Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Death of the Orc

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Feb. 8, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

22:12

The Death of the Orc

A thing is not a thing if it is not what it is. The Pondering: @ThePonderingoftheorb

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	There have been some frankly preposterous recent developments in the world of dungeons and dragons that are revealing even for people who are not interested in this geeky hobby.
	You are probably aware that D and D is a tabletop role-playing game where a group of friends use a rule set to explore a fantasy world originally based loosely on Tolkien.
	D and D inherited the classic conceptions of fantasy humans, elves and dwarves from Lord of the Rings, as well as their traditional enemy, the orc.
	Tolkien's orcs were intrinsically evil, and that is how Dungeons and Dragons also represented them.
	Traditionally, they were chaotic evil, the worst and most unpredictably savage of the alignments.
	Though they had what we call sapience, they were congentily violent, delighted by plunder and rapine, and in every case an irredeemable brute.
	As it was in Lord of the Rings, it became in Dungeons and Dragons.
	The heroes slay orcs in a copious and morally uncomplicated fashion because they are orcs.
	Slaying orcs is, in fact, part of what makes the heroes heroic.
	Nobody thought too much about this for a long time, but in recent years, very woke people took control of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise and were saddled with the moral quandary of the orc.
	The woke progressive is what philosopher Michael Okshot would call a rationalist, which he describes as thus.
	The rationalist stands for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of reason.
	His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious.
	He is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary, or habitual.
	His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic.
	Sceptical because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his reason.
	Optimistic because the rationalist never doubts the power of his reason to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion, or the propriety of an action.
	Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a reason common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is ground and inspiration of argument.
	Besides this, which gives the rationalist a touch of intellectual equalitarianism, he is also something of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself.
	I'm sure that there will be many of you for whom this paragraph instantly calls to mind concrete individuals who accurately represent this type.
	To these people, the freedom and satisfaction of the individual's consciousness is the highest good, and all ends of life must be turned towards achieving it.
	Each of them considers themselves a rational moral legislator in the Kantian kingdom of ends, as every sapient being is and ought to be, where we can, supposedly, through the power of our calculating mind alone, break free of the pre-rational world and into the purported final stage of humanity's existence.
	The formula for Kantian moral legislation is simple.
	What is moral is that which can be made into a universal rule that all reasonable minds would consent to follow.
	For example, thou shalt not steal is indeed a rule that all could agree with.
	Even the thief knows he ought not to steal and would not wish to be stolen from.
	What makes the thief bad is that he knows what he has done is wrong and yet has done it anyway.
	Woke morality is fundamentally predicated on the following three propositions.
	1. The consciousness is self-determining.
	2.
	Morality is a rational construct.
	3. All rational agents are fundamentally the same.
	All other aspects of wokeness flow from these and we see them manifested in all of their activism.
	Why do they promote transgenderism?
	Because they can't stand the thought of a rational agent being marginalised and rendered as other due to something beyond their control.
	In this case, their will being trapped in the wrong body.
	How can a man become a woman?
	Well, because everything a woman does can be identified through observation, abstracted into a doctrine, and then consciously mimicked by a man.
	Therefore, behold, a woman.
	Why are they for open borders?
	Well, because the foreigners, who are rational agents just like us, want to come here, and therefore their simple desire is enough to warrant letting them in.
	How do we know that our magic soil will make them like us?
	Because we can just explain our moral conduct to them, and they will be forced by our mighty logic to understand and agree with it.
	Because what possible objection could they have?
	Etc., etc., etc.
	These are the chains of reasoning that they adopt to arrive at any of their conclusions.
	As fundamentally, they approach each subject with the aim of creating as little discomfort for anyone's consciousness as possible.
	To them, it is preferable to recreate all of reality than to be forced to change their mind.
	Which is why woke people can't stand the presence of the orc.
	From the woke perspective, the orc as a race is problematic in the following ways.
	1. Orcs are a universally evil, sapient creature.
	2. This evil is an intrinsic part of the orc's biological nature.
	3. Orcs therefore are fundamentally different to other sapient creatures.
	The orc, if he has anything we could call morality at all, has a partial morality.
	That is, to the orc, his morality is partial to what serves his interests and desires, and what is wrong is anything that inhibits or hurts them.
	Whether you are a rational animal or not is irrelevant to the orc's violent pursuit of pleasure and glory, and though he might understand your arguments against committing atrocities, he does not consider his fellow rational beings to be a part of his own moral constituency.
	To the orc, slaughtering you and your family and then taking everything you have is completely justifiable, laudable, and the source of his social status.
	And don't take my word for it, this is how they have always been defined in Dungeons and Dragons, until very recent times.
	Take this excerpt from the 3.5 edition Monster Manual, for example.
	Orcs believe that to survive, they must conquer as much territory as possible, which puts them at odds with all intelligent creatures that live near them.
