The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[AbdulAlhazred]

Primitive is a very common and widely used word describing a vast technological difference or a lack of sophistication. And it is simply a fact that this sort of technological difference existed in history with "primitive" being the world to describe that.
Saying that "a toolkit has been developed over a, literally, immeasurable length of time." doesn't mean anything. Everyones toolkit has. Only that some tools are much more efficient, but require more knowledge and infrastructure to maintain so not everyone has access to them.

This is silly. It is like the delusional notion that some lifeforms are 'primitive'. Every single living thing we know of on Earth today descends from LUCA, they are all equally shaped by evolutionary pressures. Some happen to have occupied niches/environments in which the optimum solution was reached long ago. That does not make them 'more primitive'.

In a similar way, when an Amazonian Native is living in the rain forest, they are accessing a toolkit just as sophisticated and INFINITELY more iterated on, as some European American living in the US. It is just different. Their society has not developed the same level of operational capabilities in the sense of being able to employ materials science to make a wide variety of things. Calling that 'primitive' is a pretty bad idea. Those people were able to exist in their environment successfully for many millennia. Ours will be destroyed by our 'sophisticated' methods in a couple more generations. Who is really the primitive here?

Other illustrations of the genuine silliness of this notion: It has been discovered that the traditional land management practices in the Sahel are FAR more effective than those which western agencies, with all their supposed scientific advancement, attempted to impose. The people engaging in these practices have a very sophisticated understanding of how manage their land, and employ ecological and biological concepts which were completely unknown and not understood by our supposedly 'more advanced' experts. Likewise, nomadic pastoralists, such as the Masai in Kenya, have an extremely sophisticated understanding and practice of range management. Western interests came in and tried to 'improve production', etc. and all they ended up doing was wrecking the range. Turns out 1000's of years of native technology, and that is what it is, technology and science, far outstripped the so called 'experts'.

I agree, modern western civilization has any number of advantages and capabilities that traditional societies generally lack. The problem is, it cuts both ways, and when you label one as 'advanced' and one as 'primitive', you are simply mistaken. Nor do I think it is right to say that modern urban civilization has a toolkit which is just as ancient as anyone else's. Urbanization and industrialization are a true change of paradigm and rely largely on a new and novel set of tools. I mean, sure, Europe has in theory traditional medicinal, building, horticultural, etc. techniques that are ancient, but they are not the basis of most of our modern society.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It inevitably touches history.

In the actual world we live in, their are reasons - processes of social causation - which explain the diffusion of technologies.

In FRPGing, to posit (i) differences in technology, with (ii) no evident explanation of those differences, is implicitly (iii) to buy into the notion that there are reasons inherent in peoples that explain those differences. Which is the reproduction of racist tropes.


Why has there not been the diffusion of technology from Cormyr to the Grippli?

Again, I think I would look at it in a different light. The people in Cormyr have a toolkit which is adapted to their environment and lifeways. The Grippli equally have the same thing, the toolkit is simply different. It is certainly possible to ask why any given technical innovation hasn't diffused from one to the other, but there isn't a 'gradient' in any overall sense. And of course the situation is more complex, there are clearly interrelationships between technologies. So if manufacturing things, probably ceramics, using ovens and heat (charcoal presumably), is not a thing that can be accomplished in a swamp, then Grippli are not going to achieve iron. They simply will not get to smelting, it isn't an activity which can be undertaken in their environment. Some people from Cormyr could show them how to do it, but it won't matter. Likewise, the people of Cormyr are not going to learn how to make poison darts from certain types of swamp frogs.

Again, maybe the steel weapons of the Cormyrians are more effective than the bone, stone, and wood ones of the Grippli. They are not 'more advanced', simply more effective.

 

[Ixal]

This is silly. It is like the delusional notion that some lifeforms are 'primitive'. Every single living thing we know of on Earth today descends from LUCA, they are all equally shaped by evolutionary pressures. Some happen to have occupied niches/environments in which the optimum solution was reached long ago. That does not make them 'more primitive'.

In a similar way, when an Amazonian Native is living in the rain forest, they are accessing a toolkit just as sophisticated and INFINITELY more iterated on, as some European American living in the US. It is just different. Their society has not developed the same level of operational capabilities in the sense of being able to employ materials science to make a wide variety of things. Calling that 'primitive' is a pretty bad idea. Those people were able to exist in their environment successfully for many millennia. Ours will be destroyed by our 'sophisticated' methods in a couple more generations. Who is really the primitive here?

