Tag Archives: Narrative

Pardon My Geekitide – Frame Collapse at the Game Table

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Gaming

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43746096_10217602333635242_4017497621105999872_o

Works in Progress

I could tell Player X didn’t like the plan. He’d been silent for awhile, and now he was asking a number of pointed questions. He had begun to ask who came up with the plan for the game in question, and knowing this player for the gruff sort of fellow he is, I could see it coming. His character would of course dismiss the whole idea, but would he also do insult the character who had come up with it? I’d seen this happen before, and I cringed.

Why?

It’s just a game, right?

That would be a common take on this sort of thing. It’s a role playing game. Whatever the player said, he would be saying in character, and he wouldn’t be saying it to a player. He’d be saying it character to character. So just let the whole thing roll!

Right?

The problem as I see it is this is just the sort of thing that’s hard to contain on within the game setting. Whatever player character had come up with the plan in question, a real person had actually come up with that plan and chosen to express it through that character. In-character, or not, any contempt shown to the plan could well have reflected back on the player. I’ve seen it happen before. One player says; “who came up with this idiotic plan?” and another player sitting there realizes he’s just been called an idiot, all in character of course, but the insult reaches right through the characters and into the room with the players.

A lot depends on wording of course. If the player characters have well-established personalities, and/or if the terms of criticism clearly touch on those personalities (“hey elf, your pointy ears look stupid!” or “you dwarves are too fond of ale!”), then the insult is likely to stay in the game. It can even be quite fun to role play such conflict, but when the in-game features are thin (when the plan is a real attempt to solve a problem in game and the criticism is coming from a player who clearly doesn’t like that plan), the conflict won’t likely be contained in the game itself. The result can be an argument, or it can be an uncomfortable player. These things can blow up, or they can fester.

They can also be the reason one or more players find something else to do next week.

Luckily, the insult didn’t happen.

***

This kind of problem interests me for two reasons:

  1. As the host of an RPG campaign, I am often faced with these little moments of social brinksmanship, and I feel a certain sense of responsibility for containing the carnage, so to speak.
  2.  It strikes me as an interesting example of a larger social phenomenon, namely, the tendency for some stories to skip out of their own narrative frame and into the social context in which they are told.

It’s the second of these themes that has me writing about the matter now. There are of course much more serious examples of the sort of problem I mention her, but this kind of thing happens a lot in Pen&Paper games. So, it’s not a terrible idea, I think, to meditate on this relatively light-stakes example of that problem a bit.

The activities in a pen&paper role playing game involve at least two very different contexts, one is an imagined context in which characters interact with each other in an imaginary world. The other is the game table around which actual people sit, devour snacks and narrate the actions of their own characters in response to challenges posed by the game master. Significantly, these actual players must cooperate to some degree in the construction of the imaginary world within which their character must operate. Even players choosing to role-play conflict must cooperate to understand the terms of the conflict and the potential means of playing it out. They don’t have to share exact interpretations of the imaginary world, but it does help if they share some understanding of the social rules by which their characters operate (and at the very least the mechanics by which the game will determine what happens when character A tries to punch character B in the nose). It is of course all supposed to be in good fun (at least at my games); everyone is supposed to enjoy themselves, even if their characters don’t.

In the example presented above, the imaginary interactions of a group of characters threatened to produce implications that stretched beyond the table and into the real world interactions. It’s not a hanging matter, no, but I did see real potential for one or more players to come away with a bad experience. Significantly, this problem was at least partly a question of contextualization. The metalinguistic framework which made it possible to understand the actions of one player in terms of the game world grew a bit too thin for my comfort. I’ve seen that framework break down entirely. If you’ve played pen&paper RPGs for long, you have too. It happens all the time.

***

Other examples?

Focus: scene -setting. I once had a pair of players who insisted on focusing on something other than my own narrative just about every time. If I asked them to set the characters up in a marching order, they began asking questions about the politics of the city we were headed to, how to build their characters, etc. If I introduced the to an NPC, they interrupted me to set up a marching order. If I told them no marching order was necessary, they focused on it anyway. Eventually, I realized that no matter what I was telling them, these two insisted upon talking about something else. The other players at the table were beyond frustrated, and so was I. We could not attain any kind of immersion into the story-line, because the narrative was constantly subject to pointless interruption. It was like trying to talk to someone on a static line.

It’s not that their questions were bad; it’s just that each question asked was consistently asked at the least appropriate time for doing so. In time, I came to see this as a control issue. Neither of these players were willing to let someone else take the lead. (Significantly, neither would let anyone else get the last word on anything, least of all each other), and preventing me from gaining any momentum when setting the stage served the same purpose. Simply put, neither of these players was willing to cooperate sufficiently to achieve a common narrative framework. I didn’t have a solution for this then, and I don’t now, except to game with someone else.

Which is what I do.

Killing Your Fellow PCs: Whenever a player character kills another player character, the chances that this will be taken personally grow rather high. That should be obvious, but I am amazed at the number of players who will swear that isn’t the case, or at least that it shouldn’t be. It is extraordinarily common to find players defending such actions by saying; “that’s what my character would do” or “my character is evil/selfish/greedy/etc.” …which of course begs the question; why did you role up a bastard in the first place? Simply put, this kind of thing isn’t an in-game problem; it’s an out-of-game problem. When you kill another player’s character, you are (at the very least) bringing to an end, a story-line into which that player has invested time and energy. There may be contexts in which that works out just fine, but most of the time, it just means that you as a player have placed your own fun above that of another.

Increasingly, I find myself saying to the players; “You can role-up any character you like, but please find a reason to cooperate with the others.” If you can find a way for your otherwise-evil character to bond or at least work with with their companions, then fantastic. If you can’t, then please come up with another concept.

Separating from the Group: Some players take great joy in sending their characters off on their own. A few minutes of side story is no big deal. It can even be fun, providing the player (and the GM) remembers that the sideline is a sideline and the character will eventually have to rejoin the others. When a player just keeps doing this, I will eventually stop coming up with reasons to get them back with the rest of the group.

