Remember the old Batman?  It looks so dated now.  Remember the strange, campy costumes and the droll one liners – all those has been actors?  Were you to watch it now you would find it painful to watch – the slow pacing, the bad special effects, the goofy gadgets.  At best you can look back upon your younger self and appreciate the enjoyment you used to receive – even if the story no longer excites you like it once did.

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.

In my last post I looked at how George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” explores the key features of honour cultures.  But what is so interesting about honour?  Why should we be interested in it?  What makes George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic, as an essay about honour, relevant to modern readers?  The first part of an answer to this question is that ASOIAF is a critique.  It is not a simple portrayal of the honourable characters as good guys and the dishonourable characters as bad.  By reading ASOIAF we learn just what value the concept of honour brings, and in what ways it fails us.   But what we also learn is that Martin’s saga defines one of the central dilemmas of the modern age.  We are used to thinking that honour is a dead concept that is no longer applicable to us.  But this is not so.  Politics in the modern age is ruled by two forces – Realpolitik and Honour.  And there is a tension between them so profound that it will likely be the ruin of us all unless we find some solution.

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.

The central theme in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic ‘A Song of Ice and Fire‘ (ASIF) is the concept of honour (or ‘honor’ by the American spelling).  But what is honour?  The concept is so alien to modern, western sensibility that there is a lot of misunderstanding about it.  In this post I’m going to explore the concept of honour as it is presented in Martin’s story.  ASIF is as good a fictional representation as any you’ll find since the Arthurian legend was born.  But why would we need to understand the concept of honour?  Why would such a story resonate so strongly with so many of us?  In my opinion, honour is a concept that  is vital for understanding the modern culture that came after it in our own history.   There is something important that we lost when the honour culture collapsed – something that our modern ideas of truth, reason and virtue could not replace.  But to understand all this we’re going to need to know what honour is and why it involves a system of thinking so different to the one to which we are accustomed.

(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.

A tradition of high sophistication is now well established in genre writing.  It’s been going for a while in spy and crime fiction and a little while back; Tad Williams put in a good entry in the fantasy genre.  George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASIF) is widely cited as a worthy entry in the same.  It’s important to support this trend in genre writing.  However, when one uses the term ‘sophistication‘, there is a question as to whether what is meant refers to ‘literary sophistication‘.  Immediately the discussion becomes fractious and confused.  No, I don’t think most works of genre fiction are worth examining in the frame of reference provided by literary criticism – the value of literary sophistication is debatable anyway.  ASIF, nevertheless, is worth looking at from this point of view.   It has such a degree of sophistication that I will be devoting two entire posts to its analysis.  In this post I’ll be examining how it manages to survive some of the standards criticisms levelled by the literati at genre fiction (fantasy in particular).  In my follow up post I’ll be looking at its incredible exploration of the concept of honour – the central binding theme of the entire saga.  Hopefully these posts will give you a new appreciation of Martin’s work.

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.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a self-help mega classic.  It’s fame is so enormous that far more people have heard of the book than read it – as it often the way with really famous books.  I came to read it because of my recent interest in the notion of intimacy and the way that concept is perceived in modern times.  I wanted to know how the notion of intimacy was portrayed in one of the most influential texts on how to get along with other people.  And while this book does for the most part read as innocent, common sense – it has a dark thread which is common to all texts nowadays that confuse marketing with friendship.  It’s my belief that genuine friendship is beyond anyone who follows this book to the letter and I want to explain why.

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.

A reader on my post about why everyone should program asked me for some advice on the step I took to learn the Python programming language.  So I thought I might write a little guide for those who think they might be interested in learning Python.

This guide will be a little unusual by most standards – and it won’t be for everyone.  It will be for those who are vaguely interested in learning to program, but aren’t entirely sure if it’s for them.  It’s for those who have perhaps tried before to get into it, but couldn’t sustain the discipline or motivation to keep going.  Those who often hear stories about people getting addicted to programming but never could understand why themselves – such people might get something out of this guide.

But I don’t want to suggest that everyone should follow this approach.  In fact, if you are a person who is able to sustain the motivation to work from scratch through all of Zed Shaw’s: Learn Python the Hard Way, then you really shouldn’t bother with this post.  Stop reading and start working.  You don’t need me.  He’ll teach you Python far better than someone like me ever will.

But there is an assumption underlying Shaw’s book that I do want to challenge: that teaching yourself something like Python is a matter of brute force willpower.  I disagree with this.  I do believe that for a lot of people, there are ways to structure your learning experience that will greatly increase your likelihood of seeing it through to a profitable end before you give up in boredom or despair.

(However, I think it’s worth pointing out that I entirely agree with his statement about the purpose of learning to program that he states at the end of his book.)

Really, I won’t be teaching you Python, but will be offering a perspective on how you can learn to learn Python.  I also hope that throughout the course of this exposition, I will be able to convey some of the sense of why so many people find programming to be such a transformational experience.  I really feel people need to be able to get a sense of this in order to sustain the sort of motivation they’ll need to see it through.

In any case, I hope this guide will prove helpful to someone out there.  So let’s get started.

Step 1 –  Figure out something that you want to build

This first step in learning to learn Python is unfortunately going to be a massive catch-22 for most of you (assuming you fit within my target audience).  It is by far and away the most important step of them all.  If you can’t figure out something that you want to create using Python then when it gets hard you’re going to quit.   But here’s the rub: if you haven’t been exposed to programming before then you likely have no idea the sorts of things that you could build.

If you’re lucky then you won’t have this problem.  Maybe you have been brimming with ideas for years.  Maybe you’re a non-technical co-founder of a start up company that knows a lot about what coding can do – just not how it does it.  If that’s the case then great!  You have already gotten past the biggest difficulty people have with learning a new skill.

But I think it likely that most of you won’t fit into that category.  At best, you have vague ideas about reducing the drudgery in your life, or expanding the possibilities of your self-determination.  If this is the case then you need some concrete strategies for getting beyond this chicken/egg problem.

So that is what I’m going to provide you now.  When you start on step two (below), and begin your very first efforts at learning Python it will be vitally important that you ask yourself these two questions in tandem:

What can I build with this?

and…

What do I want to build?

Seriously – ask these questions over and over again.   Once you finish reading another page of a Python book that you are reading/working through, ask yourself again. Write out your answers if it helps you to remember to keep asking.  Shout them to the world.  Do whatever you have to do.  It’s that important.

In fact, I don’t think I can emphasise enough the importance of this process.  Many of you are not going to believe me.  You’re going to get all Jabba the Hut and dismiss it as an old Jedi mind trick.  If you do – then you’re going to fail.  You’ll get bored and give up.

Why is it so important?  There are a number of reasons. The first is that the core of your motivational drive depends on you reaching the stage where your answers to these questions are exactly the same.  Until that time, you’ll be relying on your will power to drive you forward.  And here’s a fact of life – most of us have very little willpower.  So it’s a race against time to reach this point before your will power runs out and you give up in frustration.

But why does our motivation depend on achieving this unification of answer?  Because in effect, by achieving the same answer to these two questions, you are unifying two different parts of your brain.  Well, to put it more precisely, when your answer to these two questions are the same, then you’ve succeeded in getting these two different parts to work in concert.

You know the old clichés about the head and the heart?  One suggests that it’s a good idea to pay attention to teacher and get straight As, while the other is screaming at you to catch a glimpse of teacher’s boobs.  The two forces rarely seem to work together.  Well, it only feels this way because you’ve been raised in a society that knows better how to educate dogs than it does its own children.  You give your dog all that it wants (your affection and maybe a tasty treat) when it uses its conscious mind to restrain its own impulse.  You were given – what – a red tick?  A gold star?  Promise of a good career in 25 years when really all you cared about getting back to your xbox and getting the next high score?

The modern education system seems to have forgotten that while the conscious brain did partly evolve to allow us all to enjoy the superb witticisms of Stephen Fry, it mostly evolved to aid in the satisfaction of desire.  The fact that our desires seem to go against our conscious determinations is largely a result of a perverse culture that mostly isn’t interested in satisfying your desires.

I’ll come back to that issue in a moment.  The point is that in order to achieve true motivation you need to be able to link up in a concrete way this very line of code that your writing right now to some desire that you want to satisfy.  You have to be able to see how this line of code fits within the entirety of your ambition.

This might sound far fetched – but I can in fact make you an iron lock promise on the matter.  Assuming that you get to the point where you find the same answer to both questions before your will power gives up – then what I can promise is the fact of having this same answer will feel exactly like being able to tie this very next line of code that you’re writing into the grand ambition of your life.  And having this sort of concrete understanding of how it is your conscious knowledge of the code fits into the web of your desire is going to blow the roof off your mind.

Why?  Because it’s likely not a feeling you’ve ever had before – the feeling of your conscious and lower minds truly working in concert together.  It’s an incredibly wonderful feeling.  I think that this is one important sense in which learning to code is a genuinely transformational process.

But it’s more than just this – and you have to pay attention now, because this is the most important point of all.  When you start asking yourself the second question (what do I want to build) – your answers will likely be vague and amorphous, completely unrealistic and probably unattainable by any modern man.  The process of trying to find the links between what you can build and what you want to build ends up shaping your desires and making them real.  Because really – and here’s a truth about yourself you probably never even guessed:

You don’t have any real desires at all… (at least, you probably don’t have very many)

Think about this – and let it sink in for a moment.  Take a breath.  Pause…  Now let all the questions you have explode to the surface of your mind.

How can he say this?  What presumption!  I have desires all the time.  I want a big house.  I want an arse like Pippa Middleton.  I want to sing and dance like that blonde girl on Glee.  I want to look like Brad Pitt.

Sorry, but these aren’t really desires at all.  They are like the shadows of desire – pallid and vague abstractions that are completely disconnected from your concrete reality.  A better name for them is ‘urges’.  Real desire is more like the gestalt of all these shadows – these urges – added and subtracted from one another.  You want to screw that girl from marketing, but you don’t end up asking her out of fear of rejection.  Well, your action (or lack of it) determines a sum where the fear of rejection and humiliation is subtracted from the urge to get laid with the former being greater than the latter.  You really don’t want to screw that girl, because you aren’t prepared to accept the possible costs involved in achieving that aim.

