Kevin's Watch

I dunno. Stephen R. Donaldson dominated Tolkien, and now critics are saying that Terry Goodkind is dominating Tolkien as well. The only question is, which is the master. I must go with SRD, not because i don't want to be booted or be killed, but because it is true. SRD has a very unique style as he created the Land, the place where nothing is what it seems. Whereas Terry Goodkind just wrote using medieval times as a major basis and the theme being Objectionalism, unlike SRD. SRD wrote about the human condition and about how many are opposed to it.

Donaldson wrote a dark, personal, emotional epic centered on a literary anti-hero.

Goodkind is a jingoistic nutburger who writes thinly veiled Randite libertarian propaganda with swords and long hair.

I'm not sure how you consider this a fair contest.

Given that this is a board for Donaldson fans, I'm not really sure what sort of response you are either expecting or looking for?

I've never read Goodkind, so my vote is easy

Goodkind definately wins... in the bad-ass ponytail category.

Khaliban wrote:jingoistic nutburger

heh. good one. Google says you are the first one to coin such a phrase!

(that 'tail definitely looks "intelligently designed", Syl, heh.)

I object to the description of Goodkind's tripe as 'Republican propaganda'. It is, in fact, Randite libertarian propaganda. In particular, Goodkind absolutely despises all forms of religious belief, organized or not, and makes it perfectly clear that he thinks every religious believer (or merely 'spiritual' person) is a drooling imbecile.

If you want to call that Republican propaganda, then please desist now and for ever from using the expression 'the religious Right'.

Such sloppy use of language really steams me up.

Yeah, I kept thinking Richard was going to change his name to Rourke in the one where he carved the statue... Faith of the Fallen?

I like to describe Goodkind's stuff as 'Ayn Rand for Dummies':

See Atlas.
See Atlas shrug.
Shrug, Atlas, shrug.

But I've told you all that one before.

Sorry to double post, but a separate thought —

I don't think SRD's political philosophy, or at any rate the one expressed in his work, is necessarily any better thought out than Goodkind's. In particular, the Council of Lords always struck me as just too goody-goody and hippie-dippy to be humanly possible. Institutions have been conceived with such high ideals and standards, but they have nearly always fallen apart after the first generation.

Contrast the Catholic Church, for instance, whose ideals have managed to survive in some form or other for almost 2000 years. It was ingeniously built to keep running even when the Pope is a spineless fink — necessarily so, as St. Peter himself was a spineless fink when he was handed the job. The Council of Lords only ever harboured two finks that we know of. One was Lord Foul, who brought down the Old Lords singlehanded; the other was samadhi Raver, who turned the New Lords into the Clave. A viable institution must make more allowance for the moral unclarity and occasional depravity of human beings.

But what sets SRD far and away above Goodkind, even in this limited comparison, is that SRD's books are not about his politics. Goodkind's are. If you removed the rather charmingly naive political assumptions from the Covenant books, you would still have a fantasy masterpiece. If you removed the Randism from the Sword of Truth books, you could fit the whole series on the inside of a matchbook cover.

I stand corrected. "Randite libertarian propaganda" it is.

Sorry if I sounded snarky, Khaliban. I should have put a smiley after that post.

Oh, piffle. I hardly noticed. But I fear we've shocked poor PillarofCreation beyond his ability to respond. A forum that feeds on Tolkien, Donaldson and Martin is not lightly entered.

And considering that a Donaldson Vs King topic is just below this one, he probably made this thread in all innocence.

Variol Farseer wrote:A viable institution must make more allowance for the moral unclarity and occasional depravity of human beings.

This though, VF, is an excellent point. A truly excellent one. How it can be done though, may be the subject for another topic.

What sort of system needs to be in place that will make allowance for individual failure/venality and still operate within it's ideological parameters? Most interested to hear your thoughts on this, as well as how you think that the Church has managed it, (if it truly has).

--A

It takes strong second-tier leadership with plenty of autonomy, and above all, a system of educating those leaders that trains them well in both principles and character. The Church has often failed in both those respects, but as perhaps the first true 'multinational' organization, it has always had reservoirs of uncorrupted talent here and there to lead a regeneration.

What most people don't understand about the Church is that its most essential functions are carried on neither by priests nor Pope, but by the bishops. The Pope exercises his authority by dint of being Bishop of Rome, and weak or venal Popes (there have been many) are often ignored by strong bishops in the provinces. The priests are technically only pastoral assistants to the bishops. If every ordinary priest disappeared from the Church tomorrow, and the Pope along with them, it would be perfectly possible for the bishops to ordain new priests and elect a new Pope, and the Church could carry on. Without the bishops, the whole thing falls apart.

This is important because it militates against excessive autocracy in the Church. A bishop, once installed, is difficult to remove, and has a permanent power base whose strength is proportional, not to the total size of his diocese, but to the number and vigour of the community of active Catholics within its borders. (The Bishop of Rome originally acquired ascendancy over the Western Church because Rome, the capital and largest city of the empire, had the most numerous, richest, and best-educated Catholic community of any diocese in the world until the fifth century. Rome was lawgiver to the Western world, and people looked to those legal minds to give law to the Church as well.) There are bad bishops, venal bishops, and the history of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is replete with younger sons of aristocrats who were made bishops through family influence and had no apparent religion at all. But these bishops are hardly worth powder and shot, because the laity know they are corrupt, and consequently they have little power to influence people's behaviour. It is the reformers, the ascetics, the Bible-thumpers, the moral crusaders, who catch the public's attention and gain the moral authority to give the Roman Curia a good kick up the backside when the hierarchy slides (as it inevitably does from time to time) into self-seeking and corruption. Provided that you accept the basic theological teachings of Catholicism, there has always been considerable freedom of speech within the Church, and there is a long history of firebrands and troublemakers calling out Popes and cardinals for not following the teachings of Christ.

The monastic orders are an important secondary source of this freedom to reform. At various times the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Benedictines have had tremendous prestige in the Church, arising essentially from their strict discipline, which enabled them to set a better example for the populace than the lax and ill-trained secular clergy of those periods. The Society of Jesus, though not a monastic order as such, fulfilled a similar function during the period of the Counter-Reformation. Because monks and nuns are not under the authority of the local bishops, they provide a second layer of autonomy in the Church and tend to inoculate the local clergy against backsliding. There are also bad monks and bad monasteries, of course, but again, these are not important because nobody seriously follows their example. If you want to live the religious life, you will naturally want to join an order that takes its rule seriously; if you want to enjoy the material world, you won't join a degraded monastic order, but will stay out in the world where you can enjoy all those pleasures without a lot of bothersome regulations. And so at any given time there is at least one order of monks or nuns that set a good example of Christian behaviour to the rest of the clergy — often to the annoyance of priests who would like to take matters less seriously.

In SRD's terms, the monastic orders correspond loosely to the Unfettered. In fact, the earliest form of Christian monasticism was the Stylite movement of Egypt in the fourth century. Those hermits in the desert, unwashed, devout, often highly educated but only questionably sane, pursuing their private devotions for decades on end, must have served SRD as one of the sources that inspired his invention of the Unfettered. But it was when the Church began organizing these men and women into ordered communities, making them monks and nuns instead of hermits, that they gained the ability to pass their ethical training along from generation to generation, and to speak with a collective voice to the evils of the day, instead of setting merely individual examples. A lot of the careful, long-term agriculture of Europe — the irrigation and drainage systems, the livestock-breeding, the planting of vineyards and orchards — can be traced back to the labours of monks who saw the poverty and chaos of the Dark Ages, and decided to roll up their sleeves and do some work to repair the damage. A like phenomenon was the large-scale copying of ancient manuscripts for which certain orders of mediaeval monks were, and remain, famous. In this respect the monastic orders resemble SRD's Loresraat.

But none of this works without a system of education that produces the people who carry on these jobs. One important function of the monasteries was to run schools; long before there was such a thing as public education, any poor but clever boy (girls, alas, were less well served) could, if his parents did not prevent it, get some kind of free education from the local monastic school. The Church needed literate clerics, and didn't much care what stratum of society it got them from. Secular society was ruled by a hereditary aristocracy, and it was very rare for a commoner to elbow his way into the nobility; but the lowliest of peasants could become a priest, an abbot, or even a bishop, and enough of them did to give the Church a certain democratic, or at least demotic, character, the atmosphere of which lingers to this day.

