Everything Is Permitted

Or, How Emotionalizing Morality is Destroying Literature

This essay expands upon a point I made in my Heroes and Heroism video.

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I cannot be the only one to have noticed that fictional heroes these days have become incredibly boring.

To be clear, I do not mean that heroic characters are, by virtue of their “good guy” status, uninteresting. But rather that writers have been taking less and less care in the formation of these “good guy” characters. Their heroic traits are more or less identical, their heroic behavior is safe and predictable, and the stories built around them have little substance or merit. As a result, many writers — and readers — now think of heroism as boring in itself, and heroes as boredom personified. Antiheroes are touted as “deeper” and “richer”, and even villains find themselves upheld as, if nothing else, more interesting.

If I’m remembering the stories from my childhood with any accuracy at all, this was not always the case, not even in popular culture. Heroes have only recently been dulled, villains have only recently become the darlings of sympathetic character development, and antiheroes have only recently achieved cultural sainthood.

If one were to recall the literary and cultural world of the last decade one would, perhaps, remember that all or most of the beloved heroic icons of popular culture recently underwent a kind of mass cancellation. In some cases it was race or gender based, in other cases these characters were merely being used as examples for loosely adjacent real world concepts, such as when superheroes were sacrificed on the anti-police altar.

Yes, the current nothing-characters that grace our screens and pages have perhaps been shallowed and dulled, in part, by their writers’ fear of joining the ranks of these other condemned heroes and heroic fiction writers. And so, in their effort to craft “acceptable” heroes, these writers have chosen to use accepted character formulas. Like short order cooks throwing together a bowl of corn chowder, there are certain ingredients they must use, certain ingredients they must never use, and the only room for innovation or creativity they’re allowed is aesthetic. The bowl and the garnish, let’s say. Or the costume and the particular way in which the corn chowder hero cracks his jokes.

These formulas (or formulae, if you’d prefer) have been studied and used with such religious care and devotion for so many generations of writers that a new and disturbing situation has begun to emerge. Indeed, the increasing reliance on these checklists of traits to define or construct a literary hero is perhaps the most telling symptom of this new, core problem: No one seems to know anymore what a hero even is.

Originally, and in many academic settings, a “hero” was little more than the male main character of a story, with, of course, a “heroine” being a female main character. What’s important to note is that, historically, the majority of writers did not need to be told what specific traits they ought to give their heroic characters in order for their audiences to perceive them as “heroic”.

Many characters from ancient works and even older modern works possessed a whole array of traits, some good, some bad. Historically, writers — and readers — understood when a character, despite his flaws or mistakes, was a hero and when he had crossed the moral event horizon. Readers did not have to wring their hands with anxiety whenever their heroes made a bad decision or did something they shouldn’t have. They understood and accepted the objective core of heroism, the truth that glowed at the center of all moral considerations, without which good and evil cannot ever be comprehended, much less conveyed.

Like it or not, the fictional representation of heroism, virtue, and morality in stories is necessarily reliant on the writer’s understanding of heroism, virtue, and morality. And these days, very few people, never mind writers, really understand these things. And even if they do, even if most writers could, to some degree, be considered moral individuals, that doesn’t mean that they will be able to understand the immense moral complexities that they attempt to write for their characters. So it follows that the characters will inevitably have less and less moral realism, resulting in less and less compelling or interesting heroes.

If a writer doesn’t understand true morality, how can the morality of their characters be interesting, complex, or in any way true to real life?

Writers of old — the ones who passed down to us the foundation stones of western literature like Le Morte D’Arthur, The Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, etc. — had themselves a keen understanding of the basis of morality, that is truth itself. Or, if you like, Truth. Objective morality was a cornerstone of western society for centuries and informed the telling of beloved tales. Later storytellers were then also taught both storytelling and morality by, in part, reading these tales. Thus we have, to name only a few, The Last of the Mohicans, Captains Courageous, Jane Eyre, the works of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Dostoevsky, and so on, and so on. These storytellers — and their audiences — had a more complex grasp of moral nuance than your average philosophy major today because their understanding of morality stemmed from simple, objective truth. Thus, their heroes could be flawed, sometimes greatly so, and yet their heroism was still easily recognizable to the average person. This understanding of truth and morality was then passed down from storyteller to listener, from generation to generation, forming a civilization that, until recently, grasped not just true heroism, but also truth itself.