The story-line goes this direction. Either bring your character back, roll-up a new character, or find another campaign.

Generic Disruptions: Along the same lines as the characters who wander off, some characters just keep generating pointless conflict. They pick fights with NPCs while the group is trying to keep a low-profile, steal things from others, knowing it will lead to retaliation, burn bridges with helpful allies, etc. There is a school of thought that says ‘let the players do what they like’ and some campaigns facilitate this nicely, but it doesn’t work well with a pointed plot. If the point of the campaign is to defeat the even bad guy, save the princess, or find the Magic MacGuffin, then each such sub=plot grows increasingly more irritating. These sorts of disruptions really pose much the same problem as the decision to separate from the group, except the problem isn’t an imagined physical space; it’s a sub-plot that will time and energy at the expense of the larger narrative.

Why not just let the player characters do as they like? Because each such diversion is effect a competing story-line. Imagine what this would seem like in a movie or a novel! One or two side-stories adds a little extra flavor to the story and fleshes out characters. Too many such subplots breaks up the main story-line and increases the odds that you’ll replace the movie with an old episode of The Tic or leave the bookmark right there on page 32 of your book until your grand-kids find it in the attic and end up throwing it away because it bored the Hell out of them too. More to the point, players who consistently generate such side-conflicts are effectively competing with the GM (and the rest of the group) over the story-line for the campaign. Why that is happening is another question. What to do about it is another still. The important thing is to realize that it’s not really an in-game problem. It is a form of inter-player conflict, not a quirk of any given character.

Bully-Characters: I once told a player his character had spent an entire hour given another crap about a failed action. He was shocked. He was even more shocked to find out I had timed him on the matter. The player said he could have sworn he had only spent a few minutes on it. My point was actually that the player had taken to causing his own character to bully that of the other player endlessly, though just about every game session. This could perhaps have been contained within the game setting, but the player doing the bullying often made some comments out of character as well, and he never let up, nor did he allow the second player ever to come out on top.  Once again, the rationale was “that’s the way my character would behave,” and once again rejected that explanation. When a player character consistently pushes another player character around, there is a point at which it will be frustrating for the second player. In my experience, a player who does this, does so for a reason, and that reason is NOT contained within the framework of the game world.

Fuzzy Rules and In-Character Conflict: If players turn their actual characters on each other, it really helps if the rules are clear at that point. Unfortunately, most of the time players do this they begin by grappling and grappling rules are usually a little wonky. The result can often be counter-intuitive. So, when player A says “I grab player B by the balls and squeeze”, the specific mechanics for resolving this are often less helpful than if the player had just said; “I shoot him in the head.” When player B decides to fight back, it gets uglier. A GM can finesse ambiguities much more easily when players are fighting non player characters. When two players go against each other, any benefit of the doubt given to one becomes a slight against the other player character player.

…and the resulting hard feelings are rarely contained on the table.

It’s tempting to look for a solution by improving game mechanics or at least reviewing the mechanics you have at hand to be as clear as possible while adjudicating the fight. In most cases, though, I find myself asking the players to simply stop.

GNR? I think you could treat the old distinction between gamism, simulation, and narrative playing styles as an example of this sort of problem. Where one player wants to tell a good story, another really wants to see if he can build the best tank possible under the rules, and another may really want to see what a particular setting would look like in this or that particular game system. I somehow doubt that account would pass muster at The Forge, but I’m not interested in debating the ins and outs of this old theory. Suffice to say, that I think the kind of differences Rod Edwards and company talked about could be looked at as factors contributing to the breakdown of an in-game framework. Whether or not they constitute an exhaustive, or even a robust, theory of the many ways a game breaks down is another question.

***

Okay, so that’s the end of a long-winded rant about role playing games. Writing these points out as I have, I am struck by how obvious the points might seem, almost as if they are not worth saying. And yet, I am also struck by how often players seem to overlook these kinds of problems, or more to the point, insist on trying to understand them within the context the game world. Players who consistently disrupt a campaign will often insist on in-character explanations for their own behavior. Yet, that behavior will persist from one character to next and even from one campaign to the next. It is a game of course, but there are real people playing it, and sometimes what’s done in the game really is about the people around the game table.

Of Ringers and Runts: An Experimental Exercise in Geeketry!

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by in Gaming, Uncategorized

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Nerds only now! The rest of you guys just run along…

img450fd49cc8adeI think most of us who play RPGs have had this experience, the one where the game master (GM) brings in a ringer. It may be a non-player character (NPC), or it may be the GM’s own personal player character (PC, which was much more common back in 1st edition, …yes, I’m that old). Either way, the ringer towers over the player characters. He kicks ass while they struggle to make a difference.

One thing that strikes me about this is just how often the players will initially greet the ringer with joy. He or she typically shows up just when the player characters face some challenge they thought surely would prove too much. Suddenly they have a chance after all. With the appearance of a ringer, you can’t help but feel that hope is alive and well again. At least you can feel that way until somewhere during the course of that epic battle when the three orcs your ranger has killed don’t seem all that significant in comparison to the 6 giants, four ogres, and thirteen trolls the ringer has offed while you were struggling with a random goblin. The ringer is always a mixed blessing. He can win the day, but he can also make winning feel an awful lot like losing.

If the ringer is still in the group six games later, then I for one reckon it’s time to leave.

Should a ringer stick around for several sessions, the players begin to feel they are just along for the ride. The ringer can reduce player characters, and with them the players themselves to the role of an audience rather than a participant. It can take the fun out of the story, and it can make you reconsider how you want to spend your Saturday nights.

