Hope this comes off with the curious, reflective spirit in which it’s intended. You can never tell on the internet, but I wanted to respond to something Brandon Sanderson (whom I respect) said about violence and sex depicted in media.

I wanted to respond to the 36:52 section of ep.11 of Intentionally Blank:

I’ll admit, out front, the irony of doing so for an episode about weird feedback and unsolicited critique. I take that on the teeth in a self-inflicted manner, but I’m not angry nor is this really… critique? In any case, that’s the first log of several that I want to take out of my own eye during the course of this comment in hopes of starting rather than ending a conversation.

Unlike the examples in the episode, I’m not responding to the Brandon’s ethics or Dan’s or any other writer’s so much as the hermeneutics of the argument presented. I’m doing this because there aren’t many forums on which to do this and perhaps because I’m wrestling through it myself. I feel unsettled as an author and reader as I wrestle through what to include, what to exclude, when to fade to black — and not just with these two spheres, but on a host of issues. I have myself received some of the weirdest hate mail spread out over, for instance, multiple ten-thousand word emails, even though I’m a very recent and virtually anonymous addition to the field. These emails accused me of all sorts of crimes (conflating the author with the character seems a frequent fallacy in this kind of “correspondence”).

That said, I have no dog in the fight between violence and sex in media (though I do agree with Brandon Sanderson that it’s often a rather silly “gotcha” internet question — and, on the other hand, though I will admit that Pat Rothfuss may have a salient point specific to his own books when he notes how his own readers never seem to bring up the sadistic, sociopathic murderous voodoo torture rampages of Kvothe, but rather always his consensual sex scenes, which oddly completely and consistently ignoring how the boy was molested in Tarbean…)

I’m more interested in a minor contextual interpretation point, mainly because I think we have to be honest with the entire hermeneutical moves of paragraphs to keep us from out-gotcha-ing these gotcha questions. It’s similar to when I’ve heard Christian friends say things along the lines of “All Muslims are terrorists” and Muslim friends say things along the lines of “All Christians are white nationalist members of the KKK.” The existence of my experience of this kind of corresponding tit-for-tat demonization must call us to play fair with our interlocutors, assume the best of them, assume the highest intended virtue of their arguments, assume they’re on the same level as us our own semiotic squares of meaning, speaking to the highest virtue of their intended critiques the way we would want them to do unto our arguments.

Not that Brandon doesn’t do this. Nor that he would ever demonize someone.

I’m just saying methodologically, that’s where I’m coming from with what follows.

It seems to me the spirit of the critique of violence in media is dealing with my spirit as author, not my disobedience of the letter, of violence. My internal life, not my external act. It matters more than usual because creative writing is an internal medium. Readers lead and leaders read.

But lead whom towards what?

This is why I fear to tread where I do, though I love to write. Teachers will be judged more harshly and all of that.

Preramble concluded:

The argument in ep.11 was that Jesus explicitly forbids thinking about a woman lustfully, but not thinking about violence. We are forbidden to murder, not to think about murder. Therefore it’s worse for a writer to write a sex scene than a violence scene. I actually think the argument might work better for direct profanity or, say, racial slurs in the case of the writer; sex scenes in the case of the actor (unless, and I do not mean this with any sort of insensitivity but with all sobriety, we consider a rare case such as Alec Baldwin’s or Bruce Lee’s or some text that directly incited violence or pornography that victimizes the subjects, etc). That said, I’m not talking about fringe cases here, but about people like us who actually care about steering clear of searing their own consciences in the process of creating art. Who want to strive towards virtue.

I wanted to quote the entire cited passage in context and offer a quick couple of anecdotes to sort of “steel man” this gotcha argument against violence in media which has been used against me in hate mail. I want to do so from the perspective of the Sermon on the Mount, which was cited in the episode:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into the Vale of Hinnom. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

The Sermon of Jesus — which features radical calls to take care of the poor, forgive enemies, discharge debt in post-usury Year of Jubilee style, and a slew of Jesus’s most radical statements — is generally organized in a series of triptychs. He starts the whole set by saying, “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish X, for I fulfill the spirit of X — you need to be with me to exceed the goodness of the most self-righteous folks out there.”

And so his series, like with the adultery quite, is you’ve heard X externalized law, but I tell you X starts in the heart, so here’s how you keep the spirit of the law in your heart by my grace.

Divorce, for instance, Jesus says is not merely a legal certificate. Rather, divorce tends to impoverish the divorcee to such a degree that serial monogamy ends up akin to abusive pimping. Oaths are often used to ensure your promise will be fulfilled, but if it’s fulfilled in your heart as simply keeping your “yes” and keeping your “no,” you needn’t worry about saying, “I swear on my mother’s grave” or whatever.

Jesus’s entire section on retaliation — turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, give your cloak and tunic — according to Walter Wink is a subversion of the first century understandings of shame-based debtor’s prison and postcolonial Roman occupation. In other words, it forms the foundation of Kingian and Ghandian nonviolence. (It also, frankly, forms the foundation of postcolonial philosophy when considered alongside the naming of territories Rome conquered during the Pentecost role count of Acts 2, but that’s another conversation for another day — see Aristotle Papanikolaou’s piece on post colonialism in Eastern Orthodoxy for more).

