Many youth of El Salvador are victim to and perpetrators of a long-burning gang rivalry. It is a rivalry fuelled as much by drug trafficking and bribery as by psychology. Matthew Charles and Juan Passarelli bring a camera into this terrible microcosm with their documentary The Engineer.
Around the same time as I was navigating the app, this document caught my attention. Notice how often it discusses 'anti-bullying' measures, and more importantly that it never even considers how teachers and other influential people could instead be pro-victim. This is not about blaming the victim. It means creating an environment where people can be resilient to, or even benefit from, acts that would otherwise make them victims.
The problem with being anti-bully is that it can only work from the top-down. It works to the extent that it becomes the bully's bully: assuming dominance, and then expressing it in a struggle to be recognised. If it worked from the bottom-up there would be no need for it; we would see a balance of power. It is constrained to be a half-measure because it endorses the kind of relationship that it campaigns against. It denies the worth inherent in everyone by endowing with prestige qualities people had little-to-no part in creating. For teachers this means seniority, just as bullies (and gang members) may have their strength and charisma.
That such half-measures can be valuable is attested by the longevity of law. It is such relationships that underlie the notion of statehood. In the face of historical successes, the question for the future therefore becomes when these relationships seem justified. As much as law must adapt to accommodate the changes around it, this question is always ongoing.
Legitimacy is an unavoidable membrane mediating between ideas in our heads and our physical actions in the world. At different times of our lives we will encounter it in many different forms. It takes "high-fidelity" shape in the nature of the scientific method, the development of wisdom; or lower-fidelity forms in the pressures for social conformity, the use of juries, the practice of elections. It is in constant metamorphosis; a neural network learning from the traces of past electrical impulses exchanged between one side and the other.
Fidelity is the degree to which signal is divorced from noise. I distinguish it from 'legitimacy' only in the sense that legitimacy depends on context - fidelity is context-free. Context itself is hugely susceptible to noise. For example people are able to distrust 'science' when they conflate the products of research and the method that merely assisted in producing them. Such notions of 'science' can - quite reasonably - lack legitimacy, no matter how high-fidelity the method in the background.
Here, another name for signal could be objectivity and for noise, subjectivity. That is, behind fidelity - high or low - is the matter of independence. Independence from singular, flawed interests. Wisdom is personal, yet its development is high-fidelity given a natural trend toward the universal. One gets a whiff of this in the Analects of Confucius, the Eightfold Path, gnothi seauton, Kant's Categorical Imperative, Jung's collective unconscious. What matters here is not so much the dialectical bridge between the subjective and the objective, and even less what is traveling across it.
Instead, what matters here is ambition towards the universal. Such ambition bolsters legitimacy by seeking common ground and - another, much harder task - accommodating differences. An ambition that builds community. An ambition that is conspicuous in its absence from 'anti-bullying' proposals.
Anti-bullying looks to be conceived mostly in the form of legislation, and therefore inherits the problem with any legal fiction (such as 'statehood'): you only get the sense that it exists when its boundaries are challenged. After damage is already done. Crime statistics make the principle that retribution discourages crime at least a little hollow. Legislation swims against the current in another way: that it treats children, to use an old phrase, as little adults; the schoolyard and classroom as miniature neighbourhood and economy. Instead, the tremendously simplified environment makes grass-roots campaigns much more feasible.
Being 'pro-victim' is not limited to, despite the singular nature of the term, helping individuals cope with abuse. Say, with self-defense training, or Stephen Fry's clever retort "no, no, don't touch me; you'll give me an erection." It is also about rewarding people who form supportive social groups (especially around those most in need of support), at once bringing everyone in the group greater security, instilling community values, and helping to preclude bullying, rather than just responding to it. These measures should preclude both in the nature of a deterrent, and also by combating insecurities that can lead to the abusive behaviour in the first place.
