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talkpoliticsI'm sure the Game of Thrones fans have already watched the latest episode of the hit show on HBO. The show has gone into quite some controversy lately, what with all the gore displayed on screen, and the violence against women, and a number of other controversial issues. But last weekend's installment of the epic story provided yet another piece of food for thought, many believing both author George RR Martin and the show creators DB Weiss and David Benioff have gone too far this time (for the umpteenth time, by the way).
The reason for this contention? An innocent girl, a young princess who has done nobody any harm, being sacrificed by her ruthless (but evidently conflicted) king father as a means in his desperate plight to gain the throne that's "rightfully his by law", and to fulfill his destiny of becoming king no matter the cost. A fanatical move by a fanatically self-obsessed, yet unbelievably complex character whose inner conflict between love for his family and his belief that he has no say in the direction that his destiny is leading him.
But that is not what this post is about. The problem here is about empathy. A number of viewers and analysts have pointed to the fact that this episode, like so many others before it, is raising some tricky moral questions: do we only care about the fates of people that we have become intimately familiar with, while neglecting and outright ignoring the many tragedies that have marred this world (and evidently, many other imaginary worlds beyond it)?
As one review of this episode said, "But why does "Game of Thrones" continue to subject its viewers to harrowing instances of violence against beloved characters? It seems that the showrunners want such scenes to raise questions of morality for the audience. While Weiss knows fans are affected by losing their favorite characters, he's also interested in why we don't react as strongly to the deaths of characters we don't know as well. "So instead of saying, ‘How could you do this to somebody you know and care about?', maybe when it’s happening to somebody we don’t know so well -- maybe then it should hit us all a bit harder," Weiss said. Rather than feel concern only for those with whom we connect, perhaps "GoT" challenges viewers by asking us to find sympathy for the larger tragedies that don't directly affect us."
This of course extends to our world, the real world. Because the same question is very valid for real-world politics. The world is full of countless tragedies, and people have become so accustomed to being constantly served pieces of painful information about all that pain and loss, that their tolerance threshold to injustice and suffering has become rather high - which, as many would argue, is a natural protective reaction against going insane. Thus, we end up only caring about people, stories and fates that we can identify with and can resonate with us - and this extends into politics and affects the way we perceive policy of nationwide and global importance. It could often lead us to making choices and decisions on policy that are not necessarily favourable to society as a whole, or beneficial to a maximum number of people. But we do not necessarily do it out of selfishness, but rather because we allow emotion and empathy to govern the way we think - which is a human thing. In other words, people (and hence, the electorate) is prone to extending their narrowly, individually defined views and perceptions onto society at large - at times to others' detriment. It seems that moral principles tend to become less valid and lose their weight and meaning when some nameless mass of people whom we've never met are involved and affected.
As another review of GOT's latest episode said, "War, Game of Thrones always reminds us, totally blows. However, it especially blows when your father is Stannis Baratheon and he deliberately sends your pirate buddy away to Castle Black so no one will warn him that child sacrifice is not the kind of thing that endears you to seven kingdoms worth of people who just want to stop having swords shoved through them."
My question is, is empathy ultimately the enemy of good policy? Or is the seemingly cold-blooded use of sheer statistics really the preferable option when we are considering policies potentially affecting entire segments of society, as opposed to the few people who are present in our narrow attention horizon, and whose names and stories we can cite in detail, and be impressed about?
The reason for this contention? An innocent girl, a young princess who has done nobody any harm, being sacrificed by her ruthless (but evidently conflicted) king father as a means in his desperate plight to gain the throne that's "rightfully his by law", and to fulfill his destiny of becoming king no matter the cost. A fanatical move by a fanatically self-obsessed, yet unbelievably complex character whose inner conflict between love for his family and his belief that he has no say in the direction that his destiny is leading him.
But that is not what this post is about. The problem here is about empathy. A number of viewers and analysts have pointed to the fact that this episode, like so many others before it, is raising some tricky moral questions: do we only care about the fates of people that we have become intimately familiar with, while neglecting and outright ignoring the many tragedies that have marred this world (and evidently, many other imaginary worlds beyond it)?