Similarly this plays out with the Our Father, about which David Bentley Hart offered a radical recontextualization recently (radical in the sense of a radish, getting back to the root of the text). It shows up with the “give pearls to swine” triptychs which are often interpreted, in a first century context, as rejecting allegiance to the Imperial Cult — something a few more American Christians could do these days — and embracing the allegiance to the One True King by “asking, seeking, knocking.”

Which brings us to violence:

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to Hinnom’s Vale of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

The exact parallel construction is that as looking at a woman lustfully imperils us to the internal vice that predicates adultery, so does bitterness and rage — meditating on violence and revenge — imperil us to the internal vice that predicates murder. We still have coliseums, after all, we simply have absolved our internal guilt of the actual murder of the gladiator or, worse, the martyr, the slave, infants (in the case of Perpetua and Felicity). But the question remains if no physical killing in video games or the cinema is a true absolution or merely a whitewashed tomb (Matt. 24) — does this kind of voyeuristic sadomasochism still affect us in any way?

I’m asking myself, you see.

Do I, for instance, play Apex Legends? Did I stomp through Morrowwind? Did I watch the first SAW and Die Hard?

Yes. All of the above.

And yet…

I do so less than I used to, some of these behaviors I’ve cut out entirely. Partly due to time. But also partly because I am softer than I used to be and sometimes, personally, shooting imaginary people on a screen leaves me queasy. And frankly, I’m not quite sure why. Lord knows I’ve done it enough times. But I am the sort of person who doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures — if it’s truly a pleasure, there shouldn’t be guilt. There’s a difference, though, between guilt and community shame. And that’s what I’m interested in: do we worry about this conversation because of shame or guilt?

I don’t know the answer. I think the book Healing the Shame that Binds You by Bradshaw is guiding me some, but that’s about all I can say.

I do wonder if Rothfuss is right when, in a “recent” stream, he talked about wanting to write a novella (in this case The Narrow Road Between Desires) and other stories where the main problem is solved nonviolently (in this case, nonviolently by The Good Bad Wolf). I do wonder why we don’t have more stories featuring figures based on Dr. King, Ghandi, St. Francis, Malala Yousafzai, etc. I don’t mean Christ figures and the like. Just normal people solving intense situations nonviolently — peaceful assertive conflict, सत्याग्रह, that sort of thing. I did find it instructive that almost all of the major plot points in the Hunger Games were solved with nonviolence, but it was quite the slog to make that point.

Do I have a conclusion?

No.

At best I’m a hypocrite at both ends of this thing — giving weird feedback on a post about weird feedback and knowing I consume a lot of violent and sexualized media — and can only attempt to remove a log from my eye at the beginning and now at the end of it, admitting even now that my debut novel featured a literal major siege on a major corporation. It was certainly not nonviolent, but it also wasn’t without consequence towards nonviolence. So there’s yet another log in the other eye, God only knows how I could see to remove my own, let alone someone else’s.

I’m wrestling through this and clearly the episode was generative for me personally. I remain always grateful to Brandon and the crew for introducing virtue ethics, discipline, worldview dialog, and a slew of other desperately needed conversations into a genre space that, at least in my experience at various conventions, is pretty radically hostile to these sorts of things. The most angry I ever made a colleague was on a panel I suggested entitled Magic is the Metaphysics of the Author. Half the panel didn’t know the word “metaphysics” and the other have were rather angry I’d brought it up at all. These discussions are generally frowned upon. And so I don’t “out” my worldview very often at conferences at all, particularly because of a series of false dichotomies surrounding theism that seem to linger in the broader culture.

It’s exceedingly rare — almost non extant these days — to see someone cite scripture as the major reasoning behind artistic and ethical choices as a creative writer. And I mean any sacred scripture at this point in cultural history, Quran, Bahagvad Gita (you know about Hindu Monotheism, right?), etc. Thanks for that, Brandon and Dan, if you ever see this.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth meditating on what the myth of redemptive violence does to us internally. Or at least it’s worth it to me because I consistently do not know other than I want people to believe the myth of redemptive violence less and less and less. I agree with the science on video games and violent films and yet I don’t think that the metric of violent behavior is the right metric when it comes to virtue ethics. Do video games make you more violent? That almost sounds like an ethics 101 question. Such studies are merely causal, predicated at the front and back end upon syllogisms. There are deeper concerns for us further down the ethical road. I wonder whether or not the peacemakers will still be blessed — or even blessed in abundance — with the regal Caesarian title “Sons of God” if they are peacemakers internally? For as the triptychs of the Sermon on the Mount show time and again, Scripture kills but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:6). It’s not that it’ll be abolished, it’s that it’s insufficient. And that includes the command “Do not murder.”

God help me make peace in the world with my writing, whether I speak of violence or stay silent. I don’t know what I’m doing.

“How can we know the way?”

I hope the original contextual answer to Thomas’s question is the answer for all of us.

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Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash