Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  The English Civil War was a time of terrible slaughter, with brutal clashes like the battles of Edgehill, Naseby, and Preston. Well over one hundred thousand soldiers were killed at a time when the population of Britain was less than six million. That’s like the modern United States fighting a war in which it loses five million soldiers—and that doesn’t even factor in the wounded! The horrors of this war only confirmed for Hobbes what he had already concluded from historical studies: civil war is so awful that it is never worth fighting. Any alternative is better as long as it keeps the peace. Hobbes wrote, “the greatest [harm], that in any form of Government can possibly happen to the people in general, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a Civil War.”9

  Maester Hobbes would urge the people of the Seven Kingdoms to endure the eccentricities of Aerys the Mad (and to stop calling him that); he’d insist that they show some sense of perspective. So a few Starks and other nobles get dispossessed, kidnapped, roasted, strangled, and otherwise treated with a brutality normally reserved for the common people. What is that compared with the suffering in a realm that is at war with itself?

  Robert’s Rebellion

  They had come together at the ford of the Trident while the battle crashed around them, Robert with his warhammer and his great antlered helm, the Targaryen prince armored all in black. On his breastplate was the three-headed dragon of his House, wrought all in rubies that flashed like fire in the sunlight.

  —A Game of Thrones10

  Robert Baratheon, of course, is not the sort of fellow who would be calmed by Maester Hobbes’s appeals to the good of the realm. Hobbes’s worst fears come to pass, and the houses Baratheon, Arryn, and Stark rise up against Aerys Targaryen. Thousands die in bloody clashes like the battles of Summerhall, Ashford, and the Trident, while the great city of Kingsport is sacked by the Lannisters and comes within a hair’s breadth of being burned to the ground.

  After Robert’s final triumph at the Trident in 283, in which he slays Rhaegar in single combat and puts the loyalist army to flight, Maester Hobbes has an important choice to make: he could either flee into exile with the surviving Targaryens, like Ser Jorah Mormont, or remain in King’s Landing to try to persuade the new king to let him keep his old job, like the spider Varys and Grand Maester Pycelle. Pragmatist that he was, Hobbes’s usual response to danger was to flee. When his political writings upset supporters of parliament, he fled to Paris. When his political writings upset other royalists in Paris, he fled back to London again. If there were two things Hobbes was good at, they were annoying people and fleeing. It might be tempting, then, to believe that Hobbes would escape with the last Targaryens into the lands of the Dothraki, there to try to explain social contracts to Khal Drogo. Besides, it seems natural to suppose that if subjects owe their king complete loyalty, they should maintain that loyalty if the king is driven into exile. Indeed, that is exactly what Hobbes did in the case of young Charles Stuart.

  For all that, I believe that Hobbes would remain in Kingsport and transfer his loyalty to Robert. He would do this not because he is a craven or an oathbreaker, but because the same principles that led him to support the Leviathan Aerys so wholeheartedly would lead him to desire a replacement. Remember, the entire point of giving our complete loyalty to an all-powerful dictator is that we are driven to seek safety, and only an all-powerful dictator can offer us the best protection. But a so-called king like the exiled Viserys Targaryen can’t offer anyone any protection. He’s only got one knight, and even he won’t do as he’s told. Hobbes wrote: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long as, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”11 The Targaryens’ power to protect is gone and so is any reason to support them. Hobbes supported young Charles Stuart because the only alternative was to support a republican government. In the person of Robert Baratheon, Hobbes has a perfectly good king to support, and will concentrate on serving his new monarch loyally and tutoring Prince Joffrey to be a great dictator in his own turn.