As one review of this episode said, "But why does "Game of Thrones" continue to subject its viewers to harrowing instances of violence against beloved characters? It seems that the showrunners want such scenes to raise questions of morality for the audience. While Weiss knows fans are affected by losing their favorite characters, he's also interested in why we don't react as strongly to the deaths of characters we don't know as well. "So instead of saying, ‘How could you do this to somebody you know and care about?', maybe when it’s happening to somebody we don’t know so well -- maybe then it should hit us all a bit harder," Weiss said. Rather than feel concern only for those with whom we connect, perhaps "GoT" challenges viewers by asking us to find sympathy for the larger tragedies that don't directly affect us."
This of course extends to our world, the real world. Because the same question is very valid for real-world politics. The world is full of countless tragedies, and people have become so accustomed to being constantly served pieces of painful information about all that pain and loss, that their tolerance threshold to injustice and suffering has become rather high - which, as many would argue, is a natural protective reaction against going insane. Thus, we end up only caring about people, stories and fates that we can identify with and can resonate with us - and this extends into politics and affects the way we perceive policy of nationwide and global importance. It could often lead us to making choices and decisions on policy that are not necessarily favourable to society as a whole, or beneficial to a maximum number of people. But we do not necessarily do it out of selfishness, but rather because we allow emotion and empathy to govern the way we think - which is a human thing. In other words, people (and hence, the electorate) is prone to extending their narrowly, individually defined views and perceptions onto society at large - at times to others' detriment. It seems that moral principles tend to become less valid and lose their weight and meaning when some nameless mass of people whom we've never met are involved and affected.
As another review of GOT's latest episode said, "War, Game of Thrones always reminds us, totally blows. However, it especially blows when your father is Stannis Baratheon and he deliberately sends your pirate buddy away to Castle Black so no one will warn him that child sacrifice is not the kind of thing that endears you to seven kingdoms worth of people who just want to stop having swords shoved through them."
My question is, is empathy ultimately the enemy of good policy? Or is the seemingly cold-blooded use of sheer statistics really the preferable option when we are considering policies potentially affecting entire segments of society, as opposed to the few people who are present in our narrow attention horizon, and whose names and stories we can cite in detail, and be impressed about?
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(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 14:20 (UTC)Daenerys is in a similar situation, by the way. As much as she wants to believe that she's helping alleviate people's lives, the world is a much more complicated place than that - and she ends up harming the people she cares about more often than not, even though she desperately wants not to.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 14:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 16:24 (UTC)That is not to say that it doesn't take charismatic visionary figures to trigger and accelerate that process.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 14:36 (UTC)That's part of human-ness, too. The darker part. Any 7-year old kid who's shooting with his sling at pigeons can attest to that.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 14:48 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15/6/15 10:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 15:29 (UTC)It's partially the reason why laws and governments are a necessity, despite what most anarchists or libertarians would argue. Beyond about 150 people, societies cannot operate without complex rules to govern our interactions. Things simply break down because at the end of the day, we're all apes unable to cope with a world where there are more members of our tribe than we can count.
We can change this, of course. We are more than our biology; our sentience and sense of self-awareness allows us to override instinct to a great extent. We can make an effort to learn to see the lives of others as being as important as our own, and thus start giving more weight to the tragedy of one hundred children killed in a landslide in some far off country as we give to one child dying here. We can train ourselves to learn empathy for everyone, even those outside of our closer-knit groups. But we have to realize that so many of us have never really stopped to consider these things. We don't try to change that because we've never really thought about it. That explains why it's so easy to dehumanize those we disagree with. It also gives hope, though, that such attitudes can change, if we teach people a different way.
As to whether empathy is the enemy of good policy... empathy is the only good policy. We simply need to learn to extend it to those beyond our shores, our color, or our creed.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 18:06 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 20:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 19:07 (UTC)Evolution is smarter than you (humankind) are. The world is shot through with people who will eagerly exploit empathy for material profit. Hostage takers, rich people astroturfing for laws that only benefit them, psychopaths whose only deterrent from murder is the threat of jail time, et cetera.
