Thor’s character development and types of morality

@foundlingmother, I’m making this a separate post instead of reblogging because this is getting well off the trail of the original post and I don’t want to keep dragging poor writernotwaiting into it. Here is the thread of discussion and here’s what you said in your reblog:

That’s an interesting distinction between compassion and respect. I think I would say, taking into account @illwynd‘s explanation of the ways Thor shows that he’s compassionate, or at least trying to be, that part of Thor’s character growth may be that he feels worthiness is tied to, to use the Nietzschean terminology, a slave morality (the contrast between being a good man and a great king, for instance).

That might be some of what’s going on; Thor is probably picking up some (post-)Christian moral ideas from all the Western-educated humans he’s hanging out with. And of course I don’t expect most of the MCU writers to have a very thorough understanding of when certain moral ideas developed and where they came from. So of course to most writers and audiences, “becoming morally better” is going to be more or less synonymous with “becoming more selfless and altruistic.” That said, a noble value system certainly doesn’t preclude caring about other people, and the kind of narcissistic selfishness we associate with people like Trump is still an ignoble mindset, a way of being bad or contemptible according to noble value systems like those of ancient Greece or feudal Europe.

As I’ve said before in discussions of various philosophical issues in the MCU, I think the “good man vs. great king” issue is actually more about deontological vs. consequentialist modes of moral reasoning (I discuss the contrast a bit in this post on Thanos and Ultron and a bit more in this follow-up; apparently I also touched on it in this weird exchange). That’s a distinction that mostly comes up within what Nietzsche calls “slave morality” – the standard examples are Kantianism and utililtarianism, both of which are secular adaptations of Christian morality – but it can actually cut across the slave vs. noble morality distinction. So there can be deontological or consequentialist ways of implementing a noble morality. The reason I think that’s what Thor was talking about is this line: “The brutality, the sacrifice, it changes you.” I think what he had in mind was Odin’s willingness to sacrifice many Asgardian lives (and Malekith’s willingness to sacrifice most of his people) for the sake of victory. The reason this is relevant to ruling is that when you’re making decisions about large numbers of people with different needs and interests, you’re always going to have to trade the well-being of some for the well-being of others. I think we all saw the stupidity of Steve’s “We don’t trade lives” claim in Infinity War, because he was trading lives: in order to buy time to save Vision, he knowingly risked a whole bunch of Wakandan lives. In trying to keep his deontologist conscience clean, to remain “a good man,” he just hid from himself that he was being a bad leader making an indefensible trade, sacrificing many lives for one instead of vice versa.

This got very long, so I’m putting most of it under a cut.

A note on terminology, because it’s clearly very loaded: the “noble” and “slave” labels on moralities/value systems refer to whom the value system ultimately benefits. A noble value system is posited and maintained by the noble class (which may be either a knightly or a priestly caste) and works to justify and preserve their dominant position in society. A slave value system may or may not be invented by the lower classes of society (Buddhism, which counts as a slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense, was invented by a prince), but it definitely works to their advantage, because it protects the vulnerable and promotes social equality. The terminology is unfortunate in a context where the word “slave” immediately brings to mind the American system of Black chattel slavery; that is definitely not what Nietzsche had in mind. He was a classicist before he became a philosopher, so he’s usually thinking about slavery in the ancient world as well as serfdom in pre-modern Europe. This is definitely unorthodox, but I’m going to start using “serf morality” instead of “slave morality” to avoid irrelevant racial connotations.

The main difference between noble and serf morality, on the issue of caring for and helping others, has to do with the way you think about the obligation to do so. The type of serf morality that Nietzsche calls “the morality of compassion” or “the morality of suffering” says that you have an obligation to relieve all suffering, and to care about all others who suffer. (Sometimes an exception is made for those who make others suffer and you’re allowed to hate them and want them to suffer; sometimes you’re supposed to pity and help them too.) You’re supposed to make the happiness and/or well-being of other people your primary goal in life, and you’re supposed to care about everyone, regardless of their relationship to you. Some forms of (post-)Christian morality permit you to prioritize people to whom you have special relationships (family and friends), but the purest form of this morality requires you to care about everyone equally, and ascetic or monastic Christianity discourages forming special relationships because that will inject an element of selfishness into your desire to benefit certain people. The purer forms of this morality – philosophical Christianity, with or without God – also consider the salvation of one’s own soul to be an unacceptably selfish motivation for helping others. Ideally, everyone’s entire motivation is to eliminate the suffering of others, not because of anything particular about them or their relation to you, but simply because they exist and they suffer. The morality of compassion is universalistic, egalitarian, and outward-focused.

