(Quarkstomper's sabbatical continues as I dredge up another piece from my files; this one a Street Prophets diary from 2008.)
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit it, because it will probably damage my geek street cred, but I have not rushed out to buy the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Heck, I haven’t even bought the Third Edition. Either one. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m a purist, but that’s not quite true; when I play D&D I use the Second Edition rules and real purists only play First. I have been observing the reaction to the new version from a distance, though, and have skimmed over some of the material. One thing in particular I noticed: They’ve changed the alignment system.
D&D Alignment is an attempt to classify a character’s moral values and bases its classification on two scales: the scale of Good vs. Evil, and the scale of Law vs. Order. The intersection of these two scales gives us the nine classic D&D Alignments: Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil, and with "True Neutral" occupying Paul Lynde’s spot in the Center Square. The new version condenses the system from a grid with two axes to a single continuum going from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil.
I’m rather ambivalent about the change. In its abstract form, the old alignment chart had a symmetrical beauty to it. In practice, though, the categories were awfully subjective and led to inevitable arguments. The new version, as far as I can tell, does little to remedy the ambiguity. But since I rarely play D&D, and when I do I use Alignment as a guideline rather than a constraint, I suppose it doesn’t really matter to me.
But the subject did get me thinking about Law and Chaos and how the opposition between the two has been used in fantasy.
There is a philosophy called Dualism which holds that there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who divide everything into two categories and those who don’t. All right; so maybe that’s not exactly what Dualism teaches, but people have been perceiving the world as paired opposites ever since Marduk cleaved the body of Tiamat with his sword and fashioned the world from the two halves. The theme was old when Zoroaster first envisioned the universe as a cosmic struggle between Truth and Falsehood. And so we have Light and Darkness; Yin and Yang; Anima and Animus; Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Order and Chaos.
Science fiction and fantasy author Poul Anderson used Order vs. Chaos as a theme in a number of his novels, including Three Hearts and Three Lions, one of the source materials for Dungeons & Dragons. Three Hearts and Three Lions is about a Danish engineer who finds himself transported to a magical world based off the medieval tales of Charlemagne and his knights. In this world the Dark Ages never ended; and civilization is under siege by the faerie realm. Christendom is seen as champions of Order, opposing the Chaos which in inimical to humanity.
Another Anderson novel, Operation Chaos is set in a world where magic and technology have developed side-by-side. He takes the medieval notion of a three-level universe: Heaven above, Hell below and Middle-Earth between them; and puts a scientific spin on it. Hell is the Low Continuum, where matter and energy exist in a state of higher entropy. Travelling to Hell, as Steve and Ginny Matuchek do in the story, is a problem in physics as well as magic. Heaven cannot directly aid them in their mission, (although they get a bit of technical assistance from a sympathetic angel), and so at the story’s climax Virginia calls upon those deities allied with neither the Christian Heaven nor with Hell, but who in their own way fought against Chaos.
Another seminal influence on Dungeons & Dragons, British writer Michael Moorcock, also used Order vs. Chaos as an important theme. In his Elric of Melniboné stories, the world is ruled by two sets of conflicting gods: the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos. Elric’s decadent, aristocratic family has traditionally served Chaos, but he often finds himself in moral quandaries that place him in the grey area between the two.
In the 1980s, the gods of Elirc worked their way into DC Comics, with a number of their mystic heroes recast as soldiers or pawns in this struggle. Dr. Fate was originally an archaeologist who gained magical powers by donning the "Helm of Nabu", an artifact created by an ancient Egyptian sorcerer. Nabu was rewritten as one of the Lords of Order and Dr. Fate became their sometimes rebellious servant in their eternal war against the Lords of Chaos. Other characters, such as the Phantom Stranger and Kid Eternity, also got redefined along the Order vs. Chaos axis.
At the time, the notion that Order and Good are not always congruent seemed reasonably profound to me. After all, the Nazis were all about Order, and they certainly were Evil. This theme came up again in the TV series Babylon 5 in the conflict between the seraphic Vorlons and the malevolent Shadows, aliens which at first seemed to personify Good vs. Evil but later on were seen to embody an arbitrary moral Order vs. a Darwinian Chaos.
Now, I grew up in the wake of the ‘60s, which equated Order with Repression and Chaos with Freedom. There was nothing new about this; G.K. Chesterton, writing at the beginning of the century, began his surreal novel The Man Who Was Thursday with a debate between a poet claiming that all art is anarchy and another claiming to be a "poet of Order".
Chesterton’s near contemporary Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line in his poem "Recessional" about "lesser breeds without the law." Despite the temptation to associate Kipling’s "lesser breeds" with the brown-skinned natives his empire subjugated, in the context of the poem he’s referring to peoples who worship power for its own sake, untempered by a respect for justice and honor. The militaristic Prussians of Kipling’s time and the Nazis who eventually followed them may have been rigid in terms of rules and regimentation, but lawless in their ethical codes.
Later on, I decided the idea of Law and Chaos not equaling Good and Evil wasn’t quite as deep as my comic books thought it was. If your only choices are Order and Chaos, any hero worth his spandex will have to side with Order, because heroes are all about helping people and saving them from destruction. Chaos causes destruction and doesn’t care about anybody.
Alan Moore understood this in his revolutionary series V for Vendetta. His hero, V, is certainly an anarchist, an agent of Chaos bringing down a corrupt Order. But once the repressive government has been overthrown, a new and better one must now be built; and that is something he is incapable of doing. The anarchist must step back so that a new and hopefully better Order can be created. But anarchy remains waiting in the wings, just to keep Order honest.
Neil Gaiman gently mocked the eternal conflict between Order and Chaos in his graphic novel Books of Magic. When Dr. Fate explains the struggle between the two forces, young Tim Hunter comments that it sounds like a series of rotten fantasy novels.
"Oh no," Fate replies; "It is the basis of Magic: the imposition of Order on formless Chaos, the release of Joyous Chaos into the Gray monotony of Order..."
To which Tim’s companion John Constantine mutters, "Chaos versus Order indeed. I thought Everyone had heard of Fractals these days. There’s no chaos, no order; just patterns of different levels of complexity."
Perhaps; but dualistic lenses like that of Law vs. Chaos are how we try to make sense of these patterns.
At least that’s what a person of Lawful Alignment would say.