I am a major H. P. Lovecraft fan, and have been since I first discovered his writing during my freshman year in college. Since then, I've read a ton of things both by Lovecraft and in the Lovecraft vein of weird fiction and cosmic horror. It's hard to deny his influence on English literature and culture, which can be seen in everyone from Stephen King, Charlie Stross, and Niel Gaiman to TV shows like True Detective and the Hellboy movie franchise. Heck, he even makes an appearance in the Mountain Goats' song "Lovecraft in Brooklyn."
But, H. P. Lovecraft has a big problem, one that is difficult (probably impossible) to divorce from his writing, and that problem is this: Lovecraft was horribly racist. And not just racist in an "I am unaware of white privilage" sort of way. It was deep in his marrow, and all over the place in his fiction, as David Nickle argues:
I'd make the case that Lovecraft's fiction--and Lovecraftian horror--depends on the xenophobia that was endemic to Lovecraft's work to the point that without it, many of his stories lose their unique and uniquely profound effect. "The Horror in Red Hook" is a direct channelling of Lovecraft's loathing of newcomers to New York City; the real horror of "The Call of Cthulhu" is not the octopus-headed demigod that emerges out of his underwater city to kill all the people, but the people themselves--all either eugenically unfit denizens of the bayou or "primitive" island cultures whose religious practises amount to a kind of proactive nihilism. The manifestation of Nyarlathotep in the eponymous story is that of a black man bearing trinkets, who seduces the good white folk of America into authoring their own demise.
There are other things going on in Lovecraft too: there's the bestiary/pantheon of fantastically alien gods and monsters; that overheated prose that veers so easily between the sublime and the leaden; his fearful, bookish characters. But those are characteristics, aesthetics; not fundamentals. They are not the agenda.
The agenda in Lovecraft's fiction is clear, and woven deep into the bones of his stories.
The problem Nickles confronts in his essay is how it is possible to recognize Lovecraft's contributions to science fiction, fantasy, and horror while at the same time naming and critiquing his racism. What's more, he asks, how can we write "Lovecraftian" fiction without falling into the same racist and xenophobic traps that Lovecraft did. He suggests that it's possible, though it leaves a lot on the table:
Charles Stross has good fun with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in his Laundry books, without appearing to draw on anxiety much deeper than a solid recollection of a bad time working I.T. Where Stross blends espionage adventure with the Mythos, Laird Barronblends noirish elements with pseudo-Mythos tropes to explore themes that are nearer to Jim Thompson's brand of nihilism than Lovecraft's. Thomas Ligotti cheerily swaps out xenophobia for all-out misanthropy.
Some manage to keep closer to Lovecraft's more specific anxieties, without embracing Lovecraft's awful conclusions.
Nevertheless, he argues, that still leaves a lot of material to mine:
For me, the xenophobia angle remains the most interesting, and perhaps the most relevant. The legacy of racists like Lovecraft is still very much in play in contemporary society, from the Obama birthers to the Ferguson cops and most points between... and the discussion as to how to contain that legacy is far from over. In a perverse way, Lovecraft's retrograde views on race may be his most socially relevant contribution to 20th century weird literature... not as an advocate of his views, not by any means, but as an example of where we've been and what too many of us still share, an opportunity to critique those views through the lens of cosmic horror and alien gods.
Indeed, it seems, as Nickle suggests, that the best way to call out Lovecraft's racism is to write fiction that places that dimension of Lovecraft's mythos out in the open as an object of critique and ridicule, as I think was at least partially done in True Detective and as I think Stross explicitly does, for example, in The Jennifer Morgue where one of the main characters is a Deep One who has to mask her true identity to "pass" in a human world.
Regardless, Nickle's raises some interesting and important questions, and what's more, he points out that this is something that Lovecraft fans are reluctant to deal with, but which it is vitally important that they address. It's one thing to admire Lovecraft's work. It's another thing to give him a pass on his genuinely vile racial politics.
Matthew Sitman, guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, asks whether the Niebuhr moment has come and gone, under the title "Where Have You Gone, Reinhold Niebuhr?"
