Sunshine Recorder

Dawkins, the mechanistic world, and the “war on the beautiful.

Who can look at images from the Hubble telescope and not feel overwhelming awe for our universe? But do we know what we are looking at in these photographs? Much of what impresses us in these photos is the brilliant colors, the varied hues of the cosmos. And yet, according to the official Hubble web site, “Color in Hubble images is used to highlight interesting features of the celestial object being studied. It is added to the separate black-and-white exposures that are combined to make the final image. Creating color images out of the original black-and-white exposures is equal parts art and science.”

Not only are these images part art, they depend upon the history of art for their powerful effect. To a degree, we learned how to recognize the tinted beauties of the Hubble photographs by looking at 19th-century landscape painting like J. M. W. Turner’s study of light “Slave-ship.” The spectral but completely artificial tinting of the photos helps to create a similarly powerful feeling.

This is a dramatic example of science borrowing from art. But some scientists do not limit themselves to borrowing from the paint box; they want to argue that, so far as beauty is concerned, they have entirely displaced the arts.

For example, in his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tells of a talk he once had with Jim Watson, “founding genius of the Human Genome Project.”

In my interview with Watson at [Cambridge], I conscientiously put it to him that, unlike him and [Francis] Crick, some people see no conflict between science and religion, because they claim science is about how things work and religion is about what it is all for. Watson retorted, “Well, I don’t think we are for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.’ But I’m having a good lunch.” We did have a good lunch, too.

My question is, “What’s a good lunch?” and why would a “product” be interested in it? What’s the difference between a good lunch and a bad lunch? Is this something science can tell us about? Is it just a way of talking about competition for scarce food resources (I eat squab, you eat pressed ham)? Or is it the case that in order to know the difference between a good lunch and a bad lunch you have to be something more than a scientist and certainly something more than a product? It would seem so. Don’t you have to know about something called “cuisine”? But what’s cuisine? And in just what way is it outside of science?

Watson and Dawkins are indulging in a familiar sort of self-satisfied gloating over the simpleminded anxieties of the religious. What they don’t seem aware of is the possibility that this moment of gloating and self-satisfaction is also a moment of thoughtlessness. What exactly are they saying? Are they saying, “Seize the good lunch for tomorrow we die our purposeless deaths”? A mid-day carpe diem? Is that the ethical imperative that follows from the theory of evolution and all of science’s “bleak” discoveries about the destiny of the universe?

To a degree, I’m kidding, but Dawkins is guilty of the same sort of thoughtlessness in more serious ways. He writes:

Natural selection … has lifted life from primeval simplicity to the dizzy heights of complexity, beauty and apparent design that dazzle us today.

Ordinarily, we pass over this sort of frothy enthusiasm in science writing, especially when it is looking at the cosmos. But isn’t it a failure of nerve? If science writers were to be consistent, wouldn’t it make more sense for them say something more like, “That? That’s the Eagle Nebula. It’s nothing special. There are billions of nebulae. Some of them make stars, like we need more stars. We can barely see the ones we’ve got. Dazzling? I don’t know what you mean. It’s a nebula.”

Wouldn’t that be more consistent with their assumption that everything is just a product? Even if we were to take Dawkins’s enthusiasm seriously, shouldn’t we at least ask, what do you mean by “lifted”? Is it that you think it’s better to be human than a primordially simple trilobite or dinosaur? Why? Why is “complexity” a good thing? You say, “Evolution is not just true, it’s beautiful,” but what do you mean by “beauty”?

For authors of popular science books, feeling dazzled is a consistent response to the grandeurs of the universe. For example, Stephen Hawking writes at the end of his recent The Grand Design, “… the true miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.” Perhaps he’s using the word “miracle” loosely, but what about “amazement”? What is it to be amazed? What is amazement’s relationship to the M-theory that Hawking claims explains the origin of our universe and many more like it?

None of these terms—dazzle, amazement—has anything to do with the practice of science. There is no sense in which this passage is related to the scientific method. Hawking uses an aesthetic terminology without feeling any need to provide an actual aesthetic. In short, there is an unacknowledged system of extra-scientific value at work that science refuses to take responsibility for, either because it is unaware of the presence of the system or because it doesn’t wish to disturb its own dogmatic slumber.

