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...]
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