Most writers, and even a great many people these days, don’t even realize that morality is an area of objective right and wrong, or even that morality needs to be considered when constructing or analyzing heroes, or any character. Yet it’s impossible to really define heroism — or villainy — without talking about morality. Even if writers and teachers do understand that such a thing is essential to the study of heroes and heroic characters, most are hesitant to venture into moral territory. What if someone disagrees with you? What if no one buys your book? What if you get canceled?

So instead, when writers are trying to build characters, especially heroes and antiheroes, they will focus mainly on those previously-mentioned formulaic sets of requirements found on writing websites or in writing books. Readers and literature students will also find themselves studying these character classification principles in an effort to better understand the stories they love. These resources seem to list traits and qualities that each of these character classes must possess. One such list indicates that any character who will be classified as a “hero” must be on the right side of the law, must be a conformist, and must “get the girl”. An example provided is Edward Cullen from Twilight.

Yet not a single such formula will permit the space necessary to discuss or define morality as it pertains to heroism or villainy. This is especially true of any notion of objective morality, itself a concept largely dismissed as fictional in today’s society.

But writers who find themselves unable or unwilling to navigate the morality of heroism will find these classification systems comfortable alternatives to the complex philosophical thinking they are unwilling to carry out themselves. As for literature students, well, if a writer refuses such an undertaking, why should the reader take up the slack? How, then, can any piece of literature — or indeed any story of any medium — contain even a trace amount of moral depth or truth?

The “hero” made with these mass-production formulas will necessarily be an incredibly boring, two-dimensional cut-out who does little more than parrot the shallow moral and ethical hotwords of current year while otherwise expressing very little moral opinion of any kind.

As safe as this might be, it is also boring, and everyone knows it, readers and writers alike. Therefore many writers will instead resort to the increasingly vague catch-all character category:

The antihero.

Antiheroes, by most definitions, are a great deal more interesting to modern writers and readers. Various assessments could be made as to why this is. For instance, antiheroes are often classified as rebels, they are permitted an assortment of vices such as drugs or promiscuity, and, according to some, they will not reflect society’s higher values.

Social and moral issues aside, antiheroes can’t help but be more attractive to writers who want a little more creative freedom when crafting their heroes. The lists of requirements for “conventional” heroes are, we can all agree, entirely too restrictive. Too, many readers perusing the shelves would likely prefer the interesting “antihero” to the arbitrarily regulated “hero”.

Nevertheless, the writer – and the reader – will still find himself provided with no method by which to classify these characters as heroic or antiheroic other than these lists of traits. At no point will the writer make any kind of objective assessment of the morality of the character. And if they do think to do so, matters will then become even more confused.

I know I’m not the only person to have noticed this, but in today’s world the only metric by which morality seems to be measured is one of emotions. This is the only means by which anyone has been taught to understand morality. If something makes a person feel bad it must be immoral. If something makes him feel good it must be morally acceptable, no matter what it is.

Morality, in reality, has very little, if anything, to do with a person’s feelings. If a writer fails to learn the absolutes of moral truth he will never be able to convey its nuances, emotional or otherwise. And a reader laboring under an emotionally-bound understanding of morals will be similarly restricted in his efforts to comprehend a simple moral character, never mind a complex one.

Reducing morality to a matter strictly of emotion is how we have reached a point in cultural decline at which audiences feel enough sympathy for the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer – as depicted in Netflix’s controversial Dahmer miniseries – that they refuse to hold him responsible for his crimes, or will even go as far as calling him a “good man” who kindly gave his victims “quick deaths”. The writers themselves, despite their claims to the contrary, seemed to perhaps unintentionally lean in this direction, tugging at the natural tendency of audiences to feel empathy for characters who are suffering, and thus guiding the moral interpretation of their sordid tale in such a way that it stirred up feelings of uncomfortable sympathy for its real life titular serial killer.