I think most gamers would say that it’s bad GMing to let a major character overshadow the player characters like that. It’s the job of the GM to challenge the players, not take center stage and enjoy their applause every time he wins the day. This is why so many frown on GM player characters. Game Masters shouldn’t run characters of their own, so the wisdom goes. That’s just asking for abuse. But in my experience, the taboo against GM player characters just contributes to the problem rather than helping to solve it. Almost every ringer that I’ve seen began as an NPC, just another character in the cast. This is what frees the GM to set them up with extra power. Often, the GM doesn’t even plan to keep the ringer around that long. he’s just another character in the overall plot-line, so it’s not big deal if he has a little extra power. The trouble is that GMs do become attached to interesting NPCs, so much so that they look forward to playing them, leveling them up, and watching the kick ass. A GM can feel this way about an NPC just as easily as he (or one of his players) can feel about a player character. In effect, some GMs have player characters, and they don’t even know it.

img452cb6a3c0f00Back in the days of first edition, a GM’s player character was most often rolled up according to the same rules as those of the players. This provided a bit of a check on the whole ringer problem. Abuse could still happen, but there was a bit more of a sense that the GM’s character was supposed to be part of an ensemble. When they come in over-powered to begin with, they inevitably become the star of the show, and the notion that a given character isn’t really a player character can very well serve as the excuse for a GM to field one who simply dwarfs anything the other players can produce.

***

Anyway, ringers are a problem, right? “Don’t do them!” That’s usually a pretty good rule of thumb. So, here is a thought experiment. What if we toss that rule aside? Is it possible to put a ringer in a campaign without ruining everything?

Okay, I know you can do it for a game or two, but what if the ringer was there for the balance of the campaign. Is it possible to do this without ruining the players’ fun?

In essence, this is a question of re-protagonization. In gaming, we often talk about deprotagonization, the process by which a character is made irrelevant to the story-line in a campaign, but what can be done to provide genuine significance to a character living in the shadow of a ringer? That is the question posed by the prospect of gaming (deliberately) with a ringer. It’s a thought experiment of sorts, but hopefully an amusing one.

How to go about it?

***

img450fd04546e89I can think of a few angles. Whether or not they would actually add up to a fun campaign, well that’s an open question! Anyway, here are the guidelines I would use to set up the campaign.

One: Much of the ringer’s activities take place offstage, leaving the player characters free to resolve their own challenges without the help of the big guy. For example, the ringer is a spell caster, and she is performing a complex task inside a building. The players must protect the building themselves. If they fail, her spell is ruined, and the overall plot takes a turn for the worse. What I really like about this example is the characters can fail without this resulting in a total party kill. If they blow it, then the enemy reaches the ringer, and the ringer then enters the fight. This way the PCs will probably live through their failure, but everyone will know the development is bad in the long run, because that spell was important. How? Well that’s a question for a larger plot-line…

Okay, this might be cheating a bit, because a ringer off-stage isn’t all that different from any other background piece of a campaign plot. Arguably, such things are happening just offstage in many campaigns. It’s just not that unusual. The full challenge of making a ringer work would be one of making it work when the ringer is standing right there beside the players, doing things along with them, and providing tangible assistance during the course of events. It could provide an interesting twist for a game or two to let the players cope with the sudden absence of their MVP, but if that’s the campaign, then your campaign doesn’t really have a ringer. That’s ducking the challenge here rather than facing it.

Two: Give the healer an inherently supportive role. What is she good at? She can heal like no-one’s business, or she is really great at support magic. She can make the other characters run faster, hit harder, and otherwise kick ass. If only they were a little better to begin with! (This works particularly well if you combine it with a definite plan for PC growth.)

What I like about this approach is it filters the impact of the ringer through the actions of the PCs. The ringer remains a ringer She can do amazing things, but the PCs will still have to kill the bad guys; they will still have to scale the cliffs, and they will still have to break open the door to the enemy castle. They may get a boost from the ringer, but it’s up to them to make that boost matter. In effect, the ringer becomes their own asset. It is up to them to make her matter.

What doesn’t work about this approach is that it soft-peddles the ringer to the point that she may not seem like a ringer. Fantasy movies and books are full of wise wizards with far more power than the warrior-protagonists which remain the focal point of such stories. Simply put, we care who wields the sword more than we care who keeps him healthy. That’s one of life’s little perversions, but I reckon it’s a common enough feature to storytelling, it doesn’t make much sense to deny it. A real ringer is a ringer than leaves carnage in his wake, not one that brings you back from the dead and gives you an energy drink. Maybe that shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

img4547cd6d641b0Three: Let a player run the ringer. I’ve done this countless times. My old first edition D&D campaign ran for over 20 years. Since we started a new plot-line every year or so, we would often roll one or of the old characters into the new campaign. This often meant that a single player would have a 9th level character or two while everyone else was starting at 1st. It could be fun. We let different players run the ringers in different campaigns, and with multiple characters on the board, no-one got bored. There was always plenty for the other characters to do.

This approach at least takes some of the sting out of the GM bias, but that may be all it accomplishes, and a PC-ringer poses problems of its own. If the ringer-rolling player isn’t present for a game session, then either someone else must run their character (something I don’t like doing), or your ringer is gone. How to explain the absence of the ringer or the player’s how to cope with his absence is sometimes a tricky question. Also, letting a player run the ringer makes it harder to control the relationship between the ringer and the other players. If that player is selfish, then she will deprotagonize the other players, and you can’t do anything about it without taking the player’s ability to run her own character. That’s no fun. It can all workout, but suffice to say that I don’t think this really solves the problems posed by putting a ringer in a campaign.

Four: Make the ringer its own challenge. It doesn’t have to be obvious that the ringer will help with tasks the players have set out to accomplish. Maybe she doesn’t really want to help at all and the players will have to talk her into it. Better still, if they must actively work to keep her on track over the course of the campaign! Is the ringer a drunkard? The players must keep her sober for the big fights. Is she really forgetful or otherwise aloof to the point of becoming utterly unreliable? If the player characters have to make decisions for her, or even role-play the process of guiding her actions, the ringer becomes an extension of the player’s own efforts. What she does is what they get her to do. It may still be her fireball, but at least it will be the players who told her where to place it.

On a side note: it could be interesting to give players powers enabling them to redirect the actions of the ringer. In effect, she becomes a power source, but at least some of her actions are determined by the players.

I think this approach is promising insofar as it gives the player characters some sense of control over the campaign. Still, convincing the hero to do the right thing isn’t quite as much fun as being the one who does it yourself. a fireball rolled up by another character will never be as fun as one you roll up yourself, even if you did talk the other person into casting it. Giving the PCs a care and feeding role to play in managing the ringer helps a bit, but this alone won’t provide a satisfactory solution to the problem.

img4577093b04e3cFive: You can give the player characters independent tasks and even long-term goals that diverge slightly from those of the ringer. Perhaps, the ringer is happy to demolish all the orcs in the northern wastelands, but she isn’t all that concerned about the elven princess the characters want to keep alive. Their challenge thus requires tasks that the ringer won’t help with and their sense of accomplishment will then rest (at least partially) on terms that don’t involve the ringer.

I think this is critical to resolving the problems posed by a ringer. Whatever problems the ringer can be relied upon to help the players solve, the players must face some problems they have to resolve on their own. If these problems can be put in play at the same time, in the same scenario, then so much the better. The ringer is in play on the table, and the player characters must do something for which her help will not be provided. Not only does this go a long way toward resolving the problems posed by a ringer; it can also spice up game combat in general. A battle with a subplot is more interesting than a straight-up fight, and if that sub-plot skews the significance of the characters present, so much the better.

Six: Let the characters progress to a level comparable to that of the ringer. This really is the big one, as far as this challenge is concerned, because it makes the ringer into a challenge that must itself be resolved over the course of the campaign. In effect, this turns the problem posed by a ringer into a source of meaning in itself. To make this work, though, you must risk letting the characters feel the weight of the ringer initially. Let them struggle to matter for challenge or two, then let them solve a problem or three, and finally give them a moment when they see the ringer as an equal rather than a superior.

For an extra twist, let the ringer become an enemy in this final moment, and let the battle with that ringer be the final test of progress. You know you’ve made it when your mentor lies defeated before you! …extra fun if some cryptic prophesy alludes to this early in the campaign.

Extra twist, or not, I think letting the players overcome the difference is the key to making a ringer into a positive force in the campaign. It’s an experience, I recall from my early days in gaming. I spent most of my gaming days playing first edition D&D. It was a consistent expectation back in those days that your character would start as a grunt and grow into power over the course of a campaign. Most importantly, first edition was a definite sense of diminishing returns. You could bring a 1st level character into an 8th level campaign, and by the time the other characters had made 10th, your own character was probably only one or two levels behind them. You weren’t quite even with the others yet, but at that point, you were one of the group, a force to be reckoned with. Watching your significance grow in comparison to the established characters in such a campaign could be a lot of fun. In effect, the over-powered characters provide a base-line from which you gauge your characters progress, effectively making it all that much more obvious than it would be in a campaign where the characters (and their enemies) are both relatively evenly matched.

The sense of character progress is something I missed in 3rd edition. The balance of power in that game didn’t shift much over the course of a game. If one character was 5th level and another 1st, ten games later, then 5th level character was till significantly more powerful than the 1st. You just couldn’t overcome the difference like you could in first edition. It’s one of the things that made the presence of a ringer that much more toxic in 3rd edition, I think. Under normal circumstances, the differences could not be overcome. I miss it. Maybe that’s what has me thinking about ringers.

No, I haven’t played 4th or 5th edition.

SixB: As a further twist on progress, give the ringer an active role in helping the PCs develop and grow. It’s easy enough to role-pay a mentor apprentice relationship, but it’s a little more fun to provide some significance to this in the game-mechanics. IN my home-brew system, I allow characters to share experience points, and I make this more effective under selected conditions, as in cases where the advanced character has specific teaching abilities, or if the characters have entered an established relationship of some kind). I let the players choose these things, of course, but I give these choices weight in character development. This can help to accelerate player character growth relative to the ringer even as it slows the ringer down. Such mechanics can help to facilitate the change in balance for an overall campaign. It’s particularly interesting when the players themselves have a ringer. Letting them decide how to deal with the differences in power-level provides another layer of meaning to the plot, and of course I try to ensure that the rewards for sharing experience and helping younger characters grow will outweigh any costs.

…of course, none of which is going to help any of the poor bastards when it’s time to meet the dragon!

Good Without an Apology

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in atheism, Philosophy

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god

Saw this in Cedar City this summer (I think Moni took the picture.)

Atheists can’t provide a sound basis for their morality.

…it’s the kinder gentler version of “atheists can’t be moral,” which is a common theme among Christian apologists. To be sure, some folks go back and forth between the two messages, but at least some apologists do seem to keep a clear distinction between the claim that atheists cannot be moral and the claim that whatever morals we may have, we simply cannot justify them in rational terms.

Some folks express this position in the form of an architectural metaphor; we have no foundation for our ethics, so the argument goes. Alternatively, we cannot ground our moral principles in a sound basis of judgement; our morals aren’t based on anything objective, and so on. The sheer physicality of this rhetoric is always striking to me.

I know.

Metaphors happen.

Still, I can’t help thinking some of those using this language could stand to think about those metaphors a little bit. It would be nice if they at least recognized them as metaphors. As often as not, I suspect many of those producing such messages take these terms rather literally.

All that aside, lately, I’ve been thinking about this less in terms of the argument at hand and more in terms of the narrative about that argument. Questions about the nature of morality go back a rather long way in the history of western philosophy, to say nothing of countless other contexts in which people could ask about what people ought to do and whether or not they can provide a sound reason for their answer. This is not just one ongoing debate; it is many, and while that debate rages on with no likelihood of a clear winner, this story of the unique moral failure of atheism flourishes in its own right. The notion that atheists can’t provide an adequate account of the nature of morality may be a contention to be argued in select circles. It can also be a story told about the difference between us and them.

…in this case, I’m a them. Damn! (Othered in my own blog post.)

***

First an anecdote!

This theme reminds me of a time a college friend took me to see Gary Habermas speak at his church. Habermas is a renowned apologist, so I was expecting to hear an interesting argument in favor of Christianity. Suffice to say that I didn’t. I don’t know how to convey just how unimpressive Habermas was on that occasion. I could hardly believe my ears. To this day, I wonder if I missed something important or if Habermas was just having an exceptionally bad day? I don’t know.

