What Alignment is Rorschach?

[Celebrim]

I also wonder about interpretations based on age. I was 17 when Watchmen came out. Fear of a Nuclear Holocaust was very real in my teens. Reflection on the Vietnam War doubly-so. Bernhard Goetz (dubbed the "Subway Vigilante") and the Guardian Angels were big in the news, referenced by Moore in the introduction to Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. I wonder how differently, if at all, someone who didn't live through any of those events or times views the Watchmen and it's themes?

I was 13. I may be odd, or else I'm too young, but I never was terrified of nuclear war. I never consider it a very likely possibility. I figured the odds I was killed by a nuclear weapon to be somewhat less than the odds of being killed by a lightning bolt or a catastrophic asteroid strike (the later based on the geological evidence being a good deal higher than most people suppose).

Rather, even at 13, by understanding of the 'Cold War' was that it was primarily a memetic war - that the two sides were firing dangerous ideas at each other in the form of philosophy and propaganda. And, that these ideas killed people. Both sides sought to undermine the culture of the other side, to subvert and weaken their social structures, and ultimately to convert the other side over to its favored ideology once they other side had been sufficiently morally, culturally, and ideologically weakened. So what I was desparately afraid of may seem a little bit strange, but I was terrified by the memetic war and felt it likely based on what I was seeing that we might either lose or else even if we one we'd find ourselves mortally wounded in a nightmare world of memetic plagues and unexploded memetic weapons.

So my response to Watchman was to consider it just another indirect memetic attack by someone who was unconsciously running memetic programming he'd picked up in the course of the war. As artistic and well done as it might have been, I saw it is fundamentally disconnected from reality - not because it was a fantasy - but because Miller didn't seem to realize that it was. Miller seemed to really believe that he was writing in a time when we were edging closer to nuclear war, when the actions of his own government and that of the American government could be characterized as the actions of insane tyrants bent on global holocaust.

Crazy as it was, I was much more terrified of a civil war in the U.S.A, or a Soviet invasion, or some combination thereof, as the U.S.A. fractured into peices that hated, detested, and feared each other.

So in any event, I don't know that it has alot to do with your age, how you respond to Watchman. As to how someone who didn't even live through the 80's, much less the 50's (Duck and Cover!) or the 60's (Hell no, we won't go!!) responds to Watchman I have no idea, but I admit to being very curious.

 

[WizarDru]

As artistic and well done as it might have been, I saw it is fundamentally disconnected from reality - not because it was a fantasy - but because Miller didn't seem to realize that it was. Miller seemed to really believe that he was writing in a time when we were edging closer to nuclear war, when the actions of his own government and that of the American government could be characterized as the actions of insane tyrants bent on global holocaust.

I'm assuming you mean Moore, not Miller there.

I'd put forth that you were not in the majority, there. Let's look at some of the media you could come across around the time the Watchmen came out:

The Day After (US TV miniseries)
Threads (BBC TV miniseries)
Russians (song by Sting)
99 Luft Balloons (song by Nena in both German and English)
When the Wind Blows (animated BBC movie)
Cherynobyl Nuclear Disaster
The Manhattan Project (US Movie)
War Games (US Movie)
Red Dawn (US Movie)
Def-Con 4 (US Movie)
Testament (US Movie)
Love Missile F1-11 (Song by Sigue Sigue sputnik)
London Calling (Song by the Clash)
New Frontier (song by Donald Fagen)
Lovers in a Dangerous Time (song by Bruce Cockburn)
It's a Mistake (song by Men at Work)
Hammer to Fall (song by Queen)
Def Con One (song by Pop Will Eat Itself*)

* - You might remember them for their song "Can U dig it?" in which they say that "Alan Moore knows the Score!")

That's just a quick list off the top of my head. Fear of Nuclear War and World War III was nearly ubiquitous in during the Reagan/Thatcher era. I can understand if you didn't much fear it, but I'd argue that you were very much in the minority, there.

 

[Nightson]

We were edging closer to nuclear war when Watchmen was written and we'd been right up to the edge before. I mean looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis it's pretty amazing that nuclear apocalypse didn't happen.

 

[mlund]

So in any event, I don't know that it has alot to do with your age, how you respond to Watchman. As to how someone who didn't even live through the 80's, much less the 50's (Duck and Cover!) or the 60's (Hell no, we won't go!!) responds to Watchman I have no idea, but I admit to being very curious.

I was born in 1980.

I learned about the events of the 60s and 70s after the fact, rather than lived through them. That stripped away a lot of the emotional investment that colors those eras for many people. I never really got exposed to the cult of personality surrounding Nixon or Kennedy nor did I grow up facing the full brunt of the cold war propaganda. Like children from every generation I looked at what the previous generation believed and found fault.