I was a little disturbed when it dawned on me that the impulse to unite in such groups, transplanted to the context of El Salvador, is exactly what allows gang culture to persist. The worst sense of security is a false sense of security; this is precisely the result when the bullied become the bullies, and two rival gangs - MS-13 and Eighteen Street - become each-others ideal out-group. This vicious circle can likely be escaped only with major economic reform in El Salvador. It is instructive for authority figures in less dangerous countries that this fire was only kindled due to Salvadorans carrying a particularly violent strain of gang culture from the United States. These behaviours are learned: it just needs to happen when looking at a friendly face, not down the barrel of a gun. To cohere a community of ambition, not to isolate insecurity.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Saturday, November 9, 2013
In the Lives of an Avatar
Does an avatar's life begin at conception? That moment, where one imagination is fertilised by another?
Being mere models of narrow aspects of reality, avatars have no sanctity. We need not try defining some objective milestone dividing the 'living' from the non-'living'. The important question, particularly with games, is subjective: when do we start feeling attached to avatars? While I agree that 'immersion' is a poor goal for game developers, describing a game as a whole as 'engaging' is petty praise. While the absence of such an adjective would be a chirping canary, its use leaves one wanting: what exactly separates a given game from the immense crowd of engaging media?
On top of engagement, attachment requires consequences to matter. Does a game instill awe of ingenuity or courage? Make you feel remorseful for your actions? Add to or challenge your understanding of the world? Content can be engaging - attachment demands context.
From Brenda Laurel:
Since an essential relationship between designers and players is one of trust, the question is how such relationships are established. The traditional - sometimes questionable - response has been to make trust unnecessary, for example by empowering players with better means to express themselves in interesting ways, yet (intentionally or not) limiting the harm they can do to their own or others' experiences. In digital environments at least, the expressiveness (and damage-control) of such kinds of 'sandbox' environments is sure to increase over time.
A wiser approach may be organic forms of social engineering. Expecting trust in both directions, rather than just from players to creators. Often social experiences are reward enough in themselves for good behaviour. I would love to see social science research on the feasibility of more explicit rewards for people who would otherwise need sanctions. Brenda Laurel talks about communities with effective soft sanctions, and seems quite optimistic about being able to replicate their results on a larger scale. The legal system has often taken a harder line; consent is very powerful: a trust that has turned, for example, acts of graffiti from vandalism in to expressions that can enliven urban environments.
Combined, these practices can be seen as ways of helping communities (or systems in general) become more robust - even antifragile
- to unexpected events. This is the skill of game/interaction designers: fostering serendipity in emergent systems.
Instead of technology (no offence to the programmers), Heavy Rain looked to non-linear narrative to achieve this - better than other narrative-oriented games I've seen - in the most emergent system known: the human brain. Even when a narrative is predefined, so long as you can empathise with characters the mere sense that one could have done differently can be enough to trigger remorse. Games can take narrative further, by encouraging and allowing you to change your behaviour in later, similar parts of the game. To see different consequences within the same world. To feel growth, rather than just be witness to it, and not just by seeking a better 'score,' but a 'better' story.
I have felt attached to game characters before, but their nature as levers for advancing a narrative - however enlightening of oneself or society these narratives may be - rather than challenging my motivations or reasons for doing, means they have a very different appeal. They deal with the large and intimidating rather than the small and malleable. While both experiences are obviously important, the former are most faithfully (though perhaps not as entertainingly) conveyed via audiovisuals or text.
To make player actions matter, Heavy Rain's creators had to give up a large amount of control over the progress of the story. A lack of 'game-overs' places definite limits on the way stories can be told; for want of a term, I refer to such narratives as 'persistent.' For example, If a designer relies on the player's reptilian reflexes in combat situations, they are forced to choose at which points in the story it is acceptable for a character to die.
Persistent narratives demand that we question the idea of closure: apart from cutting the power, what circumstances lead to a game's conclusion? While it depends on the nature of the story, without a combat mechanic - or a very limited one - it is easy to consider other ways for a story to end: characters could be aged (remember Jason Rohrer's Passage?), exposed to pathogens, fired from a job, whatever. Most generally, closure is the point in a game when all player characters have permanently changed to non-player characters. In a standard narrative this general perspective of closure is pretty mundane, in a persistent narrative it would endow designers with huge creative freedom.