The whole performance got a great deal more interesting though after Habermas stepped down, and the regular pastor for this church took a moment to add a few thoughts of his own. The pastor himself struck me as a fairly nice guy. I couldn’t help but like him, but there I sat listening to him try to put Habermas’ presentation into perspective for his audience. What impressed the pastor was the notion that someone could field a complex and sophisticated argument in favor of the Christian faith. He ended his own comments by saying how good it felt to know that people of intelligence could defend the faith, that smart people did in fact believe in Jesus and that they could justify that faith.

So, there I sat thinking on the one hand that Gary Habermas might be a smart guy, but we sure as Hell hadn’t seen anything to prove it on that particular day. More importantly, I couldn’t help noting how much had been lost on the pastor. He had nothing to say on the topic at hand, or the arguments Habermas had made, nothing at all. The mere fact that Habermas had fielded an argument in favor of Christianity was what interested the pastor. Such an argument did exist, and its existence was a comfort to him. It should also, he thought, be a comfort to others attending his church.

This is what I mean by the narrative value of the argument. Habermas and people like him continue to make their arguments, and people like me continue to be unimpressed by them. Still, the arguments seem to hold a value in believing circles, a value almost entirely unrelated to the soundness of the arguments themselves, much less the impact of those arguments in contested circles. An apologist may fail to engage unbelievers entirely and still count as a success in believing circles. For some, it is enough to know that smart people defend the faith.

Toward what end is another question.

***

So what? Conflict is a common source of good narrative material, and conflict over religious beliefs is no different. We unbelievers have been known to tell a story or two out of season ourselves, but I don’t think we’ve established quite the market for selling to the non-choir, at least not yet. A few unbelievers may be working tales of battle into a profession of sorts, but we are generations behind the business of Christian apologetics. So, our narratives are generally more fluid, the pay-off less certain, and the likely consumers for such stories less obvious. When an atheist fields an argument against a believer, it is still reasonably likely that the believer is the actual person we are trying to communicate with. Christian apologetics, by contrast is full of people framing arguments in terms of a confrontation with unbelievers only to produce them for the benefit of other believers. It is in effect a business aimed at producing stories like those told by the pastor above, stories of reassurance.

Let’s come back to the notion that atheists can’t justify our own ethical principles. What does this contention provide when it’s construed in terms of narrative themes? I think the payoff is very clear, namely in the implied contrast. If we non-believers can’t justify our moral principles, so the argument seems to suggest, those who believe in God can. As much as people working this argument may be trying to tell us about the failures of unbelief, they are also claiming a victory for theism, or at least for specific variations of theism.

What is wrong with us, so the story goes, is we cannot justify our moral principles. We may be moral people, but our morality is lacking something, and that something is important. Don’t get me wrong; this story a damned site better than the argument that non-believers are inherently immoral, but this particular concession that we are moral without a sound reason damns us with faint praise.

What’s so infuriating about this is the difficulty of the issue. It really is very difficult to establish a rational justification for ethics. We can often establish reasonable connections between certain basic value judgements and more specific propositions (Kant’s categorical imperative could be used for example to suggest that one ought not to lie to someone else as that would entail reducing them to the status of a means to an end), but providing those basic value judgements with a non-circular justification is damned difficult. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s certainly difficult, and always subject to contention. Is morality deontological or consequentialist? Universal or some variety of relative? These are all pretty difficult questions, and belief in a god simply doesn’t provide an obvious solution to any of them.

When apologists pretend that atheists are uniquely unable to handle the matter, it always strikes me as a rather premature declaration of victory. As often as not, they seem to confound two or more sub-themes in these discussions. When for example a theist claims their oral principles are objective because they have been mandated by God, I find myself at a loss for words. Even an ultimate subject is still a subject, and a morality derived from the will of a subject, even an ultimate subject, is still a subjective ethics. …unless of course one can demonstrate that the subject (God) has Herself based her judgement on something objective. Or perhaps, there is an objective reason why we as subjects are obligated to do what God (that uber-subject) wishes, but that would be stretching the meaning of objectivity a bit thin. I can certainly understand someone expressing skepticism at any of the attempts to establish an objective or absolutist form of ethics, but atheists simply are not uniquely implicated in this problem. I’ve known Christians who handle this issue very well. They are not among those proclaiming to failures of atheist ethical theory to the faithful in their churches.

***

In the end, I think this theme has two significant practical implications:

First, it reverses the point of morality, at least for purposes of the narrative in question. One might expect that the value of ethical behavior would in some sense be found in the behavior itself. Those hawking the notion that atheists are unable to demonstrate a sound basis for our moral judgements are, in those moments at least, shifting the focus of the work at hand. They are in effect, presenting the intellectual justification for morality as an end in itself. The point of morality is in such stories a bit intellectual exercise. I might do right by my neighbor, so the story goes, but I don’t really know why I should do so.

And thus doing right by my neighbor becomes just a little less important.

Second, this theme seems to produce a kind of moral hierarchy. There are those of us who do right, so the story goes, and those who know why we do right, or at least why we should do so. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this kind of division of labor appearing as a theme in apologetics, but it is fascinating to see the way it takes shape in this rhetoric. The authority of the faithful seems to colonize the world at large in these stories, and those of us who are merely moral (at best) are just a little less than those that know why we should be so. Our actions are just a little less significant than those who claim to know the objective basis for moral principles. We can say no, as I surely do, but that’s to be expected of us. The faithful know.

But of course this isn’t simply a claim to authority over the rest of us, and it isn’t even a claim that privileges the perspectives of priests and pastors, much less the avergae everyday believer. It is a claim that privileges the perspectives of apologists. Simple pastors like the man I mentioned in the story above can do their best, but it is up to the smart people who defend the faith to do the real work of ethics. The rest of us, believer and unbeliever alike can be moral, sure, but our morality will always be missing something.

Which of course makes Christian thought into a rather esoteric enterprise.

