6-4

People say they never forget where they were when they learned of certain historical tragedies--the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster, 9-11. My earliest such experience, which marked me deeply, was of the Tiananmen Square incident. In Chinese it is typically referred to as 六四 (6-4) in reference to the date that the People's Republic of China resorted to military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations.

Though the protests had been going on for months all across China, I was five years old and oblivious. I had broken my ankle the previous winter, and spent what seemed like an eternity (but turned out to be less than two months) in a cast. Happily recovered, I had spent much of the spring rambling through the coastal shantytown on the outskirts of Keelung where we lived in temporary military housing.

I was sitting on the floor of the little concrete hovel I shared with my parents, doodling. The door stood perpetually open to admit the sea breeze that cooled steep seaward slope. My grandmother, visiting as she often did, and sat nearby shelling beans for dinner and watching news on our flickery television set.

I looked up from my drawings when I heard the news anchor say something about 'students'. Chinese children heavily identify themselves as students for various cultural reasons, so I was keyed to the word. What I saw had nothing to do with preschool. It was a video clip of the early morning hours of June 4th, when the ironically named People's Liberation Army rolled in to clear Tiananmen Square. It was a vision of darkness punctuated with fire and milling bodies, and then a line of troops.

The anchor described (in what was probably a recap of earlier news) the crackdown on the student protesters, and the uncertain death toll. I could not fully comprehend, but I stared raptly at the screen.

"Ni-ni," I said to my grandmother (in Chinese; I translated it as best I can remember), "why would the soldiers kill the students?" To my young mind, a students were children, and soldiers were kindly 'older brothers' who played with me when my father was too busy at the base.

"Those are older students," my grandmother said. "They did something the government didn't like."

I turned around and looked at her, wide-eyed. "What if I do something the government doesn't like? Will the soldiers come after me?"

"We do not have the same government as those students," she said wearily.

"But they're Chinese, too!" I insisted, not yet understanding the complexities of the Chinese Civil War, which ended in the ongoing stalemate of Taiwan's ambiguous statehood.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "We came here so that would not happen to you."

I looked back at the television screen, which showed an interview with a highly agitated eye-witness. For all I understood of geography, it hardly mattered whether Beijing was a world away or just over the next ridge. Watching the man on that screen, I did not find my grandmother's words very reassuring.

Love is Love (Unless I Find it Gross)

Most people express a powerful, reflexive disgust at the idea of incest, even if all other aspects of the relationship in question are ethically acceptable. This belief in the 'wrongness' of incest is strongly conditioned and rarely questioned. Being the skeptical sort, I just cannot leave it alone.

The offspring of close blood relations have an elevated risk for inheriting genetic disorders, since consanguinous parent have a higher-than-average chance carrying the same autosomal recessive traits. However, incest taboos/laws in most places predate the science of genetics as we understand it today. As well, modern Western society condones relationships between fertile, unrelated persons who carry genetic disorders while condemning even non-reproductive incestuous relationships. Given the above, I think it is fair to assume that--on the societal level, at least--incest taboos cannot be attributed solely to concern for the health of offspring.

One psychological explanation for the near-ubiquity of the incest taboo is the Westermark effect, which holds that children develop sexual aversion to people with whom they cohabitate--regardless of consanguinity--from birth to about age six. Demographic studies support this hypothesis, but the phenomenon is not all that well understood. Nevertheless, most humans are strongly repelled by the idea of sexual contact with first-degree relatives.

It seems strange to extend a personal aversion (no matter how common, no matter what the cause) to other people. However, there is adequate precedence for the development of sexual taboos based on the preferences of the majority rather than any systematic ethical consideration. Homosexuality is one such example.

Sociologists argue that the homosexuality taboo has its roots in the reliance of primitive human groups on reproductive viability. In a modern context, however, homophobia seems largely motivated by personal disgust. Straight homophobes find the idea of coupling with someone of the same sex unappealing, and conclude that anyone who enjoys it must be a pervert (quoth my brother, "Why would anyone want to do 'that'?!"). Gay or bisexual homophobes internalize pressures generated by social/religious/legal prohibitions as well as homophobic peers, and develop a reaction formation to avoid confronting what they see as an undesirable trait in themselves.

As a society, we have begun to accept that 'I find it gross' is not an ethically sound argument for the persecution of those different from ourselves. When the Supreme Court of the United States struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), some commentators feared that the ruling would lead to the legitimization other sexual relations hateful to their eyes. Attempts to overturn polygamy and incest laws have subsequently failed--in the latter case, on the basis of potential harm to unborn offspring. I find that argument startling in a culture so gun-shy about anything resembling eugenics.

Non-reproductive incest between consenting adults is a victimless crime, but it can put someone in jail for up to 20 years in parts of United States. Even inbreeding, while unwise and unfortunate, is effectively little different from non-incestuous reproduction by persons carrying genetic disorders. Image the furor that would result from the passage of a law forbidding marriage or sex between carriers of cystic fibrosis!