Now, it is a tremendous advantage to be the proprietor of the only free school in a town: your students will swallow almost any amount of indoctrination, provided that you teach them the skills you promise. A few will always rebel and become heretics — the Inquisition was originally formed to keep such people from stirring up public unrest, which was a good idea until it got woefully out of hand — but most will become, if not clerics themselves, then educated and interested laymen with a healthy interest in keeping the Church orthodox. This theological middle class has always been the ballast that kept the clergy stable; the lack of it in America, where Catholics have always faced strong pressures to conform to secular society and not to ecclesiastical teachings, is one reason for the perennial scandals and administrative messes that plague the Church in the U.S.

If SRD has any equivalent to this, it is in people like Atiaran, who attended the Loresraat awhile but never (so to speak) took their degree. But such people were very few, as the Land was large and roadless, and for most Stonedownors and Woodhelvennin, the Valley of Two Rivers was very far away. The awed respect and loyalty that the people of the Land showed for the Lords would be easier to understand, I think, if there had been Lorewardens and Unfettered scattered through the Land, teaching the rudiments of lore to the young. Prothall son of Dwillian was the Lorewarden who taught Atiaran the first prayers (LFB): well, in my experience, most people have a lot more interest in prayers if they don't have to travel hundreds of miles to learn them. The rituals of the Loresraat would have struck most ordinary people as the strange customs of a far-off place, almost a foreign country, with little relevance to the everyday life of the Land. That they did not do so suggests that the villages of the Land had some more widespread system for disseminating the teachings, the 'ideology' if you like, of the Lords; but we see no evidence of this in the books.

The Catholic Church, of course, is far from being the only organization to perpetuate itself and (most of) its principles in this way. The various Buddhist monastic movements do a similar thing on a smaller scale. And the mandarins of China, an elective caste which anybody could join by passing a rigorous examination in the Confucian classics, were the body and the hands of the Chinese state for a longer span of time than the Church has existed. The aristocracy of the British Empire, who were not all of noble birth but were all educated in the strict regimen of the public schools, carried on a looser tradition of the same kind until they burned themselves out in the First World War. In each of these cases, the same principles applied: local autonomy, more or less freedom for the leaders to police one another's orthodoxy, and above all, widespread education and indoctrination of the populace to produce each new generation of the elect.

I imagine the Land would have had Loresraat-run schools and other local institutions, and a kind of glue of Old Boys (and Girls) to keep the people emotionally linked to Revelstone. And I imagine that there would have been bad Lords and Lorewardens, people of great skill but unstable character, and some who, though not bad in themselves, tried to perpetuate their influence by pushing their children into positions for which they were poorly qualified. (One wonders what would have happened if the son of Variol and Tamarantha had not been so gifted in his own right. Even a mediocrity might have risen high with such a pedigree to help him.)

It would have lent greater verisimilitude to the First Chronicles if at some point we had seen a Lord try to give some fundamentally misguided order, and been corrected and overruled by the opposition of ordinary educated people. This sort of thing happens all the time in every kind of organization. But when High Lord Elena went off her rocker, the Council followed her right to the brink of disaster without a murmur — and watched her plunge over the edge. The Lords were not political enough to feel quite real to me. And they always seemed to float mysteriously above the surrounding population, as if they were freaks of nature and not a natural outgrowth of the society that produced them.

None of this, mind you, prevents me from appreciating the very real greatness of the Covenant books. In a way, it's actually helpful: this air of unreality in the society, this implausible perfection and unity, lend a subtle but powerful reinforcement to the idea of Covenant's Unbelief. Not only the Land but the people of the Land are rather too good to be true. It would nevertheless have been a better-told tale if there had been hints of something more. But SRD's imagination does not work that way: he is, as he says, a story-builder, not a world-builder, and the offstage mechanics of the Loresraat just weren't of that much interest to him.

There are a couple of examples that fit what you're talking about, but I think they mostly reinforce your observation by contrast.

Pietten - respected by the Ramen for his skill with the Ranyhyn, but largely (and rightfully) distrusted.

Trell - given a position of considerable prestige. Whether by being the High Lord's grandfather or other reasons, his actions were... destructive.