Oh how I remember those heady days when everyone was writing about and discussing Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian famous for books like The Nature and Destiny of Man and The Irony of American History, the preacher who taught us how to think about the Cold War. As a graduate student immersed in Niebuhr’s work around this time – the “Niebuhr moment” probably peaked in 2007 or 2008, but his specter loomed over many of the arguments about the invasion and occupation of Iraq – I had the rare pleasure of feeling like my labors in the stacks really connected to contemporary debates. For once, a preoccupation with theology was cool.
In the years since, he argues, the theological "coolness" of Reinhold Niebuhr seems to have faded. Where once Paul Eli quipped that "a well-turned Niebuhr reference is the speechwriter’s equivalent of a photo op with Bono" now he is seldom invoked by the high, the mighty, and the powerful in support of their arguments. Sitman diagnoses the reason:
Part of Niebuhr’s post-9/11 popularity, I would argue, was the compelling way he connected Christian theology to modern political problems. He could use original sin to diagnose American democracy, or discuss the coming of a world community as embodying Christ’s love. He wrote about war and peace while drawing on figures ranging from St. Augustine to Abraham Lincoln. Niebuhr was no mere pundit; his writing had a depth and seriousness notable in his own day and even more rare in ours. And when we found ourselves struggling to understand how to make our way in a newly terrifying world, we turned to Niebuhr as both a model and a resource.
But as Elie points out, there were elements of Niebuhr’s thought that seemed to support, or could be wrenched into supporting, nearly every imaginable position regarding the war on terror and, especially, regime change in Iraq. Which is another way of saying we found in Niebuhr what we wanted to find, all while enjoying the heft he gave our own ideas. The way we read him confirmed our preexisting inclinations more than it provoked us to think deeply and creatively – his work should have been, but wasn’t, a mirror in which we were forced to take a long hard look at ourselves and confront our fallibility and pride, to question our assumptions and cherished certainties.
Niebuhr, Sitman argues, wants us to turn our critical gaze away from our perceived enemies in order to recognize our own flawed and partial perspective, the way in which we are complicit in the evil we suffer, and how we suffer from the evil we inflict. The binaries of absolute good and evil have little place in Niebuhr's theology and ethics, even has he is deeply cognizant of evil's reality, and the need to respond to it forcefully, even when doing so embroils us in the ironies and the tragedies of participation in an imperfect and fallen world. As a result, in responding to the evil of others, we are tainted with evil ourselves, yet we mask our own evil in the mantel of purity and righteousness. The last thing we want to do is examine our own motives and justifications.
This failure to understand, and willingness to appropriate, Niebuhr's theology was most clearly and egregiously demonstrated by the way in which some thinkers, most notably Jean Bethke Elshtain, used him to justify the War on Terror and, worse still, the Iraq war. While it is imaginable, and even likely, that Niebuhr would have counseled the need for some form of military response to the 9/11 attacks, Elsthain's Just War Against Terror is a model of exactly the kinds of self-righteous moral blindness of which Niebuhr was most critical. While he may indeed have had harsh words for those who would have advocated passivity in response to the attacks, he would have been no more tolerant of those who refused to consider the way in which history, and our complicity in the chaos of Middle East politics, contributed to the "blowback" that 9/11 represented.
In the case of the Iraq war, there is little to be found in Niebuhr to justify the idea that he would have supported such a foolhearty and disasterous adventure. The closest analogue would be his resistance to the Vietnam War, to which the Iraq debacle is the closest historical analogue. The way in which he was appropriated for the purposes of supporting it can only be seen as a willful distortion and misreading of his thought.
The problem, however, is that Niebuhr's thought is complex. He did not simply have one position that he maintained continually throughout his career, and so there are bits of his writing that can be interpretated to support neo-conservative positions, other bits that can support the "chastened Liberal Hawk" position that Sitman refers to, and still others that would support the kind of deeply critical perspecitve brought by the anti-war left, particularly around Iraq. The reason for this is that Niebuhr's theology was deeply contextual and responsive to the particular situations he was addressing. It is not even clear that one could speak of Niebuhr's Christian Realism as a "method" so much as a mood or attitude. It was a way of approaching controverted issues at the junction of religion and public life that depended not so much on following a series of steps from premises to conclusions as recognizing the limited and ideologically conditioned character of one's own perspective, and being cognizant of the relativity of all possible real-world solutions.