Looking back on it the idea of a successful preemptive strike seemed laughable and the idea of the government actually trying to pull it off seemed divorced from reality.

Meanwhile the constant revisiting of Vietnam through extremely slanted fiction looked like little more than a tired appeal for the dollars of people who'd once said "Never trust anyone over 30" and were now themselves well over 30.

That's why, to me, the Watchmen feels like it is set in a city made of cardboard cut-outs and populated by straw men. I can feel the author's fears and apprehensions spawned from ignorance and emotional investment and see how the Straw Men he writes are really just the hobgoblins that haunt his own head. I'm not saying his feelings weren't real, or even pervasive. I'm just saying that no matter how strongly he felt that way the world he portrayed was more divorced from reality than he probably realized.

Of course, he wasn't lacking company either. The world many broadcasters, TV executives, movie producers, professors, and journalists portrayed was pretty far divorced from reality as well. There was propaganda everywhere trying to sway people politically and not a whole lot of information resources available to the general public.

- Marty Lund

 

[Celebrim]

I can understand if you didn't much fear it, but I'd argue that you were very much in the minority, there.

I probably was, if only because I hear so many people talking about it. Maybe I was too clueless, but whenever people talk about their fear of nuclear war during the '80's, it always baffles me a little. I can kinda understand why you might get all panicky if you lived back in the 50's when we thought (erroneously we now know) that we were close to nuclear war a couple of times like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and when little kids were forced to do nuclear weapon drills alongside fire and tornado drills, but in the 80's we didn't have any of that.

I also should say that I paid very little attention to any of the media you listed, which might have something to do with my emotional inattention to the matter. In any event, with the possible exception of The Clash, I wouldn't have listened to any of that nor have I see any of the movies you listed except for 'War Games' (which I considered to be more interesting for having games and a computer in it than anything it wanted to say about nuclear war).

To be honest, I considere excessive exposure to any of that fiction, from the right wing ones like 'Red Dawn' to left wing ones like 'The Day After' to be the equivalent of walking around the infectious diseases ward at a hospital rubbing your hands on every thing and sticking them in your mouth. Even back as a kid, I hated politicized art (as if politics was beauty and meaning).

Anyway, Rorschach's alignment is clearly Chuck Norris. Only if Rorschach had been Chuck Norris, he would have round kicked Dr. Manhattan and said, "Get off the planet, you blue skinned mass-murder condoning alien freak. And get some clothes!"

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Anyway, Rorschach's alignment is clearly Chuck Norris. Only if Rorschach had been Chuck Norris, he would have round kicked Dr. Manhattan and said, "Get off the planet, you blue skinned mass-murder condoning alien freak. And get some clothes!"

And if Rorschach was Batman he would narrow his eys, look at manhatten and say "Don't make me stop you"...then manhatten would have backed down, and Ozymandius would weep like a little girl...

 

[Krensky]

Rather, even at 13, by understanding of the 'Cold War' was that it was primarily a memetic war - that the two sides were firing dangerous ideas at each other in the form of philosophy and propaganda. And, that these ideas killed people. Both sides sought to undermine the culture of the other side, to subvert and weaken their social structures, and ultimately to convert the other side over to its favored ideology once they other side had been sufficiently morally, culturally, and ideologically weakened. So what I was desparately afraid of may seem a little bit strange, but I was terrified by the memetic war and felt it likely based on what I was seeing that we might either lose or else even if we one we'd find ourselves mortally wounded in a nightmare world of memetic plagues and unexploded memetic weapons.

So my response to Watchman was to consider it just another indirect memetic attack by someone who was unconsciously running memetic programming he'd picked up in the course of the war. As artistic and well done as it might have been, I saw it is fundamentally disconnected from reality - not because it was a fantasy - but because Miller didn't seem to realize that it was. Miller seemed to really believe that he was writing in a time when we were edging closer to nuclear war, when the actions of his own government and that of the American government could be characterized as the actions of insane tyrants bent on global holocaust

The Cold War wasn't cold for millions of people, but most people forget that because it happened in the third world. It also wasn't a cultural war, it was a fear of the other side. The US leaders were terrified that the godless communists would be willing to go to war to spread the revolution, potentially even using weapons of mass destruction to do so. A little silly, I admit, but not entirely implusible in the context of the time, espesically considering that Stalin wasn't the most tightly wrapped man in history and the central ideologies of the USSR called for violent global revolution. The USSR, ideologically, was convinced that the powers that be in the west would do anything, upto and including the use of WMDs to stop their revolution and restore class opression. There was also a whole crap load of colonialist and nationalist baggage at play on both sides too. Both sides were silly, and I've come darn close to criminally simplifing the issues and ideology at play, but it wasn't inherently different then a man walking into his home and finding a deer that's crashed through his patio window. The man's terrified, the deer's terrified, the chances of something misreading the other's actions or intentions are striking out solely because of that fear are pretty darn high.

