NPC Conan

One of the more effective memes developed lately is the meme of the NPC, short for "Non-Player Character." These are characters one encounters in video role playing games that are supposed to simulate human beings, but whose responses are scripted and thus limited and predictable. Politically Correct culture forces its adherents into a similar role of only being allowed certain thoughts and expressions. Thus, they come to act as if they were NPCs even though they are, presumably, actual humans.

Naturally members of the PC culture are describing this meme as "fascist," which somewhat amusingly makes the point that they have a very limited range of acceptable responses. They claim it is "dehumanizing," which is a favorite term they use that doesn't seem to mean what I'd expect it to mean. Human beings are characteristically capable of free thought and, therefore, free expression. Limiting one's own capacity for thought and expression is more dehumanizing (to one's self) than mocking others for refusing to engage in freer thought and expression. The guy who mocks you as an NPC isn't dehumanizing you; he's pointing out the degree to which you have agreed to dehumanize yourself.

I thought of all of this because of today's edition of "Conan the Salaryman," an often-amusing Twitter account that imagines Conan the Barbarian forced into modern life. Normally the joke is that Conan would probably kill people on a regular basis if forced into such a life, which allows the author to make jokes about the indignities of commuting or working in an ordinary office. Now and then, though, you get stuff like this:


I find transgender claims philosophically interesting, at least the ones that arise from people who physically are biologically male or female but who claim to be the opposite sex essentially. The claim seems to point to a sort of dualism, in which the sex of the body and the sex of the soul/spirit/mind/etc come apart. That's so at odds with the materialism that wrongly dominates much of our philosophical conversation today that I'm inclined to entertain it, if only because I see the value of the challenge it poses to ordinary received wisdom dominant in our culture. (In addition, at least some people aren't either male or female in the strict biological sense; these people have a sensible claim to accommodation as they have been born into a world that otherwise doesn't really have a place for them.)

That said, it's absurd to adopt the persona of Conan and talk movingly of transgender rights. Robert E. Howard would have laughed in your face, probably just before punching it. Howard was an early 20th century adherent of understanding even many mystical aspects of the world in terms of hard science; he wrote of demons as coming from 'outer space,' and of evolution causing 'races' of men to rise nearly to godhood, or fall back to bestiality. Indeed, there's no separating Howard's racism from his adherence to Darwinism, at the hour when Darwin was being treated with intense skepticism by the Christianity of the period. Howard believed a man could come from an ape, and he believed a line of men might therefore be closer to apes than another line; or that a line could fall back into apehood, under the right conditions. He believed apes could come to take on manlike intelligence, thus being even greater perils for his heroes.

As far as I know, Howard didn't even imagine a transgender character, but I can't imagine they would have come off kindly in Conan's eyes had he encountered one. But it's the only acceptable viewpoint for the PC today, and therefore even NPC Conan the Barbarian has to mouth the line. It's the only line in the script.

11 comments:

MikeD said...

What gets me about the NPC meme, is that Twitter is putting users into "time out" for using it as it is "dehumanizing speech". And then gives a 100% free pass to Louis Farrakhan who flat out says "Jews are termites". Sorry Twitter, your hypocrisy is showing again.

Grim said...

It’s not hypocrisy. It’s the way the program was written. They can only respond to the right.

David Foster said...

"The claim seems to point to a sort of dualism, in which the sex of the body and the sex of the soul/spirit/mind/etc come apart. That's so at odds with the materialism that wrongly dominates much of our philosophical conversation today that I'm inclined to entertain it, if only because I see the value of the challenge it poses to ordinary received wisdom dominant in our culture. "

It is remarkable and disturbing that so few seem to understand that these two views--typically held by the very same people--are contradictory.

douglas said...

But not surprising in the least, Mr. Foster.
If there's one thing the left is consistent about, it's their ability to be inconsistent.

Tom said...

I'm not really sure Conan would object to troglodytic kings, myself, but take it as a given. What's wrong with saying every human being is valid? That's the traditional Christian view.

Note, he doesn't roar out that the gender identity is valid, just "you are valid". Technically, I don't have a problem with that.

Now, if he roared out "Regardless of whether you are in the womb or out of it, by Crom you are valid," then he could get into some real trouble.

Traditionally, the consistency in the left is that they will say anything to win and retain power.

Grim said...

I don't actually understand what "valid" is supposed to mean in this case. I know what it is to say that an argument is valid, or that it isn't; I don't understand what it is to say that a person is valid, or isn't. It's got something to do with gender identity, but I'm not clear on what the claim is exactly.

As for expressing the traditional Christian view, that wasn't one of Howard's big things. CS Lewis or Tolkien would have wanted to capture Christian morality in some way, but not Howard. Conan is a moral man, to be sure, with a code that he adheres to; but that code admits of piracy and slaughter, or mercy killings of those too weak to go on.

The idea that he'd be bent up about expressing emotional support for the distressed is laughable. 'March or die, live if you're strong enough,' that was Conan's system. He'd extend protection to a beautiful woman, but only because he happened to value beautiful women.

Grim said...

I ran it by Google, and the answer I got to 'how is a person invalid?' was to tell me that they couldn't walk easily. So Google only knows "in-VAH-lid," not "in-VAL-id."

Texan99 said...

Decades ago I read a Doonesbury strip I thought was funny, quoting Simone de Beauvoir saying something about how a woman who tried to act like a human being was accused of trying to be a man. As a criticism of people who tried to fit a woman's psyche into a pigeonhole, I thought it was spot on. These days, the fashion is to be a woman who insists that, if she's not really in the female pigeonhole, she must be in the male one. I'll never understand it.

It should be so simple. Men and women overlap more than they differ, but they do differ. The differences show up most starkly in averages and of course therefore on the tail of the distribution. What an individual actually is, though, can't be altered by either the averages or the experience on the tail. I'm on the tail in lots of ways. That makes me a woman on the tail, not a man. If I were six feet tall, as two of my aunts were, that would make me an unusually tall woman, not a man.

Lots of the silliness about men and women in various fields is based less on what men and women are immutably good at and more on differences between what the average man or woman finds compelling enough to devote a career to. Still, if you run into a woman who likes engineering and is good at it, that doesn't make her a man any more than a man becomes a woman because he likes nursing and is good at it. It's not the gender that needs to be more fluid, it's our ability to see that individuals are what they are, even if they're not on the median in every possible way.

Tom said...

Well, I wasn't really suggesting that Howard would have endorsed a Christian viewpoint, but I do.

I think "valid" in identitarian-speak just means "fully human." Somehow disagreeing with an identity person (where identity is any category of LGBTQ or race/ethnicity except any variation of white) is dehumanizing.

Much like calling someone an NPC, since that contradicts their identity-ness.

Grim said...

"Well, I wasn't really suggesting that Howard would have endorsed a Christian viewpoint, but I do."

Sure, but you didn't style yourself "Conan" and presume to speak for the character R. E. Howard created.

Tom said...

Also true.

On the 'valid people' thing, things like the headline Trump Can't Erase Transgender People ... make me think they really do see these things in terms of existential threats.