And no, that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

 

 

Tu Quoque as a Modus Operandi: Rush Limbaugh Doing What He Does Best

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Politics

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rushcigarWhen you catch the other guy doing something wrong, most folks would say that’s an opportunity of sorts, an opportunity to correct them. For some though, it’s license. This is the basis for much of Rush Limbaugh’s schtick. His narratives rarely stray far from the Libs-do-it-too theme. He is particularly fond of saying that he is only “illustrating absurdity with the absurd”, which is a fancy way of saying that his cheap shots are really attempts to undermine some parallel logic on the part of his political enemies. Were such moments carefully tacked to some particular piece of liberal rhetoric, this might be a plausible angle, but this just isn’t generally the case.

If Rush Limbaugh is satire, then it is a particularly adolescent form of satire. Whether or not he is just kidding depends a lot on how much backlash he gets, and whether or not he and his fans feel like distancing themselves from a given comment. All to often, his cheap shots become gospel to a significant segment of the pseudo-conservative public. His game becomes satire precisely when Limbaugh is forced to deal with the absence of a rational case for his position.

Case in point, many people still seem to think Sandra Fluke testified about her own sexual activities and/or that she wanted the public to pay for her contraceptives. She didn’t.

But that’s a different rant. What has my attention today is a rather different gambit, Limbaugh’s efforts to spin the captivity and sexual abuse of three young women in Cleveland Ohio into a diatribe against the welfare state. Media Matters ran a story about Limbaugh’s comments here. The audio is painful to anyone with an ounce of sense, but it’s what I will be commenting on, so my apologies…

Limbaugh’s narrative is slick as Hell. He doesn’t assert that the Cleveland kidnapping has anything directly to do with welfare opportunism; he simply uses the coincidence of an episode of Hawaii 5-0 to field the story. The potential effectiveness of this meme is readily apparent, welfare as a subsidy for kidnappers, the mere thought of it may do more to combat aid to the poor than a thousand stories about the dreaded welfare mother. Limbaugh doesn’t need to assert the truth of his narrative; it is enough to generate the association. Much as he has done with one outrageous suggestion after another, Limbaugh settles for insinuation.

Limbaugh will of course cry foul (or ‘drive-by media’) if people call him on the claim, because of course he never quite made it. But that is a skillful propagandist for you. Long after his audience has forgotten the details of his particular presentation, they will remember the narrative he presented for them. The power of that narrative is what will matter in the long run, and neither the facts of the case, nor the logic of Limbaugh’s half-assed argument will matter in the long run.

But what really interests me is the disclaimer; “I couldn’t help but make the connection. I mean if everybody else in the low-information crowd is gonna use what happens on TV for reality, why can’t I?”

‘Low-information crowd’ is of course a reference to ‘low information voters’ which is how the right wing echo-chamber has taken to referring to liberals. That this summary judgement is utter nonsense has little to do with its value in pseudo-conservative rhetoric, and Limbaugh must know that his own less-than-impressive fan-base will love to think of their enemies as ill-informed. Of course this remark adds another ingredient to that theme, suggesting that liberals rely too much on TV for their information. He doesn’t need a reason to believe this is true, and neither will his fans. It is enough to assert it.

But all of this is the powdered sugar on the brownie, so to peak. The real work of this disclaimer is the suggestion that if there is anything wrong with using a TV show to interpret a news story about which Limbaugh admits himself to be ignorant, well then that fault lies with his liberal opponents. They are the ones who do this for real, Limbaugh is merely showing us how silly they are. This gambit is a tu quoque fallacy at best, or in terms with a little more widespread usage, it is two-wrongs-make-a-right. I think teh average third grader can understand the problem with this gambit, but it’s pretty much standard operational procedure for Limbaugh.

The particular particular utility of this you-do-it-too gambit lies in its conjunction with the inability to field a hard claim in this instance (and so many others). Limbaugh has no evidence that this kidnapping is a welfare scam; he just wants people to associate the two themes, preferably without thinking too much about the details. A quick they-do-it-too serves both to relieve him of responsibility for checking the facts before spouting off about them, and to shift responsibility for his own sleazy gambit to others. If it is shocking that Limbaugh would make (or almost make) such a wildly outrageous claim without any evidence, well then that is all the fault of liberals, because Limbaugh is only satirizing their behavior.

…except it isn’t.

This is Limbaugh advancing a narrative, and past experience has shown it is an effective strategy. Time and again Limbaugh’s fans have adopted his narratives as gospel truth long after the facts should have led any reasonable person to conclude otherwise. There is no satire in the successful propagation of such lies. The tu quoque gambit is there simply to cover his tracks in the event that the backlash proves too strong. When the public tires of answering this kind of idiocy, Rush and his fans stick to their guns.

This is not mere entertainment, and it is not satire. It is a propagandist doing what he does best, which is to deceive the public. The man has made quite a career out of it.

It is the career of a con artist.

Case Studies in Professional Bigotry: Poisoning the Vaginal Well

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Politics

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I suppose the furor over Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke is dying down. The smoke is beginning to settle, and some on the left might be thinking we have gained a victory of sorts. But I wonder.

Ten years from now, how will I remember Sandra Fluke’s testimony? Will I remember what she actually said? Or will I remember Rush Limbaugh’s flagrant misrepresentation of her testimony? Something tells me that most folks will remember Limbaugh’s take. They might not like his insults, but they won’t really remember just how far off the mark his interpretation of her testimony was to begin with.

It’s a common pattern. Folks tend to remember the headline even after the have forgotten the article. They remember the outrageous accusation long after they have forgotten the reasoned rejoinder. They remember the error long after the correction has faded from memory.

And that is of course the point of Limbaugh’s politics. It doesn’t really matter whether or not his critics prove louder than his supporters, much less whether or not they are right and he is wrong. What does matter is that Limbaugh has replaced a substantive debate over the merits of an insurance regulation with one about the imagined sex life of one particular college student.

Rush Limbaugh characterized Fluke’s testimony as a plea for public assistance with contraception to help sustain her personal sex life. The fact that Fluke made no mention whatsoever regarding her own personal sexual activities seems to have escaped Rush Limbaugh, or at least his public comments on the issue.