It’s understandable that most of us mistake urge for desire.  Our entire culture is geared to encourage us to indulge endlessly in the fantasy of our urges.  Our fiction industry, our film industry – computer games, television, celebrity magazines – all of it designed to allow you to live an endless wet dream filled with tepid, shadowy urges.  Why bother expending the effort to require real power when you can ride along with Harry Potter as he waves a phallic wand in the general direction of Voldemort’s cock?

All this exists to so as to stunt your real desires.  It exists so you go to your job on a daily basis and allow the numbness to wash over you like a sea full of soma.  What’s more, and this goes back to the point I was making in my previous post about why everyone should learn to program – given that all of the interfaces with which we use to do anything at all have generally been handed down to us from somewhere far above us in the great institutional hierarchy, and given that we largely obey the social rules that determine opprobrium or appropriateness in various social settings – it turns out that most of what we do is determined for us by forces external to our own motivations.  Since desire is constituted by what we actually do and not by those urges about which we fantasise – it follows that we actually have very few desires, if any, of our own.

But what has any of this got to do with coding and learning Python?  Because when your answers to the above two questions match, you will be but a single step away from converting a vague wispy urge into a concrete and achievable desire that you can actually satisfy.  The urge will no longer be wispy and vague because they’ll be shaped and moulded to the fundamental and absolute laws of physics that underwrite computer science.  You won’t necessarily understand any of these laws.  But you know that they will be in operation because you know that these laws (whatever they are) are what make computers work – and learning to code is learning how to make these computers obey your commands.  So if your two answers match – if you know you have a grasp of the code needed to build something that you want to build – then you know that your desire is not just a mere fantasy – not just a shadowy urge, but is in fact something that is concrete, real and attainable.  All you have to do is write the damn code.

This story that I’m telling is an exaggeration in one important sense.  Unless you are some kind of Mozart like savant that can visualise all the notes of the sympony (read: lines of code) in his head before he actually writes it – then likely your two answers will not entirely correspond with complete exactitude until you’ve actually written the code.  Always there are gaps in the steps between here and there.  You won’t always know for sure that you’ll be able to cross those gaps when you reach them.  Sometimes you’ll run into problems you can’t solve.  Sometimes there will be chasms too large to cross.

The trick is to not worry about them until you reach them.  If you fret about ensuring you have the complete symphony playing in your mind before you write a single note, you won’t actually ever write anything.  And of course, the flexibility required in adapting your vision to the limitations of your problem solving abilities is the most wonderful aspect of hacker sensibility.  At the same time, however, sometimes its important to stay true to your vision if you desire it enough.  Sometimes you have to stick at a problem because your vision demands it.  Finding that balance comes with experience.

There is one further aspect of this questioning process that I think explains the frustration that many developers have in working for their clients.  Because most people haven’t trained themselves to make their desires concrete, developers end up having to play mid-wife to their desires (and they hate this).  They get handed these vague specifications for an application that literally doesn’t make sense when thought about in terms of how the project is to be actually built.  The developer has to spend an enormous amount of time explaining what is possible.  They have to constantly battle the urges of the client that refuse to be tempered by reality.  The client becomes frustrated that the developer keeps trying to change what was wanted, whereas the developer knows that the client likely wouldn’t want that for which they ask if they knew a little bit more about what they are asking.

By learning to code, you’re training yourself not to be one of these people.  By learning to code, you are training yourself to turn away from your urges in order to satisfy your desires.  And this realisation will spread to every aspect of your life.  It will change you – fundamentally.

Step 2 – Start the grunt work and learn the basics of Python

Now for the hard bit.  You know in the abstract about how to approach your learning.  It’s now time to sit down and start doing it.  You need to learn the basics of the Python language.  This is the most dangerous period for you – because your motivational core is as yet unformed.  It is nascent and vulnerable in its cosy womb!  The key is to move as fast as you can to the next stage.  The secret, surprisingly enough, is to learn as little as possible.  I’m going to explain what I mean by this and provide some strategies that will help.

First of all – what do you need to know?  You need to learn how to install Python.  You need to learn how to fire up the Python interpreter (a vital tool that allows you type in code line by line and get an immediate response).  You need to understand what a module is and how to import them into your code.  You need to understand how to install libraries (you’re going to be doing this a lot).

You need to understand the fundamentals of the syntax, variables, the basic data types (lists, strings, dictionaries, numbers, tuples, files) and some basic control control flow operations like conditionals, loops.  You need to understand functions – and for extra credit you can learn the basics of what a class is – even if you don’t get to the point where you can successfully use them yourself.

As I said, the secret to this stage is to move as quickly as possible, and learn as little as possible.  This sounds counter intuitive – but trust me.  You have to get to the next stage as quickly as possible.  What you need is get is a broad understanding of the language.  You need the gist.  And you need this so you can start forming answers to the above two questions.  If you spend two weeks working through examples on string methods – learning every method that the standard library has for strings – you’ll be awesome at string manipulation – but crap at understanding why on earth you might want to use these methods for something in your real life.

What you want for this purpose is a straightforward reference book – something that is actually quite light on examples and exercises.  For this purpose I personally used “Learning Python – Fourth Edition”.  But I’d be keen to hear other suggestions (i.e. something that covers the basics quickly and in much shorter time).  Read up to and including Part V.  But OMG – that’s over five hundred pages!  Well – don’t read every page.   You won’t need to read every chapter.  You won’t need to read every page of any chapter.   If something bores you – skip it.  If you don’t understand something – skip it.  Try out a couple of examples on the interpreter – but don’t do too many.

Don’t worry about the higher order concepts.  You will need to know that 3 + 3 will output 6, and that “3″ + “3″ will output “33″ – but an understanding of dynamic typing itself can come later.  You will need to know that a variable declared inside a function can’t be accessed outside that function – but you don’t need to know  the details of name spacing, or why it’s important.  Read these sections cursorily.  If you go for extra credit and start reading about classes – you probably should understand inheritance – but don’t stress about encapsulation. (But I don’t mean to say you should never learn these things – once you’ve got the bug you’ll be able to bring yourself to attack just about any higher order concept you like)

Many seasoned programmers will be likely frothing at the mouth right now.

Don’t do many examples?  Skip name spaces, dynamic typing?  Skip encapsulation!?! How can he advocate this?  A student must learn the fundamentals or he will be forever undoing his bad habits in the future.  He needs to work through example after example after example – as doing programming is the only way to learn programming.

But this is not the right mindset for us – at the very least.  And I could even make the case that it’s not the right mindset for good (independent) learning – period.  Remember, we are in a race to reach a certain goal before our brain decides that this isn’t profitable and declares boredom.  We don’t have parents or teachers to chastise us if we fail.  Most of us don’t have the promise of a glorious coding career ahead of us.  We need to motivate ourselves, and what I’m giving you is the best method I know for achieving that motivation.

What’s more – what I’m teaching you is actually a much more efficient system for learning than what we were taught at school.  This is because our traditional learning systems seem to fundamentally ignore what the brain is good at – and what it is not good at.  And we need to understand a bit about this before we go any further.

Let’s start with what the brain is bad at – details.  It’s woeful at remembering specific, isolated details.  Dates, places and names – isolated historical events – a particular method for finding common factors in algebra – a particular method for sorting lists in Python.  To learn such things you do indeed have to repeat them to yourself over and over and over.  And it’s not just that the brain is bad at remembering the information – it’s that the brain will send signals to you, trying to make you stop trying to learn it.  That’s what boredom is.  The only reason why we manage to learn all this boring stuff is that institutions arose to punish us if we didn’t practice them endlessly.  Society found a way to impose motivation from the outside – resulting in our collective misery.  But hey – I’ll agree it’s better than no learning at all.

Anyway – this tendency to boredom is just the brain being efficient.  We evolved to avoid trying to learn stuff that we aren’t likely to use.  Because if we aren’t likely to use it – then it’s just wasted effort and is actually impeding survival.  The brain will do everything it can to avoid such tedium and to forget whatever is learnt through it – to free up resources for more important things.  But if the brain can easily make the connection to a real world use that works toward the satisfaction of desire – then just watch how fast it locks down even the most difficult to understand piece of information.

Which brings us to what brains are good at.  They are good at seeing patterns – connections – links.  They are good at narrative and story telling.  They are good at systems and the gestalt (even if the gestalt must be a convenient fiction).  Most importantly, they are good at indexing information – as opposed to storing it.  By indexing information, I mean that the brain will pick a symbol (or a sequence of symbols) for the particular task or operation under study and it will assign a look up procedure which helps you track down (in the world) the specific bit of information being indexed.  But it will more often than not forget entirely the actual bit of information itself.   I don’t understand the exact mechanics of it – but presumably this is just a hell of a lot cheaper in terms of storage and effort than keeping the actual information being indexed.

It’s exactly this process which explains why it is that just about all of you reading know that there is such a thing as long division – and yet wouldn’t know how to actually do long division to save your life – assuming that you weren’t allowed to look up how to do it.  Even though you were forced to do hundreds of the bloody things when you were kids – you STILL forgot.  You remember that it’s math.  You remember that division is the opposite of multiplication.  You remember all sorts of things about long division – because they connect easily to a broader network of information you have built in your head about the world (information that you actually need).  But that specific algorithm for long division is lost to you.  But now imagine someone putting a gun to your head and commanding: “Long divide this! – but uh, feel free to look up how to do it.”  You would know exactly what to do.  You’d grab a maths textbook – or you’d google the method – and you would get the job done.

It’s this aspect of how the brain learns that is the most important with respect to the particular learning strategy I’m offering.  And it’s also the reason why I advocated reading a straight forward reference book (as opposed to a coding cookbook and that sort of thing).  While you’re reading – even if you’re reading very quickly, and without a large degree of understanding – your brain will be indexing information like a super computer.  You won’t remember much about the actual syntax of the  methods for manipulating strings – but you will probably remember that there is such a thing as a string, and you’ll remember most of the sorts of things you can do with them – like conjoining, splitting, changing the case… etc.  You’ll also remember the approximate location where you learnt these things so you can quickly look up the syntax – if you need them.

