However, this presents me with a problem. Most of my ideas are heavily anti-instinctual (since I see no need to fight for that which is already instinctual - I believe, and state, that people should maximize their utility functions, but I see very little need to press the point given that everybody does that anyways), and technologically centered. No aesthetic whatsoever enters into it. I fight to defy "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic", while the human psyche affirms it. And that is the problem. Good fiction appeals to the human instinct; my philosophy appeals to logic. The two seem very difficult to reconcile. Let me illustrate with an example:
A while back I had an idea for a story (tentatively called 'Honor'). The plot concerned a young, enterprising sergeant in the SS at the beginning of the Holocaust who is repulsed by the ghettoes and decides to covertly help the victims. However, after he is nearly caught helping four people escape and two days later learns that the four were found and killed, he decides that to really help, he needs to be more than a sergeant. He then proceeds to work hard and try to please his superiors in order to quickly advance to such a rank that he can save as many people as he wants. He moves up the ranks through the years to become the second-in-command at a concentration camp by late 1943, with a reputation for grim efficiency thanks to his tireless efforts to secure his promotions. He decides that by far the greatest good he could do could only be done as a commandant of a camp, and continues to work alongside Nazi hard-liners in an attempt to achieve that rank. However, he never attains such a rank, is captured in a surprise Russian advance, and ends up hanged at Nuremberg since the only evidence as to his real views is the fact that he was a 'grimly efficient' second-in-command.
The only problem with this story is that I abhor the implied moral, which is 'changing a bad system from within is a bad idea' and that 'despite the good intent of your motives, working with the Nazis in order to eventually help victims is wrong', neither of which is true. He could have succeeded, and if he had, many more people would be alive. In effect, given the correctness of his assumptions, his decision was a worthy gamble. I could change the story to make him succeed, but I feel this lowers the emotional punch of the plot and turns the story into something very banal. I feel that I will have a hard time reconciling 'effective plot' with 'morals I wish to convey', which is why I probably won't even attempt to write this story (as opposed to 'Immortal', which I described in an earlier post) let alone actually succeed in writing it. And that's why I have such a problem with my stories - because good storytelling and rational morals mix like oil and water.
It depends on how you write Honor. From a first-person perspective it could be easier to emphasize his inner moral struggle and his attempts than you may think.
ReplyDeleteEven if one can't put the logic into the stories as the core (which could happen if you tailor it) you could simply interweave it into the story, through characters or through side plots. LOTR, for instance, has several semi-political themes but the point is the struggle, the mythological tale.
"The only problem with this story is that I abhor the implied moral, which is 'changing a bad system from within is a bad idea' and that 'despite the good intent of your motives, working with the Nazis in order to eventually help victims is wrong', neither of which is true. [...] which is why I probably won't even attempt to write this story"
ReplyDeleteWait, this is totally fixable. Just have your protagonist eloquently comment on the fact that he made the best utilitarian decision he could, and that the general strategy of seeking power in order to do good is expected to have good results, even if it didn't work out in his own particular case. Have him explicitly note that he's aware that this is exactly what a villain would say in an attempt to rationalize his own crimes, but that it still happens to be true, even if other people don't have reason to believe it.
Then the implied moral is, "Sometimes maximizing expected utility doesn't maximize actually achieved utility because of factors you couldn't possibly have anticipated, and you may suffer arbitrarily large punishments for your actions even if you were doing the right thing given your state of knowledge."