Sitman seems to think this as well, as he argues that the biggest problem with the way we approach Niebuhr, is that we pillage him for our purposes, and leave his deepest insights into human fallibility behind:
there were elements of Niebuhr’s thought that seemed to support, or could be wrenched into supporting, nearly every imaginable position regarding the war on terror and, especially, regime change in Iraq. Which is another way of saying we found in Niebuhr what we wanted to find, all while enjoying the heft he gave our own ideas. The way we read him confirmed our preexisting inclinations more than it provoked us to think deeply and creatively – his work should have been, but wasn’t, a mirror in which we were forced to take a long hard look at ourselves and confront our fallibility and pride, to question our assumptions and cherished certainties.
The more I’ve considered Niebuhr’s work the more I’m convinced that’s what he calls us to, and what we resist. Once we had rummaged through his work for polemical purposes, we left him behind, refusing to grapple with the most enduring elements of his thought. Niebuhr saw the self-interest lurking behind every argument, understood self-deception to be perennial, grasped that nothing in this world was pure. He should have been used not to endorse this or that particular position, but turned to as a prophetic figure who calls all of us acknowledge what, in a different time, we’d have called our sinfulness.
And for that reason it has become less and less useful for powerful figures to utilize Niebuhr for their own purposes. Perhaps the apex of Neibuhr's influence was Barack Obama's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, which was deeply enmeshed in a genuinely Niebuhrian analysis, without once simply dropping in a Niebuhr quote for the sake of establishing his intellectual cache. For those who knew Niebuhr, the connection was clear without his name needing to be said. Of course, what we make of that depends a great deal on whether or not we think Obama's foreign policy has been a (relative) success or failure.
Yet the decline of "Niebuhr chique" is not necessarily a bad thing. Overuse of Niebuhr is just as unhelpful as underuse, and the way in which he was misused over the last decade might indeed cause those who find him to be an important and necessary figure for thinking about the role of religion in public life to breath a sigh of relief that he's not as present as he was. But at the same time, I believe that his influence will be longer lasting, if subtler, than Sitman seems to. But I think that Niebuhr's famous words (which Sitman also endorses), speak most powerfully to his lasting influence:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
In preparation for Good Friday, it's useful to contemplate the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ, as a spiritual matter, but also as a philosophical matter. The cross is a multivalent symbol, that contains within it a wealth of meaning, and yet, as Guiseppe Fornari argues in his new book, A God Torn to Pieces: The Case for Nietzsche, central to the message of the cross is something that Nietzsche understood and many, perhaps most, Christians have forgotten. "In the end," Fornari writes, "he was much closer to Christ than many who would claim to be Christians.”
As Adam Erikson summarizes at Sojourners, Fornari's analysis is rooted in the recognition that Nietzsche understood the significance of the cross in a way most Christians have not. He saw in Christ's cry on the cross -- "Father forgive them, they don't know what they are doing!" -- a message of universal forgiveness, a message that Nietzsche rejected:
Nietzsche’s problem wasn’t his analysis that “we have killed God.” Good Friday proves him right. His problem was that he rejected the alternative of universal forgiveness that Jesus offered from the cross. Jesus’ universal forgiveness seeks to transform us from being murders into being forgivers.
And that’s where Nietzsche consciously rejected Christ, and that’s where many Christians don’t know Christ. To know Christ is to know that in his life, death, and resurrection Christ freely offers forgiveness to all – even to those who have become “murderers of all murderers.”
For Nietzsche, Jesus’ attempt to end sacrificial violence was foolish because he believed that humans need sacrificial violence to survive. To show this he compared the death of Jesus to many ancient sacrificial myths and discovered that they are structurally similar. The god is murdered by an angry mob that is united in their violence against a divine victim. After the mob murdered their victim order was restored. The only difference between the murder of Jesus and the murder of the mythical gods is in interpretation.
