Dungeons & Dragons & Prog Rock & Disco: On Progress & Tradition (Part 3)

In Part 1 of this series, we saw how the game designer Matt Colville argued that his beloved prog rock and Dungeons & Dragons are both conservative in light of being backward-looking in their essential defense of the status quo and appeal to the past. This he contrasted with being progressive, represented in this typology by disco, as something which is forward-looking, about the now and the future, and committed to establishing a world more egalitarian, democratic, and inclusive.

In Part 2 of the series, we saw how Colville's own claims undermine the vision he presented in Part 1. Specifically, we saw how appealing to the past, indeed being backward-looking, can be a rejection of the limits and evils of the status quo, as seen in the Rebellion of Star Wars. We also saw how his notion of D&D as not any particular product or brand but a tradition, and a tradition which his whole online project is designed to present and pass on to a new generation, is a fundamentally conservative approach to the game.

All of this leads us to a foundational question: What is progress? At its root, to progress is to "step forward", but forward to what? The future? No. There is nothing especially interesting in "progressing" to the future, if that just means "getting older" or "being later than that which came to pass earlier". Rather, that to which one makes progress is a goal or an end. We progress when we do that which brings us closer to our goal, and we regress when we draw away from that goal.

Do we have any reason to associate progress with the future? In one sense we do, because in our own lives, we cannot be said to progress if we become worse, or fail to become better. Both stasis and corruption are contrary to progress, and as all of these are lived out in time, there is a perfectly unobjectionable sense in which we associate progress with the future. However, what is unjustified is the presumption, common from the late 18th century until the present, that the historical process itself has some intrinsic tendency towards the human good, the goal towards which humanity as such (inevitably?) tends.

For many in the late 18th century and widely in the 19th and 20th centuries, that end was a liberal one. On the liberal view, the human good is found in maximal human freedom, freedom to seek his good by his own best lights, and according to this "Whig" reading of history, there is an intrinsic tendency to freer, more liberal societies. Whatever is contrary to liberalism would not only be regressive, but also backward-looking, a resistance to the future which, on this view, will come to pass.

For Marxists, liberalism is seen at itself a sign of alienation, one which is opposed to that final unleashing of the fulness of human possibility which can only come about with the elimination of the social, economic, and cultural praxis that impedes the free, spontaneous activity of each to fulfill and perfect his powers, powers which, absent the false consciousness arising from capital, would also inevitably express itself for the good of each and the good of all. On the Marxist view, while this future will come about through revolution, it is nonetheless inevitable, the inexorable end of human activity. To resist revolution, to stand for liberal freedoms, is to be opposed to what must come, and thus to be reactionary, counter-revolutionary, and so opposed to the future itself.

Even milder versions of this view have found their way into the politico-cultural lexicon of recent years. It has become commonplace to accuse opponents of one's politics of social transformation as being on "the wrong side of history." On this view, there is only one (ultimate) possible outcome of human society, and this outcome will vindicate any and all efforts made to reorder society now in light of what the future inevitably will hold. All opposition, then, is necessarily irrational, as much as resisting universal gravitation or the Pythagorean theorem. Moreover, it is to be "trapped in the past", even to "turn back the clock", as though the promoted praxis is the only real expression of the march of time towards the future.

It is generally in light of some version of the above sentiments, i.e. those which perceive a tendency in human history towards some good, that we find the adjective progressive used to identify this or that policy. If the future is seen as one of liberal or libertarian freedom, then progressives will advocate a minimal state, maximal individual liberty in political and economic spheres. If the future is seen as one of material human flourishing and access to public goods, then, as was common in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, progressive politics were those which promoted public heath (sewers, water, etc.), limited hours, the weekend, increased suffrage, publicly-funded education, public parks and nature reserves, and the like. If a Marxist, a progressive politics will be illiberal, abandoning the notion of rights of the individual in place of revolutionary change to eliminate the social basis for the rise of capital.

