How the fight between "good" and Evil" came to dominate our thinking
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, November 12, 2021 17:33
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Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?
The first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a good guy would never do. But then the nature of a bad guy is that he does things a good guy would never do. Good guys don’t just fight for personal gain: they fight for what’s right – their values.
This moral physics underlies not just Star Wars, but also film series such as The Lord of the Rings (2001-3) and X-Men (2000-), as well as most Disney cartoons. Virtually all our mass-culture narratives based on folklore have the same structure: good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society. These tropes are all over our movies and comic books, in Narnia and at Hogwarts, and yet they don’t exist in any folktales, myths or ancient epics. In Marvel comics, Thor has to be worthy of his hammer, and he proves his worth with moral qualities. But in ancient myth, Thor is a god with powers and motives beyond any such idea as ‘worthiness’.
In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys advice. Defending a consistent set of values is so central to the logic of newer plots that the stories themselves are often reshaped to create values for characters such as Thor and Loki – who in the 16th-century Icelandic Edda had personalities rather than consistent moral orientations.
Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.
The situation is more complex in epics such as The Iliad, which does have two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the world from the other team. They don’t symbolise anything but themselves and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the reason to fight the good fight. The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one...
... Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. That shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to change or improve society’s values. Good guys stand up for what they believe in, and are willing to die for a cause. This trope is so omnipresent in our modern stories, movies, books, even our political metaphors, that it is sometNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The 'Princes and the Pea' stands out in my mind as one of those moral(ity)-free tales. The prince, who needs to find a princess-born to be his one true love shows some cleverness in hiding a small pea underneath many mattresses. Common women, who probably slept on straw on the ground would never be burdened with such fine sensibilities as to detect such a small lump. But a lost princess-born, who was probably extremely sleep-derived living her common life, would notice.
So the moral of the story is ... be born for finer things and a spoiled life, and your clever prince will find you?
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Here's another one: The Frog Prince.
He has to sleep with a Princess for one night before he turns back into a prince. In the original version, a princess temporarily takes refuge in his palace. He tells her of the curse and begs her to sleep with him for a night. She's so disgusted by the thought she refused. So she slips into bed, but unbeknownst to her, he hops onto her pillow and stays there the night.
When she sees him there in the morning she picks him up and throws him against the wall.
He magically turns back into a prince, and they live happy ever after.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Children and Teenage stories do they really carry with them strong concepts of Moral Absolutism or neo ethical relativism to stories become part of a national consciousness, do the stories add to the language and culture and nation of these kids or do they have no meaning and are just entertaining escapism? 'Cancel Culture' is another strange movement or Wokeism, it almost wants to erase the past and now wants to ban stuff because people are offended by offended people who find other stuff offensive? I do wonder what stories from America was survive far into the future, will it be Canadain or Asutralia story or British or America that dominates, a story of Alice in wonderland, will Sherlock Holmes or Green Lantern be there in 200 years or 500 years will there still be a Mickey Mouse or Captain America or Bugs Bunny will 'Shaft' survive, or Wonder Woman, or will Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn survive long into the future? I am sometimes amazed at how long stories of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm Brothers or stories of Asia and Greek Folklore survive, I guess some stories as just that good.
I did read some of this stuff but I think I also skipped much of this stuff as a kid, maybe for a while I just prefered to play ball or something, as a child I remember simple child like stories of Jack and the Beanstalk or 'Brothers Grimm' was the more spooky scary version, I don't know about morality but I think most of these were just ways to improve your reading skills with a fun story while entertaining the kids and giving parnets some free time off. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables, keeping kids busy with written texts or projects or coloring books or games or sports or songs or readings was a big thing and you could read old Folklore stories or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, I do remember Dickens a Christmas Carol was kinda scary. As a kid grew up they pestered parents or got pocket money or picked their own books, I think these were not only to prove kids reading skills but keep them busy and give parents free time. The French kids story Around the World in Eighty by Jules Verne is a great kids story. A weird thing is how they turned the kids into a market, the kids themselves were an economic market buying up their own entertainment products or wanting the lastest cartoons or pop songs.
There is Bible influence in the most of the West but was also reading folklore from Asia or Europe or Hawaii or the Greek, Roman and Nordic Viking stuff, I notice kids today having an even more global cultural experience with Korean kids books or access to Anime toons. I think Japan is probably the only Western Democratic country that lies far outside that area of Christian influence, South Korea for example has Christianity as one of its largest branches, while Christianity has grown in some parts I believe in Nordic countries the people are becoming more 'Atheist' for whatever reasons, maybe its the harsh cold geography, language itself, sociopolitical public schooling that sends them this way? While a lot of Communist USSR countries were Growing Up as an Atheist I notice now they are becoming very Religious again. I think now in Australia and according to the last census the largest "religion" will soon become "No Religion" even though Australia can be classed as a Western Christian country. I think kids are smart enough in their own way, they want to be entertained but are not willing to be bored and morally lectured, they might be getting enough of that from teachers or parents or another problem is they get too little discipline from teachers or parents.
Kids took influence from other kids and older kids, If someone nearby had an older brother or sister when you were young you sometimes got to see what music or books they were into. In comicbooks, fantasy books and video games and scifi movies you would find re-imagined amalgamate fusions of other mythology, you could argue that cartoons, harry potters, the toys and LOTR and comicb
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