The philosophy behind this strategy is to index as much information about the Python language as possible – while learning as little about the actual language itself.  Why?  Because you only need the index to be able to start answering the question – what can I do with this?  You only need the index to be able to start forming the connections between your desires and the knowledge you will need to obtain those desires.  Once you have those connections – learning the specifics will be easy.  What’s more – you’ll spend more time building your first application – your application will be the embodiment of your  practice.  The aim is ultimately to practice as little on things that you won’t ever use.  We want as much of our practice to be directed toward our goals as is possible.  And we want to do it this way because that’s what will keep up motivated.

This fact about learning is so straightforwardly obvious to my mind that it astonishes me how the modern education system proceeds as though it is completely ignorant of it.  (And this is despite the fact that most educators I speak to seem more than aware of everything I’ve just written.   And this is despite the fact that most people – period – see the common sense in it immediately – if they haven’t thought it to themselves before).

Yet, our chief assessment method for students remains the ‘exam’.  The exam requires that you can deploy the actual information from your mind without being able to rely on your brain’s natural indexing and retrieval methodology.  That means thousands of hours of artificial practice procedures.  That means the best part of our youth is spent on storing knowledge that is forgotten as soon as the brain realises what it will actually be doing in life.  The best part of youth spent on activities that make you miserable and net you next to nothing beyond an index of information that you could have obtained in a fraction of the time.  It’s a god damn crime.

Hopefully I’ve made the case.  So go and do some reading!  Keeping reading cursorily like this for as long as you can without getting bored (which for most of us won’t be very long).  Keep asking yourself the above two questions.  When you feel yourself starting to get bored, when you begin to wonder why on earth your bothering with this endeavour – then it’s time to move on to step three.

Step Three – Choose a Front End

Hopefully by this stage you have at least a vague impression of what you want to build and what you can build.  At this point the gap between the two will still be quite large – but you will already begin to see the distance between the two growing smaller.  If you still don’t have a clue about what you might want to build – don’t worry too much yet.  It’s rare for most people to have gotten there by this stage.

But what about my motivation, you might ask.  If I have to read another word of ‘Learning Python’ fourth edition – I’m going to kill myself!

Don’t worry – I know your pain.  What you need now in order to keep you going are a few endorphins.  Nothing like a shot of endorphins to get the coding juices flowing.  To get these endorphins, all you need is to see various things pop up on the screen – fun, shiny things that happen as a result of your code.  The brain is good like that – once it sees that your practice is having a real world effect of some kind it will reward you with happy-making endorphins as a sweet, sweet reward.  It will even do this for a little while when it still can’t connect these events to the grander scheme.  The rewards will stop if the connections aren’t made eventually, but the brain knows implicitly that is has to reward a little bit of experimentation and trial and error – otherwise we’d never get started on anything.  So being able to make things happen on the screen is going to buy you a little time while you search for inspiration for your project.

So, for this purpose you’re going to need to choose a front end.  By ‘front end’ I mean something which allows things to pop up on the screen – that’s all.  The python command line interpreter is one such front end.  And if you have been using it to practice the odd example, then you might have already received some happy endorphin juice.  But the command line isn’t going to remain satisfying for long.  The brain wants to see you manipulate a front end that resembles stuff it has used in the real world.  For most people, this means a graphical interface of some kind.

(There may be some exceptions to this rule.  If you already have an idea of what you want to build, and say that it has, for instance,  something to do with say – natural language processing – then a graphical interface will probably be the last of your concerns.  Your brain will forgive the lack of a shiny front end because it will see your efforts situated within a larger set of goals.)

Now – choosing a front end will be a lot easier if you already have a clear idea what you want to build.  The great thing about Python is that no matter what you pick at this stage – there is almost certainly a library or a framework that helps you get to the stage of outputting to the screen relatively quickly.  If you want to build a computer game – then Pygame is going to give you relatively quick access to a front end that you can use to meet your goals.  If you want to build a desktop app of some kind – then there are a number of different options for you depending on your platform (http://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming).  If you want to build a web application of some kind, then I personally would recommend Django – but there are also a number of different options here.

If you still have no idea what you want to build, then things are a little more risky for you.  If you can stand it – go back and read some more.  But if not – you have to pick something and roll with it.  It’s crucial that you start making things happen as soon as possible.  If necessary, learn the basics of one kind of front end and then switch to another to get a feel for what is possible.

In my case I wanted to build web applications.  So I chose Django.  What follows will largely be about Django because I just don’t have enough experience with other kinds of front ends to really be of help.  Presumably a lot of people reading will be interested in the web as well – since it’s kind of the in-thing at the moment.  So let’s proceed.

Step Four – Find a Django Skeleton (if one exists!)

Right – you’ve got the gist of how Python works.  You’ve got a front end you want to use.  Now it’s time to start coding and make things happen!

Well, actually – not yet.  There is one big problem in choosing the web as your front end when you’re a first time programmer.  You can’t make anything happen unless you know a little HTML – and you certainly can’t make anything look nice unless you know a little bit of CSS.  Oh noes!  Two new languages!  We haven’t even really properly started with Python yet.

And to make matters worse, as awesome as Django is – it’s still something that has to be learnt.  And most of the introductions to Djano will assume more Python than you can probably handle at this point (depending how far you got in step 2).  And that’s a problem – because at this point of time your brain is starting to shut down out of pure boredom and frustration.  It needs an injection of endorphins – stat!

What we need is a skeleton Django application that comes ready made with an HTML template (plus css) – as well as the usual views.py, urls.py, models.py with some basic examples in there ready to go.  All the code would be nicely commented so it’s dead easy for the newbie to see at a glance how to make the browser screen output different stuff by changing things in the views.py file.

The purpose of the skeleton would be to make it as easy as possible for Python newbies (and not just Django newbies) – to use the browser to test and experiment with their code.  The quicker we can get them to this point – the more likely a love of coding will take – since it’s just so much more satisfying to see things happen in a real environment.

I’ve had a look on the internets for such an application – but I haven’t been able to find one.  If someone knows of one, let me know in the comments and I’ll link to it here.  Failing that – as soon as I’m done with this post I’ll look into making one myself and make it available here (no promises!).

In the meantime what can you do?  Well – you’re still going to have to install Django.  You can learn how to do that here:

http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter02/

If you can stand any more reading – just keep going with that reference as far as you can.  In this case you should start working through all the examples as it pretty much takes you through the process of setting up you first django application.

You won’t have to worry about learning how to deploy a server and all that sort of thing for a while as Django comes with a handy server application that will allow you to play around with your code and see it deployed locally to your machine.

As for avoiding learning HTML and CSS.  Find a free HTML template off the internet and when you’re ready, use that to insert Django’s template tags.  I recommend approaching the HTML and CSS exactly the same way as for Python.  Get the gist as quickly as possible and then experiment in the context of building something that you want to.

Alternatively you could work through a very good book by one of Django creators James Bennett Practical Django Projects (Expert’s Voice in Web Development) (disclosure: affiliate link!  Use it!).  The cool thing about this book is that it will very quickly get you to the point where you can start outputting the results of your code to the screen, while also working through the basics of how Django works.  Even better – it’ll actually give you some experience building entire Django applications.  Even if you don’t start with this book, I highly recommend going through it at some stage.

But in my view – what would be ideal is a ready made skeleton.  Because really at this stage, these alternative suggestions will be intimidating to most Python newbies.  And yet – if they aren’t able to play around with something on the screen it will be hard for many to sustain their motivation.  It seems to me that it wouldn’t be too hard to remove these obstacles so that after installing Python, Django and the skeleton, they could just type:

python manage.py runserver

…at the command prompt and see the  application already up and running.  Then all they’d have to do is open up the views.py file of the skeleton application and start manipulating the nicely commented code.  In essence my suggestion is that rather than expecting people to know Python so as to learn Django – we should find a way to use Django to teach people Python.  The idea is that they use the views.py file of the skeleton as a place to learn basic Python syntax and operations.  From there they could branch outward into the Django framework learning pieces of it as they go to build richer and more complex applications (with the skeleton application perhaps providing gradated examples of greater complexity that students can graduate to).

Consider this analogy made by Zed Shaw at the beginning of Learn Python the Hard Way:

While you are studying programming, I’m studying how to play guitar. I practice it every day for at least 2 hours a day. I play scales, chords, and arpeggios for an hour at least and then learn music theory, ear training, songs and anything else I can. Some days I study guitar and music for 8 hours because I feel like it and it’s fun. To me repetitive practice is natural and just how to learn something. I know that to get good at anything you have to practice every day, even if I suck that day (which is often) or it’s difficult. Keep trying and eventually it’ll be easier and fun.

While I agree that if you have the discipline, and are able to approach your learning in the way that Shaw suggests, then a couple of hours of practice a day in either music or programming will eventually get you to your goal.  But I disagree that the analogy between the two is actually all that appropriate.  If you’re playing the piano and want to draw upon the notes written in one of Mozart’s piano concertos in one of your own compositions, then you literally will not be able to do it without the sort of practice that Shaw suggests.  You won’t even be able to add a single bad note to Mozart’s composition, because you won’t be able to play any of it.

But programming is different.  The fact is that I can add a bad note to an existing piece of code without ever having looked at a single line of code before hand.  With only the most passing familiarity with the Python language, one could change a views.py file in a way that gets you a successful result in the browser – if things had already been set up for you.  Will the newbies likely compose a crappy addition to this wonderful stack that is Django?  Of course!  But at least they are composing in the context that will most quickly allow them to reach their goals.

Step 5 – Choose an IDE

IDE stands for integrated development environment.  Basically its something in which to write your code beyond just a mere text editor.  Now there is a lot you could look for in an IDE.  But what you want is something which doesn’t itself add another learning curve of difficulty.  At this stage – you just want something that is going to at the very least highlight your syntax errors without getting in the way of you writing code.

To this end I recommend pyscripter (windows).  It’s free and it’s easy to use.  For other OSs – I don’t really know.  So if anyone has any suggestions please feel free to leave them in the comments.