Policy clearly must account for them ... or become victimized by them.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 07:26 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 23:16 (UTC)E,g, The Iraq war.
Oh, definitely.
mikeyxw
Date: 11/6/15 09:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 14:32 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 15:55 (UTC)Yep, absolutely Evolution is smarter than you (humankind) are. Empathy as opposed to evolution is odd, since if empathy wasn't something beneficial, evolution would have gotten rid of it a long time ago. Obviously it's helped (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/sep/19/evolution-frans-de-waal-primatologist). When was the last time you saw an alligator with empathy?
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 19:32 (UTC)Meh.
Seriously though, empathy versus statistics is a false dichotomy. Empathy and statistics can (and should) both be used to inform the structure of law. For example, empathy may compel people to endorse a law banning abortion. Others may oppose that same law, out of empathy for the harrowing situation of the mothers involved. Empathy may compel people to ban the death penalty. Empathy for victims - anger expressed on their behalf - may compel others to pursue the death penalty instead. Empathy for parents of drug-addicted children versus empathy for drug-addicted children in jail versus empathy for children subject to peer pressure from drug dealers et cetera has created the current swamp of anti-drug laws. Empathy is a great place to start, but not much more.
So we get statistics involved. What are the aggregate outcomes for children born to mothers who would have chosen abortion? What is the cost to society? What is the total cost to the state to perform an execution, with all the appeals and delay, relative to life imprisonment? What are the consequences of vastly increasing the prison population for drug offenses? How often does recidivism occur? How much do rehabilitation programs cost relative to jail time and lost productivity?
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 19:39 (UTC)I'd like to think the fantasy genre has grown up beyond the fairy-tale stage.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/15 20:13 (UTC)Old fairy-tales are full of blood, murder, and suffering, and often only end because the protagonists simply can't take any more. Also, Tolkien's work has been surrounded by 60+ years of allegorical interpretation. Is the genre a mere set dressing, or does it encompass all this history and development as well?
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 05:41 (UTC)There *is* suffering in old fairy tales, except it's depicted in a stylized, more symbolic way, leaving a lot to the imagination of the reader. Now we've got it all into our face, as if we're some kind of imbeciles who can't figure out what's what. I realize that in a way this defeats my point about the genre becoming more mature - but maybe it's the audience that has changed, and with it, its expectations.
As for allegory, GRRM has been ganking stuff from all across the historical and geographical board in order to create his world and the characters and stories that inhabit it. Nearly everyone in the genre does that, including Tolkien.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 06:54 (UTC)I don't know where you get the idea that old fairy-tales had "stylized" violence. People get their hands chopped off, they throw themselves in the sea and drown, they burn to death, they get ground up and fed to their loved ones, et cetera. Violence has always been explicit enough to appeal to the "cheap seats" in the auditorium. Your friend Shakespeare never wrote the worst of it into his stage direction but you can bet that directors snuck it in anyhow.
Really, though, I don't have a dog in this fight. Proust might appreciate Game Of Thrones for the size of the cast and their character transformations, but I'm the inverse of his Mme de Guermantes; I'm not keen to take a side for it's own sake, and I'm not enamored with the theater.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 07:43 (UTC)How exactly does it do that? If I've been reading them correctly, most fairy-tales are about the good guys who are fighting for a just cause overcoming the obstacles that the bad guys put in front of them, and good prevailing over evil, thus teaching the reader some moral lesson. Can you tell me who the good and the bad guys are in GoT, what the just cause of the former is, what represents the good and the bad, and what the moral lesson is from this story?
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 10:39 (UTC)http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/
Harrowing encounters that end in death, cruel origin myths, mortals learning harsh lessons, disfigurings, wily animals raising hell, and so on. Of course our modern canon only seems to have room for the "black and white" ones scattered around.
Game Of Thrones is a serial in its middle period. Like any other soap opera, no one EVER permanently learns a lesson, or remains locked in the role of hero or villain, unless they are stopped by death itself. Fairy-tales are short. Thus, they usually come to a point in due time.