Noble value systems allow agents to be selective in whose well-being they care about. Special relationships are extremely important. Traditionally, this usually means family relationships and comradeship-in-arms because aristocratic societies have conventionally been very heredity-focused and martial. But it also includes what Aristotle scholars call “character friendships”: friendships formed with kindred spirits because of mutual admiration for each other’s qualities and abilities. The standards of a noble morality only apply to a small class of people, namely, the nobility; it’s largely silent on how non-nobles should behave, and different versions have different rules about how nobles should treat non-nobles. Respect is reserved for other nobles, but some noble moralities, especially medieval hybrids of Christianity and Roman/pagan noble morality, also encourage benevolence, generosity, and forbearance toward commoners. Under certain circumstances, nobles can be obligated to care about the well-being of certain non-nobles, but it’s virtually always a matter of regarding them as your own, as your responsibility. Lords are supposed to care about the commoners who live in their lands and are obligated to protect them and provide for them; Christian knights are supposed to care about other Christians. In the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic, the guardians (the warrior class) are compared to guard dogs who are friendly to their master’s family but hostile to strangers. Their responsibility is to all the citizens of their city, even the lower-class ones; to that extent, all citizens are their own in the same way family members are. Caring for others in noble moralities is selective and is always a matter of regarding certain others as an extension of oneself and, therefore, regarding their well-being as part of one’s own well-being. Noble moralities also don’t preclude sacrificing yourself for others – that would be very silly in a warrior’s code of conduct – but self-sacrifice is not selfless when you’re sacrificing a part of yourself (your life, your body) for another part of yourself: the people who matter to you, your family, your comrades, your countrymen. There’s also the understanding that those who sacrifice themselves in such a way will be remembered and honored; you exchange a brief life for long-lasting glory.

(To be clear: Nietzsche was not in favor of going back to a Homeric-style warrior noble morality; he was very aware of the many cultural changes that have made that both impossible and undesirable, mostly involving the internalization and intellectualization of human life and activity. He was imagining communities being constructed and battle lines drawn on the ground of ideas, not geography or ethnicity, which can no longer defensibly be said to have the significance they once did. Nationalism, he thought, was a spasm of an outdated worldview. But he also questioned the value of selflessness and wondered about the end goal of a moral system whose primary motivation is the alleviation of suffering.)

So… I’m not sure if Thor’s moral improvement was a matter of moving toward serf morality or just becoming a better representative of noble morality. I definitely think Odin’s goal was the latter. “Humility” considered as an absolute value, as in the more of it the better, definitely belongs to serf morality, but there is a place for humility as a balancing quality in noble morality: Aristotle places magnanimity, or “greatness of soul,” as the virtue at the mean between vanity or arrogance – claiming more honor than you deserve – and an excess of humility or “smallness of soul,” which is effectively meekness, laying claim to less honor than you actually deserve. Thor was arrogant and vain; he invited adulation, he overestimated his own abilities and (as we saw in the deleted scene) the amount of credit he deserved for victories he shared with others. He needed to be shown that he isn’t invincible and that he sometimes has to rely on others, but the goal wasn’t for him to become self-effacing. His maturation also involved a greater awareness and sensitivity to the needs of others: contrast his complete obliviousness to the danger his friends are in during the Jotunheim battle with the slow-motion sequence in the Puente Antiguo battle where Thor looks around and really takes in how much his friends are struggling. That – along with his acknowledgment that he might have done something to wrong Loki and his attempt to apologize – might be considered an increase in empathy and/or compassion; in any case, it’s definitely doing a better job of caring for the people with whom he has a relationship, and for whom he is responsible. Making friends in Midgard does seem to have done something to widen the scope of his compassion and/or benevolence, since he now sees a problem with wiping out the Jotnar.

Millennial culture is spending your teenage years rolling your eyes at adults claiming violent video games will make you a killer, and spending your adult years rolling your eyes at teenagers claiming fictional ships will make you a pedophile.

copperbadge:

It’s too true. Though I think it’s also important to remember that the adults who claimed violent video games would make us all murderers had all the power and all the influence; they “put the stickers on your record sleeves,” as Chumbawamba said. We had no money and no say in anything and they just fuckin’ did it. Whereas the kids claiming fictional ships will make you a pedophile are, well, kids.

That’s not to say they’re dumb or clueless, or that they can’t cause real harm. It’s just that unlike the adults, they haven’t got much real power. In fact they are probably one of the most restricted generations of children in decades, if not in the past century.

I think that’s often why that specific sector of fandom frames interaction the way that they do: as people without much power or autonomy, the only way they know how to exert control or assert authority is by using that powerlessness. When you don’t like your parents’ rules, you situate them as dictators, but because most adults out in the world aren’t really trying to control kids they don’t know, they have to be framed as predators who are actively seeking to hurt kids. Being powerless is what they’re used to, and now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness.

And this has the nasty side effect of minimizing the very real abuses that kids who are actually subject to predators and abusers suffer.

I mean, I don’t know, I don’t talk to these people, and the teens and young adults I do talk to in fandom are generally enviably smart and self-assured. Like I wish I had my shit as together at thirty as they seem to at sixteen. So I can’t really speak to the motivations of the rest. But I can see how, having found a method of asserting independence and authority, kids without much of either in their brickspace lives would find that narrative attractive.