Given that death is such a permanent change for a character, it is interesting that its presence in games has been so chronically unreflective. "Health bars" are such a shallow facade - a one dimensional gap between alive and dead. The change from one to the other is isolated to such a narrow band of time - and with game-overs can happen so frequently - that the idea is sucked of almost all meaning. It is much easier to give the idea meaning in manual than automated, repetitive storytelling. So far, attempts at automation have meant giving a character some form of blurry vision or fatigue (perhaps with the screen donning an increasingly red hue).
So long as games are oriented around skill, and developing the twitch reflexes so as to die less, this immediate link between cause and effect is useful if not necessary. At the same time, it makes 'how?' questions stupid, and doesn't invite anyone to ask 'why?' More cerebral choices offer both the player and the designer more latitude. Passage creates closure with a five minute timer in the background and a rapidly aging character in the foreground. Other games could offer branches in the story for the player (and creator) to decide how - and more significantly, when - they experience (or create) the transition.
Games broaden the definition of 'content' beyond any other medium, because players are able to develop meaning from more than what they have experienced via their senses. Content is also the experience of what they didn't do (and as a result, didn't sense; a parallel to the economists' opportunity cost). This understanding can build on itself by impacting ongoing play (and later missed choices).
In a perceptive discussion between Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder, all-round smart guy) and Garry Kasparov, Moravec's Paradox is drawn from the annals of Artificial Intelligence. They use the paradox to highlight a predilection within Silicon Valley to try and automate everything, when many problems would often become much more tractable by offloading some of that work to humans. I think, on a smaller scale, that this becomes even more true for games.
Duolingo makes for a powerful case study of this.
Algorithms replace designer ego with player ego, and so does offloading content creation. Both are desirable, but the need for a coherent story also limits the amount of creative effort that can be offloaded. Economically, it is also a matter of incentives: offloading creates a need to give work a playful face. With Duolingo for example, the desire to learn a language is more engaging than any of the game mechanics it uses. It is also instructive in that the learning experience can be influenced by the actions of the global community, without making the game 'multi-player' in the classical sense.
Games dissolve many differences between creation and consumption, leaving chiefly the contrast of incentives - and therefore power - to express. Exploiting the paradox, this form of crowdsourcing therefore offers particular benefits to smaller developers.
The paradox is also echoed in the nature of games that inhabit each genre. Put more forcefully, the choices made in the above balancing act delimit the kind of game one can make. Existing sandbox games, like The Sims, edge closest to achieving my friend's dream. At the same time, they very strictly limit the gamut of experience that players can have, in turn precluding them from deep attachment.
If dying between the panels condemns a comic-book character to a thousand deaths, the lives (and deaths) of an avatar are magnified in potential significance still more. Design decides whether this potential becomes reality. That can and should include all of us; I can't wait to see where we go with it.
Being mere models of narrow aspects of reality, avatars have no sanctity. We need not try defining some objective milestone dividing the 'living' from the non-'living'. The important question, particularly with games, is subjective: when do we start feeling attached to avatars? While I agree that 'immersion' is a poor goal for game developers, describing a game as a whole as 'engaging' is petty praise. While the absence of such an adjective would be a chirping canary, its use leaves one wanting: what exactly separates a given game from the immense crowd of engaging media?
On top of engagement, attachment requires consequences to matter. Does a game instill awe of ingenuity or courage? Make you feel remorseful for your actions? Add to or challenge your understanding of the world? Content can be engaging - attachment demands context.
From Brenda Laurel:
I used the Renaissance Faire as an example of how the clever selection and arrangement of materials (to quote Aristotle) could predispose individuals with differing traversals through the space to have dramatically satisfying experiences. This moves the notion of the dramatic from a line to a field. Interaction designers can also think about what sorts of predispositions are set up by the arrangement and potential ordering of experiences and encounters. [emphasis mine]Having played through Heavy Rain recently, this quote resonates. It suggests that good design is good curation. This is bound to become an increasingly limited perspective of design as technology advances. Design-as-curation assumes both a stable "arrangement", and 'look but don't touch' (or only-touch-in-exactly-the-ways-we-expect) behaviour from players. This kind of context is fragile to transgressions of unspoken (and not just agreed-to) rules. It exalts the designer and infantilises the player.
