Why Good vs. Evil

Cafe Society
1

Fascinating article here: The Invention of Moral Narrative. The argument is that in our culture, the most popular stories have two things in common. First, they pit a band a good guys against a band of bad guys. We are supposed to root for the good guys and cheer as they fight against and defeat the bad guys. The high point comes when the bad guys, or at least their leader, is killed.

Second, the bad guys always have massive advantages to start off with. The good guys are heavily outnumbered and outgunned. The bad guys are extremely organized with a regimented hierarchy, numerous levels of leadership, and vast resources. The good guys, by contrast, are a small band, disorganized, without much in the way of weaponry or technology or leadership. But they are scrappy and resourceful and courageous, and eventually they win.

It’s easy to name examples of stories that fit this description: Lord of the Rings. Star Wars. Harry Potter. The Avengers. The Hunger Games. Almost any James Bond movie. Avatar. The Matrix. The Lion King. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Independence Day. All the Indiana Jones movies. Even The Wizard of Oz fits it perfectly.

So there’s the question of why there is. Was all entertainment always like this? There are some cases from centuries ago that arguably were (e.g. Robin Hood) but many were not. The article presents some theories, but I’d be interested in hearing more.

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Humans are differentiated by our consciousness.
Consciousness in some ways can be defined by self-awareness.
The ultimate self-awareness, as defined by emerging religious thought globally around 700BCE is “Do Unto Others…” It is the recognition of your own Self and the Self in others.
It focuses on doing Good to others

This line of thinking, therefore, asserts that Good vs. Evil - a moral code - is a central ingredient to consciousness. So it has always been around and must be around - and our stories reflect that.

As for Hero myths, yes, they are tribe-building. We once were weak, but a few key Heroes did XYZ and now we’re strong. Let’s eat.

PS: I strongly recommend a book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. He is an evolutionary psychologist. This book breaks down how Human Moral systems and individual decisions emerge from a few key evolutionary traits that we acquired. The way that Good and Evil’s role in how individuals and communities apply morals is fascinating.

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Popular stories like The Godfather?

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Because “okay” vs. “meh” just doesn’t have the same ring to it?

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Stories where one bad guy wins out over other more powerful bad guys can be very popular. The obvious recent example is Breaking Bad.

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Not even all of the stories you list fit your description. The good guys in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have plenty of strong leaders. James Bond and the Avengers have a great deal of weaponry and technology. A lot of these stories don’t have Bad Guys dying as the high points, and when they do, it’s often not at the hands of the Good Guys.

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The general theory in the literary world (I believe), is that fictional narratives exist primarily as a teaching tool to encourage people to be self-sufficient, clever, motivated, etc.

As such, the hero (or heroes) represent the reader or the reader and her closest friends. The reader is just one person in the big, wide, savage world who needs to not just muster her way through life but even step up to it and poke it in the eye, if everything’s going to hell. We want people who will report crimes, who will figure out how to care for others in an emergency, who will serve their nation in the defense against invaders, etc. And individuals want to feel like they can cope with reality, with setbacks and bullies and enemy troops.

We want a scrappy hero, because we’re all just one person. The hero is outgunned because we’re outgunned in regular life.

That all said, it should be made clear that fiction tries to make you think for yourself and to go out there and kick butt - and as readers we enjoy this sort of positive encouragement. But it’s a bit misleading to say that fiction exists to make us into heroes or to do good versus evil.

If you read the original, unedited 1001 Nights, for example, the tales are all about warrior princes going out to rape women, take slaves, and steal treasure from rival kingdoms. These were stories written primary for Arabic princes in a highly misogynistic and classist society, and the emphasis for the expected reader (a young prince) was not that he would go out and commit heroic acts, it was that he could take what he wanted through cunning, guile, and murder if he was sufficiently clever, unscrupulous, and capable in battle.

The morality play aspect of modern fiction is an attribute of our culture and what we want to teach our children. And as people who were raised, as children, by people who taught a similar morality, we’re also inclined to enjoy this sort of fiction as adults as well. Though, often, we’re able to appreciate things that are more nuanced as well, as we age.

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In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Good Guy prevails, not by killing the leader of the Bad Guys, but by allowing himself to be killed by her (in a clear and deliberate parallel of the Christian story).

And The Wizard of Oz only “fits it perfectly” if you focus on the conflict with the Wicked Witch of the West, which isn’t the whole plot, especially in the book.

That said, thanks to the OP for starting the thread. The linked article (and the article it links to) provide good food for thought and discussion.

The thread title says “good vs. evil,” but the OP talks about “good guys” vs “bad guys”; and I don’t think this is the same thing. I like stories in which Good wins out and Evil is defeated, but having clearly delineated Good Guys against Bad Guys is only one way of doing this, and not necessarily the most satisfying way.

