I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, as we tend to do when a health crisis makes us face our mortality. We reevaluate basic assumptions about ourselves and our values; the things we still dream about accomplishing and those we must resign ourselves will never happen; and all the things we have worried about that didn’t come to fruition and those that have. We start thinking about perceived risk, and how that guides or misleads us: all those worst-case scenarios that nag us into inaction or leave us feeling that our glass is half empty.
Image from TheBookCoverDesigner.com for Regency Romance
My mom was one of those people who never quite achieved her dreams. By the time she felt herself capable of tackling independence, it was too late. The frailties of an insidious mind-robbing disease already crowded the doorstep. She was a voracious reader, devouring hundreds of formulaic romances. She said there was nothing wrong with wanting happy endings.
She never got her happy ending. And unfortunately, that is true for most of us. The grail we seek is always just out of reach. When the horizon narrows and all those plans shuffle from “someday” to “maybe never” it gets you thinking and where that takes you isn’t always where you want to go.
Happy Endings
Cover art derived from a photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
To combat the urge to go all maudlin about the whole seeming unfairness in the grand scheme of things (when, seriously, isn’t there someone who really deserves chemo because they are just a crappy human being?), I have been preparing a trio of novels (THE ENCHANTER’S WEB, coming soon!) for publication while still flogging the recent release of BLACK RIVER.
In that process, I’m starting to see the hint of a worldview creeping into my work that I didn’t realize was there. Where my mother sought her happy endings where love triumphs and the heroine gets what she wants, I realize my “happy endings” come with a whole lot of caveats.
In an earlier blog post, I talked about themes, and how authors sometimes don’t necessarily intend, or even see, themes that others find in their work. This one is so blatant and crosscuts so much of my work I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it. It’s tribalism. And because it’s such a fraught feature of our humanity, it makes those happy endings … let’s call it complicated.
Justifying the Means
Good vs. evil is never unambiguous.
It makes sense, really, if you’re going to have fantasy conflict there will be “sides” or “factions” who grapple with that conflict. But even when distilled to the most basic “good vs. evil” dichotomy, I see nuance. Just as in the real world, and honestly in any good storytelling, none of my good guys are without flaw and none of my bad guys are wholly bad. They don’t get to just walk away in the end to happily-ever-after. There’s penance for doing what you must to win. And amongst participants on both sides there can be moral ambiguity.
In Black River, on both sides of the conflict there are dissenting positions, and people acting in manners that could be considered treasonous or evil in their own right. They disagree on the correct use of magic, and power, and whether the ends are acceptable if the means are wrong. The ultimate evil acts are not happening in a vacuum. They are the product of the acts that came before and the ability to pursue that evil at some future time doesn’t cease to exist with the resolution of the plot.
In The Enchanter’s Web, there are “traitors” on both sides of the issue, their causes worthy, and their justifications internally logical. Both sides commit atrocities in their belief that what they are doing is right. How can the heroes be right, when they are doing wrong? Can their means justify the ends? The ultimate bad guys had “reasons” and in the end, still can’t cease to exist. They must be managed, contained.
Cover art by Ingrid Kallick
As the Visionary Cree claims in EW Book I, Specters from a Dream:
“Envy and ambition will always challenge peaceful stability, each skirmish a passion that builds into a consumptive thing that feeds upon itself. [The world’s] tribes will fracture, each as certain of its principles as it is evil in its methods. For there can never be one truth when both have done wrong against the other.”
Boon
Through all the novels runs a thread of how we use the power we’re granted by our tribe, that affinity group that we feel has cohesion because we share a cause, or a belief system, or a suite of cultural traditions. My childhood was dominated by the breakdown of trust in the institutions, the pillars of our national tribe, as we caromed from crisis to crisis – from war to Watergate to race riots. It shook my sense of the unambiguous moral good. It was no great discovery that governments lie to their people, or at a minimum, often withhold the truth. They’ve been doing it likely since governments began. But there was something about that time that ruptured the narrative of our righteous history and unity.
Tribalism is built into the human DNA, emerging perhaps from what Michael Shermer called the “shared intentionality” of a social species of communal hunter-gatherers who succeeded by working together. In that process groups came to share language, culture, beliefs and history. It created norms, which also established when a member of the group did not behave as expected and should be excluded because their nonconformity led to distrust and a perceived risk.
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This kind of tribal affinity created powerful and enduring structures that could protect us. It survived in our DNA because it was useful. Being fearful of a stranger that could harm or steal your resources was positive adaptation. Our attachment to our “tribe” is one of our strongest and enduring desires: these are “our people,” by blood, culture, politics or geography. It gives us a sense of belonging and community. It staves off loneliness. It gives people a sense of a unified front against detractors, our safe spaces and our shared voice in conflict. Our workplace is dominated by concepts of teams (perhaps taken to extremes by the abomination of Microsoft Teams (we hates it)). We encourage the spirit of die-hard support of our sports teams, our schools, #OurCommunityStrong, our countries, our fandoms; we exhibit our dedication through our uniforms, our tee shirts, our cosplay, our rallies and bumper stickers.
