Quest Games

"Elves and humans are actually the same species... They can produce fertile offspring." One of my players said this during a game one time, which is a thought I'd had before myself. It seems to make sense with our modern understanding of taxonomy, sorting all organisms from Kingdom and Phylum down to Genus and Species. We understand that after some event of abiogenesis, life diversified over billions of years through random mutation, breeding, and environmental pressures causing natural selection. If humans and elves were genetically similar enough to produce fertile offspring, then we should be closely related, even being one and the same not long ago in our shared evolutionary history—as with Neanderthals.  

I hate this. But why? I am no creationist, no opponent to scientific understanding and progress. Why would it bother me to think of elves in scientific terms? Why do I hate imagining the true size of space in my fantasy world? Why do I dislike germ theory together with dragons and unicorns? There is something beyond the mixing of present knowledge with historical myths.  

If we had not been born after the Enlightenment, the world might look very different to us. Microbes, quarks, quasars—none of this was at all expected. We tend to look at people in history as being terribly ignorant and even simpleminded, but there's no way we would intuit all of these discoveries on our own. It seems to me that the most vicious ridicule of flat earthism comes from people who have the least wherewithal to go about disproving it. Very many of their beliefs rest on the foundation the Earth being round, but their embarrassing secret is that, from first principles, they don't understand why it's true. "Believing the science" just because it's what you heard in school is the opposite of a scientific attitude. It's an ideology.  

Modern, rational people like to believe that they are not captured by any ideology. We are free thinkers, aren't we? But when we encounter the question of breeding with elves, we immediately default to taxonomy, genetics, evolution—the whole corpus of biological research since Darwin. It's not even a thought, we just presume that's how the world works so of course that's the truth. No more consideration than an ancient Grecian explaining that Atlas holds up the sky—except that we're correct of course! 🙃 

I would submit to you that not long ago, there were many other obviously true scientific ideas. Ether, for instance, was thought to be the medium through which light traveled. Physics is the hardest science, so of course we should trust them to know what they're talking about! And phlogiston is what causes things to burn. Mesmerism, phrenology, the four humors—the list goes on. One day you are an enlightened, forward-thinking individual, the next you are a gullible proponent of pseudoscience.  

You may ask, isn't that what science is supposed to be? Believe the answer that is most likely to be correct until better evidence comes along? Of course that's true, but if we know that our understanding is likely to change in the future, why does it not occur to us that any one scientific notion we hold could be wrong? We defend each individual belief with relative certainty. We may even hold to the scientific explanation over our immediate experience—you weren't transported outside the universe to meet clockwork elves, you simply had some neurotransmitters rearranged by smoking DMT.  

I'm not arguing for radical skepticism. We must assign probabilities to facts to make decisions and act in the world. That's just practical. But I am saying that the ground under our feet can always shift with the next change of paradigm. One day String Theory promises to unite general relativity with the standard model, the next day it's nothing more than an exercise in mathematics. One day it's only the nutters who believe the lab leak hypothesis, the next day it was obvious from the beginning. One day parents are grieving because their child went to Limbo before it could be baptized, the next day the Pope declares that Limbo doesn't exist.  

My ultimate point is not that we are mistaken about many facts of this world, though we undoubtedly are. My point is that the facts *most definitely could have turned out differently* (and may still). We only know that corks are made of tiny plant cells because somebody created a microscope and started examining it. Ricky Gervais once said that if we destroyed all scientific texts and holy books, in a thousand years' time, only the scientific texts would come back just as they were because the tests would produce the same results. I contend that this is not entirely accurate!  

Yes, someone else would eventually make a kind of microscope, and yes they would see the cork made of cells, but would they say, "this is a cell, and this is its nucleus and its mitochondria and its ribosome?" I'm sure the terminology could change, though the things observed and described might be the same. And with religion, *who is to say that we would not discover the same archetypes*? These are stories that have enough resonance with human psychology that they have lasted for thousands of years. Though we may not create another Jesus of Nazareth, could we not rediscover the idea of a god-turned-man who was sacrificed for the good of humanity? The New Atheists themselves have pointed out such similarities between Jesus and figures like Horus and Dionysus!  

We could live in a flat earth without ever really knowing the difference. If we were born without astronomy, an eclipse would of course be the wrath of an angry god or wizard. Naturally. If all knowledge was lost, we might comprehend the idea of a Sabbath before ionic bonds, and it might be more immediately useful to us. Resting once every seven days may have been a more important discovery for us than all of Chemistry.  