Yet, even given this imaginative connection which progressive politics has with an imagined future, one which is seen as the lodestone of history, does that place it in opposition to being conservative, to being backward-looking or even reactionary? Perhaps for Marxists this is so, insofar as the Marxist reading of history rejects the idea of a better past to which we can turn for a model. The goal is always, ever, and only future. However, we have no good reason to think that the Marxists are correct here. Perhaps the best articulation of the fallacy of associating progress with a refusal to be backward-looking can be seen in C.S. Lewis' discussion of progress in his famous apologetic work Mere Christianity:

We all want progress, but progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

We can promote progress, in other words, by going back, by reaching back into the past for what has been lost, what has been forgotten, what was pointing us to the goal we seek. In the language of the moment, if we want to arrive at the good we seek, we sometimes need to "turn back the clock". We need to be "backward-looking", not because the past is better qua past any more than the present is best qua present or the future qua future. A backward-looking progress is not regressive, but restorative.

Indeed, this is one of the most important reasons for a society, whether on the small-scale level of fans of Dungeons & Dragons, or on the full-scale level of proper, human societies, to be traditional. To be traditional, to cultivate and prioritize tradition, is to accept that it is folly to presume that the options and preferences and perspectives of the present have some special value, or even worse, must be better in light of being more recent than that which has come before. As G.K. Chesteron reminds us in Orthodoxy, to be traditional is to be truly democratic, truly to give weight to the insight of one's fellow man:

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

Moreover, to be traditional one must be conservative. To pass on what one has received not merely to suit one's own preferences, but to do justice to the whole of the wisdom of the past, and particularly that wisdom which expresses itself in what has continued to shape a community over the course of many years, across many different situations and by people of quite varied perspectives, requires resisting the temptation to edit, to cull, to "fix", to hide or obscure, merely because this or that feature of the tradition does not make sense to me or that I cannot provide a full account justifying it. To be conservative is to recognize that there is more wisdom to be found in institutions and practices long standing than is clear or able to be articulated by any one person, or even any one generation. Change will happen, of course, and in our engagement with what has been received, we will inevitably leave our mark. Yet, we do so best not by repealing what has been, but by receiving the whole as best we can and passing it on as best we know how.

Should we seek, then, to make our music, our hobbies, and more than that our society more inclusive? Make its riches more widely available, more widely enjoyed? Certainly! Are there aspects of what he do, how we have received our culture, our music, our hobbies, that communicate, even unwittingly, that not all are welcome, not all are invited? Sadly, this seems also to be the case. But will we find our solution in appealing to a non-existent future of our own imaginings, one which will necessarily be limited by our own best lights? Or, will we find a better way by passing on the fulness of what we have received, making best use of it, letting the double action of receiving and handing on guide us to invite to our tables those who also have a share in what has been?

Part 1

Part 2

Dungeons & Dragons & Prog Rock & Disco: On Progress & Tradition (Part 2)

In Part 1, we looked at Matt Colville's argument that Dungeons & Dragons is fundamentally conservative, but that it need not be. We saw how he associated his beloved D&D with his beloved prog rock, and how both were inherently backward-looking. It was disco, not prog or punk, that was truly progressive, and thus his exhortation to his fellow gamers, "Let's be disco!"

More than that, we saw something of his account of what it is that makes something conservative and what makes it progressive. To be conservative, on his view, is to seek to maintain the status quo, or to return to the status quo ante. As such, conservatism resists attempts to include those who had been excluded, to center those who had been or are being marginalized. Such moves would be a threat to the status quo or the (imagined and romanticized) status quo ante.

In contrast, to be progressive is to be forward-looking, to be about the future. This is taken by Colville to entail being more democratic, more egalitarian, more inclusive. To be progressive is to turn not to the past for inspiration, but to seek out what new opportunities exist in the present, and to lean on them to produce something novel, which he takes to be what it is to be "towards the future". While a progressive can, on his view, value and even enjoy the past, he cannot make a turn to the past to be a means of going forward. Such moves would always entail, to one degree or another, a return to exclusion, to hierarchy.