  In Hobbes’s view, despite the fact that Robert should never have rebelled in the first place, it is now King Robert who must never be rebelled against. It is just as wrong for Queen Cersei to defy the usurper Robert by plotting to place a Lannister on the throne as it would have been if she’d tried that on Aerys, who was heir to a three-hundred-year dynasty. It goes without saying that her murder of the king is even worse! Such an act puts the entire realm in terrible danger. Yet once again, just as in the case of Aerys, once Robert is gone, the important thing is not bringing the perpetrators to justice but making sure that there is someone sitting on the Iron Throne to keep the peace. Hobbes would be as eager to transfer his loyalty from King Robert to King Joffrey as he had been to transfer it from King Aerys to King Robert, even if he knew of Joffrey’s true heritage. Targaryen, Baratheon, Lannister—it really doesn’t matter very much as long as nobody breaks the peace. It isn’t even particularly important that Joffrey is so incompetent a ruler that he thinks disputes over real estate should be settled by combat to the death. The harm the little git can inflict is minimal compared to the carnage of a civil war.

  The eunuch Varys would agree absolutely. He works desperately to keep King Robert alive, but when Eddard threatens the peace of the realm by preparing to reveal that Joffrey is not Robert’s rightful heir, Varys conspires to have him executed. He cannot allow Ned to undermine the power of Joffrey, regardless of his lineage, because to do so would plunge the Seven Kingdoms once more into civil war. When Ned asks Varys to at least smuggle a message to his family, Varys replies that he will read the message and deliver it if it serves his own ends to do so. Ned asks, “What ends are those, Lord Varys?” and without hesitation, Varys answers, “peace.” Like a true Hobbesian, he explains, “I serve the realm, and the realm needs peace.”12

  Lion and Direwolf, Dragon and Leviathan

  “The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer. If that’s true, Lord Eddard, tell me . . . why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”

  —Varys13

  Hobbes’s way of thinking about politics differs greatly from that of most of the nobility of Westeros. Who is right—Hobbes, or the great houses, or neither? Hobbes would view himself as a realist who is willing to face some hard truths—truths that are dangerous to ignore. To his mind, ambitious nobles like Tywin Lannister endanger the realm by defying the will of the king. It may seem that such nobles are simply being selfish, as Hobbes recommends, but a sensible selfish person would realize that they put their own safety in great danger by playing the game of thrones, and would opt for obedience to the Leviathan instead. Honorable nobles like Eddard Stark endanger the realm no less than plotters like Tywin. Their obsessive concern with the rules of honor leads to the War of the Five Kings just as surely as Lannister greed.

  Hobbes was right to recognize that political theory must take into account the degree to which people are motivated by self-interest rather than duty. The Starks in particular could have used some instruction from Maester Hobbes on this point. When Ned comes to King’s Landing, he tragically puts his trust in Littlefinger to do the right thing, when it should have been obvious that Littlefinger’s interests would be served by betraying Ned to Queen Cersei. When Robb first marches against the Lannisters, he expects his bannerman Lord Frey to answer his call to arms because that is Frey’s sworn duty, while Catelyn understands that Frey will be moved only by his self-interest, including an advantageous marriage for his daughter.

  On the other hand, Hobbes was surely mistaken that people are only motivated by self-interest. Like Eddard, whose attachment to honor is so great that he dies rather than serve an illegitimate king, people in real life sometimes die for what they believe in. Similarly, like Jon Snow, who gives up home, safety, and luxury for a life of hard service on the Wall, people sometimes make extraordinary sacrifices for the ben
efit of others. Tales of courage, honor, and self-sacrifice in fiction ring true for us when they capture something of the best in real humanity. If we were all motivated by self-interest alone, stories about people like Ned and Jon would be absurd, even incoherent. We understand the motivations of characters like these precisely because we understand that a human being can be motivated by higher concerns.