	They are constantly warring with, or preparing to war with, other humanoids, including other orc tribes.
	They can ally with other humanoids for a time, but quickly rebel if not commanded by orcs.
	Their deities teach them that all other beings are inferior, and that all worldly goods rightfully belong to the orcs, having been stolen by others.
	Orc spellcasters are ambitious, and rivalries between them and warrior leaders sometimes tear a tribe apart.
	Orc society is patriarchal.
	Females are prized possessions at best and chattel at worst.
	Male orcs pride themselves on the number of females they own and male children that they sire, as well as their battle prowess, wealth, and amount of territory.
	They wear their battle scars proudly and ritually scar themselves to mark significant achievements and turning points in their lives.
	The chief orc deity is Gramush, a one-eyed god who tolerates no sign of peaceability amongst his people.
	It's fairly easy to see why a woke progressive takes issue with the orc at this point.
	It boils down to a fairly simple and intuitive conclusion that normal people wouldn't take issue with.
	It is rational to be racist against orcs.
	They are, after all, monsters and not people.
	That's why they're in the monster manual and not the player's handbook.
	They are monsters smart enough to craft and use weapons, cooperative enough to form war bands and armies, and forward-thinking enough to be able to even create plans with which to accomplish their goals.
	But they are monsters, nonetheless.
	However, they aren't monsters to progressives.
	The moral constituency of progressives does not consist of biological beings of the same type, but instead, it is any creature that is capable of grasping a rational argument.
	The progressive is therefore naturally inclined to prevent the orc from being marginalized, and attempt to bring them into their kingdom of ends and make of the orc a rational legislator like themselves.
	Moreover, the woke progressive is very concerned about representation and can't help but find inappropriate analogies to people in the real world.
	When looking at the orc, the progressive outrageously decides that orcs are actually a fancy representation of black people.
	Much to the shock of literally everyone, they proceeded to eradicate the traditional concept of the orc on the grounds that everyone else was a racist.
	As a quick aside, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was a teenager, and I have not once, in more than 30 years of playing, heard anyone draw this comparison.
	Normal people think that humans, of all kinds, are represented in Dungeons and Dragons by other humans.
	In every case, Orcs are monsters and are not representative of any humans.
	Anyway, the Orc presented a double bind for the progressive in the fact that they were congenitally evil.
	That is, to be evil was a part of their nature, regardless of what their rational mind could comprehend.
	This is what they would term biological essentialism, as in, this behavioural expression is a genetically pre-programmed aspect of the orc, which they can never fully break.
	Orcs will always be a brutish and violent species, and the progressive couldn't stop comparing them to black people, so the orc had to change.
	But this does not resolve the underlying problem, however.
	Even if black people did not exist, and the progressive could not identify any real-world analogue for the orc, the orc would still present an irresolvable issue to progressive concepts of morality.
	The woke activists who took over the Dungeons and Dragons franchise found themselves in a quandary.
	Can there really be permitted to exist such a thing as an intrinsically evil, sapient creature?
	If the answer is yes, then they are also admitting that the entire progressive worldview is wrong about the nature of morality, rationality, and consciousness.
	If the answer is yes, then they admit that a person's consciousness is not a purely rational, self-authored, autonomous creation of their own choosing, and is in fact a product of the biological functions of the body and the inculcation of non-rational habits.
	If this is the case, then there is no such thing as a universal rational agent, and morality is not simply about rational calculation.
	Indeed, older traditional perspectives of morality, which are particular, habitual, and based on deeds, suddenly appear to be much more realistic.
	And if this is true, then the progressive has to admit that prejudice is at least in some cases valid.
	If the orc not only won't stop trying to kill us, but also cannot be reasoned with, nor persuaded to follow a different course of action because its beliefs are a product of its biology, society, and religion, and it is these which drive it towards invasion, then put simply, it is us or them.
	And those of us who finally put an end to them are doing something heroic.
	In this context, not only is the heroism of the hero a valid and necessary thing for human civilization to continue, for the innocent members of our society to live lives of happiness and security, such heroism is also a form of racism.
	The existence of the orc creates a context in which racism can be heroic.
	You can understand why they find this completely unacceptable, and so Dungeons and Dragons has therefore been entirely re-engineered for the modern audience, as this New York Times article from just over a month ago explains to us.
	In previous editions of D ⁇ D, each character type would get certain kinds of racial bonuses and abilities.
	For example, elves got a natural proficiency towards being wizards, whereas half-orcs got an intrinsic negative to their intelligence stat due to their orcish lineage.
	The characters were based in biological essentialism and were physically different because of their heritage, and this was reflected in their stats.
	Races are now species.
	Some character traits have been divorced from biological identity.
	A mountain dwarf is no longer inherently brawny and durable.
	A high elf no longer intelligent and dexterous by definition.
	They want D ⁇ D to be woke, and in doing so, they have abandoned all elements of biological differentiation between the player races, which means that each character comes from a universal humanoid type, and not a particular kind of creature.
	The differences in character stats will now come from their professions.
	Bards will get a charisma bonus, fight as a strength bonus, etc., etc.
	Rendering the different races, sorry, species, in D ⁇ D, a superfluous aesthetic choice with no functional distinction between them.