Since an essential relationship between designers and players is one of trust, the question is how such relationships are established. The traditional - sometimes questionable - response has been to make trust unnecessary, for example by empowering players with better means to express themselves in interesting ways, yet (intentionally or not) limiting the harm they can do to their own or others' experiences. In digital environments at least, the expressiveness (and damage-control) of such kinds of 'sandbox' environments is sure to increase over time.
A wiser approach may be organic forms of social engineering. Expecting trust in both directions, rather than just from players to creators. Often social experiences are reward enough in themselves for good behaviour. I would love to see social science research on the feasibility of more explicit rewards for people who would otherwise need sanctions. Brenda Laurel talks about communities with effective soft sanctions, and seems quite optimistic about being able to replicate their results on a larger scale. The legal system has often taken a harder line; consent is very powerful: a trust that has turned, for example, acts of graffiti from vandalism in to expressions that can enliven urban environments.
Combined, these practices can be seen as ways of helping communities (or systems in general) become more robust - even antifragile
- to unexpected events. This is the skill of game/interaction designers: fostering serendipity in emergent systems.Instead of technology (no offence to the programmers), Heavy Rain looked to non-linear narrative to achieve this - better than other narrative-oriented games I've seen - in the most emergent system known: the human brain. Even when a narrative is predefined, so long as you can empathise with characters the mere sense that one could have done differently can be enough to trigger remorse. Games can take narrative further, by encouraging and allowing you to change your behaviour in later, similar parts of the game. To see different consequences within the same world. To feel growth, rather than just be witness to it, and not just by seeking a better 'score,' but a 'better' story.
I have felt attached to game characters before, but their nature as levers for advancing a narrative - however enlightening of oneself or society these narratives may be - rather than challenging my motivations or reasons for doing, means they have a very different appeal. They deal with the large and intimidating rather than the small and malleable. While both experiences are obviously important, the former are most faithfully (though perhaps not as entertainingly) conveyed via audiovisuals or text.
To make player actions matter, Heavy Rain's creators had to give up a large amount of control over the progress of the story. A lack of 'game-overs' places definite limits on the way stories can be told; for want of a term, I refer to such narratives as 'persistent.' For example, If a designer relies on the player's reptilian reflexes in combat situations, they are forced to choose at which points in the story it is acceptable for a character to die.
Persistent narratives demand that we question the idea of closure: apart from cutting the power, what circumstances lead to a game's conclusion? While it depends on the nature of the story, without a combat mechanic - or a very limited one - it is easy to consider other ways for a story to end: characters could be aged (remember Jason Rohrer's Passage?), exposed to pathogens, fired from a job, whatever. Most generally, closure is the point in a game when all player characters have permanently changed to non-player characters. In a standard narrative this general perspective of closure is pretty mundane, in a persistent narrative it would endow designers with huge creative freedom.
Given that death is such a permanent change for a character, it is interesting that its presence in games has been so chronically unreflective. "Health bars" are such a shallow facade - a one dimensional gap between alive and dead. The change from one to the other is isolated to such a narrow band of time - and with game-overs can happen so frequently - that the idea is sucked of almost all meaning. It is much easier to give the idea meaning in manual than automated, repetitive storytelling. So far, attempts at automation have meant giving a character some form of blurry vision or fatigue (perhaps with the screen donning an increasingly red hue).
So long as games are oriented around skill, and developing the twitch reflexes so as to die less, this immediate link between cause and effect is useful if not necessary. At the same time, it makes 'how?' questions stupid, and doesn't invite anyone to ask 'why?' More cerebral choices offer both the player and the designer more latitude. Passage creates closure with a five minute timer in the background and a rapidly aging character in the foreground. Other games could offer branches in the story for the player (and creator) to decide how - and more significantly, when - they experience (or create) the transition.