(Source: new-resistance, via sybaritic-scribblings)

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

Since the September 11 attacks, the government has been engaging in extensive surveillance and data mining. Regarding surveillance, in December 2005, the New York Times revealed that after September 11, the Bush Administration secretly authorized the National Security Administration (NSA) to engage in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens’ telephone calls.1 As for data mining, which involves analyzing personal data for patterns of suspicious behavior, the government has begun numerous programs. In 2002, the media revealed that the Department of Defense was constructing a data mining project, called “Total Information Awareness” (TIA), under the leadership of Admiral John Poindexter.2 The vision for TIA was to gather a variety of information about people, including financial, educational, health, and other data. The information would then be analyzed for suspicious behavior patterns. According to Poindexter: “The only way to detect … terrorists is to look for patterns of activity that are based on observations from past terrorist attacks as well as estimates about how terrorists will adapt to our measures to avoid detection.”3 When the program came to light, a public outcry erupted, and the U.S. Senate subsequently voted to deny the program funding, ultimately leading to its demise.4 Nevertheless, many components of TIA continue on in various government agencies, though in a less systematic and more clandestine fashion.5

 In May 2006, USA Today broke the story that the NSA had obtained customer records from several major phone companies and was analyzing them to identify potential terrorists.6 The telephone call database is reported to be the “largest database ever assembled in the world.”7 In June 2006, the New York Times stated that the U.S. government had been accessing bank records from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT), which handles financial transactions for thousands of banks around the world.8 Many people responded with outrage at these announcements, but many others did not perceive much of a problem. The reason for their lack of concern, they explained, was because: “I’ve got nothing to hide.”9

The argument that no privacy problem exists if a person has nothing to hide is frequently made in connection with many privacy issues. When the government engages in surveillance, many people believe that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. Thus, if an individual engages only in legal activity, she has nothing to worry about. When it comes to the government collecting and analyzing personal information, many people contend that a privacy harm exists only if skeletons in the closet are revealed. For example, suppose the government examines one’s telephone records and finds out that a person made calls to her parents, a friend in Canada, a video store, and a pizza delivery place. “So what?,” that person might say. “I’m not embarrassed or humiliated by this information. If anybody asks me, I’ll gladly tell them where I shop. I have nothing to hide.”

The “nothing to hide” argument and its variants are quite prevalent in popular discourse about privacy. Data security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the “most common retort against privacy advocates.”10 Legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as “all-too-common refrain.”11 The nothing to hide argument is one of the primary arguments made when balancing privacy against security. In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal to trivial, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security. Sometimes the nothing to hide argument is posed as a question: “If you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?” Others ask: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?”

In this essay, I will explore the nothing to hide argument and its variants in more depth. Grappling with the nothing to hide argument is important, because the argument reflects the sentiments of a wide percentage of the population. In popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument’s superficial incantations can readily be refuted. But when the argument is made in its strongest form, it is far more formidable.

In order to respond to the nothing to hide argument, it is imperative that we have a theory about what privacy is and why it is valuable. At its core, the nothing to hide argument emerges from a conception of privacy and its value. What exactly is “privacy”? How valuable is privacy and how do we assess its value? How do we weigh privacy against countervailing values? These questions have long plagued those seeking to develop a theory of privacy and justifications for its legal protection.

This essay begins in Part II by discussing the nothing to hide argument. First, I introduce the argument as it often exists in popular discourse and examine frequent ways of responding to the argument. Second, I present the argument in what I believe to be its strongest form. In Part III, I briefly discuss my work thus far on conceptualizing privacy. I explain why existing theories of privacy have been unsatisfactory, have led to confusion, and have impeded the development of effective legal and policy responses to privacy problems. In Part IV, I argue that the nothing to hide argument— even in its strongest form—stems from certain faulty assumptions about privacy and its value. The problem, in short, is not with finding an answer to the question: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?” The problem is in the very question itself. 