Or...so it might seem. Curiously, in the same Twitch stream, Colville also makes other claims which resist the point he was trying to make about progressivism and conservatism. Let's consider, for example, the admiration he has for what he calls "OG Star Wars". While he admits that Star Wars is in some way "backward-looking", being about a world "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," this is on his view because SW is a fairy tale, and so about what is true about the human condition in any time, even if it rhetorically sets its story in a far-away land and the distant past. Moreover, he takes the theme of the original movie (perhaps the original trilogy) to be about the resistance to a regressive, which he then elides and equates with conservative, machine world.

Can we take such a view seriously? What is conservative about the Empire? It's rather more obviously the case that the Empire stands not just for, in Obi-Wan's words about Darth Vader, something "more machine than man", and so more allied with the futurity that Colville takes to be the lodestar of progressivism. The Empire seeks to destroy what is old, what is traditional (the vestiges of the Republic), replacing them with cold, brutal efficiency, one which (apart from Vader and, we see later in the trilogy, the Emperor) has no room for religion, for the Jedi, dismissed as "sad devotion for an ancient religion," one that is mocked as ineffective and far inferior to the great monument to the future, the Death Star. The Rebellion is not a progressive force, but a conservative, we might even say reactionary one. It does not seek to produce a new order, but rather to reach back into the best of the past (the Republic, the Jedi Knights) and to restore them. The path that led to Empire was a corruption, and so the only way forward is by going back, picking up from where the digression happened and correcting the errors of the status quo.

Likewise, Colville appeals to novels in which he finds the progressive themes he champions, novels which all the same make use of Medieval tropes. In this vein, he appeals to T.H. White's The Once and Future King with its peasant King Arthur who seeks (even if he ultimately fails) to challenge and even alter the very feudal order and the knighthood that served and maintained it that traditional Arthurian lore and literature celebrated. He also (here and elsewhere) lauds Michael Moorcock's Elric series, which is rooted in the rejection, indeed the tearing down, of the corrupt, decadent status quo. I would venture to add that most of the literature of Appendix N (the list of works from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide of 1979 which noted works that inspired Gary Gygax and the other originators of the hobby) is disruptive of the status quo in much the same way. Science fiction and fantasy of the mid-20th century, even if not especially sensitive to issues of sexism and racism in ways palatable to early-21st century progressives, was nonetheless hardly friendly to tradition, to the status quo, to received belief and institutions. That is, however much it might use the trappings of a feudal, Medieval past, it did not tend to be sympathetic to the Medieval ethos any more than was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This is not Romantic literature, but thoroughly modern, even "forward-looking", while undoubtedly doing so (for the most part) by and for white men.

Finally, and more importantly for our purposes, Colville is actually something of a conservative malgré lui. He is hostile to the progressive project of "Year Zero," the desire (one might say fantasy) of tearing down what has been and starting over. Even while admitting that there is no revolution without bloodshed (which is a chilling sentiment, but I'll let it slide), he admits that the experiment of starting over from the beginning, without reference to what has been, has never ended well.

Indeed, the key to Colville's conservatism is his traditionalism, at least with respect to Dungeons & Dragons. On Colville's view, and I believe he is correct here, D&D is not this product, this particular brand and product line owned once by TSR and now by Wizards of the Coast (and so by Hasbro). As much as TSR in the past and WotC in the present might want you to think that to play D&D is to use their proprietary products, D&D is a tradition. It is what happens at the table, not what is found spelled out in this or that licensed product. Indeed, from the beginning, the game as it was played at Gygax's and Arneson's table was never really represented in any published version of D&D, and Gygax (when he wasn't speaking "authoritatively" as the CEO of TSR) always insisted that each table needed to play the game its own way. There was no "one true way" to play the game, but there were a set of practices, of general rules, of content, of shared lore and stories and characters from the tables of those who made and played the game. That is, there was a material tradition of D&D, which content and lore and set of practices was and continues to be handed on (i.e. tradition) by those who have played before and experienced the game in the past to new players. In fact, this act of handing on, of passing on the tradition, is exactly what Colville explicitly takes to be what his YouTube channel (especially the "Running the Game" series of videos) is all about!

