D&D and Racial Essentialism

[Elphilm]

But it's interesting to note that there are no Numernoreans (to the best of my recall) that are orcish in their outlook - even when they invade the island of the Valar, they are motivated by pride - which is, in the right degree, a noble sentiment - and are not aiming at the destruction of beauty and civilisation, nor motivated by the base greed or hatred, in the way that orcs are.

In addition to what Celebrim wrote about pride, you might want to consider the Black Númenóreans. The Mouth of Sauron is said to be their descendant, for one.

 

[billd91]

Frankly, I don't think much of the blog. Someone's thinking way too hard about his games.

When contemplating playing the member of another species in games like D&D, in order to even attempt to play something other than a human in funny ears (or in a beard, with harry feet, etc), the game has to define something different about the species in question and it only has limited space to do it. Thinking too hard about a few paragraphs or a couple of columns defining general dwarven culture and worldviews is probably a waste of time... unless you're using to provide a more complete picture in which case you'll probably just be accused of more essentialism.

The fact of the matter is, most games probably don't do enough to illustrate a different species' worldview and culture, or interesting nuances within it. And, perhaps just as badly, too few players really push at what it means to play an elf other than being a stereotype of what the game says about the race or a direct counter of that stereotype. But spending a lot of time wielding a political science degree to engage in extended literary criticism of elements of the game is pretty masturbatory, if you ask me. I'll use my poli sci background to come up with interesting political relationships, figure out how they'd best develop in-game, and try to add to the richness of my campaign for the benefit of my players.

 

[Mark]

Use of the term "race" to describe other sentient species was an outdated term biologically since before the first RPG was penned. It was used in literary sources from earlier periods that informed early RPGs and I have felt for a long time that it should have been phased out.

 

[Ariosto]

"Race" in that context means "people". It is chiefly a cultural reference, but in the case of the fantasy folk of mythology there are peoples with associated physiologies. Going back to the sources, that is in the immediately relevant cases really not so clear cut; Dwarves, Elves and Trolls can get mixed up in Norse mythology. What a poet calls an Elf might seem to us a Dwarf, or a named Dwarf might seem more a Troll or Giant, and the distinction between Trolls and Giants might not be so neat as in a game.

It would be rather hard, I think, to be a Centaur with a merely human body, harder than for Chiron to break type and become a famous teacher.

The important thing to remember is that gods and monsters are products not of biology but of mythology -- and, above all, that they are not human.

 

[Celebrim]

The important thing to remember is that gods and monsters are products not of biology but of mythology -- and, above all, that they are not human.

In fact, that they are not human is often the whole point. Fantasy and Science Fiction share that they invent The Other primarily to compare and contrast it with humanity. Quite often (and I'd like to say 'most of the time'), the author is not trying to say, "Humanity is like this.", but rather, "Humanity is NOT like this, and by contrasting humanity with things that it is not, we might gain a better grasp of that slippery question of what humanity is."

It's always hardest to see yourself. Without something to compare and contrast to, it's almost impossible to see yourself.

So fantasy might be interested in the question, "Do humans have free will?", and it might respond by trying to imagine a race that clearly does or doesn't have free will and then comparing and contrasting humanity with the invention to answer the question, "Is humanity like the race that clearly doesn't have free will, or is it different?"

Likewise, science fiction might be interested in the questions of how much we hold to be universal is actually just a product of our particular biology, and so imagination sentient beings with very different biology to see if they do or do not share some 'universal value'.

The point of these excercises is that the thing imagined is not human. If everything we imagine is limited to being human, we not only greatly limit our capacity to imagine, but we are also resting on the unquestioned belief in what you might call 'sapient essentialism', that underneath everything possible is the same and shares the same values. I'm not without empathy for why someone would denounce attempts to create 'The Other', as I am well aware that the creation of 'The Other' is related to much of humanities self-justification for being inhuman to one another, but conversely I think that demonizing every attempt to look at 'The Other' as being motivated by this immoral purpose is to be willfully blind and to rest your moral convictions on a very unstable surface.