I shall advance the thesis that if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free. By saying that there is this right, I mean that in the absence of certain special conditions which are consistent with the right being an equal right, any adult human being capable of choice (I) has the right to forbearance on the part of all others from the use of coercion or restraint against him save to hinder coercion or restraint and (2) is at liberty to do (i.e., is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons.”

I have two reasons for describing the equal right of all men to be free as a natural right; both of them were always emphasized by the classical theorists of natural rights. (I) This right is one which all men have if they are capable of choice; they have it qua men and not only if they are members of some society or stand in some special relation to each other. (2) This right is not created or conferred by men’s voluntary action; other moral rights are.3 Of course, it is quite obvious that my thesis is not as ambitious as the traditional theories of natural rights; for although on my View all men are equally entitled to be free in the sense explained, no man has an absolute or un conditional right to do or not to do any particular thing or to be treated in any particular way; coercion or restraint of any action may be justified in special conditions consistently with the general principle. So my argument will not show that men have any right (save the equal right of all to be free) which is “absolute,” “indefeasible,” or “imprescriptible.” This may for many reduce the importance of my contention, but I think that the principle that all men have an equal right to be free, meager as it may seem, is probably all that the political philosophers of the liberal tradition need have claimed to support any program of action even if they have claimed more. But my contention that there is this one natural right may appear unsatisfying in another respect; it is only the conditional assertion that if there are any moral rights then there must be this one natural right. Perhaps few would now deny, as some have, that there are moral rights; for the point of that denial was usually to object to some philosophical claim as to the “ontological status” of rights, and this objection is now expressed not as a denial that there are any moral rights but as a denial of some assumed logical similarity between sentences used to assert the existence of rights and other kinds of sentences. But it is still important to remember that there may be codes of conduct quite properly termed moral codes (though we can of course say they are “imperfect”) which do not employ the notion of a right, and there is nothing contradictory or otherwise absurd in a code or morality consisting wholly of prescriptions or in a code which prescribed only what should be done for the realization of happiness or some ideal of personal perfection. Human actions in such systems would be evaluated or criticised as compliances with prescriptions or as good or bad, right or wrong, wise or foolish, fitting or unjitting, but no one in such a system would have, exercise, or claim rights, or violate or infringe them. So those who lived by such systems could not of course be committed to the recognition of the equal right of all to be free; nor, I think (and this is one respect in which the notion of a right differs from other moral notions), could any parallel argument be con structed to show that, from the bare fact that actions were recognized as ones which ought or ought not to be done, as right, wrong, good or bad, it followed that some specific kind of conduct fell under these categories.

Dien Ho asks if you’d be better off undead.

The contemporary zombie narrative follows a fairly predictable path. A zombie-causing agent is released and spreads uncontrollably, causing an outbreak of zombies. The social fabrics that bind civilization and civility unravel. In this post-apocalyptic world, survivors survive by mustering all their resources and energy. and they do so under constant threat from both zombies and other survivors. In light of the harsh and uncertain reality of a survivor’s existence, one might wonder why a survivor doesn’t just give up and become a zombie.

In some respects, the idea that becoming a zombie is a bad thing borders on a platitude. Zombies wander around in constant hunger in a semi-decomposed state. Their actions are guided entirely by impulses. They seem to lack the complex cognition that’s critical for most of the activities we consider worthwhile – social interactions, intellectual pursuits, personal projects, etc. But in other respects, the life of a zombie has characteristics many of us strive mightily to achieve. Their lives are highly centralized and simplified, since their needs and wants often revolve around just a few things, like brains or human flesh. They are largely indifferent to pain and suffering. Short of severe head injuries, zombies enjoy a type of immortality. Zombies do not care about most of the pesky concerns that fill our daily lives: they do not care about the weather, their appearance, their social status, their retirement plan, their morning commute, and petty office politics. They are not concerned about the threat of terrorism, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. And they certainly do not become jealous, depressed, worrisome, or suffer the other anxieties that regularly plague our waking moments. Indeed, if we focus on just these qualities, the life of a zombie resembles the ideal state of a disciplined Zen Buddhist monk who has managed to let go of his earthly concerns.