The cross then, as Rene Girard argues, is the end of sacrifice. Nietzsche could see that, and yet he believed we still needed sacrifice. Many Christians today fail to see what Nietzsche could, they don't believe that the cross was the end of sacrifice, since they are still engaged in the sacrificial regime that Christ came to end. Universal forgivenss is an abstraction to a great many Christians, and certainly not something that God would endorse. They need God's wrath and God's judgement to make their own righteous self-conception appear valid. Erikson continues:
Nietzsche consciously chose the way of Dionysus, and the way of violence drove him mad* because he couldn’t accept the forgiveness of Christ in his own life. And yet by clearly seeing the alternative between Dionysus and the “Crucified,” Nietzsche was closer to Christ than many who profess to be Christian. Many Christians are far from Christ because while they profess Christ, they actually believe in Dionysus; they actually believe in a god who justifies their violence rather than leads them in the way of forgive.
And the Christian world is going mad because we don’t believe in Christ who leads us to love and forgive all, including our enemies.
So, as we move through Maundy Thursday into Good friday, let us lift up Christ's prayer of universal forgiveness and pray for the reconciliation of all. But let us also be aware that the spectre of Nietzsche looms behind our protestations of self-righteousness. Until we can break the systems of sacrifice in our own lives, and cease projecting them onto the cross of Christ, we will continue to be closet Dionysians, while understanding both Christ and Dionysius far less profoundly than Nietzsche did.
*To be clear here: Erikson plays with a common Nietzsche myth: That his philosophy drove him insane. It did not. Syphillus drove him insane.
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been getting a lot of attention since it's French publication late last year. It's been out in English for several months now, and my copy is sitting on my desk as we speak. The Guardian has a good article summarizing Piketty's argument. The conclusion:
The lesson of the past is that societies try to protect themselves: they close their borders or have revolutions – or end up going to war. Piketty fears a repeat. His critics argue that with higher living standards resentment of the ultra-rich may no longer be as great – and his data is under intense scrutiny for mistakes. So far it has all held up.
Nor does it seem likely that human beings' inherent sense of justice has been suspended. Of course the reaction plays out differently in different eras: I suspect some of the energy behind Scottish nationalism is the desire to build a country where toxic wealth inequalities are less indulged than in England.
The solutions – a top income tax rate of up to 80%, effective inheritance tax, proper property taxes and, because the issue is global, a global wealth tax – are currently inconceivable.
But as Piketty says, the task of economists is to make them more conceivable. Capital certainly does that.
I am reminded of Karl Polanyi's remark in The Great Transformation that socialism is the self-defense of society against the economy. This is the main reason I still call myself a socialist.
So, let's talk about what happened on Game of Thrones last night. Let's explore our feelings, shall we? open up, and tell the group all about our reactions to the Purple Wedding. I'll go first (warning: Spoilers ho!)
So, I have to admit, I knew it was coming. I've read the books. Twice. In fact, I've been looking forward to watching Joffrey Baratheon/Lannister choke to death at his own wedding pretty much since the whole "Lion's Tooth" incident in season one). And this leads me to the troubling reality: I enjoyed watching Joffrey die.
I have enjoyed very little of the death on this show. I didn't enjoy them in the books either, but the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that these deaths are horrible, painful, shameful and immoral, and that, what's more, this is the reality of war. This is what war is. War is the organized pursuit of horror, death, and destruction. It's not romantic. It is not glorious. It is not what the Knights of Summer believe it to be. It is, in the end, the death of honor, not a manifestation of it. And Martin and the producers of Game of Thrones have done a painfully effective job at conveying that message. Repeatedly.
They have also demonstrated the idea that politics is, far too often, war carried on by other means, and thus only barely sublimates the brutality of war within the putatively peaceful conventions of diplomacy and political jargon. The threat of violence always lurks not particularly far from the surface of political life, and the main dispute is over the question of who gets to claim the right to weild violence under the veil of legitimacy. But again, as Martin has repeatedly demonstrated, ultimately all of the legitimation stories told by kings and princes rest on the fiction that their effectiveness at deploying violence in the interest of seizing power conveys the right to weild and control it. The Targaryans became the rulers of Westeros because of their military superiority (in the form of their dragons). Robert's rebellion established him as the King, not because he had proven some principle of legitimacy, but because he effectively murdered all who had a greater claim to the throne than himself. And after his death, all the War of the Five Kings demonstrated is that "king" is just the name we given to the last thug standing.
