic realities in which the subjects are situated it’s impossible to rule out that perhaps  there just isn’t the kind of contextual variation in circumstances of the subjects that would cause variation in networking structures.

So maybe we’ll see more information in Adam’s book.  Until then – we need to be really careful about interpreting Adam’s results.  (Or until we can find the time to hit the literature or conduct our own studies).

Dunbar’s Number and its Interpretation

But even when you have a data point like Dunbar’s number which does seem to persist through time – you still have to be very careful about how you interpret it.  You have to be even more careful about how you use it to inform your choices when building social networking products.  To just see this as a blanket limit that can’t be circumvented, I’ll argue, is a big mistake.  Yet these are the sorts of conclusions drawn by people researching tools for developing online social networks.  This research paper on recommendation systems in social networks, for example, uses Dunbar’s Number as the rationale for stopping your recommendation engine from recommending contacts to people who are maxed out already at 150 connections and over.  To see why this sort of conclusion is wrong, we’ll have to dig a little deeper into Dunbar’s Number to understand just what it means.

Dunbar came up with this number by observing a correlation between the size of the neo-cortex and the maximum size of groups in various kinds of primates.  By applying this correlation to the size of the human neo-cortex – this yielded 150.  Dunbar then began to look for at examples of human organisation throughout history and he found many examples that supported the thesis that human groups begin to lose hegemony at around the number of 150.  This result, combined with the correlation between neo-cortex size and primate group size, led Dunbar to conclude that there was a causal relationship between neo-cortex size of humans and the size limit of effective social engagement in human social groups.

But why did we evolve this limit?  Dunbar’s answer to this question is fascinating. As primates hanging out in small groups we developed certain social procedures like grooming which conferred obvious benefits like controlling parasites and improving health.  Now it turns out that we weren’t very nice to each other back then (there’s one data point that remains the same through time) – with many sub-groups harassing and making life unpleasant for various individuals.  Given that you didn’t want your grooming buddies to get disrupted and thereby jeopardising your own comfort and health, it was natural to step in to their defence when they got harassed.  Over time, as our brains got big enough, grooming came to be seen as a signal that you wouldn’t harass and that you would help defend in the event of harassment.  So primates came to groom one another just to let others know that everything between them was tight.

The most important part of this story comes next.  Given that grooming behaviour takes a lot of time and energy – sending out the necessary social signals to the other primates in your group comes with a hefty economic cost.  For a species that has to spend a large amount of its time gathering resources, it means that you can’t groom as many primates as you would like.  And so it comes to be that you have to choose who you’re going to groom and who you’re going to ignore and thereby signal that you’re just not that into them.  It’s for this reason that there is an upper bound on the number of members in a group before social cohesion begins to break down.  Large groups have an economic overhead associated with appropriate signalling procedures that can’t be borne without the appropriate technology.

So then – it’s not that primate brains evolved in a certain way to only handle a certain number of connections and that THIS causes the group size limit.  The causal direction goes the other way.  Economic limitations involved in signalling procedures causes signalling failure – and this signalling failure constrains possible group size.  Primate brains adapted to this natural economic limit.  After all – why keep track of all those people that are just going to get the annoyed when you don’t signal to them correctly?  It’s not efficient.  Hence we get the correlation between brain size and group size.  The brain got as large as it needed to deal with the largest group sizes it would have encountered.

The natural limit for humans is much larger than primates.  Dunbar’s explanation for this is that our survival depended on the development of larger cohesive groupings, but in order to achieve this we needed a way to reduce the costs of the various signalling procedures used to maintain cohesion.  To this end, he claims, we developed language.  Language allows humans to signal on the cheap.  Rather than having to actually groom your fellow primate, you could just tell him that you would be there for him in a fight.  So the economic cost of signalling decreased dramatically.  Also it allowed us to cheaply gain information about others in the group through gossip as opposed to having to spend time observing an individual.

One  problem for Dunbar is in accounting for the obvious fact that much larger societal structures developed.  How did we manage to do this if our brain craps out at around 150 peeps?   It turns out that language came with some ancillary benefits.   Our representational systems allow us to categorise people into types easily – so we can quickly decide how best to behave in front of a particular individual (think uniforms on police officers… etc).  Secondly, they allow us to teach others how to behave in different types of circumstances – with none of this implying an increase on the upper bound of individuals we can personally keep track of.

So that’s Dunbar’s story as to how we circumvented the limit.  And it’s a good answer.  Unfortunately, however, it undermines any suggestion (implied by Dunbar and Adams as well) that the causal relation between brain size and network limits goes back the other way – from brain to group size.  Because as we’ve seen – the real causal determinant here is economic – not physiological.  The brain adapted to a particular economic reality.  The question is – how would the brain respond to a sudden drop in the signalling costs involved in group cohesion and maintenance?  And have we ever seen such a drop since language developed?

