The general issue is that archetypes are, by their very nature, resistant to nuance, immutable, and less than real. Archetypes are easily packaged and media creators of all types should consciously avoid packaging each story that comes along into an archetypal dichotomy: hero/villain, good/evil.

The specific issue, in the case of the game The Saboteur, is that, by treating Nazis as the archetype of evil, the true horrors of Nazism in the Third Reich can be simply ignored. Nazis become monsters instead of men. You don’t need to understand a monster. You don’t try to understand a monster. You don’t ask “Why a monster?” You just kill them.

Plenty of media narratives fit this bill. Yesterday, when, about a half mile down the road from me, 3 women were saved from a life of rape, abuse, and captivity, the archetypal narrative was immediately placed upon the scene. Charles Ramsey: Hero; Angel Castro: Monster; Gina deJesus, Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight: Damsels in Distress. It’s all too easy. You can make a story out of anything by imposing archetypes and then adding flourishes, like, in the case just mentioned fake satellite news reporting.

When it’s easy, you get lazy. People who are convicted of crimes are treated as monsters. Every person who works in public safety or in the military is automatically a hero. This kind of laziness does serious damage to peoples’ lives, gut-level public opinion, and to critical thinking skills of the people who propagate it. I hope adding just one layer of complexity can make this point stand out a bit more.

Instead of saying that convicted criminals are evil, let’s just say they’re barbarians. So, people who are in, or have been in jail are barbarians, and people who aren’t and haven’t are civilized. There’s no good or evil here, just a level of social sophistication. In this context where is there space for good or evil? Well, who would the barbarians kill? Child molesters and rapists. Why? A barbarian would say “Because they’re evil. Monsters.” and leave it at that. But that’s still wrong. A society in which rooms full of children are murdered by a gunman, athletes and spectators are shredded by bombers, and a trio of brothers enslave young women for a decade is not a society that can afford to rely on lazy narrative archetypes. We have to be willing to exert ourselves enough to ask earnestly uncomfortable questions. Archetypes worked in pulp fiction fantasy stories in the 1930s, but this isn’t the Hyborian Age. Evil doesn’t look like a crazy frog beast. It looks like everyone. And, more importantly, so does Good.

A barbarian has no need for nuance: if it’s a monster, kill it. A civilized person must ask “Why a monster?” 

The agnostics contend that pain has evolved blindly as a means of causing us to avoid injury. There are two things that might be said about the theory: the first is that a few moments’ thought will produce half a dozen better ways of achieving the same objective (one of them is intelligence — but the more intelligent the organism, the more pain it is capable of feeling). The second is that by and large it does not work — human beings jump their motorcycles over the fountain at Caesar’s Palace; dogs chase cars.

What pain does do is act as a motivator in all sorts of less than obvious ways. It is responsible for compassion and the hot foot; it makes people who do not believe God would permit it think about God. It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a “humble carpenter” that we feel a a little surge on nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table, or a chair, but a whip.

Castle of Days; Helioscope by Gene Wolfe pp 218-219

Abraham Harvey, 16 January 2012 (extemporaneous, as dictated to his father)

My friend, I cannot
watch you, miles away,
intubated, awash
with medicine, cordoned
amid a hush of mechanical
saviors. I cannot sing
with you, your unabashed 
heart brimming with
life in dark nights
of karaoke and root
beer. 

I would rather have offered 
parts of my body, to keep
you encompassed among
us.
As I live,
as I die, I would rather have
you piecemeal than
not at all.

I could pluck
my beard, cry out
in the wilderness, I
could burn a blessed
candle and offer your
pain to God.

But, I respect your 
unbelief and 
though this
means 
I cannot pray for
you, 

but, 
my friend,

I will 
stand
with you
and hope.

Some tragedies are beyond my scope of empathy. Some rationales exceed my capacity to set aside love. If I can’t write about I try to write around, to show the shape of what I can’t describe. This poem could apply to any gun massacre, but today it is for Newtown, CT.

I’m basically using my rusty anthropological education and sundry other learning to express exasperation regarding the Christian emphasis that we are sheep and God shepherds us. That’s an easy metaphor used by a nomadic tribe of herders to explain their theology in terms they could understand. Since sheep are considered remarkably dumb and meek, it’s also a useful way for, say, a priestly hierarchy to enforce control and adherence for a few thousand years.

We can be God’s and be men as well. He’s not the God of sheep.