As for whether the creation of 'The Other' rests on differences in 'Biology' vs. 'Spirituality', I don't think it matters that much except for the comparitively trivial question of which genera to slot the story into. If 'The Other' is a stand in for some real world ethnic group, I think we'd all agree that it doesn't matter much whether they are being demonized on the basis of supposedly inferior biology or inferior spirituality. I think that for these purposes we can use 'biology' and 'spirituality' somewhat interchangably as two different languages for describing essentially the same thing. It doesn't matter that much most of the time if Mind Flayers or Aliens or irredemably wicked as a result of their biology or if their biology makes them irredemably wicked (when it does matter its precisely because the author is trying to get at the question of whether there is something more than the material). For myself, I often bounce back and forth between describing humanity in terms of biological instincts and spiritual dispositions, and I don't think of myself as talking of two different things but of approaching the same subject from two different sides of the coin.

 

[Ariosto]

I think it's often to the point that beings of myth are part human; not in the "half-human" sense, but in having only part of what makes a whole human being. They embody aspects of humanity, bringing them into sharp relief for our entertainment and reflection. They do not live, but are told.

That can be awkward if one wants to tell a story that is in fact not about mythic things but about temporal and topical things.

On the other hand, such archetypal roles can be powerful in a game of fantasy role-playing.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Really? Name two. Two specific viewpoints that not only span the entire species but all points in history as well. Or, heck, we'll only go back, say, two thousand years. Show me a two outlooks that span all cultures.

Death is scary.

All of the others I can think of (about half a dozen) will get us into discussions that violate forum rules, because half the room will freak out, insisting that they don't think that way. Which is true, because they don't have to consciously think that way. Their behaviors, however, point to implicit assumptions and concepts.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I think the folks who did the Human Genome thing, one of the first things they announced is that there is no genetic marker for race (in humans).

Of course there isn't. Race is a largely social construct, and not at all a biological one. The fact that we even had to have that announcement makes me weep for the future.

Check out Faces of America.

 

[Ariosto]

As for whether the creation of 'The Other' rests on differences in 'Biology' vs. 'Spirituality', I don't think it matters that much except for the comparitively trivial question of which genera to slot the story into.

I consider it more than trivial that human beings are real, whereas Fairies and Dragons are imaginary (or so is my belief).

 

[Celebrim]

I consider it more than trivial that human beings are real, whereas Fairies and Dragons are imaginary (or so is my belief).

I agree that its not a trivial point, but would like to point out that however important it is it has no relation to mine. A person could conceivably believe dragons are real, or they could believe they are not real, and it wouldn't really have in bearing on whether they believed it was important that the imaginary component of an invented other was grounded in imaginary biology or imaginary spirituality. You could believe that biology is distinguishable from spirituality in that some imagined biology is concievably possible but you believe that all imagined spirituality is impossible, and I don't see how that harms my point.

If we invent an other using speculative biology or handwave the invention with 'magic' or fantastic imaginary laws, the important point is that this other you created is an invented literary device. The faerie or the dragons power over the imagination has to do with speculation far removed from biology, but that doesn't give it less hold over the imagination. An alien whose genesis is in speculations about variant biology, may still be put to the purpose of answering questions of moral and ethical import. The plausiblity of this device and your willingness to suspend disbelief for the purposes are separate questions to the literary purposes that the invented other is put to. Imagination is imagination. For these purposes, I don't see the question of how the imagination was fired as being that important. The main difference is that we categorize one creation as 'fantasy', and the other is 'science fiction'. While each genera tends to use the concept of the other in distinctive ways that the other does not (science fiction rarely uses aliens to represent anthromorpic evil, and when it does it veers toward fantasy), either could use or not use what the blogger calls 'racial essentialism'. Neither biology or spirituality is particularly attached or detached from the idea, and I don't think the blogger harms his point by veering between fantasy and science fiction so much as he harms it in other ways.