Oh, and memes. Really? Memetics is a pseudoscience that Richard Dawkins invented to explain to himself how people he felt were otherwise sane and rational could believe things he found stupid and repugnant (primarily that they were religous or tolerant of religous people). It also lets him dismiss those who don't agree with him as being sick.

It is also worth noting that there were two incdents that were very likely to have lead to a nuclear exchange. The first was during the Cuban Missle Crisis when a Soviet submarine was cornered and depth charges were being dropped and the Captain and Politcal Officer were prepared to use a nuclear torpedo on the US carrier group involved and were stopped by the Second Captain. The other was in 1983 where a combination of events (including Korean Airlines Flight 007 being shot down by the USSR) and policies (launch on warning) actually meant that nuclear war was avereted by a Russian Lt Colnel deciding to ignore five launch warnings as computer errors rather then report them. Look up Able Archer 83 and Stanislav Petrov. The fact that the USSR had a fail-deadly strategy for most of the Cold War wasn't a good sign either. There were three other incidents where we were on the verghe of nuclear exchange. in 1979 someone in the US ran a training tape for the early warning system and didn't tell anyone. Lauunch warnings were sent to SAC and ICBM sites and Ballistic missle subs. War was averted because the book called for the officers to check the raw data. In 1980 a computer glitch caused a launch alert, this one was not as close because the nature of the glitch made the number of detected launches change frequently and at random, but warning were sent out and threat assessment was still run. Again, the policy of looking at the raw data stopped things from going further. Lastly, in 1995, a sounding rocket launched from Norway unwittingly followed thge expected flight path of a radar-blinding airburst Trident missle would. Boris Yeltsin actually opened and turned his football on. This means the world was one button away from a nuclear exchange.

 

[ppaladin123]

Indeed. It is a debate which is at the heart of the Watchman story.

There seem to be two points to your post. The first is that deontology/consequentialism does not equate with your (Celebrim's) definition of law and chaos. I agree. Deontology/Consequentialism is a different dimension from the one that you use.

The one that you use is rather close to the communitarian vs. individualism divide.

The second point is that deontology/consequentialism is totally independent from communtarianism/individualism. In other words you are arguing that these two dimensions have no covariance, that knowing where one falls on one axis tells you nothing about where one likely falls on the second.

I find that point rather interesting and I believe philosophers can, if they haven't already, write volumes as to whether this is the case.

(Omitted philosophical musings that, on second thought, seem entirely inadequate.)

 

[mlund]

The thing I've noticed with human applications of Deontology are that they don't actually disregard consequences. Rather, Deontology requires humans to believe that in the long term the outcome of adhering to an objective set of moral guidelines is a the best outcome.

Meanwhile humans embracing Consequentialism run afoul of uncertainty, limited knowledge, and variables all the time. Presumptions can lead to some beneficial outcomes in the short-term, but the long term is impossible to extrapolate adequately.

Case in point, Ozymandius's plan presumes a whole lot. It presumes that people would actually engage in a nuclear exchange without Dr. Manhattan. It also presumes that the outcome of the plan would result in a lasting, meaningful peace. These presumptions are monumental, hence the need for unsympathetic cardboard charicatures to be portrayed with their fingers on the button. There is also a great need for no character to voice any reasonable alternative to his plan and for Ozymandius to be taken seriously as the most intelligent man on the planet. He's essentially taking on the mantel of Hari Seldon out of Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy.

But then there is the matter of Rorschach's journal, which highlights the potentially fatal flaw in such planning. In a very real way Rorshach is the Mule to Ozymandius's Seldon. His journal is only symbolic of the millions of variables that could make Ozymandius's plan fail to achieve its consequences.

One thing to keep in mind with Rorschach is that he's not really fixated on how well people adhere to rules. We don't get a clear picture of what kind of rules he'd have everyone adhere to. Instead, Rorschach seems most concerned with the lack of Virtue in the world at large. His despair at this matter is what causes him to identify with the Comedian to a great extent. They see a hopeless world due to the lack of virtue in the populace. The Comedian, seeing the whole thing as a meaningless joke, gives allegiance to a form of Deontology relative to the government in exchange for what he wants. Rorschach, on the other hand, seems to embrace virtues he condemns others (and himself) for failing to measure up to while never getting what he wants.

- Marty Lund

 

[ppaladin123]

The thing I've noticed with human applications of Deontology are that they don't actually disregard consequences. Rather, Deontology requires humans to believe that in the long term the outcome of adhering to an objective set of moral guidelines is a the best outcome

What you are describing is actually known as "rule-utilitarianism," or "rule-consequentialism," (depending on the flavor) which is a subset of consequentialist thought.

Deontology can be divided up into "duty-based" and "right-based" deontological frameworks.