I accidentally deleted this post. I found the editor version and it is republished below. But the url of the post is different now. Sorry about that.
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Fiction, whether a short story or a novel, a movie and a TV show as well, offers entertainment, certainly, but also gives the author's point of view, sometimes on issues where the characters must make ethical choices. This author point of view stands in contrast to the point of view of the reader, who may not have thought about the underlying issues at all, or considered them only from a substantially different perspective. We readers thus get a bonus from having a go at a work of fiction. We get pleasure from the story, but we also get moral instruction of a kind that might actually reach us, as long as we embrace the story and consider it in reflection as well as reading it the first time through.
As I've been a John le Carré fan for quite some time, typically reading one of his novels during the winter holidays, I can report that I was first drawn to them purely for the entertainment, but in the more recent ones I've read the ethical components were more evident to me. Perhaps I've reached the age where I'm ready for these ethical lessons, or especially want something of this sort as a contrast to the tenor of our time, a way to keep a bit of idealism alive inside me when it is so easy to become completely jaded. Given le Carré's recent passing, in the next day or two I do plan to read one of his older books for a second time, one that has gathered dust on my bookshelf. And I do want to note that the ethical education in the stories is not about purity in behavior, but rather a way to navigate turbulence of actual life.
“Thematically, le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”
However, rather than use le Carré as my focus for discussing the question in the title of this post, I'm going to rely instead on Game of Thrones, which I've been watching recently as I do the treadmill in our basement. Indeed, I've learned to turn on captions while doing this so the noise of the treadmill doesn't block the message that I should be hearing. I recently finished going through all 8 seasons and am now going through the episodes again, to make further identification with the characters and the story line. I actually want to focus only on one little bit of the plot. Jon Snow's true identity is revealed near the end of season 7. When Jon learns this he feels obligated to tell others, first Daenerys, then his "sisters," Sansa and Arya. Daenerys pleads with Jon not to tell them, but he does what he feels he must. He swears them to secrecy. Yet Sansa doesn't keep the secret and that leads to many adverse consequences. This makes much of season 8 a tragedy. So, one wonders, could the tragedy have been avoided if Jon exercised discretion rather feeling bound by some code?
Before trying to answer this question, I'd like to make several asides. First, I've been noodling on this post for several weeks, but not fully satisfied with what I had come up with. I did come to an overall conclusion, which was based in part by my son Nathan, who had read all the books by George R.R. Martin, telling me that seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones went beyond the books. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who wrote the screenplays for TV series based on the books in the first six seasons, were the authors of that part of the story. The conclusion is that they should be encouraged to write a few different versions of the end of season 7 and season 8, keeping the war with Ice King intact, but varying the story by whether Jon Snow ever learns his true identity or, if he does, whether he keeps it secret. I'm guessing there would be quite an audience for these alternative endings, even if they never were made into a TV show.
Second, in the middle of the noodling it occurred to me that some of my old economics research is actually somewhat relevant to the question in the title. Thirty years ago I wrote a paper called Flexibility Versus Commitment in Strategic Trade Policy Under Uncertainty: A Model of Endogenous Policy Leadership. (The Working Paper is dated April 1990 while the published version appeared in the Journal of International Economics the following year.) Indeed, in the second quarter of my first year of graduate school, we learned about the debate in macroeconomics between those who favored rules for fiscal and monetary policy (Monetarists) and those who favored discretion (Keynesians). So in other contexts, where the concern is not fundamentally ethical, though you could take economic performance as a kind of ethical imperative, I've been exposed to this type of question for quite a long time and find myself engaged with it. I'm not sure whether others who watched Game of Thrones would be likewise engaged, but perhaps they would.
Third, this bit about Jon Snow's true identity exposes a variety of potential inconsistencies in the story. I'll mention only a couple here. There may be others. Daenerys views Jon Snow's true identity as giving him more of a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne than she has, because he is a male heir in the Targaryen bloodline and the society is quite sexist that way. Yet Ned Stark doesn't consider Jon Snow as a possible successor to Robert Baratheon at all. Indeed, in retrospect it seems Jon was sent to join the Night's Watch so the question would never come up. But shouldn't Ned Stark have seen Jon as the rightful successor rather than Stannis Baratheon? The other inconsistency is that Catelyn Stark never questioned the story that Jon Snow was Ned's bastard son. But Ned was otherwise such a good and upstanding person. Did he whore around nonetheless? And Ned's sister is Jon's true mother. Catelyn must have known approximately when she died, though she wouldn't have known that she died from complications in childbirth. But might Catelyn have put two and two together, given what she did know? For the story to work as it was told, it required that Catelyn, for whatever reason, didn't do this.