If you graduate to more complex applications then you may well want to use something more sophisticated.  But more than likely Pyscripter will have way more functionality than you’ll ever actually need.

Step 6 – Set Mini Goals

Break up your overall aim into little mini goals.  These will be little subsets of functionality that you can code independently from one another and then figure out later how to stitch them together.

Maybe your application will need to allow users to log in and display personalised information.  Well – code up a basic application that does just this.  Don’t worry about how it will fit in to the rest of your larger application.  Just get it up and working.  This is akin to doing an exercise in a book – except you’re creating your own exercises based around your own goals.

Achieving each little mini-goal will give you another hit of happy making endorphins and will contribute greatly to your staying power.  You won’t lose your motivation because learning each subset of functionality is part of your larger ambition.

When you start out, your mini-goals are going to be very basic.  Maybe your application is going to have to do some basic mathematical operations at some point.  Write some!  Maybe you’ll have to dynamically generate text for an email sent to your users.  So write a quick script that concatenates strings.  Etc…

The next task you pick should be as close as possible to your current skill set while extending it by a single degree.  Don’t write your first string concatenation and then set as your very next task the creation of a snazzy ajax powered webform.  Learn to distinguish between the small goals that you could accomplish in the next day or so – and the larger long term goals of which they form a part.  Constantly be thinking about how the former fit within and contribute to the latter.

The particular task of breaking up tasks is in fact itself a crucial skill in software development (as well as life in general).  May as well start working on your abilities in this respect from the very start.

Step 7 – Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Ok – so now you’re coding, and you made various cute little things appear in the browser as a result of your code.  Now’s the time to re-iterate to yourself your reason for doing this.  What do you want to build?

Every bit of code you write now should already be working toward your aim.  Don’t learn some feature of Python or Django because some influential hacker wrote on his blog that he doesn’t respect any coder that doesn’t use it.  Learn it because it’s something that you need to learn in order to build the thing you want to build.

From now on, learning Python will be an iterative process where sometimes you’ll be experimenting with code, and at other times researching particular ways of doing things by googling, asking questions on Stack Overflow, or reading more books.  If you proceed in this way, your motivation will always stay strong.  Even as you’re trudging through some difficult documentation, you’ll be able to say to yourself, I’m working through this because I need my application to do X.

Write as little code as possible.  Seriously.  For whatever piece of functionality you are trying to implement – do a google search for an existing (open source) library.  If there is such a library that does most of the work that you need to do, use it.  Only start worrying about the magic going on under the hood if there is a problem, or the library doesn’t do exactly what you need it to do.  And if it doesn’t do what you need, don’t start building the functionality from scratch, try to modify what the world has already given to you.  Although you’ll be writing as little code as possible, you’ll still have to write a mountain of it before you are able to reach your goals.  But hopefully you will have achieved your goal as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

You won’t be living to program.  You will be programming to live.

Step 8 – Find Some Way to Give Back to the Community

That’s actually the last of what I want to say here about learning to learn Python.  It’s no where near as detailed as I’d like it to be.  It’s closer to an overview of what I’d like to write, which would be a kind of Python text book that walked you through the process step by step toward the goal of building your own applications for the web as quickly as possible – but underwritten by the kind of philosophy I’ve been outlining here.  If there is any interest for this kind of book – let me know in the comments.  It’s something I’ve been thinking about writing for a while, but knowing there was a potential audience would help with the motivation greatly.

As a final comment, I’d like to take a moment to emphasise the importance of giving back to the community if you ever get to the stage of building your own applications.  The sort of approach to learning Python that I’ve advocated here would be impossible if not for the open source movement.  Without the higher level languages, the awesome frameworks and libraries, it just wouldn’t be reasonable to expect a newbie programmer to be able to quickly get to the stage of starting work on their first application.  It’s because of their work that we can now begin to think of programming as a non-specialist endeavour.  Don’t just take from this generosity – find some way to make a contribution of your own.

Now folks like us – the non-specialist coders – aren’t likely to ever be able to write an open source project that helps others in building their own applications (at least, such a task is currently daunting to me although I’d like to be able to do it one day).  But there are plenty of other ways one can make a contribution.

One easy way is simply to spread the word to your friends about the importance of programming and the difference it has made to your life.  Show them how easy it can be.  Do what you can to break through the mentality that people commonly have that coding just isn’t something they can do. (But don’t be an a-hole about it.  The best way to convince people is to just build cool things that make your life (and theirs) easier).

And if any of them do take up coding, take the time to help and guide them.  I have a very good friend who helped me greatly when I started to learn to code.  He didn’t just give me examples of ways to write good code – he helped me keep my ego in check when I started getting cocky about things.  He taught me always to try and approach your work with a humble attitude and to realise that there is always a better way of doing things.

Be like this, and we’ll all achieve maximum awesomeness a whole lot quicker.

Not too long ago, the Internet went nuts over Roger Ebert’s contention that not only were computer games not art, but that they never could be.  The subject is well worn, and most of you are probably tired of it – having heard all the arguments from every side that you think you’re ever likely to hear.  What many don’t probably realise is that the discussion itself has damaged the prospects for the evolution of artistic gaming experiences.  We’re all so busy arguing with one another over what art is that we have ironically removed ourselves from discussions of the techniques required to produce art.

The problem essentially stems from the fact that the  ’identity’ question of what art is – is largely conducted in metaphysical terms – whereas discussions about technique generally require no such metaphysical stance.  What we end up with is a community whose technical appreciation of artistic form is so poor that it makes the production of high quality artistic works in the gaming medium extremely unlikely.  This is unfortunate, because there is nothing in the medium itself which should prevent this.

So I’m going to revisit this question and hopefully set the discussion back on toward a better foundation.  Ultimately we need to learn how to talk about the question in a different way from what our cultural leaders have offered us.  When you focus on technique, the metaphysical questions settles itself – if it is something that is even capable of being settled.

The moral of the story will be:  disregard metaphysics – acquire technique.

The Metaphysics of Art

You know when you’re heading directly toward a metaphysical discussion of the nature of art when people start rolling out their definitions, and you start rolling out your own.  Perhaps you provide some kind of quintessential feature, or perhaps instead you offer a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  Depending on your bias, you go forth to point out how a particular example succeeds/fails to embody said quintessential feature.  Your opponents enter the battle with a different conception of art in mind, and before you know it you’re no longer even discussing the original question while sinking deeper into a quagmire of definitions.

As philosophers have long known, a priori conceptual analysis is tricky business at the best of times.  We could be discussing the nature of lemons  - an object in the real world that provides an independent constraint on our conceptual apparatus.  We naturally think lemons to be oblong, yellow, sour citrus fruit that grow on trees.  But what if the world changed tomorrow and all the lemons became perfectly spherical.  What if they became sweet?  Would they still be lemons?  Intuitions on such matters have historically tended to split, and philosophers are still arguing about i

But when you’re talking about something like Art – then things are doubly confusing, for it’s an object which is defined by constantly evolving human practice.  A practice, mind you, that often tends toward the fickle and superficial.  So in terms of establishing consensus, we’ve already started with a severe handicap.  In fact, historically there has been so little consensus that one has to wonder why on earth so many of us would expend so much energy on the question.  It ostensibly seems to be a complete waste of time.

Well – that’s the way it has been with discussions about metaphysics throughout the ages.  Human beings never end up agreeing about it.  If you’ve had any experience yourself with metaphysical debate then you know this innately to be the case.  If you’re unlucky you’ll be tempted down some kind of anti-metaphysics path where you try to convince other philosophers that metaphysics is a waste of time (usually followers of Wittgenstein) – with various labyrinthine constructs of reason.

You won’t find this sort of argument from me here.  The sane among us just walk away and go and build bridges and roads and other useful things.  If you’re not convinced of this – then I guess you just haven’t hit your head against that brick wall for long enough.  There is nothing I can do or say to save you from that pain.  This article is really for those who already feel the twinge of dissatisfaction at the discourse as it is currently conducted – but don’t really know how else to go about it.

As for having the sense to go and do sensible things like building bridges and roads,  few of us are actually all that wise all the time.  The metaphysical nature of art – a useless debate even by metaphysical standards – drags in even the philosophically disinclined.  No – you don’t have to be a philosopher to engage in metaphysical debate.  Humans end up doing it in some form or another all the time – in all sorts of different ways.  And on the face of it – they do it for no profit or sensible reason since metaphysical discussion produces absolutely no net benefits to the lot of human kind.

One has to wonder…. WHY?

Gaming Art

Stop and think about this for a moment – it’s important.  Here is an activity – arguing over the nature of art its metaphysical essence – that is seemingly futile and unproductive.  Yet the debate that the Internet had with Ebert was nothing if not impassioned.  Ebert himself is somewhat bemused by the level of energy expended when he writes:

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

However, the irony of Ebert’s question is that it applies equally to his own stance.  The point is, why bother expressing an opinion either way?  Many authors will state in one breath that arguing over definitions is pointless and then go on to state their favoured definition in the next.  It’s as though we all understand that the game we’re playing is completely false, yet we can’t stop ourselves from playing it – or we don’t have the tools that would allow us to play it in a more productive way.

So I return to my question – why?

Well here’s one possible answer that Ebert actually alludes to, and I think it’s correct: the game in question is one of status.  Don’t get me wrong, each side genuinely believes their point of view that games are or are not art.  But the question asks after the motivation behind such forceful argumentation between each side?  Pause for a moment and ask yourself honestly.  All those impassioned comments you left on this blog or that forum – why did you need others to believe in your opinion of the matter?  If you’re able to appreciate the medium as Art, why not spend more time doing so?  Why not enjoy it in silence?    Why bother arguing over the matter when we all implicitly know that reasons pro and con are as effectual as fluff on the breeze?  The same goes for Ebert and his ilk.  What motivates them to try to makes others believe that their appreciation of what they thought was art is in fact not actually art at all?

It’s because the debate is largely a status game between humans.  Art has this status conferring power for a number of important historical reasons.  One is a legacy from our monarchical and ecclesiastical past.  Art was often (and still is) the luxury of rich and important people.  Another is that for a long time Art was associated with highly refined technique.  It took skill and long practice to create art of any kind.  Great art took great skill and so was made rare and valuable as a result.  Not least, the artists themselves waxed lyrical about art being the pinnacle activity of human endeavour, and managed to convince quite a few of the truth of it.  And so it came to be that doing something that reasonably could be labelled art was a signal of high status.  You wore the badge with pride and it brought you the esteem of your peers.

