Game of Thrones: Humanity without Grace

On the Hype Train

Back in 2013 or so, I had lunch with some of my relatives, and I heard from my Great Aunt, of all people, about this new show on HBO called Game of Thrones. Quite honestly, a long time ago I had consigned most of paid cable to a mental category somewhere between Gladiatorial Arena and pornography, since most of the series that come from those producers tend to be extremely violent and sexually explicit. Game of Thrones was certainly that, although they toned down the latter a lot after the first season. My Great Aunt is a pretty devout Catholic, and so I decided to watch the show one night. By 5 AM that morning, I had watched the entire first season, and was hooked.

Two days ago, on May 19th, the Eighth and Last Season of Game of Thrones aired, which closed nine years of near constant excitement and intrigue on the part of the fan base. Most major newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and even CNBC and Forbes, always had a de rigueur review after every episode. It is not an overestimation to say that Game of Thrones is an international cultural phenomenon. I have even had to do Hispanic presentaciones of infants named ‘Khaleesi’. Shouting, “Que viva la reina de los dragones” or “Long live the Queen of Dragons” received more enthusiasm than “Christ is Risen” at these occasions. So yes, even my people were naming their children after the characters on the show, and knew more about Westerosi dynastic politics than the Four Gospels.

George RR Martin, the creator of the books, which I also read, explicitly set out to create the series as a sort of ‘antidote’ to the traditional English language works of high fantasy, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. He wanted to create, according to interviews, a more nuanced, morally ambiguous fictitious universe. Therefore, very few characters in GoT can be considered either completely good or bad. There are no orcs or goblins, elves or dwarves. Humankind is both the protagonist, and the primary antagonist, of the story. All else is a foil.

Complex Psychology, Facile Anthrophology

A lot of well-meaning people have tried to tell me how ‘realistic’ and ‘authentic’ the drama of GoT is. There certainly is a lot of believable action in the story. Yet there is a lot that is utterly preposterous. By that I do not mean the existence of dragons or of rudimentary magic in the story. I mean the near-complete incapacity of Martin to actually grapple with the potentialities in humanity, apart from the brutal and the banal.

For instance, the world of GoT begins in the context of a broadly Feudal society, with a general peasantry under the headship of local lords, who themselves swear fealty to higher lords, much like Medieval Europe. That is where the similarities to Medieval Europe end.

The people of Westeros may have the political arrangement of Western Europe circa 1300, but they have almost none of the cultural or philosophical presuppositions which would have allowed such a political arrangement to arise. The people in Westeros are ostensibly divided between an old, pantheistic/polytheistic old religion practiced by the original natives of the continent, and a new modalistic monotheism (a contradiction in terms, I argue) called the ‘Religion of the Seven’, which is technically the state religion, being explicitly endorsed in the capital of King’s Landing.

The moral and spiritual life of the people of GoT is also nothing like that of a typical medieval man or woman. The people are generally either devotees of ‘therapeutic-moralistic deism‘, agnostics, or fanatics. There really is no fourth option. The world of GoT is also apparently one which can’t decide whether it’s had a 20th century Sexual Revolution: the series gyrates between the very libertine and the taboo. Most significantly, Martin cannot bring itself to decide, and perhaps that’s the point, whether the notorious incest between two siblings in the story, Jaime and Cersei Lannister, is actually morally abhorrent.

Most people in Martin’s world use religion as a palliative, like the majority of Westerners do today. Religion for them is a comforting thought, but devoid of all effective agency in the world. The powerful and the sophisticated in GoT largely do not believe in God, which again, is largely a reflection of our world projected into fiction. Also typical of this frame of mind, only fanatics actually believe this stuff: and so most of the people who actually practice a religion in Game of Thrones are generally evil characters who sacrifice children to inscrutable gods or use spiritual language as cover for bold power moves.

In essence, the world of Martin is a world without grace. It is because of this that I think his fiction ultimately lacks the verisimilitude to be considered great literature, or even great drama. GoT may be an enchanting Machiavellian melodrama, but that’s where its power ends.

