Graceful Monuments to the Obvious

[pyat]

I found this essay on my hard drive. It's not quite finished, and not well-polished, but I might as well post it, finally. I wrote this sometime last year.

Of late I’ve been reading a selection of George Orwell’s essays. His critiques of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens fired some larger thoughts, which I’ve been trying to take a moment to write down.

So, here we go.

Rudyard Kipling was intensely popular in the late 19th century as an Imperialist poet. It was he who coined the term “White Man’s Burden,” and his poetry was the backdrop of the Victorian Empire. By Orwell’s time – indeed by the end of WWI - Kipling was seldom quoted by anyone with pretensions of culture, except in a purely ironic sense. He was too hawkish and mawkish, all at once. However, he remained hugely popular with the British working class, the very class that had paid the most in blood and toil to realize the dreams of Empire, and perhaps benefited least from it.

Orwell suggested various reasons for this. He noted that Kipling’s poems often expressed fairly common sense moral principles of decency and fairplay and honour. He refers to them as “Graceful Monuments to the Obvious.”

You see these monuments almost everywhere, some of them less graceful than others. A Graceful Monument to the Obvious is a self-evident truth or commonplace moral that everyone can get behind. Orwell expressed as similar sentiment when writing about Dickens. One of the stock characters in Dickens is the kindly old rich man who hands out shillings and 100 guinea annuities and enviable positions as an office boy to all the poor characters. This is clearly a good thing to do. Almost everyone can agree with that. I’ve met people whose entire morality depends on “Monuments to the Obvious” in one form or other. Chances are, you have too.

This happens a fair bit in fandoms, with intelligent people eschewing a traditional set of morals or spiritual tradition in favour of a more recent construct. The moral code of Superman, for example, or Captain Mal Reynolds.

The Third Doctor and Captain Kirk and Mr. Pickwick all present fine, upstanding moral codes that no one can question within the context of the media. This last bit is very important, however, because they don’t exist outside of the limited and shallow context of their own fictional reality. They fight only chosen evils. Sure, Andy of Mayberry is a swell guy. But what does he think of abortion? Or homosexuals? Or capital punishment? It never comes up. The writers of the media control the situation in a way that can never happen in the real world.

And, one must surely wonder how someone as warm-hearted and generous as Mr. Pickwick (for example) ever got to the point where he had any money to give away in the first place. In the real world, while it is good for rich people to be generous, one must also realize that, in order to get rich, it’s usually necessary to eschew fair play, if not honesty outright, at some point in the game. You don’t get rich by handing out shillings to plucky urchins all day.

In that sense, Dickens’ morality was similar to those golden platitudes offered in something like Chicken Soup for the Soul, or in the scriptures of a hundred minor gurus. It is perfectly possible to read through the entirety of Chicken Soup for the Soul and find no objectionable lesson, no hard fact, and no contentious advice. The whole book may glow with the light of gentle truth. It also offers very little useful practical advice.

To put it another way, we’re all against torturing puppies. We’re all against children starving. We’re all against evil totalitarian governments showing up and taking out freedoms away. However, the real world rarely presents us with such clear-cut moral choices, in part because the world is made up of individuals who mostly share exactly the same set of basic morals. That doesn’t stop us from attempting to fit complex situations into easy moral boxes. This seldom works very well in reality.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I dunno; I can question Captain Kirk within the context of the media plenty.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

No you can't! Because he's almost always right, in the end.

You're sophisticated enough to see that his rightness is contrived within the context of the show. But if you were IN that universe, you'd be constantly frustrated by the fact that the sexist, violent blowhard was always right.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's clear that he's always right. Sure, he always comes out at the other end with a solution that was in some sense satisfactory, for very low values thereof, but sometimes it seems that other options could have been a lot better -- that he did it his way, but maybe his way wasn't the best way.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

In the better written episodes, certainly!

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Janeway is worse for it.

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

But.. what of Lazarus, Spock? What of Lazarus?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Bah! A good stiff uppercut and phaser application sorted him out easily enough.

Aside from the whole "eternally locked in combat" thing.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

The way I put it: your moral choices only matter when they hurt you like hell to make. Because that's how you know they matter.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Yes!!

When I was teaching a teen Bible class, I had that discussion a lot. The Bible says "Thou shalt not kill." Jesus says "Do not resist an evil man" and "Turn the other cheek." The class would not happily along with those sentiments.

But at the same time, going to war with Saddam Hussein was right and proper, and Allied bombing of Germany was fine. Because we were fighting bad people.

Basically, it came down to, "Thou shalt not kill only applies to people we don't have a problem with."

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

In my own life, it worked out like this: Do I put to death an animal I have raised and loved for ten years, or do I attempt a risky surgery to improve the quality of his life? Do I take a job that may very well result in a reduction of my overall pay and freedom, but give me a base of security that I might not otherwise have?

If you're not arguing with yourself about what to do, it's not really much of a choice.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

If you're not arguing with yourself about what to do, it's not really much of a choice.

Just so.

[rowyn]

Though approving of WWII is hardly inconsistent with Biblical teaching. After all, in Joshua G-d pretty much orders the Jewish People to commit genocide of all the tribes in the Promised Land. And then punishes the Jews for letting some of them live!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ah, but that's Old Testament stuff. Protestants are supposed to be worshipping the Prince of Peace and all.

[rowyn]

"Thou shalt not kill" is Old Testament stuff, too. :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but the same book has an awful lot of God-ordered killing in it. Whereas in the New Testament, Christ gets mad at a disciple for chopping off an ear, and all the Divine killing is saved up for Revelation.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I've heard this statement before, and have always been puzzled by it. Perhaps it's because I'm both highly utilitarian in my morals and also exceptionally self-interested, but I'm never had to struggle with a moral choice, and have trouble imagining what that would be like.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Saying that is kind of like writing "DO NOT TRUST ME" on your hat.

Not in a personal sense, but just that humans in general are iffy about people who don't hide the actual cynical reasons they make their decisions instead of pretending to be emotionally engaged in upholding the moral pretenses of their society. Usually we're socialized to hide from others, and ourselves, the lack of empathic engagement in the decision-making process.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

*nods* This is an attitude that puzzles me. I am far more likely to personally trust someone who admits to being strongly self-interested, because I tend to assume people who don't are either lying, self-destructive, or so caught up in some ideology that they care more about being ideologically correct than their own well-being or the well-being of others. I do my best to avoid all three types of people, especially the third type.

It's also true that empathic engagement is a significant part of all moral calculations I make. I avoid many actions because performing them would obviously hurt other people and seeing people I interact with regularly being in distress makes me unhappy.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Well, I tend to (cynically?) assume that because empathic engagement usually results in someone being hurt, most people are inadvertently taught not to do it and rely on pat, well-worn ethical boundaries to avoid a constant barrage of universal misery. Thus, by wearing an ideological hat, they're telling me up-front where they stand. The Bene Gesserit perspective, I guess.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I can see that. My objection to people who strongly follow ideologies is that I've all too often seen the result being people who focus more on ideological correctness instead of any attempt to maximize the immediate happiness or even to minimize the immediate suffering in their lives and the lives of others. From my PoV, that single tendency is the cause of much, and perhaps most deliberately caused suffering in human history. Thus, I distrust all strong ideological motivations. If nothing else, it's possible to reason or bargain with someone whose motivations are relatively self-interested. Reasoning or bargaining with ideologues is far more difficult.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I explained what I meant. I don't... believe in ideological correctness, I guess, or that people who espouse belief in its importance are either sincere in that belief internally or honestly pursuing it in their social actions.

I think it's a myth, or at least if it is somehow achieved it's because the ideology is constructed rom negotiation between normative habits of the social environment and whatever personality traits the individual prefers in themselves. Especially in politically secularized societies like ourselves (well, mine–I'm Canadian :P), religious placards–ideology, philosophy, political orientation or what we classically recognize as religion–are more about taste and brand loyalty than anything else.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

religious placards–ideology, philosophy, political orientation or what we classically recognize as religion–are more about taste and brand loyalty than anything else.