Subsequent outrage has focused primarily on the ethics of Rush’s personal attacks on Fluke. That Limbaugh has apologized does little to help matters. The apology was limited to his use of two words. It was followed immediately by renewed attempts to misrepresent Fluke’s testimony and eventually stirred into a narrative about sinking to the level of liberal rhetoric (because apparently such tactics are distinctively liberal).

Really, there are too many errors and lies in Limbaugh’s take to correct them all. One hardly knows where to begin!

But herein lies the central problem. What Fluke was actually doing was trying to show the need for the availability of insurance policies that cover contraception. She explained the financial needs for such policies and she testified to the existence of medical uses of contraception beyond birth control. Her testimony only begins to touch upon that latter subject.

One can certainly question Fluke’s presentation. A critic can double check her math on the cost of birth control. He can ask for documentation of the actual cases she mentions (or others like them). He can even raise questions about the total impact of laws requiring the availability of coverage, or the acceptability of Obama’s present compromise with Congress. All of these might be reasonable questions to which reasonable answers might be offered.

We could have such a debate.

And of course some of these arguments are taking place, but they must now take place in the shadow of Limbaugh’s personal attacks. Long before anyone on Fluke’s side of the discussion can begin to answer the real criticisms of Obama’s policy and Fluke’s testimony, they must first wade through the poisoned waters of Rush’s lurid imagination. And the real problem here is that imagination, perverse as it is, remains far more vivid than the details of the actual political decision at hand.

This is a victory for Limbaugh and the right wing echo chamber. One may pray that it proves to be a Pyrrhic victory, that he and those who have joined in Limbaugh’s tactics will pay dearly in lost advertizing revenues and diminished public status.

But that is a vain hope.

What Rush and his ilk do best is to inject this kind of personal invective into an already difficult subject. He brings public support for the conservative cause, not by appeal to conservative principles, but by triggering the anger of those with little real grasp of conservative politics (much less those of liberals). And those with but a thin grasp of fiscal conservatism or the ironic politics of Federalism may yet be moved by contempt for the morals of a loose woman. This the bet made by Limbaugh and others mocking Fluke.

It is unfortunately a sound bet.

In the end, Limbaugh’s story will prove more compelling than Fluke’s, not because it is the more sound argument, but because it is the more psychologically moving.

This is the power of Limbaugh, of Oreilly, of Hannity, of Savage, of Coulter, of Beck, and of all the other professional bigots working the right wing echo chamber. It is a force for which the left has never found an adequate solution.

But the problem is not simply that the din of slut-shaming, race-baiting, and liberal bashing keeps the left on the defensive (and often beats left wing defenses outright), it is that these voices have also beaten the conservative thinkers of the nation as well. Those who might have sound reason to question left wing politics have long since fallen to the way side in American politics, their own points just as difficult to hear above the thunder and clash of the right wing hate-machine.

And what passes for ‘conservative’ comes ever closer to the living caricature that people such as Limbaugh embody.

The United States has been shifting steadily to the right, led not by the Republican party leadership or conservative intellectuals so much as the shrill voices of folks such as Limbaugh. Voices that are always happy to tell us this woman is a slut, that man is a communist, or that those on any form of public assistance are as undeserving as the day is long. It is frustrating to see how often these herders of prejudice have defeated the left in one political conflict after another.

It is still more alarming to see that people calling themselves “conservative” are increasingly unable to recognize their own political heritage, or take note of established political compromises. Cap&Trade (a free market counter-point to environmentalism) is now a socialist ploy. Because it is a Federal rather than state policy, Obamacare is a radical effort to destroy the free market. And Obama’s current compromise proposal parallels that offered in 28 states. While right wing bigots do their best to convince the public that the President’s new policies constitute an unprecedented attack on religious freedom, it is in fact a variant on policies already established in other jurisdictions.

Far from a demand that the public pay for her private sex life, Fluke sought to explain the benefits of covering birth control under insurance plans. The wisdom of such provisions has already been born out by the insurance industry itself which recognizes the option as a long-term cost saving measure. That private individuals, particularly those struggling their way through school, may find it difficult to pay for contraception should come as no surprise to anyone who has actually tried to live on a student’s budget. But insurance companies can discount the present cost of contraception against the savings it generates. It is for precisely this reason that such coverage need not lead to extra cost for anyone, much less the fantasies of public assistance touted by Limbaugh and his fans.

For women such as Fluke, the issue may well be the chance to get through school before finding themselves at the mercy of their own bodies. It is well enough to tell these women they should take responsibility for their own choices, but men do not have the choice pressed upon them with quite the same degree of urgency. Of course an accidental father may be required to pay child support, but that still falls far short of the consequences for a woman who must bear the child (and who will be far more likely to raise it). Insurance coverage makes possible a degree of protection from unwanted pregnancy (among other things) which would otherwise be unavailable to them. In practice, it can mean the difference between a successful education and dropping out of a program.

Limbaugh’s slut-shaming is nothing other than an attempt to dismiss the value of such benefits, to ensure that they are not weighed against the value of religious freedom as conservatives are now defining it.

Of course institutions such as the Conference of Catholic Bishops will argue that providing such policies contradicts their faith. This too is a value demanding our attention. But how far does the right of religious freedom extend? Does it really entitle an institution such as Georgetown to deny the option to its students? The requirement that insurance companies serving their students provide such coverage on their own is a reasonable compromise on the issue, one well established at the state level. Whether or not a co-payment would prove necessary or even acceptable remains an outlier in this discussion, but it is needn’t prove to be a deal-breaker.

If the Obama administration has shown unusual aggression on the issue, so has the Council of catholic Bishops, and so have the Republicans. Time and again, Boehner and other Republicans have sought to preserve the religious liberties of institutions to discriminate against individuals on religious grounds. (Witness the Head-Start debacle of 2005.) If their is an argument to be made that such policies protect the religious liberties of corporate entities, another argument can be made that they threaten the liberties of those that deal with such entities. Ultimately, the Republican vision of religious freedom is most salient to the interests of those with significant political power. It has little to offer the individuals who may for one reason or another find themselves doing business with such entities.