So, the question lingers: Can we overcome this cycle of violence, or is society ultimately condemned to base itself on the ability of one party or another to establish itself through the tools of violence, and then deprive others of those same tools? Is there a way in which authority and legitimacy can be established through nonviolence, or must violence and the threat of violence always be the ultimate trump card in any political dispute.
There are, of course, other models. One can look to India, or South Africa, or the civil rights struggle in the United States. It should be the case that legitimacy is rooted in an authentically moral standpoint which is able to pursuade the bulk of the population to either agree or at least acquiesce. Unfortunately, even in circumstances where legitimacy can be established on that basis, it often still must defend itself from illegitimate violence through resort to violence itself.
But, I also cannot escape the violence within me. It's not just governments, societies, and institutions that find a too-easy resort to violence. As individuals, violence is often our first order respons to conflict. And even when we do not actually act on our instinct to violence, it lies just beneath the surface. And so, when someone as legitimately hateful as Joffrey finally gets his comeuppance, I cheer with joy along with the entire rest of the viewing audience.
And it is for this reason that Kierkegaard once stated that original sin was the one empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.
Wallace Best, at Religion and Politics makes an argument about Langston Hughes' poem "Goodbye Christ" and it's connection to the American liberal religious tradition. The poem reads, in part:
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all –
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME
Best argues that this poem should be understood, not simply as a rejection of religion in the name of communism, but rather as part of the tradition of "critique and complaint" in the African American Christian tradition.
With this concentrated look at “the culture of critique and complaint,” I place Hughes squarely in the context of American religious liberalism—not a rubric under which we have placed many African Americans or many expressions of African American religion. I make the claim that Langston Hughes espoused various tenants of religious liberalism and it is in this context that he and much of his writing on religion is best understood. ...
Hughes’s religious liberalism did not always contain the “optimism” characteristic of many religious liberals of the time, but it did have many other of the principal features, including individualism, ecumenism, cosmopolitanism, humanism, “a certain generosity or charitableness toward divergent opinions,” as Sydney Ahlstrom called it, a strong emphasis on the social (or practical or material) aspects of religion, ethics, and moral reform. It placed reason and experience over emotionalism put confidence in higher criticism and the scientific method. Just as crucial to Hughes’s religious liberalism was a desire to liberate himself from the creedal commitments that he viewed to be principally at the service of ecclesial and State power.
The poem haunted Hughes for years, and led, in part, to a humiliating interrogation before Joe McCarthy's communist witch-hunting "Permenant Subcommittee on Investigations," at which, after hours of questioning, he was forced to declare "I have never been a communist; I have never been an atheist."
In the end, Best argues, the poem should be understood as a critique of the corrupting power of capitalism on the Christian churches. He concludes: "Far from being a remote example of 'anti-religious' sentiment, the poem was integral to a culture of complaint and critique among clergy as well as lay people who implicated American churches for social inaction during the Great Depression"
Recently, Jonathan Ryan at the Christianity Today blog offered up an analysis of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones from a Christian perspective, comparing Martin's world to that of J. R. R. Tolkien. His verdict:
Martin is missing Tolkien's sense of "eucatastrophe," the word Tolkien famously coined in his essay On Fairy Stories: "The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn"…. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
Ryan argues that "Martin's relentlessly grim view of human beings is far from realistic. He is looking at the world with just one jaundiced, damaged eye."
On the one hand, Ryan is certainly right that Martin's view of the world is much darker than Tolkien's, but it's a rather strange to criticize Martin for writing a different kind of story than Tolkien. What's more, I think the key difference between their stories is precisely the one that Ryan overlooks, namely, that Martin isn't writing a "fairy story" in Tolkien's sense. Rather, Martin is writing the historical fiction of an imaginary world, and as such, he is trying to convey as realistically as possible the human limitations and failings of a world that runs according to the principles of "real-world" power politics, and not according to an idealistic assessment of how the world ought to work. The underlying moral question for Martin is whether there is still any place for honor or morality in such a world. The answer to that question, it seems to me, is still very much in doubt for Martin.