Other illustrations of the genuine silliness of this notion: It has been discovered that the traditional land management practices in the Sahel are FAR more effective than those which western agencies, with all their supposed scientific advancement, attempted to impose. The people engaging in these practices have a very sophisticated understanding of how manage their land, and employ ecological and biological concepts which were completely unknown and not understood by our supposedly 'more advanced' experts. Likewise, nomadic pastoralists, such as the Masai in Kenya, have an extremely sophisticated understanding and practice of range management. Western interests came in and tried to 'improve production', etc. and all they ended up doing was wrecking the range. Turns out 1000's of years of native technology, and that is what it is, technology and science, far outstripped the so called 'experts'.

I agree, modern western civilization has any number of advantages and capabilities that traditional societies generally lack. The problem is, it cuts both ways, and when you label one as 'advanced' and one as 'primitive', you are simply mistaken. Nor do I think it is right to say that modern urban civilization has a toolkit which is just as ancient as anyone else's. Urbanization and industrialization are a true change of paradigm and rely largely on a new and novel set of tools. I mean, sure, Europe has in theory traditional medicinal, building, horticultural, etc. techniques that are ancient, but they are not the basis of most of our modern society.

The only silly thing here is to argue that all toolkits are equal. They simply are not. A simple (primitive) toolkit for the Amazonas simply far behind the toolkit of developed nation. Just look at for example medicine, including treating diseases prevalent in the Amazonas. Even the "foreign but more advanced" toolkit would be better suited for living in the Amazonas as the one of the natives themselves, simply because it gives you more tools to alter the environment.

The reason why the traditional land management in the Sahel are more suited to the region is because they do not have the tools in their kit to implement all the suggestions. If they had access to equipment like the western world has then their traditional form of land management would be clearly inferior.

Again, I think I would look at it in a different light. The people in Cormyr have a toolkit which is adapted to their environment and lifeways. The Grippli equally have the same thing, the toolkit is simply different. It is certainly possible to ask why any given technical innovation hasn't diffused from one to the other, but there isn't a 'gradient' in any overall sense. And of course the situation is more complex, there are clearly interrelationships between technologies. So if manufacturing things, probably ceramics, using ovens and heat (charcoal presumably), is not a thing that can be accomplished in a swamp, then Grippli are not going to achieve iron. They simply will not get to smelting, it isn't an activity which can be undertaken in their environment. Some people from Cormyr could show them how to do it, but it won't matter. Likewise, the people of Cormyr are not going to learn how to make poison darts from certain types of swamp frogs.

Again, maybe the steel weapons of the Cormyrians are more effective than the bone, stone, and wood ones of the Grippli. They are not 'more advanced', simply more effective.

No. Iron and especially steel tools and weapons are more advanced than bone and stone weapons, not only because they are more effective but also they require much more knowledge to craft. The same way a laser edged tungsten steel blade would be more advanced than a hand forged steel sword.
The idea that everything is equal is simply not true.

 

[Monadology]

The rejection of a sliding scale from 'primitive' to 'advanced' in the description of technology and culture does not imply and certainly is not equivalent to the claim that 'everything is equal.'

The whole point of AbdulAlhazred's evolutionary analogy as I understood it is that comparing these things on a scale is incoherent. The notion of 'equal' depends on the idea that we can compare things on some kind of scale. The whole point is that evaluation of the 'quality' of technology has to be contextual and fine-grained.

This allows room for the notion that there are technologies from the so-called 'developed' world that will, in fact, be contextually quite useful for those in the 'developing' world, so being able to point to modern medicine is not quite the counterexample you make it out to be. It's only a counterexample to the implausible position that all human cultures have exhaustively perfected and discovered the technologies useful in their context, which no one in this thread has suggested.

EDIT: I'd also like to pose the question: what useful work does a framework that approaches the analysis of technology primarily in terms of how 'primitive' or 'advanced' it is actually accomplish? What's the loss of abandoning a coarse-grained, linear scale in this case? Why is it important to defend it?

 

[Malmuria]

The use of primitive culture has been used from the nineteenth century to the present day to justify colonial appropriations. It is inherently judgmental and used to assert the intellectual superiority of the West (in which technological advancement was associated with the concept of "Civilization"). It treats contemporary people as if they were in the "stone age," and thus relics of a different era, minimizing their knowledges and world views. Until the mid 20th century (at best), the "primitivism" of groups was thought to be biologically determined.

There are mountains of research dedicated to tracing this history and its relation to European colonialism. Something I said upthread, is that one can be aware of this intellectual history and still engage with creative art that makes use of it, dnd included. But I will say that it is frustrating when you bring it up, either just to note it or deal with it in the game in some productive way, only for it to be immediately dismissed as a non-existent problem.

With regards to CM, for an author to try to write an adventure for mass audience that presents these issues in a way that is different than is typical, only for the editor to come back in and a) add language that the author considers problematic ("primitive") b) remove a faction of good-aligned humanoids and c) make the adventure all about killing the inherently evil-aligned humanoids must be extremely frustrating and feel very disrespectful (and incidentally it's bad design, since it seems to have turned an adventure with multiple paths and multiple factions into a linear combat fest).

 

[Doug McCrae]

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION

This post proposes a possible pathway whereby the ideas of scientific racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard could have influenced the AD&D 1e orc and half-orc via very similar ideas expressed in 1949 in the letters pages of the magazine Planet Stories. As described upthread there is a remarkable correspondence between Grant and Stoddard's notions about black people having higher fertility rates and dominant genetic traits, and "fecund" orcs (AD&D 1e PHB) and 90% of half-orcs being "basically orcs" (AD&D 1e MM).

Gary Gygax, born in 1938, was an avid reader of 1950s science fiction and fantasy magazines. He read back issues going back to 1940:

From 1950 through 1956 I read about every book and magazine of F & SF published in the US, and I bought used pulps so as to read back through the entire 1940 on era.

Source

Letters from Edwin Sigler expressing similar ideas to those of Grant and Stoddard were published in the 1948 Fall and 1949 Spring issues of Planet Stories. Planet Stories 1949 Spring:

As to allowing intermarriages that is silly. The victim of such action could not inherit any vigor from the lower race because it isn't there and he couldn't inherit any good qualities from the other parent because only scum would wish to intermarry. Since the term here refers to Negro and white marriages mainly, the following would be the result. The poor child would be neither white or black. What strength he might have inherited from the white would be submerged in the slothfulness of the black...​

​

No, the law against mixing races serves to protect the possible child as well and has been observed as far back as recorded history runs. Even the ancient Jews practiced it...​

​

It is the law of heredity that the lower must always drag down the higher and a person is a fool that attempts to violate it.​

Sigler, in both letters, uses the racial slur "mongrel" to refer to people who are biracial. Planet Stories 1948 Fall: "As far as these ancient civilizations are concerned you cannot prove anything by them because the races that built them are not the races that occupy those lands now. They are merely mongrel descendants of the builder races."

In JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), orcs are often described as "swart" or "black". Orc-human hybrids are encountered several times. Their creation is a "black evil" and the result of a "foul craft."

A huge orc-chieftain… leaped into the chamber... His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red.​

​

Presently two orcs came into view. One was... of a small breed, black-skinned, with wide and snuffling nostrils.​

​

In the last years of Denethor I the race of uruks, black orcs of great strength, first appeared out of Mordor.​

​

These creatures of Isengard, these half-orcs and goblin-men that the foul craft of Saruman has bred, they will not quail at the sun.​

​

Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!​

It seems quite possible that Gygax took Tolkien's orcs and half-orcs and, probably unconsciously, combined them with views openly expressed by Sigler or his like-minded contemporaries to create D&D half-orc "mongrels" that "favor the orcish strain heavily." (AD&D 1e MM) This post is not saying that Gygax agreed with Sigler.

 

[pemerton]

Ask that to the designers of the FR.

I don't need to. I know! The designers drew in pulp tropes, which in turn reflect "scientific" racism. That's the point of (much of) this thread.

why has there not been a diffusion of technology from Europe, through Costal Africa, to Central/Interior Africa? Or from Europe to the Natives in North America? Or China/Japan to South East Asia?

There has been. I don't know how much time you've spent in central Africa, but if you go there you will find that people live in houses modelled on European designs, wear clothes that are European or North American in conception, use mobile phones that have been imported, etc. One effect of colonialism has been to generate this sort of rapid diffusion of technologies.

If you are suggesting that there was not diffusion of technology from China to other parts of Eurasia prior to the period of European domination of world affairs, then you are wrong. There obviously was.

That technology is not adopted is hardly unheard of. A concrete example would be that Shaka Zulu refused to buy guns when it was offered to him as he thought short spears (impi) and shields are superior.

Even today groups and tribes remain who voluntarily live without technology or are even consciously left alone by the rest of the world and remain on a stone age technological level.

Shaka Zulu is one actor in a brief period. The ANC used guns.

PNG has been colonised for around 100 years, and some parts of PNG have had "contact" for less than that. People in PNG wear t-shirts.

There are some Masai who are self-conscious about the maintenance of tradition (of course this is a comportment towards material and other culture that only becomes possible in the context of rapid social change). They use mobile phones.

How long have the Grippli existed in Cormyr? What are the social processes they are participating in? Obviously there is no in-fiction answer to this. But the answer to the question why are they authored in that fashion is straightforward, as I already posted.

 

[pemerton]

I would look at it in a different light. The people in Cormyr have a toolkit which is adapted to their environment and lifeways. The Grippli equally have the same thing, the toolkit is simply different. It is certainly possible to ask why any given technical innovation hasn't diffused from one to the other, but there isn't a 'gradient' in any overall sense. And of course the situation is more complex, there are clearly interrelationships between technologies. So if manufacturing things, probably ceramics, using ovens and heat (charcoal presumably), is not a thing that can be accomplished in a swamp, then Grippli are not going to achieve iron.

I don't think I used the notion of a gradient. I did talk about differences. You own use of the verb to achieve shows that there are some challenges in locutions here.

That said, Australia has no manufacturing capacity for mobile phones, nor any more for cars, yet both are pretty ubiquitous. The previous sentence is also true if "Kenya" is substituted for "Australia", except that Kenya has never had a manufacturing capacity for cars.

Notions of core and periphery can be useful for trying to get a handle on patterns of wealth and trade, some dynamics of diffusion, etc. (Such notions are also going to have to be tentative, given that the periphery (eg Mongolia, or Britain) can feed back into the core in surprising and dramatic ways.) It seems that any "realistic" treatment of the Grippli vis-a-vis Cormyr would have to accept that they are going to be on the periphery, in the same sort of way that (in Europe) Albania has been peripheral in a way that Austria has not been, or (in the US) South Dakota is peripheral in a way that California is not. We might except Grippli manufacturing capacity and trading significance to be less than found in the core of Cormyr. But we wouldn't expect "primitiveness" in the sense of - say - a resolute determination to not use those metal knives or axes that are available. Or as far as the waterproofing of houses is concerned, we wouldn't expect any significant difference in performance between the houses built by Grippli and the houses built in the nearest Cormyrean villages. Whereas we would probably expect fewer opera houses or grand cathedrals among the Grippli than in the Cormyrean capital.

maybe the steel weapons of the Cormyrians are more effective than the bone, stone, and wood ones of the Grippli. They are not 'more advanced', simply more effective.

modern western civilization has any number of advantages and capabilities that traditional societies generally lack. The problem is, it cuts both ways, and when you label one as 'advanced' and one as 'primitive', you are simply mistaken. Nor do I think it is right to say that modern urban civilization has a toolkit which is just as ancient as anyone else's. Urbanization and industrialization are a true change of paradigm and rely largely on a new and novel set of tools. I mean, sure, Europe has in theory traditional medicinal, building, horticultural, etc. techniques that are ancient, but they are not the basis of most of our modern society.

I don't think notions of "primitive" or "advanced" are terribly useful. But notions of causal dependence can be useful. You gave an example: smelting iron is causally dependent on access to certain resources. Perhaps a bit more intricately, having access to vast quantities of steel is dependent on having railways to cart ore and coal, which are in term dependent on having access to vast quantities of steel - this is (one example of) the self-sustaining causal process of industrialisation that can emerge only under pretty distinct conditions.

Which relates to your remarks about a "novel set of tools". This is, at its core, the rationalisation/technicalisation thesis found in (eg) Weber and Hodgson. In one sense, this social form is very durable - once it emerges, it appears that it absorbs/destroys all others that it comes into contact with. (One version of this idea is Weber's "iron cage"; another is Marx's idea of the power of liberal capitalism to dissolve all other relations of production.) In another sense, though, there is no reason to think it is can last - Weber flagged as the limit the consumption of fossil fuels; it seems more likely now that the limit is the consumption of atmospheric capacity. In this way it is different from hunter-gatherer or pastoralist technologies which have shown themselves to be very durable on their own terms (I use that last qualification because they have also shown themselves highly liable to destruction/absoprtion by industrial modernity - see the opening sentences of this paragraph).

 

[pemerton]

The reason why the traditional land management in the Sahel are more suited to the region is because they do not have the tools in their kit to implement all the suggestions. If they had access to equipment like the western world has then their traditional form of land management would be clearly inferior.

I don't think this is true. Or at least I doubt that you have any evidence for its truth.

I say the above because I remember a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a professor of agricultural science, who was talking about research he had done in Benin. This showed that the adoption of techniques recommended by the FAO supposedly to increase production were actually, over the medium-to-long term, reducing production because those techniques - by changing land and plant forms - were destabilising micro-climates that had generated necessary rainfall.

My guess is that my previous paragraph would be an example of the sort of thing @AbdulAlhazred had in mind in his post.

 

[aramis erak]

I honestly think far too many people are reading way to much into way too many elements of various fantasy settings.

Also, things like "Since animal comparisons were used to demean ethnicities" is being used to falsely accuse anthropomorphic and/or uplift animals of being racist content about those ethnicities... Overgeneralization. Looking for offense by misattribution of causality. Anthropomorphs in fantasy are usually not stand-ins for some historic group; they're usually there specifically to NOT be some other ethicity.

Just because Tolkien's Orcs are evil and deformed Mongols, that doesn't mean that those in other works, even those which draw heavily from Tolkien, are aware of Tolkien's inspiration/source, let alone share it. Fundamentally, the trope of orcs isn't related to Mongols anymore. It's outgrown the origin. It's become a species, not just a culture, outside of Tolkien's works and the games directly derived from them.