The public must now weigh the value of preserving religious freedom for entities such as Georgetown against the possible costs to women such as Fluke and her classmates. There is every reason to hear the testimony of both sides, and to find a solution which facilitates the interests of all concerned.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee heard the concerns of those in religious institutions. What Fluke sought to do was explain the concerns of women who must deal with those institutions. There is no reason that testimony could not have been given due consideration.

California Admitted as a Free State, …Oh Wait!

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Education, History, Native American Issues, Politics

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Okay, so we just started a section on slavery and the civil war in my American history class. One thing that always irritates me here, or maybe it just amuses me, I don’t know… Anyway, I think about it whenever I cover this subject. Every textbook I have ever used on American history explains that California was admitted as a free state under the terms of the Compromise of 1850.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is a little known law passed in California that very year, ostensibly for the protection of Indians. The law imposes a $50.00 fine on anyone forcing an Indian to work against his will. So, that should be good, right?

Actually, no.

The law also contains the following provisions:

When an Indian is convicted of an offence before a Justice of the Peace punishable by a fine, any white person may, by consent of the Justice, give bond for said Indian, conditioned for the payment of said fine and costs, and in such case the Indian shall be compelled to work for the person so bailing, until he has discharged or cancelled the fine assessed against him…

and

Any Indian able to work and support himself in some honest calling, not having wherewithal to maintain himself, who shall be found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral and profligate course of life, shall be liable to be arrested on the complaint of any resident citizen of the county, and brought before any Justice of the Peace of the proper county, Mayor or Recorder of any incorporated town or city, who shall examine said accused Indian, and hear the testimony in relation thereto, and if said Justice, Mayor or Recorder shall be satisfied that he is a vagrant, as above set forth, he shall make out a warrant under his hand and seal, authorizing and requiring the officer having him in charge or custody, to hire out such vagrant within twenty four hours to the best bidder, by public notice given as he shall direct, for the highest price that can be had, for any term not exceeding four months; and such vagrant shall be subject to and governed by the provisions of this Act, regulating guardians and minors, during the time for which he has been so hired.

Oh there is a lot more to the act, and plenty of reassuring clauses that appear to keep people from exploiting natives, but it should not take a lot of imagination to read between the lines here and see how this story actually went down. To say that this law opened up the native labor-market to exploitation would be putting it mildly. …too mildly.

In essence, the law made it illegal to enslave an Indian, at least on one’s own initiative, but if someone was caught being an Indian on a city street, the city could bond him over to you for a price. Oh yes, folks would have to go through the trouble of slighting the moral integrity of the Indian first, but how difficult do you think it would be to find a white guy willing to do that?

Not very.

It’s not the most efficient form of slavery one could devise, but it is slavery non-the-less, and that is why it always bugs me to see textbook after textbook announce that California was admitted to the Union as a free state under the terms of the compromise of 1850.

…in the very year they created a legal procedure for enslaving Indians.

Oh I get it; this kind of issue simply falls outside the scope of the narrative in question. It was not even on the horizons of those debating the major issues of the day in Congress. So, if one is recounting the events leading up to the Civil War, then this piece of information does not really change that story much. Neither does the existence of a viable slave-trade in the interior Southwest. If one is focused on the question of slavery as it was framed in the national politics of the day, then yes, California was certainly admitted as a free state.

Or is that the problem, the terms of that debate?

The bottom line is that ‘slavery’ is just a word, and you can choose to use it or not as easily as you can any other term regardless of the realities of the labor conditions in question. So, historians can skate right past these instances of captive labor (much as the great figures of the era did in their own approach to the issue) while focusing on the institutional forms of slavery that were the main issues of the day. But of course that same sleight of hand is necessary to cap off the story of the Civil War in the standard way, describing it as bringing about the end of slavery in America.

To give closure to the issue of slavery in our national storyline, one has to ignore the use of debt-peonage in conjunction with Jim Crow Laws, or at least classify them as a whole new kind of problem. Using the word “slavery” in the chapters leading up the Civil War and dropping it afterwards creates the illusion that the new social problems are significantly different than the old ones. This approach suggests that the problems associated with slavery were somehow resolved with the closing chapters of Reconstruction, perhaps not to the satisfaction of all concerned, but resolved nonetheless. And Jim Crow then becomes a whole different kind of problem, as do a host of similar practices.

Just like the California Law for the protection of the Indian.

***

Note: The law can be found in the California Statutes from 1850. It is also included in the primary documents for the following textbook:

Albert L. Hurtado, Peter Iverson. Major Problems in American Indian History: Documents and Essays. Second Edition. (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

Wrestler on a Machine (Warning: Spoilers!)

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Movies

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So, I finally watched “The Wrestler,” and I almost liked it.

Almost.

I find myself wondering, at what point does failure to resolve a conflict amount to the same thing as letting the hand of God resolve it for you. The movie goes well out of its way to show us that this character has depth, that he has feelings, that the bits and pieces of his broken life matter to him in deeply personal ways.

All of which just makes the final ending such a disappointment.

The way I read it anyway, the central problem is what is he going to do with his life now that wrestling is over. Sadly, the final answer appears to be “pretend that it isn’t.” The move is tantamount to suicide, of course, but that is beside the point. It really doesn’t matter if we imagine the main character dying two minutes after the closing credits or surviving the match, even somehow doing another one. The bottom line is that this solution doesn’t work unless we ignore the very premise which led to it, namely that his heart won’t allow him to wrestle.

Of course the main character has his reasons which he delivers in a compelling speech to the love interest he is turning his back on to go wrestle, but that is the main problem. This guy can’t find any other way to proceed with his life than to go back in the ring? I think the writers believed in this character less than they wanted the audience to. In the end, they could not let him be anything but a meat-head. And all the rest goes out the window with that decision.

He took the easy way out.

So, did the people who made this movie.