The last aside comes from a lesson I learned the last time I taught a class for the Campus Honors Program, back in fall 2009. The CHP students are among the best we have on campus. Yet they asked me pointedly, more than once, to be very direct with my instructions and to avoid subtlety. I gathered from this experience that they felt they weren't very good at reading between the lines and/or they had been badly burned from having made what they considered a minor mistake of this sort. This point actually manifests in Game of Thrones repeatedly. Once he became the King's Hand, Ned Stark is terrible at playing the game of palace intrigue. He doesn't understand fully what is going on and he doesn't seem to care to devote his attention and energy to figuring this out. The characters who are good at this game in the first season - Cersei, Lord Varys, Littlefinger, and Tyrion, are each ethically challenged, though some more than others. The story makes it seem that one truly understands what's going on only if one wants to practice deception. I don't think that is true, but in the world created in Game of Thrones, the ones who practice deception surely need to have a good understanding of what's actually happening.
Now I want to briefly sketch how a "what if analysis" might be done by the character of Jon Snow on whether to tell others about his true identity. First, one might imagine playing out the story as if Bran never learned about Jon's identity nor conferred with Samwell that it was a birth done in wedlock, so Jon wasn't a bastard. Without this as part of the plot line, the story still holds interest because of the evident rivalry between Sansa and Daenerys. Would Jon have been able to resolve this in a way that was tolerable, if not amicable?
Here is an interesting wrinkle that some viewers might have liked to see. Sansa became good at the palace intrigue game by carefully observing others who were good at the game and, of course, by being the victim of many of those decisions without having the power to undo them herself. This provided the strong motivation for her learning. Jon recognized this in Sansa early on after his return to Winterfell. Could he have Sansa design an arrangement that Dany would accept which would also work for her. In this arrangement Jon would somehow be released from his being King of the North or be allowed to hold that title in absentia, while Jon would be living with Dany in King's Landing. Sansa would be the Lady of Winterfell and the surrogate King of the North (or some other title to that effect). The bending of the knew part might be moot because of the great distance between Winterfell and King's Landing. One would think a peace along these lines would be possible.
There is a different issue in this scenario that would have to be confronted. Daenerys' downfall was an example of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. In this case, substitute feeling betrayed for corrupting. Of course, everyone was betrayed by Cersei, who didn't send her troops to fight the Ice King. That sense of betrayal was still there. But Daenerys' sense of betrayal was so much stronger in the version that aired, because after Jon Snow's secret was made known to certain characters, they betrayed Daenerys, Lord Varys, certainly, Tyrion for telling Lord Varys, and Jon Snow too, both for telling Sansa though Dany had requested not too, and for no longer loving her physically, as it became apparent that Dany was Jon's aunt and intimate relations between close relatives was unseemly. With all this betrayal, Daenerys felt a rage that couldn't be contained and blocked her good judgement. It made her a fierce opponent in fighting the war against Cersei's forces, but it made her unsuitable to rule. If, instead, none of the other betrayals had occurred, would Daenerys then have been able to thread the needle, having enough rage to still win the war but then, with that accomplished, being able to pull back and show compassion for the vanquished as long as they would lay down their swords. Two possible story lines emerge depending on whether the needle gets threaded or not.
In the next scenario, Jon does learn about his identity, but he decides to sit on this information rather than tell those people he felt obligated to tell in the show as it aired. This would keep the secret, as Bran and Samwell wouldn't tell anyone else. In some ways, it would play out the same as in the case where there was no secret to reveal. The big issue in this case is Dany being Jon's aunt, and how he would deal with that fact. Two alternatives are first, that once Jon verified Dany couldn't bear children, her being his aunt pretty much becomes immaterial, as inbreeding wouldn't happen. The other is that the possibility of a child can't be ruled out, so Jon figures out a way where he wouldn't sleep with Dany thereafter. As King in the North, he would return to Winterfell after the war while Dany would stay at King's Landing. Could this be pulled off so that he avoided situations to sleep with Dany both before before the big battle and after? Again there are two possible story lines. In the one where it doesn't work out well, Dany starts to question whether Jon loves her, but she won't have a good reason for why he doesn't. This could lead to a personal tragedy for them, without it leading to the large tragedy for all the resident of King's Landing.
That last scenario I'll consider here is where Jon obeys Dany's wish and tells nobody else but her. They then would have it out about the aunt thing. (It is odd to me that it was never discussed between them and it didn't seem to bother Dany at all.) Somehow they work through a mutual understanding, even if that is laden with tears and emotional pain.
I do have this
feeling that the bending of the knee, as a symbol, could be modified if
Jon was at Dany's side. She could be more generous then and treat those
in leadership of the other kingdoms as partners rather than as
subordinates. The show was long on tragic outcomes, which for pure
entertainment might be right. But as an approach to good management,
the purely traditional approach was lacking. Further, the external
threats to the seven kingdoms seemed to have been eradicated, at least
for the time being. Once the war with Cersei was won, this appeared to
be a time where all should get along. If that was obvious to the
viewers, why wasn't it obvious to the characters in the show.
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