But there are many characters in Martin's universe who still attempt to embody principles of nobility and honor, even in the midst of their tragic and fallen circumstances. Ryan's biggest misstep, as Amanda McInnis points out at Cheesewearing Theology, is in his reading of Tyrion Lannister. In comparing Tyrion to Gollum, he demonstrates how little he knows about the character:
Martin paints this grimness in the portrait of Tyrion Lannister. Tyrion is a small and deformed figure born to a powerful and noble family in Westeros. Years of poor treatment and outright abuse leads Tyrion to drink more and more deeply from the corruption around him.
If you've read Lord of the Rings, you can't help but compare Tyrion to Smeagol, the hobbit who becomes Gollum after becoming corrupted by Sauron's ring The difference comes in Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum. That attempt has no parallel in Martin's world, nor is there anything like Gandalf's admonition to treat Gollum with kindness. Tyrion has no Frodo, and he never will. No one reaches out to him; no one tries to save or redeem him.
Amanda notes how wrong-headed this reading is:
Ryan fundamentally misunderstands and misconstrues the character of Tyrion. In fact, I would argue that Tyrion is in fact one of the most honourable characters in Westeros, with the understanding that the rules of morality in A Song of Ice and Fire are very, very distinct from the rules of morality in something like The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it is this honour-in- spite-of-all-he’s-been-through that makes Tyrion one of the more beloved characters to readers (and viewers). The same endearment cannot be said of Gollum.
In trying to compare Tyrion to Gollum, the author overlooks all the good things that Tyrion has done.
Tyrion befriends Jon Snow. He rescues Sansa from a fate worse than death if she were to stay in King’s Landing. He protects the kingdom from Joffrey, by reining him in as best he can.
There is nothing comparable to be found in Tolkien's treatment of Smeagol, who is utterly corrupted by the ring and ultimately serves only the Ring, and subordinately himself. When Tyrion is raised, against all expectations, to be the Hand of the King, and asked what he intends to do, his first response is: "Justice."
And by and large he does this. As Amanda notes, he also does other, quite horrible things, most of which are understandable in the context of the character and his sufferings (Amanda says that "while they are not inexcusable, they are understandable," but I think she means that they actually aren't in themselves, actually excusable). But no matter what evil Tyrion does along the way, it is clear that at almost every point, at least to the end of A Storm of Swords, he is acting to keep his head above the waters of corruption in which he's immersed, to hold on to a sliver of morality, while still doing what's necessary to stay alive in the context of the deathtrap that is Westerosi political life.
As much as Ryan misreads Tyrion though, I suspect he also fundamentally misreads real-world politics, at least in the context of the Medieval setting that Martin is attempting to emulate. While modern politics tends to publicly eschew the kinds of cloak and dagger assassination that is part of life in Westeros, one only needs to pick up any reasonable history of ancient Rome, or Medici Italy, or the English War of the Roses (Martin's historical inspiration for the series), to understand that the maliciousness and brutality of political life was indeed part and parcel of a particular time and place.
Even today, the realities of war and politics are far less subject to moral constraint than Ryan seems to acknowledge. Surely he recognizes that in many war zones around the world, the tactics used by Gregor "The Mountain that Rides" Clegane are nothing new. Surely he's read about Vladimir Putin's penchant for eliminating his political foes through the creative use of applied nuclear physics. Surely he's aware of the damage done to the "small folk" around the world by our own projection of military power, whether via the repeated invasions we've undertaken over the last decade or via the "death from above" approach to drone warfare we've embraced in the last few years. While we may like to comfort ourselves with the illusion that political life and war-making in the 21st century are less brutal than in the past, or that Martin doesn't accurately represent the "real world" of violence in his fantasy setting, I suspect that Martin understands what those circumstances are like from the inside with far more perspicacity than Ryan does.
None of which is to say that there is not room for honor, nobility, bravery and morality in either Martin's world or our own, but what Tyrion Lannister (as well as Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Jeor Mormont, Robb Stark, and Brienne of Tarth) reveals as a character is that those characteristics, when they are displayed, put one at great risk in a world where those traits are viewed as weakness. and thus one's survival in such a setting requires one to be "wise as a serpent" if one wishes to strive toward being "innocent as a dove."
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