If we consider these characteristics within the context of a zombie outbreak, becoming a zombie may appear an even more seductive possibility. Hobbes’ classic description of the state of nature is a remarkably accurate depiction of the world to which zombie survivors desperately cling. In a zombie outbreak, survivors

“live without other security than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of [a survivor], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 
(Leviathan, p.100, 1651)

As the daily struggle of a survivor becomes more gruelling, the allure of zombie life increases. Considering how little enjoyment a survivor derives from his state of subsistence and the ever-dimming prospect of a return to normality, one must eventually question the value of their struggle. If one can be better off dead – as many advocates of euthanasia have suggested – surely one can be better off undead? (Whether one can indeed be better off undead seems to depend on the supposition that one survives zombification. This is a significant metaphysical issue concerning personal identity. The answer strikes me as itself dependent on exactly what happens to one’s cognition when one becomes a zombie. To wit, if one believes that one does not survive zombification, then (all else being equal) one should be indifferent towards how one ends one’s life. Yet, many of us would rather kill ourselves via traditional means than be turned into a zombie. Perhaps there is a worry that enough of our former self survives, and we do not wish to see ourselves continue to exist as zombies. I will ignore these hard metaphysical questions and assume that it is sensible to ask whether it is better to be a zombie or a survivor.)

One response to the question of what is so bad about being a zombie is that a zombie’s life appears not to be meaningful. What then makes a life meaningful?

In Good and Evil, A New Direction (1984), the philosopher Richard Taylor offered a remarkably simple method of answering this question: take an intuitively meaningless existence and ask, “What must we add to this life to make it meaningful?”

Taylor chooses the classic tale of Sisyphus as his baseline meaningless existence. As the myth goes, the Greek gods punish crafty King Sisyphus by making him push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as it reaches the top. Sisyphus must then roll the boulder back up, only to have it roll back down,] ad infinitum. According to Taylor, this eternal cycle of objective futility and psychological frustration typifies a meaningless life.

Taylor considers two possible ways for Sisyphus to turn his meaningless existence into a meaningful one. These address the ideas of objective pointlessness and psychological frustration respectively. To counteract objective pointlessness, he imagines that Sisyphus rolls his boulders to the top of the hill in order to create a beautiful and enduring temple. In doing so, Taylor believes that Sisyphus’s labor, however tedious and difficult, would be meaningful, as it amounts to something.

To counteract psychological frustration, suppose that the gods implant in Sisyphus an impulse to roll boulders that also grants him great satisfaction and joy from doing so. Sisyphus’s life, argues Taylor,

“is now filled with mission and meaning, and he seems to himself to have been given an entry to heaven… Exactly the same things happen as before. The only thing that has happened is this: Sisyphus has been reconciled to [his pointless activities], and indeed more, he has learned to embrace it. Not, however, by reason or persuasion, but by nothing more rational than the potency of a new substance in his veins. 
(Good and Evil: A New Direction, pp. 259-260)

By embracing one’s project, however meaningless, it appears one can create meaning. Moreover, Sisyphus did not even have to be aware of, nor adopt authentically, a change in attitude in order to generate meaning in this way. A kind of unreflective enthusiasm (“nothing more rational than the potency of a new substance in his veins”) towards one’s life projects would suffice for a meaningful existence. As we will see, just exactly what constitutes this enthusiasm is a tricky and important matter, and it will require a closer look if we are to have a clear account of meaningfulness.

What of Taylor’s first tack – that of finding meaning by building something enduring? He offers two arguments why this option will not work. His first argument is that no one’s accomplishments can last for eternity. With enough time, the wear and tear of the universe will eventually undo the wondrous work of the most careful creator. Knowing this, we must recognize the ultimate pointlessness of our work. Building a beautiful temple differs only in degree from boulder rolling in the sense that both activities will eventually amount to nothing. It is just a matter of time before both projects result in no achievement. Indeed, when we perceive the vastness of the universe, we often feel a sense of existential dread, stemming partly from the realization of our inability to fight against the laws of thermodynamics. It would be foolhardy, if not contradictory, to attempt to find meaning by creating enduring works while realizing that nothing endures.