A friend of mine wishes for a game that would create content on-the-fly as the player goes. Rather than wait around for a personal Robin Williams clone, for now it is a worthwhile thought to ponder.
Games broaden the definition of 'content' beyond any other medium, because players are able to develop meaning from more than what they have experienced via their senses. Content is also the experience of what they didn't do (and as a result, didn't sense; a parallel to the economists' opportunity cost). This understanding can build on itself by impacting ongoing play (and later missed choices).
In a perceptive discussion between Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder, all-round smart guy) and Garry Kasparov, Moravec's Paradox is drawn from the annals of Artificial Intelligence. They use the paradox to highlight a predilection within Silicon Valley to try and automate everything, when many problems would often become much more tractable by offloading some of that work to humans. I think, on a smaller scale, that this becomes even more true for games.
Duolingo makes for a powerful case study of this.
Algorithms replace designer ego with player ego, and so does offloading content creation. Both are desirable, but the need for a coherent story also limits the amount of creative effort that can be offloaded. Economically, it is also a matter of incentives: offloading creates a need to give work a playful face. With Duolingo for example, the desire to learn a language is more engaging than any of the game mechanics it uses. It is also instructive in that the learning experience can be influenced by the actions of the global community, without making the game 'multi-player' in the classical sense.
Games dissolve many differences between creation and consumption, leaving chiefly the contrast of incentives - and therefore power - to express. Exploiting the paradox, this form of crowdsourcing therefore offers particular benefits to smaller developers.
The paradox is also echoed in the nature of games that inhabit each genre. Put more forcefully, the choices made in the above balancing act delimit the kind of game one can make. Existing sandbox games, like The Sims, edge closest to achieving my friend's dream. At the same time, they very strictly limit the gamut of experience that players can have, in turn precluding them from deep attachment.
If dying between the panels condemns a comic-book character to a thousand deaths, the lives (and deaths) of an avatar are magnified in potential significance still more. Design decides whether this potential becomes reality. That can and should include all of us; I can't wait to see where we go with it.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Beholding Pandora's Jar
Two of Hesiod's poems, the Theogony and Works and Days collectively provide some answers to the question “Why are humans not gods?” They reveal a chronology of the separation between gods and men; at the beginning of the Theogony narrative, they stand side-by-side, and by the end of Works and Days their estrangement is sealed with the gods' gift of women.[1] This discussion will examine how this parting-of-ways is realised. To do this, it will first explore the nature of Hesiod's works, followed by an overview of what his main characters bring to the narrative. This provides a good backdrop for understanding the three main steps in the story. It then tries to conclude by suggesting what can be gleaned from a synthesis of these perspectives.
Hesiod's chronicle is complex and often ambiguous, in both content and form. The Theogony and Works and Days, even though they ultimately provide us a neat picture of their two main mythical figures, Prometheus and Pandora, they can not be understood in sequence. The former poem alludes to events described in the latter, and vice versa.[2] In a way that itself reveals the character of the relationship between gods and men, the story's logic is similarly circular: the Titan brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, in expressing qualities we can immediately recognise as complementary facets of human nature, each take steps that bring about an unintended downfall of humans from the standing of gods to some rung above beasts.[3] In other words, humans are not so much distinct from gods due to their nature, but because (some of) the gods say so.
Such control exercised (and order created) by Zeus and his allies sets in contrast the uncertainty of human life and the perfect chaos of beastly existence. Hesiod creates this contrast through Prometheus' two – ultimately failed - challenges to Zeus, with Prometheus taking the role not of primal combatant seeking blood but of intelligent trickster trying to outwit. He first hucksters, presenting Zeus with a choice between undesirable bones covered with appetising fat or tasty morsels wrapped in an unsavoury stomach. He then steals fire for humans in response to Zeus hiding it from them. The difference between these successive challenges reflect the declining stature of man. Why, after all, would those on par with gods need Prometheus to represent them? The nature of his representation changes from mimicing human intelligence, to defending human livelihood.