Using emotions to build morality isn’t the only emotionally-centric error of modern writers. Emotions are also used to manipulate the cultural opinions of the audiences. As in the case of Netflix’s Dahmer — or HBO’s Game of Thrones and The Leftovers and many celebrated attempts at compelling literary fiction in the last decades — most writers these days falsely equate these emotional feelings of discomfort with good writing. If they’ve made their audience feel uncomfortable, then they’ve succeeding in writing a compelling character or plot, or so they assume. The more “compelling” their story, the more inclined audiences will be to refer to it and its writers for real world social and moral commentary.

However, Netflix’s Dahmer character was not uncomfortable because he was compellingly written, but rather because the writers’ assessment and presentation of his morality was so upside down, a fact most rational humans watching the show could instinctively perceive. In spite of that, these rational humans have nevertheless been conditioned throughout their lives to assess morality solely through the lens of emotion. Thus they could only assess their discomfort at Dahmer’s portrayed morality based on feelings. That is, simply, if they felt sorry for him, he must not have been a bad person.

This childish approach to morality is the most common today. Audiences who found themselves compelled to feel sympathy for a sadistic serial killer were uncomfortable not because it was compelling, but because it was an affront to basic morality. It’s the same mechanic as the one at play when we feel uncomfortable watching a rape scene. It’s not because it’s compelling, or well-written, or realistic. It’s because rape is a visceral assault on our rational understanding of morality. The emotional discomfort proceeds from an objective, rational understanding, as it should. However most writers — and readers — understand the opposite. The emotional discomfort itself is immorality. As if the immorality of the act is contained merely in the fact that it made someone feel uncomfortable.

When scenes of this nature are written in such a way that those feelings of revulsion or discomfort are downplayed or even eliminated, some audiences will call this “provocative” or “compelling” and will be less able to assess the morality because they won’t find themselves feeling particularly bad, given the deliberate writing. The writers have done nothing to create moral complexity, they have merely manipulated the audience’s moral perception with emotion. In addition to which, many studies have found that fiction tends to guide the formation of real life moral and social opinions in audience’s minds. And so this emotional manipulation then also becomes social engineering.

All of this because both parties involved, writers and audiences, are using emotions to judge morality.

In order for a writer to build a morally complex — and true — heroic character he must have a very firm, very basic understanding of objective, non-emotionally driven morality.

The more complex the story’s moral landscape, the more firmly-grounded the writer’s understanding must be. This is why so many of the great, masterful writers of old spent so long studying morality and philosophy in an effort to wrap their ordinary person minds around extraordinary moral circumstances. Such an undertaking is hard work, but it’s worth it. Famously, Dostoevksy labored for years to understand the moral nuances of his The Brothers Karamazov, as his journals relate. And few books — and few characters — can be said to match that exceptional accomplishment.

Most writers, and indeed most people these days, simply do not have that breadth of understanding. Such knowledge can absolutely be pursued, but the importance of studying morality is almost inconceivable in today’s society. Most people don’t even realize that morality is not an emotional matter, never mind that it is an objective matter.

For their part, writers seem to find no real benefit in exploring morality in any sense other than how it makes them feel and how they can use it to affect the emotions of their readers.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all heroic characters must be flawless. Indeed, if a writer’s moral foundation is fixed on solid ground and not on emotion, he will be capable of constructing a heroic character who is far from perfect. Perhaps such a heroic character will be overcome by his flaws, ultimately developing into a veritable Shakespearean tragic hero, like Hamlet. Or perhaps this hero will labor to overcome his flaws, thereby creating a variation on the almost-extinct aspirational hero, like Tolkien’s Samwise Gamgee, or C.S. Lewis’s Edmund Pevensie.

Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost. Engraving by Robert Thew, after Henry Fuseli

In any case, the writer needs to understand the moral clay with which he is forming his heroes (and his villains), and that clay does not and cannot include emotions. No matter how flawed or otherwise well-written such a character is, everything about him will fall flat if the foundational morality on which he is built is itself either unstable and uncertain, or wholly erroneous. That is to say, if writers doesn’t understand basic morality — or, dare I say, accept basic morality — then how can they even begin to write morally true characters?