Justice means justice for everyone, regardless of how much we revile them or their actions. That is why we permit the Westboro Baptist Church to spew hatred in front of mourners, as little as we may like their message. A free and just society should allow sex between consenting adults, including homosexuality, non-monogamy, prostitution and yes, incest. The price of admission is dealing with other people's personal choices--even if we cannot imagine why anyone would want to do 'that', even if we think it is unwise, and even if we find it gross.

Help Me Take This Mask Off

I visited my grandmother the day I turned eighteen. It was the first time I had been back to Taiwan after five years in the States. The trip was a gift from my parents for getting a full scholarship to university, or so they said. I had wanted to go much earlier, but there was no point arguing with them.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon in Taipei, and my cousin Erica took me on the MRT to a corner of the city I rarely visited in my childhood. The hospice center was clean and dim, its main room occupied by elderly patients in wheelchairs watching some television drama. A middle-aged caretaker guided us through a maze of partitions to where my grandmother lay strapped to a bed.

"Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes."

He explained that she could no longer move, see, or speak, and her hearing had deteriorated. We had come at a good time, however, as she was often awake in the afternoon. He put a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently, saying her grandchildren had come to see her, then left us.

Erica had to nudge me forward. Finally, I took my grandmother's rigid, claw-like hand, leaned close to her ear, and said I was back. I told her I had graduated high school, and would be going to college soon. I told her she raised me well, and did not need to worry about me. I told her I was sorry I did not get to see her earlier.

Her eyes did not focus on me, but as I spoke she started to cry. Erica told me that it happened sometimes, that it meant she knew I was there. She had no other means of communicating.

We stayed with her for a while, and she wept until she drifted off to sleep. I followed Erica back out into the sun-baked street. I felt like I was underwater, as if everything came to me from a great distance. Even the heat and humidity of a Taipei summer could not banish the sense of disconnect. It was the first time I felt the vast numbness that passes for my grief, but it would not be the last.

Because the progression of Parkingson's Disease had been frightfully quick for my grandmother, I do not think that either she or her doctors thought she would hang on for so long, forlorn and cut off from the world. I will never know if she wished for death in her final years of darkness. If we could have known then what she wanted, we would have done it; but she could only cry.

Just Drawn That Way

Many roleplaying games have morality--or 'alignment'--systems that describe and proscribe the behaviors of characters.  Like all game mechanics, alignment systems must balance verisimilitude with manageability. Too much system granularity can overwhelm players in both video and tabletop games, while too little makes roleplaying morality less compelling.

"Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost."

The classical Dungeons & Dragons alignment system has two axes: 'ethical', consisting of Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic, and 'moral', consisting of Good, Neutral, and Evil. All characters in the game fall into one of the nine intersections between those axes, e.g. Neutral Good, Lawful Neutral, Chaotic Evil. While very granular and elegant in theory, I have found this alignment system unwieldy in practice, and largely cosmetic in most tabletop games.

My favorite tabletop RPG alignment system is the Path mechanic in Vampire: the Masquerade. By default, PCs (who are all vampires) follow the 'Path of Humanity', essentially a simulation of secular humanist morality on a scale from zero to 10. Each level has a set of behavioral standards, the violation of which triggers a roll that determines whether the character feels remorse for the action, thus retaining his Humanity, or rationalizes the action and drops one level on the Path.

This mechanic seems clunky, but I have found it surprisingly useful and intuitive in the context of the game. It has an admirable balance of crunch and fluff, providing system incentives both for maintaining a high Humanity score and for letting it slide, just a little. Even more, the game contains several other Paths to which characters can 'convert' if they reject Humanity, including ones that glorify that which most humans conventionally regard as 'evil'.

Many video games have linear alignment systems. Star Wars games, such as the Knights of the Old Republic and Jedi Knight series, use the Light Side/Dark Side system as portrayed in the films. The Karma systems in the inFamous and Fallout series both measure morality on a Good/Evil axis, and adjust the way NPCs interact with the PC accordingly. A common problem with these single-axis mechanics is that they often yield rewards only at the extremes, which can discourage roleplaying in favor of powergaming the alignment system.

The most interesting and nuanced alignment system I have encountered in a video game is Reputation in the Mass Effect series, which grants Paragon or Renegade points for dialogue choices as well as other actions. It looks like a single-axis Good/Evil system on the surface, but in fact Paragon and Renegade are closer (though not equivalent) to Lawful and Chaotic. Furthermore, they are measured on completely separate scales. So the player can gain both Paragon and Renegade points in the course of a single encounter without one canceling out the other. High scores on these axes unlocks special actions that can affect the game in fairly dramatic ways.

I find, sometimes to my own disappointment, that I gravitate toward playing 'good' PCs. I derive a great deal of satisfaction from portraying a well-developed villain or anti-hero when I game master, yet have little interest in such characters as a player--this includes video games. I have occasionally made 'bad' characters in games like Jedi Knight or inFamous just so I can go on a rampage, but lose interest in them fairly quickly. Unless I make a conscious effort--and sometimes even when I do--I end up playing goody two-shoes characters. This probably explains, at least in part, why I have so much interest in alignment mechanics that break the Good/Evil mold.