"What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?" · 2:30am Nov 8th, 2013
So, I recently read Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake". It's a dystopian/post-apocalyptic story from a truly incredible author, who rarely writes genre fiction (folks here are probably most likely to recognize her as the author of The Handmaid's Tale, another dystopian book, instead of her "better" works). It is both a dystopian story and an apocalyptic story, detailing the world both before and after the end. The reason I'm writing this is the former aspect.
In the novel, Atwood creates a world, mostly through the eyes of a child, ruled by social inequity and depravity. Marijuana is as accessible and unremarkable to children as is soda pop, and videos of executions, suicides, animal cruelty, graphic surgery, and child pornography are no more taboo than Maxim is now. The end of the world comes about through neglectful science and short sightedness, which are related to what I'm talking about, but as they're not the main point I'll leave them be. The title of this blog post is a quote from Atwood on writing the novel.
I'm bringing this up for two main reasons. First, I'm both a little bored and a little depressed. Second, the specific dystopia created in the novel has been bugging me. Two things have brought it to mind, the first being a conversation I had with a friend recently over Mark Marek. I doubt anyone who isn't either a resident of Alberta or a psychopath will recognize the name; he's a man, local to Edmonton, who hosts a shock site. I'm going to state this right now, before I go any further: if you look up this site, or anything else I'm about to describe, you may see something disturbing. About a year back, he hosted Luke Magnotta's video of his murder of Lin Jun, a university student. The video was titled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, and contained the murder, dismemberment of the body, and necrophilia. Now, while Marek had nothing to do with the murder, the video was uploaded to and hosted on his website. Long story short, he is now being held and will be tried for corrupting morals, under Canada's obscenity laws.
The second thing bringing Oryx and Crake to my mind, is happening right now on this site. People are strongly and passionately arguing the place of pornography on Fimfiction, with some even making it a social issue.
So, I guess the reason I'm writing this is; how close are we to Atwood's future of widespread depravity and moral rot? We're jailing a man for disseminating psychopathic murder videos, but people are obviously very eager to watch them (and I'm sure the ice pick video is still easily accessible somewhere). We have people arguing against Adsense for pulling support from a site containing an awful lot of pornography, some of which would be considered illegal in many countries ("non-realistic depictions of minors" is a phrase in more than a few nations lawbooks, and is more than enough for a dedicated lawyer to build a case). We're not there yet, because people are still outraged over this stuff, but we're getting closer than I think we may want to be. I'm not even sure where I stand; I watch and play incredibly violent and often incredibly gory movies and games, and yesterday I watched a series of videos where some museum assistants skinned and prepped animal for display. Watching this isn't the same as watching a man being disemboweled, but shouldn't I feel squeamish or affected in some way?
As Margaret Atwood says, "What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?".
Thanks to anyone who actually bothers to read this, and I'd really like to hear your thoughts.
As someone who used to write clop, I have to say that eventually, the luster wears thin, and you realize how low you've gone. The realization is if you're lucky to have the self-awareness to know when something is truly making you unhappy, even if it gives some temporary pleasurable gratification.
Well, there are a couple of interesting things here, but I'm not into getting into them all tonight. Discussion of art, law, and social pressure will have to wait for if conversation on the subject continues.
But I do want to point out something you don't discuss in your main point: Have you considered how much our path down this slope is a reaction to the sanitation of society?
Think about it, the past 100 years or so of western civilization are among the few times and places in history where people of all ages don't see dead animals rotting in the streets on a regular basis. Where they only see dead bodies at funerals, after embalming (and where funerals for unnatural deaths occur much less frequently than in the past.) Where they don't witness people killing animals for food. Where, for many people, they don't see or hear their parents or other people having sex because it was happening in the same room, or in an un-insulated building.
I'm not arguing that history was a parade of immorality, but that by cleaning up the world we've fetishized sex and death. At the same time, we've introduced tools for delivering fiction and art that can exactly mimic our tools for delivering facts. People have always been drawn to the subjects of death and sex-- look up the murder ballads of the 19th century. But we've removed the reality of them from life, which inflates the fantasy, at the same time making movies and TV shows that look like real events. So watching a video, real or not, automatically becomes not real to people, and they want to seek those out.
I'm not sure that people are actually desensitized to things in their lives, at all. The problem is that most people don't experience things in their lives, they experience them on a computer screen. So, the good news is I don't think we're heading into a sinkhole of depravity in terms of right and wrong in the real world. But I don't expect the internet to get any better as long as western civilization lasts, and would not be surprised if the "fantasy" continues to get darker.
1490709 That's a really good point. (Who is this "bookplayer"? I must watch her.)
But I doubt that the number of horrific things is increasing. It's just easier for us to find out about them. Murder rates are lower now than they've ever been in history. Violent crime in America is half what it was in the 1980s.
Studs Terkel's book "The Good War", about World War 2, has a story about an Army training camp that had blacks and whites in different sections of the camp, with separate barracks, mess halls, PX, etc. The whites had movies but the blacks didn't. Some blacks complained about this, so a bunch of the whites got together, mounted a machine gun on a jeep, and drove over and massacred the blacks. No one was charged or reprimanded; the incident didn't make the news. I find that much more horrifying.