Contrast this view of D&D as tradition with the very progressive account of D&D that was used by WotC to promote the then (in 2007) upcoming, Fourth edition of the game:

On the view of this promotional video, D&D is taken to be above all a ruleset, one which has moved from more to less primitive, and (so it would seem) from good to better to yet even better, through the passage of time. From the passion and limitations of the game in 1978, we are told that "technology was advancing, and so was D&D" so that in 1989, the game was better, but still far from perfect (e.g. THAC0). With the coming of Third edition (here represented by 3.5e in 2003), we are told that D&D was clearly now, with "deep game play" but with (told with a smirk) "involved" rules (cue reference to grappling). We are then led to see the wondrous world of 4e in the near future of 2008, where everyone around the table is playing smoothly and effortlessly, having unimpeded fun with the latest technology at hand. D&D, we are told, "would not be the game it is without constant evolution and innovation," but that, through all of this, "the game will remain the same."

As much as Colville has elsewhere praised the Fourth edition of D&D, it is hard to believe that he would have any sympathy towards this account of the game's history. While technology can and does impact art and games (another theme dear to Colville's heart), this account of D&D as an object, or a piece of technology, being ever refined and improved, becoming ever better with each passing year and each new edition, is hard, indeed impossible, to square with his understanding of D&D as a tradition. Traditions may be enriched or expanded, but they are not improved by the mere passage of time, nor are they innovated or refined. They are received, engaged, and passed on, inevitably touched by having been engaged, but ideally passed on as wholly as possible so that my choices, my preferences, what I take to be good game play, does not impede the reception by a new player of the game as a whole, a game which no book, no edition, no systems reference document or open game license, can ever by itself contain, encode, or transmit.

In the next part, we will finally take a look at a better way to understand what we mean by progress, by tradition, and by conservatism, even by reaction.

[To be continued...]

Part 1

Part 3

Dungeons & Dragons & Prog Rock & Disco: On Progress & Tradition (Part 1)

Race is in the air. Or, anti-racism is in the air. Especially in the USA, but even here in Europe, everyone seems, when not preoccupied with the viral unpleasantness, to be talking about race, racism, where we can find it, and what we ought to do about it. Even in places the general public might imagine to be far from questions of race and representation, of privilege and politics, these concerns have become, for many, more than pressing. Places like tabletop roleplaying games, and in particular the granddaddy of them all, Dungeons & Dragons, a hobby dear to my heart—even if one I do not have the time or opportunities to engage as I might like.

Now, for those who have been around D&D as long as I have, the question of race and racism is hardly new to the hobby, although perhaps of slightly newer vintage than the question of sex and sexism. Even so, we can rightly say that whether or not tropes in the game (orcs, drow, and other "evil races") map in any way onto our present political questions and struggles about race and racism has taken center stage. However, rather than talking about these things in general (although perhaps the question of race and monstrous races might be a worthy topic for a later date), I would like to take a look at a recent Twitch video by Matt Colville, "The Future of This Hobby". (Jump to around 18:15 if you want to hear what he has to say.) In this...what shall I call it? Video musing? Proto-essay? Extended thinking aloud while his fan base listens on?...Colville explores a certain tension he has begun to experience between media that he enjoys and has no intention of abandoning (in particular D&D) and what he takes to be the "fundamentally conservative" character of that hobby.