Why would this surprise you, or strike you as unique?
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 10:43 (UTC)That's nice.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 10:48 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 11:15 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 11:27 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 11:37 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 06:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 14:33 (UTC)Hey now, ain't nothing wrong with soap operas. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 11/6/15 05:36 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 07:54 (UTC)In regards of the GOT series, I'm actually kinda surprised that people are getting this worked up over the fate of fictional characters. There certainly is some violence against women, and quite a bit of violence against men, children, horses, and chickens. I also believe that oysters have been harmed in the filming of the series but since oyster is pretty much an antonym for cuddly, nobody is going to complain. The series is showing war as a tragedy for those involved as well as those nearby, which I actually think is a good thing.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 08:40 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 10:46 (UTC)"It's violence against women!" "No, it's celebrating alternate forms of sexuality!" "No it's promoting abuse!" "It's masochism!" "It's allegorical!" "It's a stand-in for the viewers themselves!" "Ooo Eerr -- buttocks!"
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 14:39 (UTC)The objections some hold to GoT are not that it depicts violence towards women. It's that it (in their opinion) revels in it for exploitative purposes: for titillation, for shock, for ratings. Part of that criticism stems from two scenes over the last two seasons depicting rapes that did not happen in the books. Part of it (and why the "gotcha" accusations of apathy towards the deaths of men in the show don't work) has to do with the larger current climate of rape culture in which this series is being viewed; and one can never fully divorce any work of art from its contemporary climate, even if it's depicting a historical, or fantastical, setting.
In other words, there are some interesting arguments, not all of which I agree with, but it's not quite so easy to merely dismiss those concerns with simple answers.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 15:57 (UTC)It seems to me that passion is the enemy here, not empathy.. Empathy is intimately wedded to reason. Rightly understood, they are not opposites or in conflict. Part of the application of reason is giving consideration and weight to the effects of a policy. If you only use statistics then you aren't looking at every part of the equation and you open yourself up to error.
What is on display with Stannis is not cold-blooded ruthlessness or an application of reason divorced from empathy. Instead, it is fanaticism without regard to evidence or reason or empathy. It is pure passion. Obsession. Meglomania. Madness. Maybe it isn't as clear in the TV series as the books, but Mellisandre is not acting on Stannis's behalf, indeed it isn't clear to me that she is even working on behalf of the Red God. She has lied to him much more than she has told him the truth. She has her own agenda that isn't entirely clear. What is perfectly clear, however is that her main claim, that Stannis is Azor Ahai, is self evidently wrong, either a mistake or a deliberate deception. And, in the books at least, Jon Snow and Samwell Tarley know this.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 16:55 (UTC)I never read the books myself, but the producers are changing things as the series is progressing, which is certainly keeping the book readers on their toes now. For example,. the series had a rape scene between Ramsey Bolton and his newlywed bride, Sansa Stark is different in the books. It was a pretty rough scene (in fact the actor who plays Ramsey Bolton, Iwan Rheon, has said in interviews, the role really challenges his comfort zone, and he has a hard time with it.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 17:13 (UTC)Frankly, an eventual novelization of the series might end up being a better novel than the source material.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 17:56 (UTC)But I really like the big scope of Game of Thrones, its sort of like Der Ring des Nibelungen for me.
(no subject)
Date: 10/6/15 18:27 (UTC)I'm sure the series is avoiding this, because it costs a lot more to film something than it does to type something. Part of the reason ASOIAF gets me irritated now is because it is so good, but it is also completely off the rails.
(no subject)
Date: 11/6/15 05:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11/6/15 14:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/6/15 00:08 (UTC)Just because someone is dead in the books doesn't necessarily mean they're dead in the books.
(no subject)
Date: 12/6/15 04:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15/6/15 11:13 (UTC)Cold-blooded ruthlessness and application of reason are exactly what we are seeing. Magick actually works in Westeros, Stannis has seen it work. He Sacrificed his daughter to save his army, and the kingdom.
(no subject)
Date: 15/6/15 12:43 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15/6/15 22:44 (UTC)BUT WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILD BURNERS!?!?