It became an empty status game when dudes began to realise that they could use the symbol without applying the effort while still receiving a near degree of esteem.   And so we got shit in a can – tinned soup, conceptual art… etc…  Why was this possible?  It has to do with the nature of signalling procedures that are innate to the human species.  I’ve written about it in more detail in a previous post on the nature of signalling and intimacy.  The gist is that signalling is a necessary process that we devised in order quickly exchange information.  But the link between the signal and the thing being signalled is mostly arbitrary.  It’s easy to deploy a sign without actually having the reality to back it up.  And because our entire civilisation depends on the trust we place in such signs, we’re reasonably slow to adapt our usage when one is being misused.  As such, I can call my shit in a can a work of art and enjoy the status conferring benefit for quite some time before the majority of people decide to call… bullshit.

As far as status games go, the discussion over art is more absurd than most.  The word has been so raped into meaningless oblivion that there is barely anything left to fight over.  We’ve all become vulturous dogs tearing cartlidge from a long dead carcass.  The reality of this is so salient now that to discuss the nature of art now is to signal that you’re a status conscious douche.    (Case in point: – Clive Barker ended up responding to Ebert by calling him a pompous, arrogant old man.)  This is unfortunate.  Some of us just want to have a good ol’ discussion without signalling as such.  In this way does signalling behaviour and the theft of meaning block intimate, sincere discourse.

But why am I spending so much time on this status signalling issue?  Because it’s an important component to any answer to the question regarding the potential for video games to be art.  If status is the greatest motivating force driving human psychology when it comes to art and if the production of video games is not status conferring, then the best minds won’t be attracted to the endeavour.  But if the best minds are never attracted to the production of computer games, no seminal works of artistic value – proving it’s potential – will ever be created.  And without those seminal works, the medium will never achieve a status conferring role in our culture…. and so on.  It’s a chicken egg problem.

So that’s something that has to be recognised right at the beginning of any discussion of the question.  The mere existence of influencers such as Ebert, who for whatever vacuous reasons assert that video games can’t be art, serves to significantly impede that possibility.  What’s more, many of our brightest will be recognising that to engage in the kind of discourse required to increase the sophistication of our understanding will only serve to signal their own status anxiety.  (And that’s presumably bad – as status conscious as we all are – we certainly don’t want to be revealed as such.)

So when Ebert modifies his claim from saying that computer games can’t be art, to the claim that they won’t be art in our lifetimes, he may well be right – but only to the extent to which people like him continue to encourage resources away from its development through their negative status attributions.

Given this somewhat anaemic context of discourse, one has to wonder how we might actually have an authentic discussion about the issue.  The only suggestion I have to make is the following:

Ignore the metaphysical question concerning the nature of art.

That’s right.  Just don’t worry about it.  What you should do instead is focus on technique.  Either work on building games that you think employ the sort of sophistication required to be considered art – or help provide the analytical skills required to recognise such works should they happen to arise.  After a while, if the medium is indeed capable of artistic expression, the discourse will obtain a degree of technical skill  that those familiar with it will have no doubt about its status.  They won’t care if this is not recognised by the dilettantes not willing to expend the effort required to understand.  That’s how it has always been with elitist cultures.  You think T.S. Elliot cared if the masses recognised his poetry as art?  Doubt it.  But he sure wanted Ezra Pound to think so.

And here’s the key point – if you spend your time on metaphysical discussions about the nature of art, you won’t actually improve your technique, nor your understanding of it.  In this way can you stand apart from your status conscious peers.  You won’t be getting into philosophical arguments with the likes of Ebert because you’ll be too busy producing greatness.  And by producing such greatness, you’ll ultimately win the status game anyway.  It truly is a game that can only be won by not playing.

Educating Ebert

Just because we will choose to ignore the metaphysical question about the nature of art does not mean that we have to avoid the question about whether or not games can be art.  It turns out that the rejection of Ebert’s position is made straightforward by a solid understanding of technique.  I’m going to show why this is.  Ultimately it is because when you begin to study the techniques of great art you begin to see that there is nothing structural about computer games that blocks their application.  In the end, you get a very convincing argument that doesn’t at all rely on a metaphysical premise.  And what’s more – the process will all make us a little better at producing art ourselves.  It’s win – win!

To see this we’re going to look at Ebert’s arguments and show how a technical appreciation of various artistic devices will make it straightforward to reject his position.  So what are his arguments?

Well actually – I’m too kind.  I actually only see one argument that he ever produced for his view that computer games can never be art.  It is expressed in the following quote:

Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

So – the argument is that player choice necessarily blocks the sort of authorial control that is required for great art.  Now, we could mount a substantial attack on this claim on the basis of various post-modernist ideas about the death of the author and all that sort of stuff.  And maybe there is some merit to these ideas.  But it depends on how the idea is developed.  At its worst it devolves into a relativism that forms the justificatory basis for shit in a can.  But in any case this is to get philosophical when what we want to do is focus on technique.  So we won’t be relying on this sort of strategy to make our case.  Let’s grant Ebert’s claim that serious art does in some sense require authorial control.  We’ll grant his metaphysical premise so as to avoid its discussion.

Once we grant this we need to ask how it is that he could be right?  Why is it necessary that player choice should block the sort of authorial control that produces great art?  And to answer this – we need to address the concrete techniques employed in the construction of computers games and various works of great art and to see what in these techniques lead to the kind of blocking of authorial control that Ebert believes will happen.

Note that Ebert never concerns himself with this task as far as I’ve been able to discover in my research.  This is particularly galling.  Without this analysis he fails to provide his readership any sort of metric by which to assess his claim.  His role as a cultural critic is to provide such tools of analysis – to help people educate themselves to a greater level of sophistication in their own thinking.  It’s a great shame that our leaders so often fail in just this way.

So let’s get into it then.  In what way is choice bad for serious art?  At first glance there seems to be considerable room for movement against Ebert’s view.  After all – you might say that quality art allows for considerable choice.  Perhaps the choice is one of interpretation.  Perhaps the choice is over some moral precept that is the subject of the piece. Those works that allow no such choice we often dismiss as didactic, or worse – propaganda.

The only thing that one can reasonably say in response to this is to point out that the issue is not about interpretation – because that’s heading us back in the sort of post-modern direction that we said we’d avoid.   The kind of choice that should be at issue is that which allows the player to determine content in a way that serious art does not allow.   Where I say ‘determines content’ I mean – determines an object which is third person accessible by anyone in a position to view it.  That is to say, the content is not subjectively sitting in someone’s head as a mere interpretation.  And certainly it seems clear that computer games as a medium allows for THIS kind of choice that previous mediums have not allowed to any significant degree.

So we have now a much more refined question.  How is it that content determination by the player should necessarily block the production of serious art?

To answer this question we need to understand the nature of content determined by player choice.  But as soon as we start looking at concrete examples it’s easy to find examples where player choices don’t significantly interfere with authorial control.  Consider, for instance, the linear game play found in first person shooters like Half Life 2.  The technical structure of these worlds allows for limited environmental manipulation.  Any scenery viewed by the player is entirely determined by the creators.  Events are heavily scripted.  The player has a very narrow space in which to make choices – and it’s usually merely to decide which bad guy to shoot next.

Given such limitations to player freedom, the creators are able to craft sections of game play that can only be described as set-pieces: parts of the story that have heightened narrative significance or excitement.   And this is a technique that is commonly employed in many narratives we consider to be great pieces of art.  Consider the following description of how valve creates a set piece where the player is guided to narrowly avoid getting skewered by a giant bug.

Now I’m not arguing that this employment of narrative technique is itself constitutive of ‘great art’ – my point is that this is a concrete example where the existence of player choice has not ‘structurally’ blocked authorial control in the employment of narrative techniques that we see in other media.

Our antogonist could still stand their ground at this point and claim that the set-piece is but one narrative technique involved in the construction of  art – and not even the most important.  And that’s fine.  That’s exactly why I advocate an in depth exploration of technique.  Better that our detractors provide further examples of artistic techniques they think will be blocked by player choice.  If genuine examples are proffered then we can set about trying to solve the problems they raise for game design.  Since our ultimate interest is only in the craft – we don’t care if our opponents at any stage of the discussion have felt as though they have ‘won’ the point – so long as we can bait them into actually providing the technical examples that help improve our understanding.

By this stage I would hope that many of the most recalcitrant objectors would be falling into line behind us.  What the example above allows is the clear hope that the sort of structural blockage to which Ebert eludes just simply doesn’t exist.  But I’m going to carry on in the spirit of our antagonist in any case so as to really get deep into the structural features.

So one further reply that could be made to my example above is to point out that the constraints placed on player choice in the above example are so extreme that the choices made by the player aren’t really genuine.  In order to effect the set piece, the player can choose to die, or to escape through the hatch at the last moment.  This is arguably not a significant choice.  And if games are such that these are the only sorts of choices allowed, then perhaps they don’t deserve to be called games at all.  Perhaps they are best described as forms of ‘interactive fiction’.   The defining feature of interactive fiction is that while there is some freedom of action for the player, their choices do not determine the significant aspects of the content with which they engaging.  One might think of games like Half Life 2 as examples of interactive fiction because we can’t decide the outcome of significant events.  At the end of the game, the bad guy Breen is always killed and the heroes win.  And even in games like ‘Bioshock’ where the player can choose good, or evil endings depending on their treatment of various characters throughout the course of the game – these endings very much feel ancillary.  They are much like an after dinner mint that we either appreciate or we don’t, but either way they don’t greatly effect our opinion of the overall meal.

Let’s grant this objection (but only for a moment).  If we insist that games must involve the kind of player choice that can affect substantive in-game outcomes, does this kind of choice present a structural block to the production of serious art?  I actually think that it’s this sort of conception of a game that Ebert has in mind when he presents his argument.  He writes:

I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would “Romeo and Juliet” have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. “King Lear” was also subjected to rewrites; it’s such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare’s or Barker’s, is superior, deeper, more moving, more “artistic”?