In his second argument against the possibility of creating meaning through accomplishments, Taylor asks us to imagine Sisyphus as he places the final stone on his temple. He writes,

“Now what? What picture now presents itself to our minds? It is precisely the picture of infinite boredom! Of Sisyphus doing nothing ever again, but contemplating what he has already wrought and can no longer add anything to, and contemplating it for eternity! Now in this picture we have a meaning for Sisyphus’ existence, a point for his prodigious labour, because we have put it there; yet, at the same time, that which is really worthwhile seems to have slipped away entirely.” (p.265)

The completed temple stands as a monument to Sisyphus’s once great life. It is a trophy, to be sure, but a trophy won at the cost of meaning. Once Sisyphus completes the temple, he has robbed himself of the only activity that granted him meaning.

Both of Taylor’s arguments against achieving a meaningful life by accomplishments are unconvincing. In respond to his worry that no work can last forever, one might point out that abstract ideas, the products of intellectual achievement, are immune to thermodynamic laws. Moreover, although wear and tear will eventually destroy the tangible products of one’s hard work, it cannot undo the fact that one has these accomplishments. Time might destroy Mount Everest, but it cannot destroy the fact that Sir Edmund Hillary climbed to the top of it. With regard to Taylor’s worry that one will confront ‘infinite boredom’ upon the completion of a project, one wonders why the commencement of a new project would not easily solve this problem.

Although both of Taylor’s arguments are at best incomplete, there is something plausible about his denying that one can find meaning solely on the basis of one’s accomplishments. Consider a scenario in which we inject Sisyphus with an impulse to build a temple, but this time around there will not be the accompanying sense of gratification. Our Puppet Sisyphus toils day and night to build the temple, while resenting every moment of his forced labor. Would we say that Sisyphus has lived a meaningful existence as he places the final stone on this glorious temple, and dies? My sense is that we would not. However wondrous a project might be, if the person undertakes it unwillingly and lacks any commitment to it, it seems implausible to say that his existence was meaningful for him. So the pursuit of a great project cannot be a sufficient condition for meaningfulness.

When we condemn the behavior of a politician, celebrity, or friend, we often end up appealing to our moral intuitions. “It just feels wrong!” we say. But where do these intuitive judgments come from? Are they reliable moral guides?

Recently, some unusual research has raised new questions about the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning. Joshua Greene, a philosophy graduate now working in psychology who has recently moved from Princeton University to Harvard, studied how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. In one dilemma, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if the trolley continues on its current track.

The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should divert the trolley onto the side track, thus saving a net four lives.

In another dilemma, the trolley, as before, is about to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the five people in danger, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley.

Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger.

This judgment is not limited to particular cultures. Marc Hauser, at Harvard University, has put similar dilemmas on the web in what he calls a “Moral Sense Test,” available in English, Spanish, and Chinese ( http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu ). After receiving tens of thousands of responses, he finds remarkable consistency despite differences in nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, and sex.

Philosophers have puzzled about how to justify our intuitions in these situations, given that in both cases, the choice seems to be between saving five lives at the cost of taking one life. Greene, however, was more concerned to understand why we have the intuitions, so he used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, to examine what happens in people’s brains when they make these moral judgments.

Greene found that people asked to make a moral judgment about “personal” violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions. This was not the case with people asked to make judgments about relatively “impersonal” violations like throwing a switch. Moreover, the minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge took longer to reach this judgment than those who said that doing so would be wrong.

Why would our judgments, and our emotions, vary in this way? For most of our evolutionary history, human beings – and our primate ancestors – have lived in small groups, in which violence could be inflicted only in an up-close and personal way, by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club.

To deal with such situations, we developed immediate, emotionally based intuitive responses to the infliction of personal violence on others. The thought of pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these responses. On the other hand, it is only in the last couple of centuries – not long enough to have any evolutionary significance – that we have been able to harm anyone by throwing a switch that diverts a train. Hence the thought of doing it does not elicit the same emotional response as pushing someone off a bridge.