While the reason for Zeus' punishing humans rather than the (apparently) guilty trickster Prometheus is absent from the Theogony, Works and Days suggests a possibility:
The only clear way to reconcile the idea that the defense of human life could be a plague would be to find the presumptious use of intelligence to hoodwink an inordinately more abhorrent example to set. Recalling the words of another poet, Fulke Greville:
This is somewhat consistent with Zeus later punishing Prometheus for enabling man's use of fire, for again allowing humans to break that “law” to which they are bound.
Zeus has no qualms about using the same tactics in his defense of the (however demoted) human condition. Hesiod expresses this through the motif of the gift. Gifts – by their nature – are dangerous when accepted without questioning the benefits of this to the giver, or the possible harms to the recipient. The harms to those receiving gifts vary: they can be intrinsically harmful (or of little-to-no benefit, such as the bones covered in fat) and/or they can play in to the feeling of social pressure to reciprocate, which is the perfect cloak for later exploitation.[6]
Both Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus fail – after the initial huckstering by Prometheus – in the cause of representing humanity; a failure which in itself endorses the hierarchy created by Zeus. The mere fact that they are not human makes them doomed to fail, regardless of their individual qualities. For Epimetheus, this means allowing Zeus to complete a cycle of reciprocation by uncritically accepting the “all-gifted/all-giver” Pandora on behalf of humanity.[7] While this probably serves to etiologically justify human reciprocation, another (incompatible) interpretation would suggest that since the gift arises from a rage of retribution rather than a sense of social responsibility and compassion, that this is yet another form of successful deceit chartering the gods' supremacy. Whatever the case – and for the sake of the story's internal consistency between elements of the narrative, it makes sense to prefer the etiological at the expense of precise expression – we know that each step in Hesiod's tripartite creation story was inspired by originally separate tales, and combining them would have been justified so to strengthen either interpretation.
Epimetheus' dim-witted mistake leads to the third and final stage in the separation of humans from the gods. As with the first two stages – Zeus's reaction to Prometheus' part in the sacrifice ritual, then his reaction to his stealing of fire – the third stage is still more punishment for challenging what later morphs in to the “Great Chain of Being”: Zeus introduces women to the human community. Hesiod's chronicle is notably more ambiguous on the position of women – relative to men – in the hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, all mention of (or reference to) Pandora and her descendants characterise (unruly) instruments of men – who either marry in to an ambivalent future or are forgotten by the narrative – rather than fully independent agents. Still, they are very much human, with outward qualities of (and – in delicious irony, just like men - gifts from) the divine:
And inward resemblance to beasts:
Naturally alluding both to the human nature divided between Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the motif of deceptive appearances, familiar from the Theogony's sacrifice ritual using fat and the theft of fire via fennel stalk.[10]
Zeus' two punishments suggest a god who is either indecisive or capricious. His first punishment is to hide fire, treating men as animals, the antithesis of the divine; his second punishment – after Prometheus lifts their stature with the theft of fire – is to further boost their place in the hierarchy by introducing marriage. Fire and women, in other words, are Hesiod's civilising influences, and Zeus flip-flops like a politician between hiding and gifting them. They both require – again noting the demeaning treatment – constant 'upkeep' to remain bright, healthy, and yield (cultural or biological) offspring.
Resolving the apparent contradiction between the idea of nurturing 'civilising influences' and Zeus' acts of punishment that recur through the narrative neatly captures an answer to the question considered at the beginning of this discussion: “Why are humans not gods?” While humans lose and acquire 'civilising influences' throughout the story, their lives are at every step becoming more turbulent and uncertain, even as they are distanced from animals. As erratic as the behaviour of gods may be, power is insulation from – and omnipotence immunity to – uncertainty. Animals, as suggested earlier, are the perfect embodiment of chaos. Yet chaos without awareness leaves certainty irrelevant. As humans gain the Promethean fire, combined with their dependence on cooked food, the investment it demands must entail further (conscious) submission to the whims of nature. The arrival of Pandora and her jar leave this 'nature' still more punishing:
Bibliography
Greville, F., 1st Baron Brooke. (2012, May 22). Wikiquote, . Retrieved 04:31, September 2, 2013 from http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Fulke_Greville,_1st_Baron_Brooke&oldid=1446761.