As we learn the patterns of our world, we come to expect things to be as we have seen them. We do not believe in magic. Though we might not see through the trick, we know that the stage magician does not actually conjure a rabbit into his empty hat. Everything conforms to the mundanity of our lives of smartphones and automobiles and office parties until we cannot fathom any other reality! And why bother—if you spend time thinking about Neverland or Middle Earth, will it help you get a promotion? Will it help you buy groceries later this evening? We prune our imaginations of things that are not useful, because after all we're adults now with responsibilities!  

I am here to tell you that you do not have to be a slave to the happenstances of this reality. Neither to the facts of nature nor the facts of life. Buy your groceries, seek your promotion, but—the utility of the fantastic is that you may adapt yourself to many possible worlds. Suppose that you get a random invitation from SpaceX to be one of the first settlers on Mars? Suddenly, the world of smartphones and automobiles and office parties might not be the immutable characteristics of life.  

What's more, it is crushing to the human spirit to lose sight of possibilities. Is it really inconceivable that you could be a knight of an exclusive order, feeling the weight of cold steel in your hand as you challenge a demon to single combat? Could you hear the sound of ocean waves and smell sea foam as you steer your galleon through uncharted waters? What if you were using a torch to cut through a clump of minerals on an alien planet, and then your heart skipped a beat because it suddenly jerked with life? Many other worlds are possible, and we really know very little.  

You have found yourself alive as one individual in this particular existence, and could it not happen again another way? Why are you yourself and not me? Why are you not a rice farmer in ancient China, or a scorpionfish off the coast of Micronesia? How many other lives in other universes might we experience once we have left this one? How many have we experienced already? I'm not claiming to have answers, but the truth—that we are not bound by the facts of this world—means that we are something *other*. It is really possible that we could be something else, somewhere else. We are not married to darwinism or astrophysics or gravity any more than we are married to the canon of Norse gods or to the ordinary circumstances of our lives. If you are young, ask an older person about reality before the internet.  

Another thing I aim to explore is how the world looks different if we make "wrong" assumptions, as our forebears did. And, why would those assumptions have been made? For instance, we have outgrown the bias of our own ethnocentrism—other people in other cultures may believe different things, but we're all fundamentally the same humans capable of cooperation and mutual exchange. But in the age of sail, what if that next island really does contain bloodthirsty cannibals? What if those people over there really aren't like you and me, and they really could kill us? That is the archetype of the orc, or the savage man that lives to destroy you. We don't believe in any real orcs today, which is why it is some designers' instinct to undo orcish cruelty even in fantasy, make them out to be misunderstood freedom fighters. To a sensitive intellectual, anything less might be tantamount to racism.  

This case is particularly illustrative because the leftists in the hobby have correctly intuited that the trope is associated with a kind of tribal or genetic prejudice, while the conservatives can say, "What, you're saying orcs remind you of such-and-such racial group?" It's not that the concept of an evil, monstrous manlike race is racist—it's *archetypal*, which is psychologically deeper and more fundamental than racism. It can generate racism at a societal level if misapplied. But! We ignore archetypes at our peril. Archetypes are what's there when all the dressings of culture are stripped away—they're what's there in your dreams. They have kept our ancestors alive, and may survive to keep us alive again. After all, is life guaranteed to be civil in all corners of the universe?  

Something else that is difficult for us to imagine now—we have explored every part of the Earth, and so mastered its navigation and exploitation that *we* seem more a danger to *it* than the reverse. If you were to learn tomorrow about a campaign to exterminate all the gray wolves of Siberia, what would your reaction be? Pretty negative, I'd imagine, given their until-recently endangered status. To a medieval peasant though, wolves are vicious predators that stalk the night for livestock and people—killing them would be an unmitigated act of good, and exterminating them would be a positive goal beyond any hopeful expectation. Perhaps the fear was even warranted? Wolf attacks could have been more common in history, with those most aggressive toward humans purged from the bloodline over time.  

We are no longer afraid of Nature because we have sophisticated weapons and shelters and machinery, so we see our proper role rather as its steward. We imagine that Nature can be part of Culture, rather than something outside and truly wild. I have even seen calls from Effective Altruists to euthanize predator species for the sake of prey, but that only emphasizes our feeling of total mastery over nature rather than a fear of it. Jurassic Park (1993) might be the greatest resurrection of Nature's primordial archetype for a modern audience. If werewolves won't do it anymore, something fresh has to come along for us to keep rediscovering these archetypes.  

All of this is to say, when you visit other worlds, do not take the baggage of the world you are from. Which way should astronauts pray toward Mecca? The crossing of paradigms becomes absurd. Elves and humans are not the same species because species do not exist in my world of The Dark Forest. Genetics do not exist. Cells do not exist. You do not see because of photons hitting cones and rods that stimulate your ocular nerve—your eyes emit beams that bounce off of objects and return. You are not a tiny spec in an unfathomably large universe—the Earth and all its oceans are only about the size of Africa, and it is definitively flat.