So now we really seem to be getting to the meat of the matter.  If you’re trying to produce a tragedy, then allowing the player the option to save King Lear kind of breaks the artistic resonance that a tragedy seems to be trying to evoke.  So the argument from Ebert here is that by providing a possibility space of differing, significant outcomes – only some, at best will be artistically significant.

There are a number of responses we can make here.  The first is to point out that tragedy is not the be all and end all of art(see below for more on this issue).  What’s more, it’s really not the best example  to make the case.  After all, the whole raison d’etre of tragedy is inevitability.  And the sort of choice we are considering just doesn’t cohere with inevitability.  But it’s difficult to claim that inevitability of tragedy is constitutive of art as a whole.  Really, to be convincing we’re going to need to see other forms of art where choice is going to detract from the artistic resonance.

Furthermore I don’t see how such an example could ever make the sort of in principle case that Ebert wants to make (that games can never be art).  Why couldn’t the possibility space be constrained such that every outcome, while still differing significantly, nevertheless have some kind of weighty, artistic resonance?  This is of course a task that has an order of difficulty well beyond the construction of a single linear narrative.  But nothing has been offered so far to tell us why this should be impossible in principle.

It seems to me that this kind of argument that Ebert is making here is like listening to the square in flatland denying the existence of spheres because he can’t perceive in three dimensions.  Why must every concrete possibility, within the possibility space of a game, be itself a work of high art?  Might it be possible that the structure of the possibility space itself involve higher forms of symbolism that we can currently scarcely imagine.  Individual realisations of the possibility space might just be slices of the sphere.  The object of art might only be understood once a more thorough knowledge of the possibility space is obtained.  Given that the possibility space itself could entirely be a work of the author, the choice of the player is just an illusion created by his limited perception – much like our own choice in real life is an illusion borne of our inability to see through time.  Ebert’s criterion of authorial control would be met.

Or perhaps instead we figure out the broad structural features that make a particular possibility stand out as being particularly artistic.  Suppose we learn that if we throw together certain elements and weight them in particular ways, then depending on the choices of the player, one is much more likely to get the realisation of a possibility that does in fact have artistic merit.  The production of a game play event that is highly artistic could be considered a feather in the cap of the player, who might then post the results to Youtube and share in some of the status that would otherwise go entirely to the author.  The production of art could in fact be seen as a collaborative effort (much to the chagrin of those of romantic sensibility who believe in the cult of genius – and really, the only ones who do subscribe to the romantic cult of genius are the ones who secretly believe that they themselves are members of that club).

But let’s return to the claim that in order to be a real game, it has to allow the player significant narratorial choice.  Why?  Are we going to get into an argument about the metaphysical nature of games now?  Oh where is Wittgenstein when you need him.  To say that games MUST involve significant choice for the player is simply to misunderstand the potential variety that games can embody.

Besides that – think about how the limited amount of choice in interactive fiction could be used to greatly heighten an artistic experience.   Imagine a King Lear game that has as its mission the saving of the King from his tragic end, but that no matter what you do, the King still dies.  Such a game would fit the definition of an interactive story – since the possibility space doesn’t allow for significant variation from the tragic ending.  Yet think about how the existence of the (limited) possibility space itself might be thought to heighten one’s appreciation of the inevitability of his death.  Think of one’s own increasing anguish as you realise that the king is doomed in EVERY accessible possible world.

Don’t reply that a game you can’t win isn’t a game.  If you do then fine… but to this metaphysical claim I’m likely to roll my eyes and change the subject.

Having said this – I didn’t present the concept of the interactive story as a direct counter example to Ebert’s thesis.  I only intended to highlight that Half Life 2 serves as an example of how at least one traditional narrative technique can still be employed by games.  It’s a wedge argument.  If we have one such example why can’t there be more?

To provide a genuine answer this question, Ebert would have to give a detailed exposition of the techniques employed in serious narrative and why their structural nature is blocked by all forms of player choice.  Of course, he never does this.  Very few ever do.

The Shadow of Romanticism

There’s one more defence of Ebert’s position that is worthy of our attention.  An apology of Ebert has been written by Brian Moriarty over at Gamasutra, and it’s certainly one of the more sophisticated discussions of the issue.  He presents a number of different arguments, but the most important one – the one that bears directly on our discussion hitherto – relies on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer – an influential romantic thinker of the nineteenth century.

The argument is essentially metaphysical in its essence and although I’ve laid out my response to metaphysical strategies – I want to cover it in detail because it marks the sort of sophistication that this tradition of argumentation can achieve.  It also neatly demonstrates just how limiting a perspective it ultimately is.

The conception of art offered by Schopenhauer, and relied upon by Moriarty, starts with a very broad metaphysical premise:  the world is will – a ceaseless, blind irrational striving for existence.  For Schopenhauer, to be in thrall to the passions entailed by this will is a kind of fundamental suffering.  Passion and desire itself is suffering for Schopenhauer, so anything which might liberate one from it is going to be lauded.  It turns out that good art does just this, the sublime and tragic variants more than the rest.  Hence sublime and tragic art is praised as being the greatest of artistic pursuits.  As Schopenhauer puts it, in tragedy the protagonist is not just killed, their entire will to life is annihilated.  And this release is thought of as a good thing.

Moriarity’s uses this conception of art to give us an explanation as to why the choice allowed in games is antithetical to artistic ambition.  It’s because choice is an expression of will – of that supposedly horrible, painful striving.  So if games are defined by the choice that they offer players, they can’t themselves be examples of art.

This is an extraordinary defence when you think about it.  Moriarty casts himself and Ebert as good, old fashioned romantics.  But the way he invokes this Schopenhaurian romanticism feels much like how a Sunday Christian might speak about their devotion to Christianity.  Does Moriarity really believe in the central metaphysical premise – that the world is will?  Does he really believe that all desire and passion is suffering?  I find it very hard to believe.  I don’t doubt that he sees it as an attractive intellectual posit – but c’mon, who really believes such things these days?  - unless you are a practicising Bhuddist, you’re very unlikely to be writhing in pain while you covet that final remaining slice of chocolate cake.  Most of us believe that the passions are the animating force of life itself, and most of us believe that life is something worth participating within.  If you’re hanging around for nirvana instead – well that’s up to you.  But don’t pretend allegiance to a philosophy that in practice you don’t really believe in at all.  And certainly don’t try to use that pretend allegiance in an effort to make other people feel bad about their particular artistic pursuit.  It just aint cool.

What turns out to be the height of metaphysical sophistication is at its heart nothing more than shallow pretence – another move in the status game.  ”My art is a sublime expression of the inexpressible” – says the romantic.  ”Beat that!”  The romantics cast their move in the game as being outside the game as a defensive move that could only work on the gullible.  It’s just unfortunate that so many are.

Of course, everything I’ve been saying hitherto against metaphysics applies here as well.  The metaphysical claim itself is vague and difficult to understand (as metaphysical claims often are).  The world is will.. riiigghhhtt… do we even really know what this means?

Finally – do you really want your appreciation of artistic technique to be constrained by a particular weltanschauung?  For my lot, I want a medium that will allow me to explore multiple perspectives of the nature of the universe and our place within it.  I don’t want to be constrained to a medium which presupposes a particular world view – and if I did I certainly wouldn’t choose one that supposes that existence itself is suffering.  That just aint my bag.

To be continued in:  - Starcrafting Art

I’m not done with this topic – although I’m done with this particular post.  My next review will constitute a more exclusive exploration of technique as applied to the gaming medium – without the methodological discussion that constituted the bulk of this post.

I’ll be looking at the Blizzard game Starcraft and will compare the ways in which symbols are used to create meaning in narrative structures and how this technique can carry over into the gaming medium.  What I’ll hope to provide is a set of resources people can use when thinking about how to craft expression in gaming and other media.

Starcraft, as we’ll see, is a wonderful example because most don’t expect it to be cited in this sort of discussion.  While having an incredibly sophisticated gameplay experience, few would offer it as an example of high art.  Few would claim that it makes use of the sorts of techniques that one finds in artistic expression.  I won’t go so far as to claim that it is a work of high art, however, I will make the case that it makes use of one of the most sophisticated narrative techniques used by many of the greats, and that it does so in a completely innovative and new way.  Exciting!

Learning how expression is possible in new media – learning the techniques of such expression – has a wonderful side effectl.  It expands our understanding of expression itself.  The way it is that human’s create meaning is still one of the most mysterious aspects of our nature.  New and evolving media like games sit at the absolute cutting edge of that mystery.  Understanding technique is the only way we’ll ever immerse ourselves within it.  Metaphysics just keeps it all hidden from our view.  So in the next post we’ll be pursuing the former without any further thought for the latter.

Until then!

I first came to believe that we were all going to die the day my neighbour ‘Old Man Bill’ disappeared.  I mean – really believe it.  No more hope.  No more delusions.  Belief that it was just a matter of time before it happened – either by our own hand, or by way of the things that were out there.  It’s the kind of belief that comes with a bitter-sick feeling right in the pit of your stomach.  It drops you to the floor and has you crying your eyes out.  Defeat, annihilation – end.  I believed it all right.  All because one old man got taken out.  The countless deaths before hadn’t made me see it.  It was the death of an Old Man that meant the end of the world.

My house mate Jacinta had been standing at the front door.  She had it open wide enough to fit her head and was peering at the street.  David admonished her to close it and commanded me to pull her away.

‘You do it,’ I said.

‘ I’m stirring the beans,’ he replied.

So I obeyed and went to stand next to her for a moment – to give her time to close it herself.  But she just ignored me.

‘C’mon,’ I said, ‘time to close the door.’

But I just stood behind her without doing anything.  I looked over her head at the view of the street and was entranced by it just as she was.  The soft colours of an autumn dusk were fading.  The lawns and the hedges, the orange liquid ambers that lined the street – all were being enveloped by an encroaching grey.  It was incredibly still and quiet.

‘Would you two shut the door,’ David called from the kitchen.

‘Shut up,’ Jacinta said.

‘Seriously,’ he added.  ‘I mean it.’

