I have a sore throat. It sucks, but if that’s the extent of my unwellness, then it’s not so bad. And! I had a couple of days off of work because of the winter weather! And!!! I discovered a surprise otter!!!
I am presently reading the fourth Codex Alera book, and watching A Man on the Inside.
Randomly thinking of the Goths in The Expanse….
On the Decline of Fictional Societies
Let’s talk about cultures in decline!
[This has been on the list for a while, this is not meant to be a reflection of current events.]
It’s popular in genre fiction (fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction) to depict a society in decline–that is, the best days of that civilization are behind it, and it’s all downhill from there. Sometimes it’s actively being driven into the ground. Think of the old Republic in the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy: a once proud interplanetary government that’s mired in corruption and arguments that prevent it from being effective at solving a crisis, leading it to elect a Supreme Chancellor who holds onto power and makes it into an authoritarian Empire.
In that example, the decline is meant to be a tragedy. Often, it’s a setup that allows the hero/heroine to restore the culture’s balance, or lead to a revival. Or! Especially in dystopian settings, it’s for the hero to bring down an unjust system of oppression so something new and better can take its place. As a Plot Device, it’s also a nice way to explain why the characters don’t fix their problems by going to the proper authorities–the legitimate channels are likely corrupt or ineffective, so a protagonist has to do everything important himself/herself.
Also, it’s a grand way for an author to bang out his or her problems with society. You can talk about what’s bringing down society by putting it into a fictional one. Let’s take Numenor, for instance, from Tolkien’s Legendarium: it’s an island kingdom that, as time goes by, becomes more and more corrupt. Their colonies around the world are less about bringing light and wisdom, and are twisted into making themselves a seafaring empire that takes more and more of other people’s land. And under Sauron’s advice (because Sauron becomes BFFs with the king), they begin trying to expand into the Valar’s domain, while starting a religion of evil, sacrificing political dissidents in elaborate rituals. Of course, the Valar don’t like that, and eventually they ask God to intervene because the Numenorians are trying to invade Valinor. So God destroys their islands and fleets.
[That will probably spoil future seasons of Rings of Power, but I don’t care, this is an old book.]
Numenor, along with totes mcgotes being the Middle-Earth take on Atlantis, is Tolkien’s idea of a society in free-fall towards collapse. And notice what he thinks a corrupt society is like: a militarized power that thinks the best way to show power is no longer through enlightenment, but by conquest, imperialism, and silencing opposition through public ritual and spectacle. That imperialism thing really hits you when you think about where he lived. Sure, Tolkien was not progressive by today’s standards, but the notion that the British people were inherently superior and should therefore crush or conquer the rest of the world? He hated that idea.
And in this case, I think a key feature is that Numenor isn’t brought down into decline by one man. Yeah, Sauron certainly helped it along, but he exacerbated problems that were already there: human greed, arrogance, and the lust for power. That’s a key that I think a lot of people miss out on. Despite that whole “Weak Men Make Bad Times” meme that you’ve probably seen, that’s not generally how it works.
Because if you look at something like the Rome of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movies, it seems to indicate that actually, what’s bringing down the Roman nation is the corrupt Emperors. If we just hand the city back to “the People” after removing the Emperor, it’ll all work out. Arguably, the second movie proves that idea wrong, because after Commodus’s death the Empire’s still in the toilet, but that movie also tries to end on a hopeful note by suggesting it’ll be fine now, those corrupt guys are gone. What makes it awkward is that the second movie has it done by strong military types, which, uh, is not a great message: “The leaders are corrupt! We need strong generals to remove them by force!” Yeah, that’s a military coup, not great for inspiring hope in the common people.
The first movie at least had the indication that Marcus Aurelius had a plan to give the power back to the Senate in steps, only for Commodus to muck it all up and cause the Plot. The kind of thinking that you just need charismatic strong men to take the power away from charismatic weak men is… troubling.
I do like when the decline is done by factors that can’t be easily fixed, or even blamed, really. If you read The Expanse books, over the course of the series, Mars goes from being a military superpower slowly developing their atmosphere through terraforming, to being a backwater no one cares about. When the Ring Gate opens, and people can go anywhere, they decide they’d rather go to a planet where they don’t have to terraform to live on most of the surface, so they have absolutely no reason to stay there. This is not something that Martian officials could have reasonably predicted, and once it happens, it’s out of their hands.
Sometimes societies are like that. You can’t blame one person for it, there are a bunch of factors there that contribute. I mean, yeah, a renegade official running off with a splinter faction can’t help things, but things were already going downhill.
Cultures are complicated things! I think it’s fascinating to depict one in decline, though I think they shouldn’t be simplistically imagined. Yeah, one guy can cause a lot of problems, but it’s not as if removing one person is going to fix all of the problems in a society. Nor can one single person be blamed for all of a culture’s woes (though in some cases, they can be blamed for quite a lot!).
—
No comments:
Post a Comment