Game of Thrones falls flat and fails, most especially Season 8, because it built a whole amoral world that was only based upon politics, power, and human personalities, but lacks any metaphysical underpinning to create value judgments by which we can navigate that world. The ‘genius’ of Martin’s ‘nuance’ is inevitably its downfall. This is so common among bad postmodern writing and television: starting especially around 2008, Hollywood tried to pitch moral ambiguity in its characters as ‘authenticity’, ‘nuance’ and ‘character development’. Perhaps that is why most of the villains of those late 2000’s dramas are either the criminally insane or approaching insanity: Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. These works were of high quality because it was clear that insanity is a direct descendant of nihilism. A morally agnostic universe is not a nuanced universe: it is an insane universe. Moral nihilism is the beginning of the descent into madness and unreality. Typical of a postmodern drama, GoT cannot square the circle of of wanting to explore some of the greatest questions of human existence without dealing seriously with questions of sin, grace, morality, human freedom and theology. This is a quality not just of contemporary literature, but also of current politics and education. It is the practice of “removing the organ and demanding the function“. Game of Thrones may present itself as fresh and exciting. It is exciting in the sense of the twists and turns of a daytime drama, or the rise and fall of powerful men and women. Yet it is only fresh like breeze blowing through a sepulcher.

Grace and The Real

I think most of the main characters of Game of Thrones need a master’s course in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle reminds us that true human moral excellences, which we call virtues, are found in the mean between extremes. Virtually none of the characters in GoT got the memo. For instance, Ned Stark, presented by Martin as one of the most upright of characters, is a perfect example of a hypertrophied virtue of justice (which actually, according to Aristotle, is not justice, but a vice) with a lack of prudence. He knows what the right thing is, but never the smart way of how to do it. So when he gets executed, Martin, speaking through the characters, presents ‘justice’ as something that may be good in theory, but is impossible to practice on earth without getting killed. Now certainly that may be right in some instances, but it isn’t for most people in their daily lives. Moral people generally live virtue ‘in the mean’. Game of Thrones is essentially a story of competing vices, all completely out of whack. The incapacity of the protagonists to find balance and virtue is the primary drive for all of the story’s pain and carnage. The wages of sin are death, even in Martin’s world which denies sin, much like ours.

Let’s use the example of Daenerys Targaryen. She is the innocent victim of tyrannicide, where her mentally unstable father, the King of Westeros, is killed by his private guard before he could commit mass murder. Exiled with her brother, she comes into her own as the wife of an eastern warlord, and through him, she learns how to rule by his side. After he dies and she is abandoned by her followers, she wanders throughout the world in an attempt to gain power so she can retake her father’s throne. In her desperate attempt to reestablish her dynasty, she expresses at several points a complete disregard for human life, because she worships power. She idolizes the ‘good’ world she wants to create, which is ultimately that of which she alone is ruler. Yet she completely glosses over the most basic moral principle, the ends do not justify the means, and so ultimately creates the instability in her surroundings which lead to her demise. She had good qualities, to be sure: but Dani, like Ned, lacked virtue in pivotal places, and so did not meet a good end.

So the story of GoT is pretty legitimate in terms of how human failure creates most of the drama we experience as human beings. But in a world lacking in divine grace or an objective moral law, we are not given any reason to care, or to aspire to something different. I know one may make the argument for redemption arcs like Theon Greyjoy, who gave his life in self-sacrifice, but these are all too rare.

In essence, Martin possesses a basic anthropological pessimism, which is even darker than the massa damnata of St. Augustine. People are flawed, and occasionally can get better, but ultimately, we are all in the mud pit. I do not mind anthropological pessimism. I share a lot of it, quite honestly. But if a writer is going to be true to human experience, and truly be ‘nuanced’, then he or she has to accept that there is also something very good, almost potentially magical, about humanity. No one can read something like the life of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Teresa of Avila, or even a man like St. Seraphim of Sarov, and conclude that the only thing humanity is capable of is depravity.

So while I ultimately liked Game of Thrones for its capacity for presenting conflict, I think it’s a narrative with feet of clay. In my opinion, this is also the subtext and cause for the massive discontent surrounding Season Eight, most especially its finale. People today are disappointed with Game of Thrones, not just for plot holes, Dei ex machinis and non sequiturs, but also because of the spiritual, moral vacuity at the heart of the series. Some of our favorite characters may have won the Game of Thrones, but we have no reason to feel or think, outside of our own subjectivity, that that is a net positive or not. As much as it captured the imagination in our time, it will disappear in a way Tolkien has not, because ultimately, a moral universe, where right and wrong are treated seriously and integrally, makes far better drama, and is truer to experience, than the squabbling dynasties of Martin’s creation.

So I would invite most readers and viewers of Game of Thrones, as a spiritual and intellectual antiseptic, to pick up and read Nicomachean Ethics, and perhaps discover why the drama of Game of Thrones is not all fresh and groundbreaking after all. It is as old as sin.