‘Seriously, shut the hell up.  I’m trying to listen.’

It was then that I realised that Jacinta wasn’t really watching the street at all but listening to our neighbours.  I heard it then as well.  Just above the silence was the muted sound of a ruckus coming from next door.  I couldn’t make out the words – but it was clear Old Man Bill was having an argument with his wife.  After a moment their front door burst open and the nature of the argument became immediately clear.

‘Get off me woman,’ Bill said.

‘ You’ve gone mad.  Stay inside please,’ his wife replied.

‘ I’ve had enough – I’m going for a walk.  I’ve been cooped up long enough.’

‘No!’ his wife shrieked.  ‘You can’t leave me.  You can’t do that.  I won’t cope.’

Old Man Bill shrugged doggedly and fixed his sights toward the rust stained gate.  It could be seen from the way he held himself that he had once been a big man.  His frame was still enormous but with his strength gone it was now more a liability in old age than an asset.  One arm leaned on his cane the other shook noticeably as it pulled at the stubborn gate.  It creaked loudly and scraped against the concrete. Once he had passed the threshold he held up his cane and pointed it at his wife.

‘Martha, you’re a bloody pain in the arse.  I’d rather get eaten.’

And then he set off slowly down the street, ignoring the wailing coming from his home.  Jacinta and I had spilled out into the front courtyard of our home.  As Martha realised the intractability of her husband’s determination she turned to us in desperation and pleaded for us to stop him and bring him back.  Jacinta looked at her blankly.  I couldn’t keep my eyes straight for the shame.

‘What the hell are you two doing outside?’  David said from the doorway.  He still had the steaming pot of beans in his hand.  Jacinta immediately turned from Martha and pushed past David back into the house.  She was glad for the excuse.  I managed to raise my eyes to Martha’s and was crippled by terror I saw in her.  I couldn’t bear it.

‘We have to do something,’ I said.

‘Just get inside,’ David said.

I obeyed and Martha started wailing again.  From the door I saw her move to the front gate and begin shouting at the whole neighbourhood for someone to rescue her husband.

‘He’s gone mad!  He’s gone mad!  Please someone help him.’

‘Jesus David,’ I said.  ‘We need to do something.’

‘You do something,’ David said from the kitchen.  ‘The old fucker made his choice.  If I was married to that harpy I would have probably chosen the same.’

‘But maybe he has gone mad,’ I said.  ‘I’m not far off it myself some days.  Surely we need to look out…’

‘Listen,’ David said, pointing the wooden spoon at me.  ‘You wanna risk your life for some old bastard that’s probably gonna drop dead from a coronary tomorrow – go for it.’

‘But he’s big.  I couldn’t carry him on my own,’ I said.

‘Not my problem,’ he said.   He emptied some of the beans into one of the three bowls that he had arranged beside the camper on the kitchen table.   A little dollop of chilli sauce was poured into the remainder and returned to the flame.

‘Oh and when Martha starts to starve because she’s too senile to go and get her own food, when she’s pleading with us for a share of our own – that aint gonna bother you?  Takes a long time for a person to starve.  You so much a bastard that you’ll be able to endure that without giving in to the guilt – making our lives just that much more difficult?’

‘Watch me,’ he replied.  ‘You going out there or what?  Because we need to block this door.’

“Fuck,’ I said.  I turned to Jacinta who had sat herself on the couch with her knees pulled up to neck and her arms wrapped around her ankles.  She looked dreadfully thin, I thought.  She wouldn’t be much help.  I had no business asking her for it.  But I asked anyway out of my own weakness and need for affirmation.  I knelt down beside the couch.  She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

‘Jacinta, listen.  You know it’s the right thing yeah?  We should help Bill right?’

‘Of course we should,’ she almost whispered.  ‘But… but what can I do?  Really Mark.  I don’t know what I can do.’

‘Bill always liked you.  He used to pick you lemons off his lemon tree remember?  He’ll listen to you.  You can convince him to come back inside.’

‘I can’t,’ she said.

Outside Martha was still screaming at the neighbourhood.  No one was going to help her.  Humanity had abdicated.  Or maybe it had never been.  Maybe our entire civilisation had been a fairytale of solidarity.  I gave up on Jacinta and returned to David in the kitchen.

‘Listen to her,’ I said.  ‘She’s a beacon.  You want them all swarming outside our house?’

‘There’s an easy way to fix that problem,’ David said.  The second bowl was now half full of beans.  David was carefully scrutinising the quantities in each and comparing that with the remainder still left in the pot.

‘Yeah – but then you’d have to summon the balls to actually go outside and do it.  But you’re gutless so it’s not going to happen.  Enjoy your chilli beans asshole.’

I stood up and swung the door open, letting it slam against the wall.  I deliberately left it open and went to meet Martha at the gate.  I heard it close behind me.  I didn’t look back.

‘Martha,’ I said. ‘Martha listen.  I’ll go get him.  Please listen.  I’ll go get him.’

‘Oh you will!  Oh thank you.  Thank you. You are a good person.   You are good.’

‘Listen please,’ I said.  ‘I’ll go get him, but I need you to be quiet and go back inside.  Can you do that?’

‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ she said.

‘Go back inside and don’t open it until you hear my voice.  Okay?’

‘Yes okay,’ she said.  ‘I’ll wait for you.  Please bring back my husband.  You are a good person.’

The look of gratitude in her eyes almost crippled me just as much as her previous look of terror.  She held my hand for a moment and gave me a smile.   It made me feel good like she said.  Maybe I was good.  But I couldn’t really bring myself to believe it.  Maybe I just wanted to shut her up but didn’t have the guts to whack her over the head.  Who really knew after all?  Maybe it’d be all over tomorrow and things would be back to normal.  Maybe then I’d have to explain why I’d murdered my neighbour.

I made sure Martha had gone back inside her house and then willed myself to peer up the street.  It was empty.  The old man had made good time it seemed.  Where the fuck had he gotten to?  I jogged up the street.  A cool breeze was blowing from the south making me shiver – but it was stale.  The garbage was piled high out the front of many houses and it polluted the air.  The ones that hadn’t been ransacked were boarded up and relatively clean if not a little overgrown.  But the ones that had been had become dumping grounds for the shit of the neighbourhood.  I ran a little faster past those ones.  Outside one of them I spotted a shovel and picked it up for protection.  It was better than nothing, I thought.

I stopped at the intersection to try and get a glimpse of Bill but I couldn’t see him.  The light was almost gone and even if he was in my line of sight I was no longer sure that he’d stand out enough to be spotted.  He’s just gone around the block, I thought to myself.  I’ll just do one more leg and if I don’t see him then he’ll be more than halfway back to his house anyway.  I’ll have tried.   So I ran the leg down to the next intersection – the opposite corner of the block from my home.  Still no sign.  Fuck!

I’d done my bit, I thought.  I’d tried.  There was so little light left.  The moon hadn’t risen.  The street lamps hadn’t been on for weeks.  It would soon be pitch black.

That’s when I saw it.  It was in the corner of my eye – a shape, a shadow black and angular.  It crawled along the roof of the house to my immediate left.  I didn’t turn my head to confirm.  I just bolted back up the street the way I’d come.  Bill had already been taken.  I knew it now.

I was next.

I ran faster than I ever knew I could.  They were right behind me.  I could feel them there.  They had an energy you could sense – like the pull of a magnet, like the secret desire to die and have it all over with.  I looked behind me once as I ran and saw them.  Some of the shapes were crawling across the ground, some across the roofs.  One leaped from a tree right in front of me and lunged.  I sidestepped like a pro-footballer but it caught my ankle and I slipped.  I got my balance quickly but had lost my momentum.  I had to do something.  If I tried to run again now it would be all over.

I swung my shovel at the one that had tripped me.  The blow connected.  I felt the jarring impact in my arms and I saw the black shape reel backward, but the blow made no sound.  Dear god why did it make no sound?  I swung at the next shape and the next.  I went into a rage.  I swung and I screamed and I hungered for their pain.  But they remained as silent as death.  There was no telling their thoughts.  There was no avenue of empathy to these monstrosities.

I was given a chance.  My insane attack had surprised them.  Perhaps they’d never seen its like from one of their prey before.  They stopped their advance.  My senses returned and I knew their confusion and lack of momentum was my one small window for survival.  I fled.

When I reached the house I shouted and banged on the door for my housemates to let me in.  But there was no response.  I couldn’t believe it.  That was it.  There was nowhere else to go.  I put my back against the door and turned to face my end as bravely as I could.  The monsters were not far behind but they approached me with some caution.  I waved my shovel out in front.  I screamed at them to take me.

And then I heard Martha.

“Mark?  Is that you?  Did you find my husband?  Is he okay?”

I turned to see Martha’s head peering over the fence in the gloom.  I could just make out the look of hope in her eyes, as well as the sudden terror as she saw the shapes surrounding me.

‘Martha no,’ I said.  But it was too late.  The shapes suddenly bolted in her direction and her face fell away out of view.  She screamed.  She screamed so loud the night was filled with her death.  It was every aspect of the nightmare sealed in one blood-curdling note.

I didn’t move.  Martha was not a few feet away from me on the other side of the fence.  I would see her if I had the courage to turn and look.  But I couldn’t.  Her scream had stopped.   There were just muted grunts of pain now and the sound of tearing flesh.   Martha was not more than a few feet away from me but I couldn’t look because she was being murdered.  She was being torn apart by horrors and I didn’t even have the strength to bear witness.  I had no courage in me now.  I had no will nor care to help.  I wasn’t thinking about anyone else but myself.  I would have ripped the heart out a newborn if it might have saved me.  That fucking Old Man.  That selfish son of a bitch.  If the horrors hadn’t gotten him I would have put a shotgun to his head myself.

Oh god why wouldn’t they just open the fucking door!

My wits and action returned and I became singular in my quest for survival.  I alternated between kicking at the door and trying to pull away the boards on the windows.  ‘You fuckers,’ I shouted.  ‘You fucking cunts.  I swear to fuck I’ll rip a hole in this house before they get me.  I’ll fucking burn you alive.  You selfish fucking shits.  You’re all fucking dead.  You hear me?  You’re fucking dead.’

