Ruv Draba
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Hubris would be the prime example in Greek myth, so let's take a look.Let's suppose a cosmic order where if certain rules are broken very bad (and let's just say plain evil) things happen that entail huge amounts of destruction.
Hubris was considered the worst of all sins, and a bad enough taboo that Greek societies would kill for it -- and unsurprisingly, gods punished people for it in Greek myth too -- the myth of Arachne, for instance. (There's also an Hellenic flood story based on hubris that I couldn't find... maybe someone has a link?)
Even so, while Greek myth has many salutary lessons on the 'evils' of hubris, and hubris certainly leads to the death of thousands in some tales, it's more assigned to individuals than cultures. The Iliad is clearly epic, heroic fantasy, and Greek notions of sin are peppered throughout, yet it's not a war of 'good' culture vs 'evil' culture. Even the Persian wars weren't described as wars of good vs evil, despite the high stakes and all the pro-Hellenic jingoism.Any story is going to have to involve the taboo violation and the cascade of evil that results at least if we embed the story in that simple cosmic context. So there's one lesson: the Higher the story the more cosmic the evil.
So is 'evil culture extirpation' a more modern creation? Sure, we've had genocide in our story-telling since Ashurbanipal at least -- but genocide based on ideological rather than pragmatic arguments?
The earliest 'genocide the evil' myths I can think of date from the Crusades perhaps -- and even then, they're moderated by counter-myths like the tales of the noble Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn. Yet by the 20th century, Tolkien whose epic is redolent with laments about the military-industrial machine and its impacts on pastoral Britain, had no problems writing genocide into his High Fantasy good-guy narrative, and CS Lewis was right there with him. Kill the evil orcs; winnow the irredeemable (and very Persian-looking) followers of Tash.
Are we, or is this a 'it's inevitable because we do it' argument?So just one step down from a fairly clear if simplistic idea of evil (taboo violation with a cascade of destructive consequnces) we are well on our way to enlisting the reader to track all of this.
Or put another way, it's evil if Your Guy did it first and strategically, but My Guy can do it tactically in retaliation and be considered clever and good. Hollywood action movies love to use that little gem. On the other hand, you won't find a lot of it in Mallory, say... The good guys win only while they're acting good, and their flaws come back to bite them anyway. Good and bad behaviour scale right up through the narrative, but as with Greek tragedies, long-laid basilisks eventually come home to roost.each drop in level (from say cosmic structure to cosmic value) all the indicators of good and evil can potentially flip and this is the sort of thing that readers like to follow.
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