Nagy, J. F. (1981) Deceptive gift in Greek mythology. Arethusa, 14, 191-204.
Powell, B. B. (2012) Classical Myth, 7th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson.
Vernant, J. P. (1979). The myth of Prometheus in Hesiod. In Myth and society in ancient Greece (J. Lloyd, Trans.) Brighton: Harvester Press.
________________
[1] Vernant, J.P. The myth of Prometheus in Hesiod.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] All translations of Hesiod are from O'Brian & Major; 55-56.
[5] Greville, F.
[6] Nagy, J. F. Deceptive gift in Greek mythology.
[7] Powell, B. B. Classical Myth p. 128
[8] Works & Days, 63-66
[9] Works & Days, 69-70
[10] Vernant, J. P.
[11] Works & Days, 94-103
Hesiod's chronicle is complex and often ambiguous, in both content and form. The Theogony and Works and Days, even though they ultimately provide us a neat picture of their two main mythical figures, Prometheus and Pandora, they can not be understood in sequence. The former poem alludes to events described in the latter, and vice versa.[2] In a way that itself reveals the character of the relationship between gods and men, the story's logic is similarly circular: the Titan brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, in expressing qualities we can immediately recognise as complementary facets of human nature, each take steps that bring about an unintended downfall of humans from the standing of gods to some rung above beasts.[3] In other words, humans are not so much distinct from gods due to their nature, but because (some of) the gods say so.
Such control exercised (and order created) by Zeus and his allies sets in contrast the uncertainty of human life and the perfect chaos of beastly existence. Hesiod creates this contrast through Prometheus' two – ultimately failed - challenges to Zeus, with Prometheus taking the role not of primal combatant seeking blood but of intelligent trickster trying to outwit. He first hucksters, presenting Zeus with a choice between undesirable bones covered with appetising fat or tasty morsels wrapped in an unsavoury stomach. He then steals fire for humans in response to Zeus hiding it from them. The difference between these successive challenges reflect the declining stature of man. Why, after all, would those on par with gods need Prometheus to represent them? The nature of his representation changes from mimicing human intelligence, to defending human livelihood.
While the reason for Zeus' punishing humans rather than the (apparently) guilty trickster Prometheus is absent from the Theogony, Works and Days suggests a possibility:
“You stole the fire and tricked me, happily,
You, plague on all mankind and on yourself.”[4] [emphasis mine]
The only clear way to reconcile the idea that the defense of human life could be a plague would be to find the presumptious use of intelligence to hoodwink an inordinately more abhorrent example to set. Recalling the words of another poet, Fulke Greville:
“Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound” [emphasis mine] [5]
This is somewhat consistent with Zeus later punishing Prometheus for enabling man's use of fire, for again allowing humans to break that “law” to which they are bound.
Zeus has no qualms about using the same tactics in his defense of the (however demoted) human condition. Hesiod expresses this through the motif of the gift. Gifts – by their nature – are dangerous when accepted without questioning the benefits of this to the giver, or the possible harms to the recipient. The harms to those receiving gifts vary: they can be intrinsically harmful (or of little-to-no benefit, such as the bones covered in fat) and/or they can play in to the feeling of social pressure to reciprocate, which is the perfect cloak for later exploitation.[6]
Both Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus fail – after the initial huckstering by Prometheus – in the cause of representing humanity; a failure which in itself endorses the hierarchy created by Zeus. The mere fact that they are not human makes them doomed to fail, regardless of their individual qualities. For Epimetheus, this means allowing Zeus to complete a cycle of reciprocation by uncritically accepting the “all-gifted/all-giver” Pandora on behalf of humanity.[7] While this probably serves to etiologically justify human reciprocation, another (incompatible) interpretation would suggest that since the gift arises from a rage of retribution rather than a sense of social responsibility and compassion, that this is yet another form of successful deceit chartering the gods' supremacy. Whatever the case – and for the sake of the story's internal consistency between elements of the narrative, it makes sense to prefer the etiological at the expense of precise expression – we know that each step in Hesiod's tripartite creation story was inspired by originally separate tales, and combining them would have been justified so to strengthen either interpretation.
