When we write fiction, we create fictional characters. Hitchcock famously said that the audience cares about the characters, while the plot is there to give the characters something to care about.
In order for the audience to care about the characters, our words need to breathe life into imaginary people. We do this by showing them interacting with the fictional world, including other people in that world. They need to act, speak, and think in ways that readers find credible. The more tools authors have in this creative process, the better. The Emotional Thesaurus, for example, is an invaluable tool that provides physical and emotional markers for emotions. Anything that provides a deeper understanding of people and their behaviors is a potentially useful tool for the fiction author.
Primal World Beliefs
Which brings us to the topic of this month’s newsletter. The most recent issue of Scientific American includes an article about primal world beliefs. The article summarizes the findings of an ongoing psychological study that claims to have identified twenty-six primal world beliefs, organized in dualistic pairings. These include broad world views like “the world is enticing/dull,” or “the world is safe/dangerous,” or “the world is alive/mechanistic.” Most of the other twenty-three primal world beliefs fall into one of the above three broad categories, and the combination of all twenty-six primal world beliefs summarizes whether one’s overall view that the world is “good” or “bad.” You can take the survey and find out what it says about you. It’s worth the time.
This is useful to fiction authors because it can help you construct a credible and consistent character. People will hold a mix of world views, so making a credible character will not be “pure,” but rather will exhibit a mix of traits. If you create a bio for your characters as part of writing your novel, listing some of these traits could be helpful. It could also be helpful in terms of constructing oppositional traits for protagonists and antagonists, as well as providing a potential basis for common ground.
This tool, like most tools, is imperfect. Consider the pairing “the world is alive/mechanistic.” Some of the questions on the survey the specific question about which way you view the universe: alive or mechanisitc. I couldn’t answer because the proposed dualism is, in my view, meaningless. The world is neither of these things. Even worse, the questions leave undefined what “world” we are talking about. Is the world in question the physical world, or is it the cultural and social world? I was thinking of the physical world when I read the question, but others might think of the political world, or the cultural world, or Earth’s biome. Absent a definition, the question itself lacks meaning.
The question of whether or not physics is “mechanistic” is, however, resolved. This was the subject of a famous debate between Einstein and Heisenberg at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Einstein took the position that probability had no role in physics except as an imperfect way to estimate the effect of unknown and hidden variables—his view was mechanistic. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, on the other hand, is famous for Schrodinger’s cat that’s both dead and alive until the box is opened. Bell’s inequality and the experiments it inspired have resolved this debate in Heisenberg’s favor. God, if she exists, does indeed play dice with the universe.
Neither Einstein nor Heisenberg argued that the universe was “alive,” whatever that might mean. Definitions, again. The Devil is in the details. Or God, depending on your point of view.
Manichaen Fallacy
I’m more interested here in the notion of dualism. Each of the twenty-six “primal world views” are expressed as an either/or dualism. In the “alive/mechanistic” primal view, the dualism isn’t even remotely reality based if the world in question is the physical world. It’s a duality only for the uninformed—not that I expect most people to know about the Solvay conference or Bell’s inequality. But all of the “primal world views” are dualistic, and that’s the Manichean Fallacy of the title.
At one time, Manichaeism was one of the most wide-spread religions in the world. Founded in the third century by its prophet, Mani, it spread outward from the Sassanian empire as far west as the Roman Empire and east as China. Mani taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology which saw the world as a struggle between light and darkness, between good and evil. It was a syncretic religion in that it combined aspects of Gnosticism, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, all of which would have been present in Sassanian empire, which roughly corresponded to today’s Iran and Iraq. It thrived from the third to seventh centuries, but had largely disappeared by the fourteenth century, although allegedly adherents still exist in southern China.
The dualism that formed the basis of the religion has had influence throughout history. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean before converting to Christianity, for example. The Cathars in medieval France had a dualistic theology that may have been Manichean in origin. Modern-day examples of dualistic world views are left as an easy exercise for the reader.
The “Manichaean Fallacy” refers to the religion’s dualistic premise, which sees the world through the lens of polar opposites, like “day” and “night,” or “spiritual” and “material,” or “good” and “evil.” It’s a fallacy because a dualistic worldview ignores the boundaries between these opposites, places which are not purely one or the other. Dusk and dawn, for example, are transitions between “day” and “night,” and not purely one or the other. Human lives are a mix of spiritual and material—the Biblical admonition that we don’t live by bread alone acknowledges that we do, indeed, live by bread.
The boundaries are where the interesting people live and where interesting things happen. They are the places of strange attractors and chaos. Mysteries dwell in the shadows of dusk and dawn, things unseen and unknown. Anything can happen at an event horizon.
Of course, another fallacy of the dualistic premise is the notion that everything can be reduced to two polar opposites. This is demonstrably not true, even ignoring the boundaries between states. There are at least four naturally occuring states of matter, for example: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, and theoretically as many as twenty-two. Dualism’s either/or premise is tempting for its simplicity, but is far from universally true.
Connection to Characterization
In fiction we need to create credible characters. Lists like the Primal Worlds Beliefs give us another way to think about what motivates people and to construct beleivable characters. They can be especially useful in constructing character bios as part of your planning process. Believable characters are certainly more than an assembly of dualisms, but it still provides one way to think about characters.
It’s easy enough to write a character that’s pure evil. Think Hitler, and go from there. But the exception proves the rule. The most interesting characters are a mix of good and evil and other traits rather than a pure type. The Primal Worlds list lets you construct such a mix. What makes Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe interesting is that he’s an anti-hero, a flawed character in a flawed world. The same is true of Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s novels. Both characters are more credible and well-rounded than Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The latter might be more fun, but she’s not as believable.
In movies, Anakin Skywalker “has good in him,” even though he does the most evil of acts. We see his evolution from a little boy who misses his mother, to the evil dark lord, to his moment of redemption. Hannibal Lector never gets a redeeming moment, but his charm and his sense of justice and humor give him redeeming characteristics. Indeed, his charm makes him more chilling than he might otherwise be. Even the killer in Silence of the Lambs loves his dog. But then, Hitler loved his dog Blondi, too.
Holy wars are another risk of the Manichean Fallacy: implicit in holy wars is the belief that the ends justify the means. Manichean dualism can lead to exactly this state of mind, where you’re on the side of the angels and any tactic is justified against the devils on the other side, even murder. This provides another way in which dualism can be used in fiction. The relentless Javert in Hugo’s Les Miserable is, in some ways, an example of an anything-goes character who eventually has an epiphany and suicides.
In terms of characterization, the point is that dualistic pairings can be helpful in constructing believable characters. Credible characters are usually a mix of beliefs; they are impure alloys, made stronger for the impurities. The “primal world beliefs” are based on textual research and provide one taxonomy of beliefs that can inform character biographies. Just remember to design characters the way an engineer designs an alloy for a beam. The strength of your characteriization derives from intentional impurities.
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