| Home | Updates | Stories | WORKSHOP | About | Links | Contact |
|
This is another pretentious topic. (Yeah, I can hear you guys clicking "Back" already.) Back when I was still with The Real Caitlyn, we used to occasionally have arguments (well, discussions maybe) about morality and how it played into Christianity. (Many of these discussions crop up in 90Days; if you don't want them spoiled, you might want to stop reading.) She was of the opinion that, without an eternal judge, morality means nothing and there is no right or wrong. I don't believe that; I think morality has an inherent evolutionary value. In my opinion, "morality" is simply the measure of whether an action increases or decreases the likelihood of your living out your genetic and biological dictates: namely, living long enough to breed. It is a codification of the general rules and laws extant in social animals—the customs and dictates that allow tons of us to live in very close proximity, from laws to politeness. Generally, moral behavior is controlled or mandated by several factors, such as conscience, personal training and confidence. Since these things are what stop us from doing bad things to each other—say, killing millions of Jews—then lacking it is a of negative survival value, because the rest of the human race will eventually realize you are a threat to them, and soon take efforts towards getting you to be dead. In other words, immoral acts are at the very least a bad idea, because they decrease the likelihood of your being left alone to, you know, live, much less get laid. In short: even if we could somehow establish a moral vacuum and say that killing someone else has no negative practical effect on them (which we can't; being dead, and thus unable to contribute to the intellectual, genetic, social and historical legacy of the human race, is bad for you), it still has a negative practical effect on you... And that makes it immoral. This is not to say, furthermore, that religions and the idea of an everlasting god don't assist in the enforcement of morality; they sure as heck do. If you're an existentialist and believe that this life is all there is, then murder is bad because it raises the likelihood that you will get dead out of revenge. If you're a person of faith, then murder is even worse because, in addition to the getting-dead, you will be condemned to suffer (for some unspecified length of time and via some unspecified means) by a righteous and powerful god. So, being religious or believing in a divine form of judgment does indeed help encourage moral behavior... But they aren't necessary. People were behaving morally long before our modern religions showed up; and those who weren't... Well, they got selected against by evolution, because they were a danger to themselves and each other. It really is that simple to me. But what the hell does any of this have to do with writers? Well, for that we need to think about the evolutionary purpose of the written language. This one is probably common knowledge by now: writing is memory made solid. You know how people sometimes say, "If I don't write it down, I won't remember it right"? (Or even, "If I don't write it down I won't remember it at all"?) Well, there it is. Writing is an external, expanded and far-more-permanent, form of memory. Your hard drives are bigger because once you develop writing your memory is no longer confied to the fuzzy and often-limited capabilities of our wetware; instead, you only run out of storage space when you run out of writing material. Depending on that material, the scribbling-down might be much more permanent; there are Egyptian steles and Sumerian clay tablets from 4000 years ago, and even some certain Dead Sea Scrolls have survived to modern times. And finally, once you write it down, you don't forget it. Now, think about the first fiction that was written down. One of the earliest we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which (if you've read it) reflects a very different sensibility than we're used to. Then we keep moving up and we start having written records like bibles, religious texts, myths... The thing that holds them all in common is that they are stories and tales that people wanted to remember. These are stories that are important to the culture's identity. I mean, seriously, who can think of Hellenic culture without remembering how much pussy Zeus got? Or of Christianity without remembering the big twist at the end (spoiler: HE DIES. And then he GETS BETTER)? That's what stories are for: helping remind us who we are. The stories we read—and, if you're a writer, the stories you write—show what you believe. To paraphrase A. J. Jacobs' friend: "Your next story could change the world, so make it a good one." And that's why all this wish-fulfillment in porn worries me. Do we honestly believe that it's okay to cheat on our spouses if the right combination of temptations presents itself? Do we honestly believe that incest works and that people can get away with it? Do we honestly believe that women are secretly gagging for it and it's okay to ignore it when a woman says No? Do we—for that matter—honestly believe that, if we find the right person, they'll love us perfectly and for who we are and we will never have to have an argument or make a compromise with them? And, more pertinently: how wise is it for us to propagate these pure fantasies? How does it sit with you to know that something you read or something you wrote could be convincing someone to make a mistake—possibly the biggest mistake of their lives? Ultimately, that's up to you; it's not my place to know, and it's not my place to judge; furthermore, you'd remind me of the principle of caveat lector, Reader Beware, and you'd be quite right. We all make these decisions daily. It's simply about what kind of life you want to live. I think that one of the biggest mistakes we can ever make is to let ourselves get too distanced from cold, hard reality, and I act accordingly; your mileage, as always, may vary. I know people who make it a way of life to distance themselves from reality. (Jon and Caitlyn had to fight against two such people for almost two years.) They pay the price when their plans go squirting out of their hands; I pay the price for my viewpoint by constantly having to fight depression, and often by feeling hopeless. It's like eating: by now, every single food on earth has been proven to both prevent one kind of cancer and cause another. Your only choice is to decide which body part you're willing to sacrifice, and adjust your diet from there. (Personally, I'm aiming for elbow cancer. Who needs 'em?) But that's exactly my point: it's about what kind of life you want to live. We read to answer that question; we write to answer that question. It's all to decide what kind of life you want to live. Because the thing is, to take fiction and call it "just entertainment" is to do it a great disservice. It's not just entertainment, and neither is any form of media. Eventually, someone will look to what you wrote and ask themselves, 'What does this say about my life?' I believe in what Orson Scott Card said: that we read, and write, to learn how to live. Somebody, somewhere out there, wants your story to help him figure out what kind of life he wants to live. And you can't just abdicate that responsibility, because that choice isn't yours. The moment you first set pen to paper, it became your responsibility, irrevocably and forever. You are a writer. That makes you, as part of its definition, someone who guides others, or at least makes suggestions. And you can't not be that, not without not being a writer either. So, Tour Guide To Life. Where would you like to take us? And what would you like to show us? |