“now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness”

I think it’s a reflex of the cult of victimhood and oppression that started with Christianity – or “slave morality,” in Nietzschean terms, which is both a specific component of Christianity and a more general phenomenon that is separable from Christian theology and persists in secular forms in post-Christian Western culture. There’s a tendency to equate victimhood/oppression with virtue and moral importance, which is part of why conservatives, the Christian Right, “men’s rights activists,” et al. like to insist that they’re oppressed despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary.

Interestingly, though, the internet does give kids a power they never had before: the power to harass strangers without any material consequences to themselves; the power to find and distribute those strangers’ contact information and make their lives hell. But of course, it’s easier to justify such actions to themselves if they can convince themselves that the strangers deserve it because they’re evil predators.

I don’t care if it was said in jest, I genuinely want to know your Nietzschean views on why we enjoy that so much. Please share?

It was kind of a joke, because it’s pretty complicated, but I was also kind of asking for it, so here goes. (The question was about a parenthetical remark in my last addition to this post.)

In Beyond Good and Evil (henceforth BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), Nietzsche draws a distinction between noble values and slave morality. (In BGE he called them “master and slave morality,” but by GM he was using the word “morality” to refer only to the slave type.) They differ both in structure and in typical content, but the structural differences are most important. Here are the typical features of each, structure first, content generalizations last:

Noble values

Set up a hierarchical society divided into at least two castes, some of which are considered better than others, with the higher one(s) always being considerably smaller than the lower (a pyramid structure). Members of different castes have both different rights and different duties: different behavior is expected both toward and from members of different castes.
The major value axis is good vs. bad (rather than good vs. evil), where good = noble, i.e. characteristic of the high caste(s), and bad = contemptible, common, characteristic of the low caste(s).
Not everyone is supposed to be “good”; it is not expected or desired of commoners that they act like nobles.
There is a strict honor-based code of discipline and mutual respect among members of the noble caste; commoners must show deference and obedience to nobles; nobles may not precisely have duties to commoners, but are expected to protect them and show generosity (noblesse oblige); nobles don’t really care how commoners treat each other as long as they don’t cause disorder.
The values are usually (but not always) war-like: the noble caste is the warrior caste; their honor depends on their skill in fighting (according to a specific set of rules); the lower class is considered to be weak and cowardly, and may not even be permitted to carry weapons except upon the express command of the nobles.

Slave morality

Prescribes a universal code of conduct to everyone; everyone has the same rights and duties. (The universality feature is why Nietzsche stops calling noble values a “morality.”)
The major value axis is good vs. evil, where generally good = helpful, selfless, harmless and evil = violent, selfish, domineering. In other words, Nietzsche argues in GM, “good” describes the characteristic behavior of the slave caste in a noble value system, and “evil” describes the characteristic behavior of the noble caste.
Ideally, everyone will become “good.” Whereas the “good” of the good/bad noble system requires the wider prevalence of the “bad” in order to maintain its prestige, the (theoretical) goal of good/evil slave morality is to eliminate evil.
Typically the values are altruistic, peaceable, and egalitarian, though structurally speaking you can also have a “morality” of hedonism and selfishness.

As you probably will have figured out, Christian morality is the prototypical slave morality. Meanwhile, the societies of ancient Greece and Rome were governed by noble values, and despite the official adoption of Christianity, a basically noble value system persisted into feudal Europe. For the most part, Christianity prescribed the code of conduct for the lower classes (humility, forbearance) while the nobles maintained their own warlike codes of honor. The advent of democratic ideals, even as they seemed to come with secularization, actually represents the consistent society-wide implementation of Christian morality. Modern Leftists/progressives are now the standard-bearers for this secularized Christian morality of compassion (and I do include myself here!). Meanwhile, the people who call themselves “conservatives,” at least in the U.S., are not representatives of a noble value system so much as of the slave “morality” of selfishness I alluded to in the last point, which is basically the underpinning of capitalist society.

There are very few bastions of noble values left in contemporary society. The military is one. Criminal organizations, at least as depicted in media, are another. And that’s the entire reason why I wrote this post. Contemporary Western culture is a product of both the noble values of pre-modern Europe – both pre-Christian pagan Europe and feudal medieval Europe – and the slave moralities of Christianity and liberal democracy (now divided into the altruistic, egalitarian morality of the Left and the selfish, greed-driven morality of the Right). Some of the basic values of the noble system are still baked into our culture; we do have concern for honor and reputation, we respect people who can discipline themselves to accomplish difficult feats (whether or not those feats involve helping others, which is the whole point of altruistic morality). There’s still something appealing about a system in which an elite privileged few follow a demanding code of conduct and demonstrate mutual respect even when they’re on opposite sides of a battlefield, while to anyone else, showing consideration is a boon of mercy rather than a requirement of justice. Of course we don’t really want our whole society to look like that; we no longer believe in the rights of nobility; we don’t condone needless violence. But every once in a while we like to become imaginative tourists in that kind of value system, which is why people like to watch movies/TV shows about gangs and other warlike honor cultures.