The more things change, the more they stay the same

 I have been reading a lot but haven't had the blogging bug. Until today, because I read two very different things that clicked together.

I'll start with the Serious Reading: I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very philosophical novel that I won't attempt to summarize in full. I'm about a third of the way in, in chapter three of Part 3 ("Words Misunderstood") He's describing the experiences of Sabina, a Czech woman who has moved to Switzerland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sabina is talking to some other Czech emigres, and one of them starts inquiring into her anti-communist bonafides. Did she engage in sufficiently dissenting activities back in Czechoslovakia? Did she do enough to oppose the Soviet-backed regime?

Sabina's realization is that this guy is the mirror image of the communist functionaries who would scrutinize people's dossiers before they could get jobs or travel visas or official approval for other activities of life. It also reminds me of a point that Vaclav Havel made in his essay "The Power of the Powerless": These modern authoritarian regimes care deeply about appearances. It's not enough to just threaten to kill anyone who tries to thwart the dictator's material interests, they also need to keep up the veneer of ideological uniformity.

Related to the veneer of ideological uniformity, today I learned that in the official Dungeons and Dragons rules they will no longer refer to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc. as "races." They are now "species." It seems that the essentializing of group differences in Dungeons and Dragons comes too close to racism in our real world.

There are two levels on which we could look at this. If we approach it purely on the level of the specific term, well, I don't know what the "right" term is to describe a world of fantasy and magic, with trolls and wizards and lizard-men and gnomes and all sorts of other weird stuff. Surely trolls and humans and lizard-men differ from each other more than, say, humans from different continents differ from each other. On that level, "race" seems an inapt term, and trying to equate the difference between an orc and an elf to the difference between two groups of real humans seems illogical. On the other hand, the existence of half-elves, half-orcs, half-giants (in some stories), etc. suggests that these creatures can mate with humans, and maybe do differ less than most species.

Not to mention that they mix and mingle in many of these fantasy societies, which may be the far more salient reason to say that they are more akin to different human races than to, say, dogs and cats. From a story perspective, Elves and Dwarves and Lizard Men (or Lizard Thems, to be gender-neutral?) are groups that often have their own separate kingdoms but frequently trade and sometimes even mix in bustling trading ports. Their interactions are fantastical, exaggerated stand-ins for conflict and cooperation between human groups, as magical creatures in fairy tales have long been. "Race" captures their story function quite accurately, if sometimes uncomfortably. (And who said fiction is or ought to be uniformly comforting?)

But that's not the real point here. It's not about dogs and cats versus human groups in modern society. It's about moral hygiene. It's about trying to ensure that this fantasy game doesn't corrupt the youth with ideas that run counter to the morality that adults are trying to install. And we've seen this game before, with the 1980's freak-outs about D&D being satanic. Now a new group of prim, proper grown-ups with strict moral codes is trying to parse games of fantasy and imagination for anything that might corrupt the youth, and lo and behold they've found it. How long before Tipper Gore starts bitching about music again?

All of this has happened before and will happen again.