My memory is a little too murky to go into much more detail (time for a reread), but the system of governance would appear to be one that has a kind of natural harmony, one that appears to only go awry with either Covenant or Foul's influence. It also appears that the harmony is perhaps a result of the influence of Earthpower, since the monarchy of Berek's king seemed to lack it.

Damn Variol FarSeer, that was an excellent post. In fact, that is all I can say about it. An eloquently made point indeed, and a very astute analysis.

Essentially, I think you're suggesting a number of ideologically affiliated, educated, and largely autonomous organisations that will serve as checks and balances for each other. That would permit the maintenance of an ideological parity, while still being seperate enough not to "infect" each other, as it were, and indeed, to counter that infection by providing an alternative to it in the minds and hearts of the people.

Of course, the more educated the people are as well, the better for everybody. And yes, I can accept the functioning of the church like that, (over the extreme long-term at least) as well.

A system such as that really can account for the staying power that the church has exhibited, in spite of the upheavals and inter-faction fighting that is inevitable in such widespread organisations.

Will have to think further on the political and social implications and problems of instituting such a system from scratch, but I'm extremely impressed at first read. *bows*

--Avatar

Hi I've lurked here for years, and had to reread the books because the group discussions were so good.

I felt that I had to comment here, though.

Goodkind's first books were OK as short escapes, interim reads, or guilty pleasures. You may notice that his second book is basically rebadged Wheel of Time concepts. People have always wondered how TOR could keep Robert Jordan from tearing Goodkind a new one.

Not that RJ's latest works are the greatest, either. But that's another thread.

Variol Farseer wrote:None of this, mind you, prevents me from appreciating the very real greatness of the Covenant books. In a way, it's actually helpful: this air of unreality in the society, this implausible perfection and unity, lend a subtle but powerful reinforcement to the idea of Covenant's Unbelief. Not only the Land but the people of the Land are rather too good to be true. It would nevertheless have been a better-told tale if there had been hints of something more. But SRD's imagination does not work that way: he is, as he says, a story-builder, not a world-builder, and the offstage mechanics of the Loresraat just weren't of that much interest to him.

I think that you got very close to the point here, but then lost it.

Do I believe that SRD could create a world in which the government makes perfect sense? He created Thomas Covenant - of course he could.

I think it's SRD's intent to create this type of world. I've always noticed that there is a huge parallel between the health of the Land and its people. With the Staff of Law intact and in the absence of any of Foul's corruptions of the earthpower, the Land is quite healthy - nearly perfect. Thus, its people are long-lived, overly trusting of each other, and seem to naturally understand the importance of the Lords and the Land's past.

The ideals of the Gods of Homeric Greece were not taught in school or passed on by some central agency. Did the fact that no mortal had ever laid eyes upon Olympus make much difference? Not really. Parents didn't wait for the bards to show up to educate their children on the importance of the Gods, and that one should treat strangers well and guest-rites and such.

No, I imagine something else. In a Land where the people had personal relationships with the environment, where miracles happened in plain sight, I don't think it's required to have Unfettered preaching the ways of the Lords. These are not humans as we are humans, remember... they learned dignity and trust and fidelity from the very Earth.

I think that the distance between Revelstone and Mithil Stonedown is irrelevant. They are tied to the same Land, or rather, they are all brothers born of the same Land. Also, there would be no reason to embelish or alter the legends of the Old Lords. Every child could learn of Kevin from their parents, and given the characteristics of Land-people, they would take the entire tale to heart, and reach the very same conclusions that the Loresraat would reach.

Too good to be true? No, more like 'Too good to last'.

At least, that's my point of view. I don't even know if I really argued your point exactly, since my brain is hurting today.

Welcome to the Watch Kalessian. We're glad you're finally taking part.

I must disagree with you though in that I don't think that SRD even tried to create an internally cohesive world. Could he do so? No doubt.

Your comparison to the gods of Greece for example, while it may be true enough, contains I think, the very point. Parents educated their children in those issues of importance. Ergo, not a natural understanding, but a learned one?

Sorry, in a rush, just want to add that that was a good post. Look forward to reading it again when I have a bit more time.

--Avatar