The door opened.  David’s strong arm pulled me inside and threw me to the floor.  Jacinta began moving the furniture back in front of it and David turned to help.  I just lay there on the floor with my shovel in hand and watched as they worked.  When they were done Jacinta just returned to the couch and stared vacantly at the floor.  David walked past me without a word.  He gave me a look of complete and utter hatred.  He disappeared into his room and slammed the door.  I heard him bolt it from the inside.

I couldn’t hear what was going on outside anymore after that and was glad for it.  The horrors out there did their work so quietly.  We knew there would be nothing of Martha’s remains by morning – nothing but a large blood stain on the concrete.

I don’t know how long it was before I could move myself from the floor.  I went into the kitchen to splash water on my face and try to calm my nerves.  I saw the three bowls that David had used to serve the beans.  Two of them had the residue of the sauce.  One remained completely clean.  I saw that bowl and collapsed to the floor.  I bawled my eyes out.  We were all going to die and there was nothing out there in the world that was good enough to save us.

We were all going to die and none of us deserved to be saved.

End

Today we will be reviewing a programming language.  Yes!  A programming language – Python to be precise.  But as per usual here on RID – we won’t be looking at things from the normal perspective.  If you head on over to the various places where hackers hang out on the internet, the sort of discussions you’ll find run something like the following:  What is the programming language at issue?  Weigh its pros and cons versus other languages.  How is it typed?  Is it object orientated?  Is it functional?  What in fact are the advantages of these features… etc…  What is much more uncommon is a discussion of the question – why should anyone learn to program?  And that’s the question I’m going to answer today.  In short, you should learn to program because it’s easy, it’s fun, it will increase your skill set, and… it will fundamentally change your perspective on the world.  It will blow your mind.  You’ll learn why it is that the hacker sensibility is becoming such a powerful cultural force.  What follows is the proof to my hyperbole – so read on…

About a year ago I told a friend of mine that I had started to learn the Python programming language.  He asked with a raised eyebrow why it was I wanted to do this at age 34.

“Take it from me as someone in the industry,’ he said disparingly.  ’We only hire guys who know their stuff.  Python is fine, but you’ll need to know C, C++ among other things.  A couple of years of work and you’ll still only be a novice.  If you’re looking to change careers this aint the way.’

His advice is almost certainly correct from the point of view of trying to get a job as a programmer.  It highlights nicely the perception most people have of programming.  It’s a career path.  It’s something you do to earn a living.  It’s something you specialise in – or you don’t do it.

This perception is so widespread and ingrained in our culture that it defines just about all our institutionalised work place structures.  A company will either buy its software, or if it’s in need of specialised software to automate particular processes, then it will high a specialist to create that software.  None of the other employees will be expected to know how to program.  It is the cultural default that an employee is expected to passively receive the interfaces with which she must interact on a day to day basis.

But this is our cultural reality not just in our work lives, but in all facets of our lives.  We passively receive ALL the various interfaces that we deploy to manipulate our environment:  the stove top you use to cook your food, the knife you use to cut your meat, the piano on which you play your music, the steering wheel you use to drive your car.

Just think about that for a moment and let it sink in.  EVERY interface you employ on a day to day basis is likely created by someone else.  And since our own creativity is necessarily constrained by the various interfaces we employ then an absolutely crucial dimension of creativity is denied to us.

This fact of our existence enslaves us to reality in a way that most people are completely unaware of until they are shown how they can break free.  To show you this, I’ll describe a concrete example of what I mean.

I currently work as an administrator at the University of Sydney.  I was asked by one of our academics to provide a monthly report of all the publications by all the academics and post graduate students in the school.  In response to this request I surveyed my options for obtaining this data.  In a school with around 250 staff and students this was no small task.

1. I could email all the staff and ask them to email me the data every month and compile it manually.
2. Find some software that would allow me to do this relatively easily.
3. Program a solution myself that is perfectly tailored to the process.

Option 1 was a non-starter.  It would result in my insanity as well as the wrath of every academic in the school at having to constantly email me their publications for the month.  So I proceeded quickly to option 2.  Things here weren’t much better.  A programmer in another faculty had in fact built some software which sucks down publication data from the PubMed database (where most of my academics are published).  But the problem was that it wouldn’t provide data on a monthly basis.  Why – you might ask – does it fail to provide something so simple?  Because it was built to serve a very specific purpose, namely, to aid in the reporting of publication information to the Australian government – a task that needs only to be completed yearly.  So the software only ensures that the previous year’s data is scraped.

The academic that requested the report suggested an online tool that emails you notifications based on various search parameters.  Besides having to manually input all the search data – I’d still have to manually collate the information into a readable excel report – with my emails getting all clogged up.

So option three.  Turns out that PubMed has a very easy to use API (application programming interface) which allows one to query their database with your own software – receiving data in a nicely structured way that remains consistent (so it doesn’t break your program).  Within a couple of hours I have working prototype that queries PubMed for all the publications (along with their associated data, like journal information, abstracts etc), exports it into an excel spreadsheet (using the awesome library openpyxl) that is emailed to my desired email address.  A cron job on one of my servers ensures the report will be generated on a monthly basis and sent to the academic who requested it.  The ENTIRE process is therefore automated – and I won’t have to think about it ever again.

I saved myself a mountain of work, that I otherwise would have had to trudge through every month.  I freed myself to do other more interesting things in my work.  The interfaces with which I have been provided with by my work environment were not able to free me in this way.  I needed to be able to code to do it.

Approaching my work in this way subverts an established paradigm of modern work - that we need to rely on others to free us from the tedious processes that constrain us. But we don’t.   It’s this possibility that should be blowing your mind right now – if programming is something new to you.  If you use a computer in your day to day work – it’s very likely that your processes have developed to a point where they could benefit from some degree of automation.  And the only person really qualified to provide that automation ultimately will be you and YOU alone – because you may well be the only person who knows the process.

Blocking you from pursuing this course of action is your belief that learning to code is a massive investment of time that defeats the reward on investment.  This may have been true once.   When there were only lower level languages to use, there was a great deal of complex manual work that higher level languages have now automated.  What’s more, due to the wonders of open source – there is a practical infinity of libraries that further automate much of the grind work in programming.  Such are the virtues of Python and many other scripting languages.  In learning to program, your access to the varying kinds of interfaces out there increases beyond imagination, as well as giving you the power to craft your own.

In my own case, within three months of learning python part time I had enough knowledge to perform the sorts of tasks I described above.  I’m not an expert in the language.  I’m not an expert in programming – far from it.  But I don’t need to be for it to make a material difference in the quality of my existence.  I will likely never get a job as a programmer.  But that was never the aim.  It was never about being able to build interfaces for other people in a contractual fashion (i’ll be happy to do it in an open source context, however) – it was about building interfaces for ME.

Given the relative ease in learning the basics of programming in scripting languages like Python, the time has come to challenge the assumption that programming is a specialisation.  If you need an analogy:  is learning to read and write in a spoken language like English – a specialisation?  No, it’s a fundamental tool needed to navigate your contemporary existence.  It’s easy enough to learn that you devote some of your early years to the task – and then it stays with you for life.  You could go on to specialise in language use.  Maybe you’ll go on to become a writer.  But you don’t need to specialise for your language skills to provide you with an incredible level of life-improvement.  Well – so to with programming.

What’s more – I now feel cured of an affliction I never realised I had.  If I had to name this affliction, I’d call it – defaultism.  Always did I just default to the way of things as it was handed to me.  Now I look at every aspect of my life with a hacker’s eye.  How can I free myself of this task? – is the question now at the forefront of my mind at all times.  There is no need to throw out every interface with which we are presented.  If it fits our needs and desires then fine.  But how often do you subvert your own desires and needs because of the constraints imposed by the limitations of the interfaces with which you have been bequeathed?

I look at the world around me and feel almost disgusted by the entrenched defaultism that I see everywhere.  For instance, when the internet came along there was a sense of liberation from the passivity of watching television.  We learnt to talk back.  We learnt to create our own blogs and express ourselves as opposed to merely imbibing the thoughts of others in a mass daily dose of benign hypnosis.  Clay Shirky informed us about the great cognitive surplus that would result from being so freed. And yet here we all are – facebook members all – allowing one site to define the structure of our social relationships.  Yes we can comment.  Yes we can poke.  It’s more than television allowed.  But it’s the whole world still watching one tube, one interface – just as it was before.  As always we accept the tools on offer without ever questioning whether or not our desires and needs extend beyond it.

Many of you can’t imagine this because you’ve never had the experience of having your desires open out in the sort of way I mean.  The way the interfaces with which you interact constrain your awareness of those desires, because as far as you are concened – they exist outside the realm of imaginability.

My favourite example of this was when I showed one of my work mates a simple bit of javascript that could be used to extend the functionality of a particular google docs document that we were using.  Her reaction was along the lines of:

‘OMG  That’s AWESOME – I want to learn to code!”

And she felt this way because she had been given a glimpse of the way possibilities expand when freed from the constraints of the default interface.  Her immediate reaction was:  ”I WANT THIS”.  Hence her desires opened outward in a way that was scarcely conceivable to her before.  In this way does learning to code literally change your life.  It frees you from the defaultism you likely never even knew you had.

Imagine applying this perspective to the interfaces like Facebook which currently define many of your social relationships.  Imagine having the desires to reshape these experiences in a variety of new dimensions.  Imagine meeting people with similar desires.  Imagine the creativity you could bring to bear in the development and progression of those relationships.  The default processes of ‘friendship’ would become positively depressing to you.  You’d see your former life as a barren, grey void of routine and habituation.

Learning to code is about the best antidote to the defaultism of our modern age I can imagine.  It’s time it became a fundamental pillar of our cultural lives.  For most of those in the hacker community – such sentiments I think will be old hat.  But the hacker community remains relatively insular.  It needs to learn to engage more outwardly.   The hacker sensibility needs to spread beyond its elite origins and mainstream.  Many won’t like that idea – because it will muddy the ease of self-identification that hackers currently enjoy.  But the value to the world at large will be immense – so it needs to happen.

Hopefully it will.