Epimetheus' dim-witted mistake leads to the third and final stage in the separation of humans from the gods. As with the first two stages – Zeus's reaction to Prometheus' part in the sacrifice ritual, then his reaction to his stealing of fire – the third stage is still more punishment for challenging what later morphs in to the “Great Chain of Being”: Zeus introduces women to the human community. Hesiod's chronicle is notably more ambiguous on the position of women – relative to men – in the hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, all mention of (or reference to) Pandora and her descendants characterise (unruly) instruments of men – who either marry in to an ambivalent future or are forgotten by the narrative – rather than fully independent agents. Still, they are very much human, with outward qualities of (and – in delicious irony, just like men - gifts from) the divine:
“... to make a face
Like an immortal goddess, and to shape
The lovely figure of a virgin girl.
Athene was to teach the girl to weave,
And golden Aphrodite to pour charm ...” [8]
And inward resemblance to beasts:
“... Zeus ordered, then,
The killer of Argos, Hermes, to put in
Sly manners, and the morals of a bitch.” [9]
Naturally alluding both to the human nature divided between Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the motif of deceptive appearances, familiar from the Theogony's sacrifice ritual using fat and the theft of fire via fennel stalk.[10]
Zeus' two punishments suggest a god who is either indecisive or capricious. His first punishment is to hide fire, treating men as animals, the antithesis of the divine; his second punishment – after Prometheus lifts their stature with the theft of fire – is to further boost their place in the hierarchy by introducing marriage. Fire and women, in other words, are Hesiod's civilising influences, and Zeus flip-flops like a politician between hiding and gifting them. They both require – again noting the demeaning treatment – constant 'upkeep' to remain bright, healthy, and yield (cultural or biological) offspring.
Resolving the apparent contradiction between the idea of nurturing 'civilising influences' and Zeus' acts of punishment that recur through the narrative neatly captures an answer to the question considered at the beginning of this discussion: “Why are humans not gods?” While humans lose and acquire 'civilising influences' throughout the story, their lives are at every step becoming more turbulent and uncertain, even as they are distanced from animals. As erratic as the behaviour of gods may be, power is insulation from – and omnipotence immunity to – uncertainty. Animals, as suggested earlier, are the perfect embodiment of chaos. Yet chaos without awareness leaves certainty irrelevant. As humans gain the Promethean fire, combined with their dependence on cooked food, the investment it demands must entail further (conscious) submission to the whims of nature. The arrival of Pandora and her jar leave this 'nature' still more punishing:
“... scattered pains and evils among men …The “Hope” that remained is the final quality distinguishing man from animal, but really it is just the flip-side of uncertainty. It is just as irrelevant to gods, and just as inconcievable to animals.
Thousands of troubles, wandering the earth.
The earth is full of evils, and the sea.
Diseases come to visit men by day
And, uninvited, come again at night
Bringing their pains in silence ...” [11]
Bibliography
Greville, F., 1st Baron Brooke. (2012, May 22). Wikiquote, . Retrieved 04:31, September 2, 2013 from http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Fulke_Greville,_1st_Baron_Brooke&oldid=1446761.
Nagy, J. F. (1981) Deceptive gift in Greek mythology. Arethusa, 14, 191-204.
Powell, B. B. (2012) Classical Myth, 7th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson.
Vernant, J. P. (1979). The myth of Prometheus in Hesiod. In Myth and society in ancient Greece (J. Lloyd, Trans.) Brighton: Harvester Press.
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[1] Vernant, J.P. The myth of Prometheus in Hesiod.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] All translations of Hesiod are from O'Brian & Major; 55-56.
[5] Greville, F.
[6] Nagy, J. F. Deceptive gift in Greek mythology.
[7] Powell, B. B. Classical Myth p. 128
[8] Works & Days, 63-66
[9] Works & Days, 69-70
[10] Vernant, J. P.
[11] Works & Days, 94-103
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