Greene’s work helps us understand where our moral intuitions come from. But the fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature does not mean that they are right. On the contrary, these findings should make us more skeptical about relying on our intuitions.

There is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has existed for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new. Blowing up people with bombs is no better than clubbing them to death. And surely the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. So we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions.

For those who grew up with them, those late 1980s/early-1990s golden-age console and PC games can represent a great many things. They can still evoke long-lost affective states, emotive chords that have never been struck by any other medium. I’m an avid reader and a part-time cinephile, but books and movies have never done to me what Castlevania and many of its 8- and 16-bit peers did. There is a special sense of dread and anticipation, a special experience of the sublime, that belongs uniquely to those games, and that will be forever captured in my earliest memories like a solution in a jar, waiting to be occasionally stirred up by a passing remark, a news story, or a train ride.

That sense of dread is unique to those particular video games, that unrepeatable phase of gaming history that lingered for a few years and then vanished into the slipstream of forward progress. Within a decade, that style of gameplay was entirely lost, crowded out by cinematics and back-story and sensationalism. I’m glad I got to live it at that receptive stage of my life, because it’s not coming back.

Castlevania II and the Indifferent Universe

The Castlevania series has always been a showcase of excellent game design, but the most audacious (partly because it was so early and innovative) was Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. In blocky NES-era sprite graphics, the designers at Konami created an ominous world abandoned by God, a Victorian Gothic Romance landscape interspersed with Houses of Usher. This world was not created as a cradle for its characters, but rather, as a slight against them, a meditation on decay and mortality.

Castlevania II’s barrage of Gothic themes was ceaseless and brutal. You could feel the weight of the gray sky during the day, even in the towns, which were mysterious, shuttered suburbs that felt empty and uneasy. Houses were single, empty rooms with an occasional single resident standing alone at the far end. The only place where this felt natural was the church, where you could be healed, if you could make it there. The impulse of the story – loosely explained by the anemic instruction manual – was that you were mortally cursed by Dracula, your old enemy, and in order to shed the curse, you had to collect his body parts from their tombs, reassemble the dark adversary, and destroy him utterly. It seems that even in his dismembered state, Dracula could weave a doomsday spell over you.

As if the barren landscape and vagrant monsters weren’t enough during the day, in Castlevania II, you had to deal with a primitive diurnal cycle. After a few minutes of gameplay, you would suddenly freeze, and out of nowhere an alert would spring like the voice of a cruel deity: WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE.

Suddenly, the monsters would be fast and strong – aggressive, rather than merely troublesome. The townsfolk would disappear, and they would be replaced by the restless dead, casing the locked houses and hunting for bystanders. The church was still a safe place, if you could get there, but it seemed to be less a function of God’s presence, and more the result of an aura that the monsters found distasteful.

Martin Heidegger spoke of something called ‘thrownness’ – that we are born into a universe not of our own choosing, and we have to confront it on its own terms and attempt to carve out a space within it. This is certainly the fate of Simon Belmont. Nobody would choose to be born into this blasted antiquarian Earth, where whips and headstones are your only companions. Every other Non-Player Character (NPC) keeps a low profile and huddles in a row-house, but Simon has to wander out into the wilderness, facing dark nights and itinerant werewolves, and he has to burrow into the depths of stone fortresses to dispel the curse that afflicts him.

Lest you forget, this is the hero of Castlevania! Once, he was a chosen son, saving the world! Now, according to this sparse backstory, he’s paying for it with his own suffering. His reward for his good deed? He now has to reverse it, reassembling his enemy for a retrial and a second punishment. He has not “risen” to this task, nor been appointed patron hero by some protective monarch. There is no ritual of anointing or acceptance (vis à vis Campbell’s monomyth, reproduced in all the Zelda games). Rather, he has been condemned to it – thrown, as it were, into an afflicted life.

…

Prince of Persia and the Cycle of Self-Destruction
Out Of This World, The Digital Sublime, the Leap of Faith
Quest For Glory III and Cosmologies of the Absurd
Doom and the Ghost of the Body
Daggerfall and the Plague of Back-Story

(Source: sunrec)