	One of the writers just flat out tells us this is for inclusivity.
	What they're trying to do here is put up a signal flare to not only current players, but potential future players, that this game is a safe, inclusive, thoughtful, and sensitive approach to fancy storytelling.
	They also removed the concept of the half-race, such as half-elves and half-orcs, just bluntly putting it, they're racist.
	And this is not where the preposterous changes end either.
	The leash has apparently had its phylactery removed to avoid offending Jewish people, as everyone recently discovered that a phylactery is also apparently something associated with Judaism.
	The male and female versions of the Sphinx have been abolished to create a gender-neutral version, and the orc has been removed from the monster manual and reworked into a playable race to avoid accusations of racism.
	The new orcs are apparently just Mexicans.
	They have been given the same treatment as all of the other races, so now they have too been harmonized into a universal humanoid type, which has no essential contradictions with any of the others.
	The differences between them are arbitrary and aesthetic.
	They are now just like any other humanoid race.
	They live, work, love, and raise children in precisely the same way, and so we get precisely the same outcome.
	They're just like us, and so they're no longer monsters.
	The problem of homogenizing the orc and reducing him to a mere human type is that there is no longer a conflict of moral visions, and therefore, they are no longer even really orcs.
	In every compelling story, there are competing visions of how the world ought to be.
	These are drawn from situated perspectives and from contradictions between the two opposing parties.
	The clash of interests is not as interesting as the clash of moralities.
	A conflict between competing claims to a resource implies the possibility of a mutually agreed settlement by negotiation, and a room in which lawyers hash out the finer details of a contract.
	This is an important conflict resolution solution to a well-functioning society, no doubt, but hardly a compelling plot in an adventure game.
	Moral differences, by contrast, are often irreconcilable.
	That is, one side either will not or cannot concede to the moral claims of their opponent.
	In such circumstances, the only recourse for resolution is an appeal to heaven.
	All of our greatest heroes have been masters of violence in some way, and as much as the concept might be treated with stigma in modernity, we recognize this as a form of heroism when we see it.
	For example, on Westminster Bridge, when members of the public took it upon themselves to subdue a terrorist with a narwhal horn and a fire extinguisher, this was a heroic thing to do, and not only do we recognise this in reality, we constantly represent it in our fiction.
	All of our ancient heroes were masters of arms, and the very concept of a superhero is predicated on the fact that they are simply too powerful to be stopped by mortal men.
	They too resolve their conflicts by force, and we respect the courage and conviction required to brave the pain and potential death that is risked when standing for something we consider to be righteous.
	The problem of homogenizing the orc and reducing him to a mere human type is that no longer is there a conflict of moral visions.
	If we recall the previous edition's view of the orc, we see that they are biologically and spiritually driven towards conquest and invasion, to kill their neighbours and plunder their wealth, to enslave their own women and use them to breed the next generation of conquerors, to enhance their own status within orc society.
	This is a moral outlook which is not only completely incompatible with our own, but would destroy us entirely if it were not confronted with force.
	All heroism is in some way qualified by the knowledge that the issue cannot actually be talked out, and that the issue would have to be resolved in a fight to the death.
	But if they can be talked out of it, we have reduced the heroic necessity of defeating the orc at all costs to one of ensuring that he can merely be brought to the bargaining table so that reasonable representatives of both sides can cut a deal.
	The brutish, bestial horror of the devouring half-rational, half-animal raider is no longer the threat it once was, because it no longer exists.
	And thus, the concept of the orc has in fact been removed entirely from Dungeons ⁇ Dragons.
	No longer do orcs get to be authentically what they were, due entirely to the moral prejudices of the woke left, which holds that there is actually only one form of morality, and it is universalist liberalism.
	The biological nature of the humanoid animal has been eliminated.
	The essence of each character has been made universal, interchangeable, and boring.
	If all characters are basically the same, why bother choosing any of them?
	If all conflicts can be resolved through negotiation, why bother learning to fight?
	Ironically, the drive towards inclusivity has excluded those people who actually wanted to play a more grim, dark, or realistic interpretations of Dungeons and Dragons as a scenario.
	Personally, as a player in the DM, I love to min-max, and I like to get the most out of the different stats available to me in the different creatures.
	If they're all basically the same, then my interest in the property goes away entirely, and you've lost me as a player.
	The removal of racial attributes has indeed liberated the fictional consciousnesses of our fancy races from the material confines of their bodies, and made combat a non-essential aspect of our storytelling, thereby eroding the very nature of heroism in the setting.
	But does this make Dungeons ⁇ Dragons any better by making it more liberal?
	By eliminating fictional racism, have we made our setting more or less interesting?
	Are more people choosing to play and finding themselves gripped by their adventures?
	Or are they growing weary of the introduction of excessive moral complexity into their fantasy games?
	Maybe it's okay to just let us fight some monsters and be the heroes of a fictional story.
	If you'd like more from me on various kind of gaming subjects and other sort of hobby things, I've got a little side channel called The Pondering, which I'll link in the description, and you can come over and hang out.
	I regularly live stream there playing video games.

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