[For those who do not know, Colville is a game designer who has worked for years in both computer games and tabletop roleplaying games and who has amassed quite a following on social media as well as founded a gaming company (MCDM Productions) which, so far as I can tell, has been quite successful. I should also say that I enjoy his YouTube videos very much. He is a thoughtful gamer and has inspired many people to return to or, even more, try for the very first time to play a game he and I both enjoy. We are also basically the same age, although I began playing the game almost a decade before he did. We also both love Rush (the band, not the pundit)! What follows is criticsm in the academic sense, not an ad hominem attack.]

As a framing device, Colville considers music that he very much loves, and in particular progressive rock. While this music bears the identifier progressive, Colville thinks that this music (think Jethro Tull and Genesis) is basically "backward looking", "bucolic" and "pastoral", a "romantic [Romantic?] version" of England's past. It is the world of English folk song and madrigals, "progressive" in its use of decidedly older musical inspiration: whether the techniques of Classical music or those of jazz, but of a jazz already twenty to thirty years prior. Was progressive rock really progressive?, he asks. Or was it the opposite?

On Colville's reading, progressive rock, in its æsthetics and inspiration, is fundamentally conservative. By conservative, Colville means that which is committed to maintaining the status quo, to keeping things the way they are, or even to go back to the way that things were. What is the status quo he has in mind? It seems to be some kind of dominance, or at least centering, of the experience of white men. The æsthetics, and he thinks the appeal, of prog rock was designed for people like him, people like me. The rock out of which it progressed and the punk which rebelled against its (alleged) pretensions to overwrought complexity were likewise, on this view, conservative. Punk, after all, sought to return to how things were before prog rock made it complicated and inaccessible. However, the status quo ante which it sought was still a world of guitar rock and garage bands, i.e. the musical world of white men.

So, if rock & roll and prog rock and punk were conservative, what in the 1970s was progressive? While electronic music sought to be, it never managed to be truly popular. Or rather, it only became popular when it was merged with that dance music we know as disco. That's right, the truly progressive music of the 1970s was disco.

To make sense of this claim, we need to understand what Colville takes progressive to mean. On his view, disco was (and in its progeny is) progressive because it is (using his words): more democratic, more egalitarian, more inclusive. It showed and enacted the idea that there was something for people who felt excluded by (white) rock & roll (and prog, and punk, etc.), people from the city, women, persons of color, people from different (think marginalized) communities and ways of life.

More than that, however, Colville repeats over and over the contrast between backward-looking conservatism and forward-looking progressivism. To be a progressive is not merely to embrace democracy and equality and inclusion. It is to do so precisely because these are the future. The future, in other words, has a direction, and that direction is represented by the politics of progressivism. To be oriented to the past, even æsthetically, is to be at least partly aligned with maintaining the status quo (or even the status quo ante), and thus (although he never states it this baldly) with the politics of exclusion.

At this point (after briefly noting the "incredibly backward-looking" character of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth), Colville begins to pivot towards his main question, namely, whether Dungeons & Dragons is forward-looking and progressive, or fundamentally conservative?

Perhaps unsurprisingly given what he has already said, Colville has to admit that D&D, as we know it, is basically conservative. Its tropes are knights and kings and castles, which are for the most part left unquestioned. That is, D&D places near its center those very people whose existence depended on, indeed was dedicated to, the maintaining of the status quo. While he doesn't mention it in this video "essay", in other videos he likewise notes that the æsthetics of the game presume a (white) Middle Ages, and thus, like the prog rock also dear to him, presume people like him as the audience.

Yet, Colville wonders whether or not D&D might be able to be progressive. Or, in his more provocative exhortations, "Let's be disco!" Might not D&D find a way to engage what is new, be more egalitarian, more democratic, more inclusive? Might it not tell stories which do not center or presume white, male players? Might it not evoke a style of play that seeks to transform the status quo, or even to tear it down? Might it not, that is, be able to be future-oriented?

After all, Colville notes, "Disco won."

[To be continued...]

Part 2

Part 3