In general, that's true of civilized first world societies (which is why I'm very much in favor of such a society). Sadly, the US is not yet such a society, although things are looking somewhat hopeful on that front. The US has no shortage of fantatics, and unfortunately some of them get into positions of power.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I just doubt that fanatics are fanatical about anything but power : )

[heron61.livejournal.com]

That's clearly true about the leaders, but from various interviews and articles, that seems far less true about most people who follow such ideologies, and w/o them the leaders have little to distinguish them from cranks shouting on street corners.

[mairesue.livejournal.com]

However, the real world rarely presents us with such clear-cut moral choices

So true!

Do I buy products from places where they abuse their employees or animals b/c it is cheaper?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Or - "Killing is wrong! Except when it's people far away, who we don't like!"

[mar2nee.livejournal.com]

Can't comment on Kipling or Dickens (everytime I try to read Dickens I get a headache) - but I think Chicken Soup for the Soul and others like it aren't supposed to be morals or guides to live by. I think they are more like meditations - a programmatic way to take time each day and think about good things, happy stories, etc. Which is good for you (everyone should do this, everyday).
Not necessarily with the Chicken Soup books! But, some time each day to think about what you're thankful for, what you value, what your strengths are. Not a moral compass, a mental health thing.

This is a reminder to me to do this! I bought a bunch of Fulghum's books with this specifically in mind - of course, I rarely do it.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Of course, this forces me to admit I've never read it... so, yes, I can see that being a good and positive use for works of that kind. Thank you. :)

[paka.livejournal.com]

I think though there's also a time and technology slant to this.

Kipling wrote in a really entertaining fashion. Sure, he simplified the world into bite-sized chunks, with several heaping cupfuls of sentimentality and parochialism for flavor, but he wrote it in an enjoyably readible manner, certain to appeal to a population which read in the evenings, on breaks, while riding busses and trains. A lower class population which, as little benefit as they'd ever derived from imperialism, were probably not about to see India for themselves. So his fiction didn't just have the appeal of Chicken Soup for the Full-Body Conversion Cyborg's Soul or whatever - it had the appeal of Chicken Soup, an entire season worth of sitcom, and a big stack of National Geographics all rolled into one.

I've always thought the movie Zulu is what Kipling would have made if he'd been alive to write scripts, and y'know? The moral questions there (and the lack thereof) really back up your point on Kipling.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I completely agree. If nothing else, TV morality either never includes issues like the trolley car problem (http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/11/trolley-car-moral-philosophy.html), or (in the case of TOS The Conscience of the King, all Kodos had to do was wait for the inevitable but completely unexpected food shipment to arrive, since actually having to decide who lives or dies would never come up in the Star Trek universe.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Unless Kodos manufactured the problem in the first place to give him an excuse to play Galton.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

The trolley car problem seems to presuppose that you are a. mute, or b. the people on the tracks are deaf, or c. that an 'out of control' trolley isn't going fast enough to jump the tracks or spill over when it hits the curve.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, but it's still worth noting that even such a relatively simplistic case is well beyond the ability of TOS to include - instead, in the absence of anything else, all crises are automatically resolved by unlikely good luck.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, that was the part of Trek that used to terrify me the most. I mean, what if the wrong Data put in the antimatter and the Mannheim effect propagated backwards in time? The potential for a cosmic screwjob, sans ethical content, kind of dwarfed any thought about the didactic writing.

[bodhifox.livejournal.com]

I like Dickens. Dickens put problems that were ignored or brushed aside right up in everybody's face.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

He certainly did! Sort of the social conscience of the generation. Orwell's criticism was that, except in the case of prison reform, Dickens didn't seem suggest alternatives for solving the problems, beyond "Rich people should give money to deserving poor."