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This is one reason why small screen entertainment is kicking movies’ butt right now. There’s much better scope for telling more nuanced stories because, for one thing, the duration of the story is arbitrary. And in recent years many series, most perhaps, involve subversions / aversions of the basic protagonist / antagonist idea.

OTOH for movies, in some ways they’re even worse than as described in the OP. Whereas in the past the heroes would encounter danger and you’d really feel as if they’re in peril (even while knowing the hero can’t *really *die), nowadays the heroes act as if they know they are the protagonist in a movie. They make decisions that don’t make sense from the perspective of someone who is mortal.
(and of course the superhero movies are explicitly this)

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Was entertainment always like this? For what I’ve read of pre-medieval literature, there wasn’t a clear distinction between a “moral” protagonist and an “evil” antagonist. From the Illiad to the Nibelungs, a character mattered, and readers were expected to root for them, because of their fighting prowess, not their ethical choices.

The idea that the main characters also had to be underdogs seems pretty recent to me, too. Until the XIX century or so, aristocrats would pretty much be the protagonists most of the time.

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There are great stories where all the characters are greatly flawed and none can really be characterized as the good guy. Ran by Akira Kurosawa comes to mind. Sure there are a few innocents that meet their demise along the way but it’s a much more complex story than “good vs evil”

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Yeah, that’s pretty much the point of the linked article.

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Oh, well, that will teach me to read the whole thing before posting…:smack:

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Obviously there is some variation. Nonetheless, the general pattern holds. James Bond may be an employee of one of the world’s most powerful governments and have a rocket launcher built into his wristwatch or whatever, but in most of the Bond movies he gets captured by the bad guys, has his gadgets taken away, and gets taken to a secret base run by the archvillain, who invariably has scores of heavily armed and totally loyal henchmen. So the story gets reduced down to the scrappy-hero-versus-huge-number-of-bad-guys archetype.

In Lord of the Rings, we are lead to believe that Sauron has amassed enormous forces capable of dominating Middle Earth, and that all of them are completely loyal to him. The good guys, meanwhile, or not only much smaller in number, but at the start they’re also divided, distrusting each other, and unable to unite for a common goal. So even if they have certain individuals who would make good leaders, the narrative gives the good guys enormous disadvantages compared to Sauron.

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On the other hand, you can read the Iliad and the other Trojan War stories as being about cleverness vs. mindlessness. Both sides have war gods backing them, but Athena always kicks Ares’ butt, because she’s all about strategy and tactics and technology and adapting to circumstances, while he’s all about RRRAAWWWWRRRR!!!. All of Athena’s champions are described as “clever”, and of course the war is ultimately won (by one of her especial favorites) through a cunning trick.

Oh, and another modern example of a story that’s very much not good vs. evil is Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Yeah, there’s a clear villain in the end, but the main conflict is between two sides that can both be reasonably described as “good”, and yet who are inevitably in irreconcilable conflict, no matter how much they might want to try to reconcile.

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Where are you getting that? Sauron’s forces, on every level, were far less loyal than any of the Good Guys. Saruman’s planning on betraying both sides, Shelob doesn’t give a damn about anything other than her next meal, and the orcs regard all of them as “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, and wistfully long for a time without any bosses. The only reason the Ringwraiths are loyal is because he’s so thoroughly destroyed their wills that they’re basically no more than fingers on his hands.

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I disagree with the linked article with regard to stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The moral goodness of Arthur and his knights was a major theme in many (although not all) of the medieval stories, and they were often up against “bad guy” enemies.

For instance, in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” it’s important that Gawain resists the temptation to sleep with his host’s wife, even though she does her best to seduce him. The Green Knight behaves honorably and isn’t really a bad guy himself, but the whole adventure was set up by the enchantress Morgana le Fay in hopes of disgracing Arthur’s knights and frightening Guinevere to death, so there is a clear villain behind it all.

It’s true that these medieval stories don’t typically have a “good underdog vs. evil empire” plot, but “good knight vs. bad knight” is fairly common and the good knight in some cases is a young man still trying to prove his worthiness.

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I’ve read portions of the unexpurgated “1001 Nights” and I don’t remember the “warrior princes going out to rape women”, do you have a particular story in mind?

They’re considerably more erotic / sexually explicit than the expurgated versions that we’ve all read, but I’m not sure you’re right about the rape stuff.

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Sauron was … misunderstood

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You might be interested in reading Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces”. Wherein he outlines similarities between various mythological stories. He points out similarities seem to cross various cultures.

Netflix currently has a piece on him: “Myths and Monsters” episode 1.