  Perhaps it is his oversimplification of human psychology that leads Hobbes to miss the way that overcentralization of power can weaken, rather than stabilize, a state. When Aerys went insane, it was the very fact that he held the reins of power so tightly that left civil war as the only alternative to enduring his abuses. After all, he could not be voted out, forced to abdicate, or restrained by law in any way. Perhaps Robert’s rebellion could have been avoided if only the Targaryen Leviathan had not been so powerful! The same problem arises under the reign of Joffrey. The War of the Five Kings erupted because the only way to replace Joffrey was to rebel. Hobbes really ought to have learned from events in Britain that flexibility in a ruler can be more important than the will to dominate. Few supporters of the English parliament even wanted to get rid of the monarchy, until Charles I made it so clear that he would never share power that the parliamentarians were left with a choice between servility and civil war.

  For all his failings, Hobbes understood the horrors of war a little more clearly than the scheming nobility of Westeros. The War of the Five Kings was every bit as terrible as Maester Hobbes feared it would be. Tully forces are slaughtered at Riverrun and Mummer’s Ford, Lannister forces at Whispering Wood and the Battle of the Fords, and Stark forces at the Green Fork and at the Red Wedding. From Stannis Baratheon’s terrible defeat against the Lannisters at King’s Landing to Loras Tyrell’s Pyrrhic victory against Baratheon defenders at Dragonstone, from Ramsay Bolton’s murderous sacking of Winterfell to the terrible carnage inflicted by Greyjoy Ironmen invading across the north and west of Westeros, the history of the war is a tale of shocking loss and human suffering. Worse yet, all of this happens when the realm is most in need of a unified response to external threat. Winter is coming and the Others are returning to reclaim their old stalking grounds, while in the east, a Targaryen khaleesi with a sideline in hatching dragons prepares to reclaim the Iron Throne. Wherever we situate the point at which a people simply must rise in rebellion against dishonest, vicious, or incompetent rulers, surely the cost of the War of the Five Kings is so great that the decision to go to war should have depended on more than a matter of principle regarding legitimate succession.

  The lesson that the nobles of Westeros should have learned from Maester Hobbes is not that they should never rebel, but that civil war is so horrific that it must be avoided at almost any cost. Appeals to lofty principles of justice and honor that are never to be violated are all very well, but these principles must always be weighed against the consequences our actions will have for human lives. Our most fundamental need as humans is not justice; our most fundamental need as humans is avoiding having a greatsword inserted up our nose. As citizens of Western democracies with the duty to vote for our leaders, we are all, in a way, required to play the game of thrones, in our own nation and across the world. When we forget the cost of our principles in terms of human suffering, to ourselves, or to those who fight for us, or even to those we fight for and those we fight against, then we are in danger of doing more harm with our good intentions than any Targaryen tyrant ever inflicted with his greed for power.

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 253.

  2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), p. 100.

  3. Ibid., p. 85.

  4. Ibid., p. 84.

  5. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 620.

  6. Ibid., p. 796.

  7. George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 796.

  8. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 687.

  9. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 122.

  10. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 44.

  11. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 147.

  12. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 636.

  13. Ibid.

  Chapter 2

  IT IS A GREAT CRIME TO LIE TO A KING

  Don Fallis

  “It is one thing to deceive a king, and quite another to hide from the cricket in the rushes and the little bird in the chimney.”

  —Lord Varys1

  Despite King Robert Baratheon’s warning that “it is a great crime to lie to a king,” Prince Joffrey lies to him.2 He claims that Arya Stark and the butcher boy, Mycah, attacked him and “beat him with clubs,” when, in fact, Joffrey was the instigator of the conflict. His lie costs the innocent lives of the butcher boy and Sansa’s direwolf, Lady. Although Joffrey is never punished for it, the vast majority of moral philosophers would agree that he has committed a serious crime here. But is Joffrey’s crime morally worse because his lie is addressed to the king rather than to someone else? And is it morally worse because he explicitly lies instead of merely trying to deceive the king in some other way?

  Lying and Deceiving in Westeros

  While deception is the order of the day in Game of Thrones, the citizens of Westeros usually try to adopt more subtle means of deceit than simply lying like Joffrey does. For instance, Robb Stark fools the Lannisters by sneakily splitting the forces of the North, and as a result, he is able to capture the Kingslayer and break the siege on Riverrun. Mirri Maz Duur leads Daenerys Targaryen to believe that her bloodmagic will return Khal Drogo to health, but all that she explicitly claims is that she can keep him alive.3 Lord Varys, the master of whisperers, often moves about the Red Keep in disguise. And most notably, Queen Cersei tricks almost everyone, including the king, into believing that Prince Joffrey is the true heir to the Iron Throne, without having to actually say so. Are such deceivers morally better off for having avoided outright lies?

  First of all, though, what is the difference between lying and deceiving in general? Almost all philosophers (from Saint Augustine [354–430] in his De Mendacio to Bernard Williams [1929–2003] in his book Truth and Truthfulness) think that you lie if you intend to deceive someone into believing what you say.4

  Lying is not just saying something false. For instance, even though Tyrion Lannister, the Imp, is innocent, Catelyn Stark is not lying when she claims that he “conspired to murder my son.”5 She actually believes that Tyrion is guilty. (She has been told that Tyrion won the knife used by the assassin in a bet with Littlefinger at “the tourney on Prince Joffrey’s name day.”6) Thus, when Catelyn accuses Tyrion, she is not trying to deceive anyone at the inn by the crossroads. If they were to find out that Tyrion was innocent, Ser Willis Wode, Marillion the singer, and the others who were present that night might say that there is a sense in which she “lied” to them. But accusing someone of “lying” when she just inadvertently says something false is a loose way of speaking.

  Of course, Prince Joffrey is not the only liar in the Seven Kingdoms. There is actually quite a bit of lying in Westeros. According to Lady Lysa Arryn, at least, “The Lannisters are all liars.”7 In addition, Tyrion seems to be correct when he claims that “lying comes as easily as breathing to a man like Littlefinger.”8 Lord Petyr Baelish, master of coin, certainly lies to Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Hand of the King, when he says, “I will go to Janos Slynt this very hour and make certain that the City Watch is yours.”9 (When the gold cloaks turn against Eddard at the crucial moment, Littlefinger says to him, “I did warn you not to trust me, you know.”10) In fact, after she takes Tyrion hostage, Catelyn herself is lying when she tells everyone “often and loudly” that she is taking him to Winterfell.11 She knows that they will be heading for the Eyrie instead. But she wants everyone to believe otherwise so that the Lannisters will go the wrong way if and when they try to follow.

  Lord Stark’s Lies

  Even Eddard Stark, who is renowned for his honesty, lies.
King Robert tells him, “You never could lie for love nor honor, Ned Stark,”12 but Eddard actually lies on several occasions. For instance, he tells Ser Jaime Lannister that “your brother has been taken at my command, to answer for his crimes.”13 Of course, his wife was acting on her own initiative and took advantage of the opportunity to capture Tyrion at the inn. In fact, in an attempt to protect his wife, Eddard even lies directly to the king about this when he says, “My lady wife is blameless, Your Grace. All she did she did at my command.”14 But most notably, at the Great Sept of Baelor the Beloved, Eddard proclaims falsely to the people of King’s Landing that “I plotted to depose and murder Robert’s son and seize the throne for myself.”15

  Some philosophers might claim, though, that Eddard’s false confession is not really a lie. As Paul Grice (1913–1988) pointed out in his Studies in the Way of Words, saying something—at least in the sense required for lying—demands more than simply uttering some words. In particular, the speaker has to make a certain sort of “commitment” to those words. For instance, when Catelyn finally gets Tyrion to the Eyrie, Lady Lysa accuses him of murdering her husband, Jon Arryn, the previous Hand of the King, in addition to attempting to murder Catelyn’s son, Bran. In response to this second false accusation, Tyrion sarcastically utters the words, “I wonder when I found the time to do all this slaying and murdering.”16 Even though he is not really wondering about this, he is not lying because (given the sarcasm) he has not committed himself to the literal meaning of his words.