The Worldview of Wings of Fire
Dragonsphere Report
Spoilers follow
Wings of Fire, by Tui T. Sutherland, is more than a book series about dragons. It is a razor sharp collection of insights into the fundamental dynamics and difficulties of the human race, told through a fantastical parable. I will briefly discuss my impressions of the series finale and how they have contributed to and modified my worldview.
One of my favorite things about the ending of Wings of Fire in particular is what it doesn’t do. The dragons overwhelmingly function via matrilineal monarchy. This does not go away spontaneously when they learn their moral lessons and defeat the great evil. They do not spontaneously start espousing a deep commitment to neoliberal democracy simply because they have learned to expand their circles of care, be less warlike, and address real problems rather than being manipulative about fake ones.
This is very important, because it proves Sutherland has realized something that is deep at the heart of my own intuitions: that decency is an epistemic standard. It is not a political standard, that can be maintained simply by establishing a system, and it is not a “moral” standard in the conventional sense of morality as an inherited systems of rules. The dragons grow and succeed and make the world a better place because they stop discounting other people’s experiences. A worldview that discounts the experiences of entire categories of people as irrelevant or epistemically unsound is incorrect, it is materially wrong. You pay a penalty, or your children or loved ones or communities pay a penalty, when you ignore this information.
I also deeply liked that there was someone who couldn’t be saved in this book, and that violence was the answer. These are mature lessons. Sometimes you get backed into a corner and your preferred solution isn’t available. You are still obligated to solve the problem.
These are topical lessons. As the United States prepared to elect a fascist president, as the world seems increasingly gripped by an international fascist movement, it is worth reflecting on them. Democracy is failing. It is failing because human reasoning is failing. Democracy is meant to be representative, and the function of this when it works is to ensure epistemic windows are wide enough to account for facts about everyone. When it does not do this, it is useless.
Right now, there are not a range of thoughts or evidence making it into the calculus of the decision makers. There is one thought. The entire right wing of the United States, most of its liberals, and dozens of billionaires representing altogether a massive plurality of the world’s wealth have all united around this thought. When you consider the political trend in a global capacity it’s probably a majority of the world’s wealth that is being spoken for.
That thought is, in a sense, the thought. It is perhaps the first thought ever conceived by a living organism. It is pre-linguistic, and has the lowest kolmogorov complexity, which is both why it came first and why it’s so ineradicable. When people try to put an actual word to it they fail. Communists think it’s property, anarchists think it’s heirarchy, and fascists, who worship it, think it’s power. But it’s a thought that can be held in common between a man and an amoeba, and so it doesn’t have a word for it. It is something that either attaches easily to, or is held in common between all of these things, that an amoeba can understand.
In Wings of Fire, Tui T. Sutherland uses the metaphor of an evil plant to depict this thought. Due to the requirements of storytelling, this plant has a number of other properties that unfortunately muddy the symbolism. For instance, it can establish an afterlife, and facilitate communication and coordination across great distances. We aren’t interested in these properties; they aren’t central to the point Sutherland was making.
Fascists think this thought, as depicted by this plant, is the foundation of life. And in a sense they are right. It has been with life since the beginning. They are worried that if it went away, life would go away. They worship it as the essence of life itself.
But life existed for a very long time before higher consciousness developed, and nothing of value existed before higher consciousness formed. A world that consisted of life that did nothing but follow this prerogative would be a world without meaning or truth. This is the world that the most powerful people in the world are working towards.
I am not against the plant. It is not fragile. I don’t believe there is a way to destroy it. This would be like trying to destroy the element of hydrogen: it’s something the universe will always recreate. Yet even so, if it placates the monsters, if it makes them call off the assault, we can keep the plant. The dose makes the poison. Most human meaning is created in an environment that includes adversity. Human meaning is beautiful. But we don’t need the plant to take over the world. It is enough, in fact, for it to never grow high enough one can’t walk over it without trouble.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report