In my view – the answer to the latter question has been no, up until very recently.  Certain peripheral costs started dropping in a dramatic way around the beginning of the industrial revolution.  For instance – Dunbar did a study on groups involved in the sending of Christmas Cards.  He found that the Dunbar Number limit applied to these groups just as in many other cases.  The cost of sending Christmas Cards dropped dramatically upon the development of rail and road infrastructure – so this enabled one to signal to people that were physically a great distance away from you.  But the usual costs of writing the cards, employing the appropriate language – writing the symbols, keeping a list of who to buy cards for (either mentally or by means of a written ledger),  etc… that all remained constant.  Still much cheaper than spending an afternoon over a Christmas Ham, but relatively as expensive as it has ever been to signal to one another by means of language.

Enter online social networks.  We can now understand just what’s so revolutionary about them – they reduce the signalling costs involved in social cohesion.  The drop in costs are dramatic.  I don’t have to keep a mental list, or even a spreadsheet of my contacts.  I come across a person that I find interesting on Google+ and I just drag them to a circle.  I don’t have to laboriously track birthdays.  Facebook tells me when someone I know was born, and I can signal that I care about that person by writing on their wall – as everyone seems to do.  We know for a fact that signalling costs dropped dramatically since tens of millions of 30/40 something, estranged high-school friends suddenly started wishing one another happy birthday.  If I’m right, then there hasn’t been an equivalent drop in signalling costs since the birth of language.

There are still plenty of costs.  I spent pretty much an entire day trawling through Google+ profiles looking for people to add and only got up to around 60 people.   That’s way more people than I’ve ever been able to interact with on any level in such a short space of time – but it already feels like an enormous cost relative to the incredible pace at which those costs are dropping.

Over time these problems will get solved and signalling costs will continue to decline rapidly.  Robert Scoble, for instance, recently alerted his followers to a technology that will allow you to automatically group your contacts – so you don’t have to bear the cost of manually creating a taxonomy for them.  People seem to give Scoble lip for jumping on every new tech bandwagon – but I think he’s totally correct in this case.  We’ve only just begun to realise the potential benefits of this technology.

The last time something like this happened – around the dawn of language – humans managed to create institutional structures that changed the face of this planet.  This happened without any change in Dunbar’s Number.  So might a similarly massive drop in signalling costs allow us to create new institutions that progress us forward just as much?

Besides this – somewhat hyperbolic – supposition – we don’t actually know how the brain is going to respond to a massive drop in signalling costs.  Could it be that the 150 connection limit has been around for so long precisely because there hasn’t been an equivalent drop in signalling costs since?  After all – some of the costs are directly related to the effort the brain has to expend in order to track the people it wants to track.  It seems reasonable to suppose that,  given the large degree of automation of signalling related tasks the brain would otherwise would have to perform manually, the reduction of such costs would allow a larger amount of tracking.

Think about some of the concrete reductions in costs that social networks have achieved in terms of allowing you to quickly access information about your friends.  This New York Times article  by Clive Thompson describes how the invention of the Facebook Wall meant that you no longer had to surf from page to page to get information.  The ease with which we manage to garner information about our friends leads to what Thompson describes as an ambient awareness of a much larger group of people than that suggested by the Dunbar limit.

We Need a New Yardstick of a Real Relationship

Ah – but you reply, but these aren’t real relationships.  In fact, the practice of friending people on online social networks has been the object of some fantastic satire.  Cue this classic Daily Show Clip with Demetri Martin:

What is the source of suspicion that many people have with this kind of behaviour?  The intuition seems to be that the relationships formed aren’t ‘real’ in some sense.  And Dunbar’s Number is commonly used to defend this idea.  Dunbar and Adams claim that the same limits of human attention are to be seen in human interactions on online social networks.

From what I’ve been able to find – the data actually seems to be mixed.  I think we’re going to have to wait for more research to be conducted.  (Although I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expect in this literature so feel free to correct me – my larger point doesn’t depend on this.)  One study I read has observed an increase in the number from 150 to the 200-300 range in online social networks.   Results like this would support the view that the reduction in signalling costs will allow the brain to handle a larger number of connections.

A different study by Goncalves, Perra and Vespignani (GPV study for short here on out) measured social interactions using the Twitter Firehose API and came up with a result which supports the existence of the standard Dunbar Number as a constraint on human relationships.  I also believe that Dunbar himself has come out with similar research – although I haven’t been able to find it.

But even if it proves to be the case that the GPV study gets it right and the first study proves to be aberrant, this STILL doesn’t make the case that there is a biological limit for social relationships hard wired into us.  To see why – we’ll need to look at the GPV study in a little detail.

What the study did was analyse a bunch of tweets in a cross section of the whole twitter network.  They filtered out large uni-directional exchanges – like those between celebrities and their followers – and included only straightforward bi-directional exchanges between individuals.  Conversational nodes – i.e. tweets that begin a series of replies between participants – are identified, and the distance from the node of each tweet is measured.  The total distance of a conversational tree is called the ‘weight’ of that conversation and is taken to be a measure of the strength of the connection between participants.  What they saw was that the number of messages sent by participants to each contact maxed out at around 150 contacts.  After that point the number of tweets sent per contact declined.  As a result – the weight of each conversation suffered a corresponding decline, indicating a decreasing strength in the connection.  And so – because of this result the GPV study authors conclude that the Twitter data “offers support to Dunbar’s hypothesis of a biological limit to the number of relationships”.

So what’s wrong with this?  After all – it seems to support our intuitions that those folks that add thousand of people to their online social network are somehow behaving in a superficial way.  Well – one problem is that the authors are ignoring the fact that the amount of signalling is not necessarily a good measure of the quality of a relationship.

Human signalling in its very nature is arbitrary.  Our great innovation as a species was to employ signs that have no causal relationship to what they signify.  Thus the sentence: “I will protect you if other primates harass you” can signal your willingness to help another primate – even though you may not be in a grooming relationship.  But there is nothing forcing me to follow through on the promise.  It’s in this way that signalling behaviour tries to get value out of social relationships on the cheap.  And assuming that everyone is signalling honestly – it allows us to spread risk in a much more diverse way.  We can promise to help more people than we ever could possibly follow through upon – but that’s okay, because not everyone needs our attention all the time.  It’s like a bank that promises to pay anyone who decides to withdraw all their deposits.  That promise is only good on condition that not everyone decides to withdraw their capital all at once since the bank only keeps a fraction of those deposits on hand.  Assuming that disaster doesn’t happen – the bank is free to make use of the total capital sum deposited.  Similarly, we enjoy the advantage of having a wide range of people to potentially call upon should we need to through our signalling behaviours.  But we  know that we couldn’t possibly meet all obligations if everyone demanded our help all at once.

The problem is that due to the arbitrary and cheap nature of signalling, people signal stuff all the time that they never follow through upon.  So the value of a particular signalling procedure to the recipient comes from the sincere intentions of the signaller.  And the value of an act of signification to the signaller comes from the success in eliciting the desired increase in attachment from the receiver without a large degree of investment on the part of the signaller.  But the mere fact that a transmission of a signal between two parties has occurred does not establish whether or not either of these two conditions have obtained.

So let’s apply these insights to GPV study.  The study supposes that connections beyond the 150 limit suffer a loss in quality because of a reduction in the length of those exchanges.  But we don’t actually know much about the quality or not because we know nothing about the intentions or beliefs of the people involved.   It’s also going to be really difficult to gather this information.   Given that signalling procedures tend to be largely subconscious (as many like Adams argue),  how do we know for instance what a given engagement actually signals to the receiver?  How do we tell if they believed it?  How do we measure the sincerity of the signaller?

What’s more – there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we engage less in signalling type behaviours with people with whom we have a greater degree of intimacy.  (I go further and define intimate relationships as those which  minimise arbitrary signalling behaviour – see my review of The Social Network).   Such a phenomenon is often interpreted as taking people for granted  (not always correctly in my opinion).

In many cases there are lots of factors determining whether or not a particular strategy of signification is likely to yield good results.  For instance, the single biggest predictor of being cheated on as a man among personality traits is agreeableness.  That might give you reason to think that a long twitter conversation between an agreeable man and his mate is in many cases actually weakening the relationship not strengthening it.

Similarly, many men will tell you that they received an increase in positive signalling behaviour from women when they reduce the  number of positive signals offered.  Successful dating profiles for men include pictures of men that aren’t smiling and are looking away from the camera.  There’s reason to think that people will signal a large amount to contacts that they value, when they doubt the level of the connection.  The flurry of signalling can be an attempt to remove this worry and strengthen bonds.   A high level of signalling, therefore, can actually imply a lower degree of connection between individuals in some cases.

So given cases such as these – it’s hard to maintain that Dunbar’s Number does anything like provide us with an upper bound on the number of strong relationships that a person can maintain.  Nevertheless, assuming the GPV study is replicated, it does seem to be telling us something.  But what exactly?  Well – just read it off the study, it’s all very clear.  It’s telling us the number of contacts with whom we can maintain a high degree of bi-directional signalling activity.  And given the restriction of the study to traditional, bi-directional exchanges, they are simultaneously selecting the kinds of exchanges that come the with same sort of economic signalling costs that have been with us since the dawn of language.