It is true, of course, that emotion is a crucial aspect of mankind’s existence. It is also true that divorcing the mind entirely from emotion is not a realistic solution to any problem. However the fact that emotion is such an important part of the human condition is often used to justify its prioritization in matters of morality. What those who argue for this fail to realize, however, is that emotion is not the foundation on which morality is built. But rather rational, objective morality must form the groundwork. And from that ground ordered emotion can emerge.

There are stories throughout history of heroic characters pursuing justice or combating villains with a certain marked emotion. Readers of ancient classics and of medieval epics will be familiar with many such heroes. Angered, perhaps, by betrayal, or by the murder of their family, the invasion of their lands, or the defiling of their sacred places, they will be driven and motivated by this emotion until their task is completed. What is crucial, however, is that this emotion was not ever the foundation of their moral character nor was it the metric by which they — or their authors — measured justice and morality. It was, perhaps, the fuel that propelled them through the difficult tasks of their heroic journey. But reason and a firm understanding of true, objective morality was what ordered and directed their furious anger. And, in fact, in the instances in which these ancient heroes became tragic heroes it was almost always as a result of their emotion becoming less the fuel and more the guide of their actions, as in the case of Hamlet.

All humans are emotional creatures. It is how we were made and it serves its purpose. But in spite of this — or even because of it — all of us must also order and constrain our emotions with reason. Placing such restrictions and guidance on our moral acts is what enables us both to know what is or isn’t right and also to know what acts and what heroes are truly admirable. Assessing the character of, for instance, Count Roland from the medieval epic that bears his name, from the initial standpoint of moral objectivity allows us to order our emotional response to his tragic final stand. The ability to intellectually and then emotionally appreciate a heroic character is a major factor in that character’s ability to influence mankind for the better, and also to resonate with readers enough to potentially become a beloved part of popular culture.

Wolf von Bibra - Battle of Roncevaux Pass (from The Song of Roland)

So-called confessional writing, in which the author uses the characters and the narrative to relate personal experiences in an almost autobiographical way — such as Plath’s Bell Jar — has only risen in popularity. Such an attitude towards literary pursuits is very in keeping with the philosophy of the social media influencer who seeks to use “authenticity” to elicit enough views and likes to create the perception of relevance. Doing so in literature is childish self-indulgence. It is also very much the norm. No author these days, it seems, can create a character who is not in some way him — or her — self. Which is all mere literary onanism outside of which nothing of any significance can be pursued or comprehended.

This kind of writing has resulted in the current parasitical literary infestation of “self-insert” characters. Aside from being embarrassingly self-indulgent, this habit also prevents the creation of heroic or aspirational characters of any kind. In an age when “aspiration” is a hateful word, no person wishes to be positively portrayed endeavoring to accomplish a difficult and worthy task. Or, worse yet, endeavoring to better themselves. Likewise, they would also seek to portray certain faults as not just acceptable, but also admirable. Whether this is an iniquitous level of irresponsibility, or an attraction to disturbingly young boys or girls, it only matters that the moral flaw is not depicted as a moral flaw, as this would force the writer to admit that his (or her) own flaws are just that, flaws. As such the morality in these writings hinges on the notion that there is no such thing as objective good and bad, but that the only matter worth considering is the character’s — and the writer’s — feelings.

Heroic characters will continue to be senseless nothings for as long as writers form them with an emotional skeleton instead of a rational – and moral – one. And their work will continue to be nothing more than shallow, meaningless vanities sacrificed at the altar of whatever vague social virtue is currently being championed.

Literature has long since lost its moral objectivity and therefore its moral relevance. Keeping perfect pace, society has long since abandoned the standards by which morality and good are able to be measured. Each can be blamed for the other’s decline. As long as literature and storytelling lack moral solidity, society’s own sense of its moral self will continue to fade into an amoral, godless haze in which there is no right and wrong.

As Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” Or, perhaps more appropriately, as Ivan Karamazov observed, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

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