Fairies and Wolfe

David Stockhoff · 29 Mar 2012, 12:11 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:11:01 -0400
Subject: (urth) Fairies and Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W20886ECA8EAD437D78DFF0CF480 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W20886ECA8EAD437D78DFF0CF480 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4F745155.5080003 at verizon.net>

On 3/29/2012 2:19 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
> In consideration of Jeff's comment, I am thinking David's remark that robots and fairies
>
> are more alike than humans is because both are solely rule governed. Jeff's examples
>
> illustrate that only humans have the freedom to break our rules and thus only humans can
>
> be said to be guided by a moral compass rather than programming or laws of the super-
>
> natural.
>
>
>
> Anyway, I still get a sense that humans occupy one sort of middle ground. A robot or
>
> computer's every action is guided by written rules (superego?). A fairy does whatever
>
> it wants, its actions merely constrained or circumscribed by a few rules (id?). Humans
>
> (ego?) seem to be a balance and/or compromise between the two.

This makes sense, since humans pretty much occupy the middle of any 
conceivable ground. We are not wholly rational, but we imagine ourselves 
to be; we are not immortal, but we sometimes forget we are mortal; we 
are seldom honorable, but we strive to be, and then some little pixie or 
hobbit or robot slave shows us up.

I might note that demons are rule-constrained too, in the way genies 
are: they are "programmed" to follow the letter, but never the spirit, 
of any agreement. Malevolent fairies are not much different. One could 
lump them all together and generalize that all beings from gods to imps 
represent/are projections upon a world we know operates systematically 
but in a complex way we don't understand that often produces unexpected 
results. Or, we could take a cue from evolutionary biology and say that 
they were imagined (i.e., created) to reinforce social conventions, and 
this is why their capricious-but-rigorous behavior always seems to point 
up some human failing. Modern literature thus finds them useful in much 
the same ways its earlier forms did.

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