As such, the study can’t give us information about the limit on connections given a large drop in signalling costs.  Consider some of the ways in which these costs have dropped.  My favourite act is the act of following someone.  It’s a very low cost act – much lower than a short conversation, or even a single tweet.  Yet, it still is a signalling act.  What it means probably varies from person to person – but it’s not uncommon to think that to follow someone is to signal that you are interested in that person to some degree – that you will read at least some of their posts – that you might even share their content with your other contacts.  And while these might be intended as further acts of signalling that do take an investment of time – in many cases they won’t be.  If one values the content of the one you’re following – then reading it and sharing it has its own reward in value besides any signal that you’re a more devoted fan.  Now a mere click of that follow button probably doesn’t signal the sort of connection that would have to serve as godfather to their child – or even that you’d be willing to simply meet them for coffee – but it’s a connection of a sort and it has real value to the people that you follow.

Consider also signalling acts that are not generally bi-directional like when celebrities tweet to their followers.  Such acts play a powerful role in allowing personalities to signal their appreciation to their fans in a way that bi-directional relationships can’t possibly allow.  Celebrities can also establish a kind of faux intimacy by selecting a lucky fan with whom to engage directly in a bi-directional conversation – something that was difficult to do using television.

If you want an example – consider what is perhaps the most famous tweet of all time, Conan O’brien’s tweet about Sarah Killen.  This tweet made Sarah Killen an internet celebrity in an instant and resulted in an enormous amount of goodwill toward the Conan ‘brand’ for a gesture that cost him next to nothing.  Thus social networking has allowed for influential personalities to signal to their fans in ways that just weren’t possible before.  Now – again – these signalling acts don’t constitute relationships that can be characterised by traditional bi-directional signalling.  But they are real – and they have real value for the celebrities if not the fans as well.

As I mentioned, the GPV study excluded these sorts of uni-directional relationships from its analysis.  Thus it has its bias toward what it thinks are real connections built into the structure of the study.  Therefore at most it’s only telling us about a particular biological limit for a certain specific kind of signalling based relationship.  That’s a whole lot less interesting than the claim that there is a biological limit to relationships in general.

The discussion so far brings us to another important question.  Why do we tend to latch on to data like Dunbar’s Number as evidence of  value (or lack of it) in a relationship?   Because the economic cost of a signal is itself a signal of intentions and we’re going through a transition period while we are getting used to lower costs.  Dunbar’s Number measures limits on bi-directional communication given traditional signalling costs.  So a failure to match those costs by violating that limit signals to us that the intent is less than sincere.

Think of it this way:  when humans started using language to signal to one another that they would be there to defend against harassment – consider how shallow that might have appeared to those that used more expensive signalling procedures like grooming to signal their allegiance.  It would have appeared cheap!  And certainly at first one would be more suspicious of a person who only used language to signal loyalty and didn’t engage in grooming as well.  But obviously language did take off as a signalling medium because it’s the main one currently in use today.  And I think this is the same sort of thing that is going on now with the dramatic drop in signalling costs made possible by social networking.

The Hidden Narrative of Social Networking

Whether or not you understand the value of it, many people are making use of these new signalling opportunities.  What we need to understand is why.  At the same time we have to balance this against some of the other data that Adams has provided us.  Simple applications of data such as Dunbar’s number gets in the way of this understanding, rather than enhancing it.  It’s tempting to take particular data points and see in them aspects of our fundamental psychological reality.  But in actual fact, a true understanding of what is going on is still a long way away.

I get the impression that Adams is acutely aware of this since he points out that we don’t know yet whether online social networks should simply replicate existing offline social structures or seek to structure them differently.  This question is directly related to the issue of understanding the psychological reality which governs our lives.  Because to model online networks on the structure we currently observe in the offline variety is to assume (at least implicity) – that these observations represent the fundamental reality.

I agree with Adams that we don’t ultimately know yet what the answer should be – but obviously I lean toward the view that this is wrong.  I don’t doubt that our fundamental psychological nature is evolutionarily determined – but it’s a fallacy to infer from this that the surface phenomena we observe in human interaction are somehow static and insensitive to dramatic changes in context.  As I’ve argued above, the invention of social networking is itself a dramatic change in that context because of the reduction in signalling costs that it enables.

When provided with all these new tools tools of expression and social management we see an explosion of many different kinds of behaviours that aren’t common in the offline world.  It’s almost as if there was some latent human potential that we scarcely even dreamed was just sitting beneath the surface and waiting to be released.  Why chain it with our theories, when we can release it with our imagination?

It’s time to liberate ourselves from the view that our new found scientific perspective of our own nature dramatically limits the narratives we can craft for ourselves.  The potential of the human animal is vast and as yet unimagined.  There’s no need to try to cage it yet.