And if you’re going to win a war in a fantasy world, it helps if you can build a team and coalition, and find a common purpose.
Bane
While we may belong to a number of tribes and build cooperative networks between them, it’s at best performative. We know the rules of our tribe and others who don’t fit those norms aren’t fully welcome. Because tribalism is also a bane. It’s where we get polarization, racism, otherism, hate that is built on the smallest doctrinal differences. It’s how wars can emerge into sectarian violence hundreds of years after some imagined slight. The critiques of tribalism are many and the research into understanding it has exploded in the last three decades with the increasing polarization of politics.
New York Magazine Writer Andrew Sullivan wondered:
“What’s it like to see the contours of someone’s face, or hear his accent, or learn the town he’s from, and almost reflexively know that he is your foe? How do you live peacefully for years among fellow citizens and then find yourself suddenly engaged in the mass murder of humans who look similar to you, live around you, and believe in the same God, but whose small differences in theology mean they must be killed before they kill you?”
Samantha Power’s book is a fascinating and necessary exploration of genocidal violence.
From the Balkans to Rwanda, Northern Ireland to Syria. Myanmar to Sudan. The world has a long history of murder and genocide built upon this evolutionary quirk that we can’t seem to purge.
But community pride and our in-group affinities aren’t inherently bad. A church or school family or science-fiction fan group gives us a sense of being part of something. The issue is the weaponization of tribalism, and the growing extremism in the space we stake out. We no longer know how to make coalitions. We toe a party line and will die on the spears of a single issue.
In Black River, the factions are divided not only by historical conflict, but within the factions. They divide over doctrinal interpretations of prophecy and history, interwoven with the desire for power, leading to additional layers of intrigue. Our tribal leadership can be our undoing.
Risk Assessment
As Sullivan notes, we don’t have to think if we let our tribal leader do it for us. They call the shots and we go along. And as they demonize their opponents, so, we too, come to be unable to recognize their innate humanity. They can’t be human so it’s okay to take from them. There are no innocents. They are innately evil because they don’t believe what we believe. Their traditions are weird. They could destroy us, so we must destroy them first.
As psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht writes in The Conversation, it’s a politics of fear that drives us to tribalism. He notes that fear is uninformed. It doesn’t know the other and can’t see its humanity. And we consume media designed to trigger our fear and anger. Often those triggers are wild speculation or unfounded conspiracy. As David Ropeik wrote in Psychology Today, “dumb works when people are worried. Reason matters less, and the instincts of self-protection have more influence, when we’re afraid.”
It’s not just the people of Metatha, but all the worlds in Black River’s universe that face destruction if evil foolishly gets its way in its pursuit of power. There will be people who follow their tribe to that doom. And some who see the wisdom of not being dumb.
The Middle Ground
Cover art by Ingrid Kallick
In EW Book 2, Dread Warrior, Khoti bemoans his inability to recognize deceit among his fellows, and warns of the danger of seeing humanity in his enemy, even as he yields to it. He errs in his default thinking, with devastating results.
Polarization leads to failure. Shermer appeals to the need to come together to find our livable middle ground. During my research on proposed mining legislation, I interviewed state legislators from both sides of the aisle who decried the loss of compromise and collaboration that party adherence forced on them, preventing any kind of meaningful good to come from their work. How can we hope to tackle pandemics, climate change and other national or global challenges if we can’t work together to solve them? But how can I engage with someone that thinks people I love should not exist? How can we progress, survive, without recognizing the humanity in our Others?
In The Enchanter’s Web, destruction of evil could unmake the world. They can’t live with it; they can’t live without it. They must find a balance and always strive to come together, to find a way to bring the disparate factions into some kind of unity. It’s not pretty. Sacred traditions may be rejected. They may lose much of what once bound them together. But if they don’t set aside norms and dispense with tribal instincts to bring their world together to solve the crisis, all fail.
It’s in our DNA to seek our affinities, to fear the other, and to be more likely to recall the negative than the positive. Those are the adaptive features that helped our hunter-gatherer predecessors survive.
As Cree went on to warn in his prophecy in Specters:
“Each generation fights its battles and in their wake leaves more dismay, more anger, and more hate to carry to the next generation. … Needing to find answers for the pain it has inflicted upon itself, it seeks others to blame. … The lessons of history are there for us to avoid the same mistakes. And yet, it is that history that people turn to when they seek a scapegoat for their troubles.”
As long as we let our basest instincts drive us, we won’t have those unambiguous happy endings. It’s time to evolve.
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At the Macquarie Heads, near Strahan, Tasmania, Aus. Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz