I rather like the idea that elves are incredibly conservative, but not in a way humans would recognize. The world they long for is so old, it goes right through human ideas of conservatism and back out the other side. The Elder Kingdoms didn't have judicial systems, or monetary systems, or even commerce as we'd understand it. They didn't have anything we'd recognize as laws. Instead, they had a bewildering web of esoteric customs and ancient pacts so old that their original import had been forgotten even by the elves. Occasionally, one of the Elvenlords would just suddenly draw their enchanted blade--probably named eldarion letharniel, the blade of strife or something--and behead a seemingly random onlooker, and every elf present would know exactly what subtle infraction that person had committed. That world was cruel, but it was also full of passion and beauty and tragedy and life, so much more then the drab grey world we know today.
The elves, as elves are wont to do, mourn their fallen kingdoms in songs of such beauty and power that anyone who hears them is transported to that long-lost time, and loses themselves in the sorrow of the elves, never to see again the majesty of...wait a minute. Stop singing! That sucked for literally everyone who wasn't an elf! Yes, it did! That's why you don't have majestic kingdoms of whatever anymore. No, I don't want your pamphlet.
That's actually pretty much how I do treat elves in my world. They don't actually starve to death very much, but they do lose track of time, and they mostly can't function very well in human society. Most elves live out in the woods and are never seen by humans--the ones that are are vagabonds, rarely capable of holding down a job or maintaining friendships with shorter-lived races--I mean, you turn your back and they up and die while you're not looking.
Oh, I like this. I like this a lot.
but again your basing that on human art styles which because humans only have 30 years to express themselves before another generation wants the limelight means that styles change quickly.
Maybe Elves spend there years crafting a single seed into a 1000 acre espallier woodland, where everything from the deep humus layer to the species of birds in the canopy is part of a grand design. Trees change significantly over 1000 years and a Elf has the time to appreciate that adaption, even more so when they have the ability to guide the change.
and noone said elfs were interested in society, its there view of whats important is likely quite different
Elves exist in worlds with humans. And orcs. Halflings. Gnomes. Every D&D race. They don't get to be absolutely isolated from other cultures, and the point is that those cultures would be dizzyingly swift to change by comparison to elves. The entire point is that compared to humans, Elves should be stuck under the weight of time, of personal history on a scale no human can ever actually experience.
A human who plants a palm tree may never enjoy the coconut, while an elf can plant a dozen, each one after eating the last, and enjoy them all.
(Coco De Mer takes 20-40 years to flower, and the coconut takes 6-10 years to ripen)
I mean, or the opposite could easily be true.
It'd be maladaptive to be stuck in the past, like literally maladaptive. If you lived potentially hundreds of years but got stuck in your ways in your, say, 40s or 60s or 100s or whatever, you'd probably die before you made it to 300, because you were unable to keep up with change, not just to society, but to environments, methods of warfare, the beings who are around, and so on. Only being incredibly magically powerful might prevent that.
This fits with a lot of fantasy ideas of elves as flighty or capricious, because honestly, unless they were a bit, they'd get locked into mindsets which passed their "best before" date millennia ago.
Yes, an elf that was -utterly- blind to the world around themself beyond an idea of the past would be maladaptive. SOME adaptation is needed just to deal with changes to environment and major societal advances in technology...
But also... uh... Look at Forgotten Realms.
It has been at the same High Fantasy Quasi-Medieval Borderline Renaissance technological level for about 3,000 years. So I think they'd be mostly okay. What they would be out of touch with is social customs of the younger races that advance faster than they do.
But ignoring that:
No. You're confusing "conservative thinking" in the small-c sense with very specific ideologies inaccurately labelled "conservative", which emerged extremely recently and are actually not at all "conservative". None of the Founding Fathers of the US would be "fiscal conservatives" by 2020s standards (or 1980s ones). Nor even the right-wing politicians of the 1940s and 1950s, for that matter. Just look at Eisenhower. It was him who warned us about the "military-industrial complex", not hippies, and advocated for social welfare programs. The whole modern idea of "fiscal conservatism" is just that - modern. It's just as modern as LGBT rights, for example, literally, it's from the same time period - the 1960s and 1970s!
Fair point. Very fair point. Though that particular example was tied up in the "Modern America Setting" and constrained by our systems which, y'know, favor the endless personal acquisition of wealth.
You're talking about people who would PREDATE CAPITALISM. Your logic might hold to some extent for beings who lived 200 years, and whose views got set in stone in their 50s, say, but 500? 700? That's BEFORE CAPITALISM. It's before money was a huge thing at all. They'd think Adam Smith was a dumb whippersnapper, and would have prevented his ideas getting anywhere if they could manage it.
Ea-Nasir has some complaints about his copper business on tablets written in cuneiform that might kind of undermine that idea... It's not the -modern- idea of capitalism, but the exchange of goods and services, the idea of individuals owning means of production, the division of labor largely determined by class, etc are way older than Adam Smith. S'why he wrote about it and codified the idea, but it had already been happening before him.
Debt, too. In which the wealthy lent land, resources, or straight up cash to others and expected prompt repayment with interest. And in the Code of Hammurabi there were lines about how debts were to be repaid and -whether- a debt needed to be repaid if circumstances made it impossible.
It may not have been named "Capitalism", yet... but what's in a name? A rose by any other would smell as sweet.
You've got to think about this in a less "in the box" way. Everything post-3000 BC is potentially "off the table". That very much includes things like physical money. When money/wealth is like, a physical thing someone can make off with, that's disadvantageous to a very long-lived being, if it's using that money. They'd want to crack down on that sort of thing. They'd also want to crack down on any middle or mercantile class appearing, or on any religions which weren't their religion and so on.
Physical money is just a representation of value as a form of abstraction. The actual source of the wealth comes from resource control and control of means of production. So long as the elf owns the mine or the forest or the farmland the money they use to represent the resources that are produced isn't disadvantageous at all.
Wealth and estate -can- be taken by force. S'why kingdoms fall and empires crumble. But whether that wealth is land, gemstones, coins, paper, or floating numbers the same remains true. And unless the elves are willing to destroy the systems of other races in the worlds (Humans gonna human after all) and have religious pogroms and so forth... not a lot to be done about it.
Also in 99% of campaign settings GODS ARE REAL so whether you like their religion or not is kinda irrelevant since they can drop lightning, plagues, or curses on you for getting uppity.
I'm not a big fan of the Malazan setting and I don't think it's well-handled in a lot of ways, but the author does at least attempt to grapple with some of this stuff, and it becomes clear that older mindsets, older ways of making way and so on are often just extremely dumb, and only work if you're incredibly magically powerful so that overrides the stupidity.
You're not wrong. You're not wrong at all.
I'm not saying that modern American Elves 300 years old who grew up in the colonies would be openly outright racist and sexist and get scandalized by a woman wearing a skirt short enough to see her calves.
I'm saying that what they have experienced, the full breadth of it, should be considered in roleplaying them. And while some of it, like Firearms being a constantly advancing thing, is really important... some of it, like Slang or what is the most current political debate about people's rights or how to use an ad blocker to keep malware from getting downloaded...
That stuff gets lost in the "Minutiae" pile of irrelevancies for someone who has seen -so much- change in regards to all those things.
Because what weighs more on a 300 year old mind? Whether 8-Tracks or the Civil Rights Movement? Which one are they more likely to remember and care about? PROBABLY not 8-tracks...
But they might complain about the changeover from Vinyl because records were around a lot longer than Laserdiscs were.
