The Air Nomads and Religious Vegetarianism

In the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the quasi-extinct culture of the Air Nomads are portrayed as a society of peaceful, fun-loving monks. They are known to travel extensively, are the only one of the Four Nations to be composed entirely of benders of their respective element, and have a penchant for fruit pies. But one other trait distinguishes them from all the others: They are all vegans. Or vegetarians, or what-have-you.

It's no secret that the world of Airbender (created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko) draws heavily from medieval East Asian culture. Indeed, this unique choice of source material is one of the cornerstones of the success of the series. The mythologies and histories of Japan, China, India, and other East Asian cultures are ripe with storytelling possibilities to draw from. The fact that DiMartino and Konietzko (the latter of whom is a vegan) are the most visible Western creators to do so is a credit to their ingenuity and talent.

However, looking back on the series, particularly the Air Nomads, I began to wonder just how true to their inspirations some aspects of this incredible fictional world were. Maybe it was something I read about vegetarianism in my college Nutrition class, but my curiosity was piqued. So I did a little investigating, and found some things that surprised me, if only just a little.

The Air Nomads, a monastic society, are obviously based off of Tibetan Buddhist monks, right down to their clothing and architecture. On the face of it, Buddhist monks are known to adhere to a code which prohibits the killing of either man or animal. However, as usual, the devil is in the details. Within Buddhism, there are multiple schools of thought regarding exactly how far this code applies. Insofar as I can understand, most divergences in this area of Buddhist doctrine stem from a disagreement over whether the no-kill rule logically extends to not eating meat. Put simply, one school of thought believes that the eating of certain meats (such as pork, chicken, or fish) is okay as long as the Buddhist eating it didn't know it was killed on their behalf, while another believes that a moratorium on the consumption of all meat is implicit in the reading of their sacred texts. And that's all without getting to the Tibetan school of thought which allows for the consumption of both meat and alcohol, a big deviation from these other two which I have been able to identify.

It's a bit complicated, involving a depth of understanding about Buddhist theology and doctrine that I won't even pretend to have. As it applies to the Air Nomads, who are obviously heavily inspired by Tibetan society, I can make a slightly swifter judgment. If the Air Nomads were based primarily on Tibetan Buddhist monks, then their sacraments endorsing vegetarianism, let alone veganism, make little sense. Tibetan Buddhism, as stated, allows for the consumption of meat. The 14th Dalai Lama has encouraged vegetarianism, while still acknowledging it as optional, to the point of regularly eating meat himself. The reasons that vegetarianism is optional in Tibet is for reasons both religious and practical. Tibetan Buddhism follows a school of thought originating from Northern India called Vajrayana which makes vegetarianism unnecessary. More pressingly, vegetables are scarce in mountainous regions such as Tibet, thus requiring less stringent traditions.

So, assuming DiMartino and Konietzko did their research, their incorporation of veganism into the fictional society of the Air Nomads may instead come from the culture of Hindu priests. I talked with an acquaintance who formerly resided in India, and she informed me that when it comes to adherence to the dietary laws of Hinduism, the different castes of Hinduism vary greatly. The priest caste ardently practices vegetarianism, no doubt because they can afford to do so, but not uniformly. Lower castes, however, are allowed to eat meat and dairy. Even these general rules of thumb differ heavily region-to-region.

My acquaintance's son resided in a region near the Ganges River, one of the most polluted rivers in the world by his account, which kept the consumption of fish down. Meanwhile, this 2006 survey tells us that only about 31 percent of Indians are vegetarians. That's all without accounting for Jainism, whose most devout adherents pursue the goal of non-violence to the point of using feathers to sweep insects out of their way wherever they go and wearing head coverings to avoid inhaling small insects. They're all either vegans or lacto-vegetarians, going even beyond that by not eating garlic or other root vegetables so as to not do harm to plants!

Tibetan Monks

In view of all this, the Air Nomads, like most of the other cultures depicted in Avatar: The Last Airbender, are a composite culture which contain elements from Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. This fictional society does not conform to any one specific religion, but is syncretic. This explains why the Air Nomads place great value in meditation and piety, abide by strict dietary regulations, and yet are able to kick serious tuckus through the use of magic kung fu.

A discussion on this blog about religion and fictional monastic orders wouldn't be complete without a Christian view on the subject of religious vegetarianism. While several Christian sects, ranging from Benedictine monks to Seventh Day Adventists, encourage or even mandate vegetarianism, the Bible's teaching on it are clear enough. God gave humanity permission to eat meat after Noah's flood (Genesis 9:3), and although He prohibited the Jews from eating certain animals, He never prohibited the consumption of all meat. Jesus later declared all foods clean in a vision given to the Apostle Peter (Acts 10:10-15), and is recorded in the Gospels as eating fish (Luke 24:42-43) and lamb (Luke 22:8-15). He also served bread and fish during the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:17-21).

In one particularly notable passage, found in Mark 7, Jesus made the larger point that it isn't what a person eats that makes him "unclean," but what comes out of the person from within. As it reads there:

And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride,foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

Image 1 courtesy of avatar.wikia.com. Image 2 courtesy of tibettravel.org.

The Metal Clan and Utopianism

A couple weeks back, I ended my post on Zaheer and Zen Anarchism (that sounds so fun to write) with a promise that the next time I wrote about The Legend of Korra, I'd talk about the Metal Clan. That day has come, and I now plan onc talking about how the Metal Clan relates to the philosophy of Utopianism.

Utopiansim refers to the belief or philosophy surrounding the concept of utopia. Utopia itself is defined by merriam-webster.com as "an imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect." Christian philosopher and apologist Dr. William Lane Craig defines Utopiansim as "arrival at... a kind of perfect world, a paradise on earth, as it were—the perfect society." Although this precise term wasn't coined until English philosopher Thomas More wrote the book Utopia in 1516, the idea of utopia has been around since Plato's Republic at least, which dates back to around 380 B.C. Utopia has been discussed in various other literature and other media across the centuries, and in the modern era has led to the development of the respected but relatively new genre of dystopia. The Legend of Korra provides in Book 3: Change an example of what is for all practical purposes a utopian society: Zaofu, home of the Metal Clan.

Zaofu is a community made up largely of metal and earth-benders, founded and led by some of the descendants of Toph. According to its leader, Suyin Beifong, it is a place where everyone is encouraged to strive for their maximum potential. She also states that it is "the safest city in the world." Indeed it is, as it contains elaborate security measures, such as retractable metal roofs over the city, metal-bending powered gondolas for entry, and a crack squad of metal-bending police, though Lin Beifong doesn't think much of all this. What's more, it's implied that all or many of the city's earth-bending inhabitants have learned Toph's ability to detect lies in other people through earth-bending, providing a neat incentive for the residents of Zaofu to never fib. Zaofu is evidently a meritocracy, housing some of the world's finest scientific minds, including a certain Howard Hughes-esque businessman who we haven't seen since the Book 2 finale. Thus, for all intents and purposes, Zaofu is a utopia, most likely following the philosophy of classical liberalism (not to be confused with liberal progressivism), perhaps not intentionally established, and not stated outright by the characters, but definitely meeting much of the criteria.

But here's the catch: Utopia, by its very definition, is imaginary, just like Zaofu is imaginary. But unlike many imagined utopias, Zaofu's status as an ideal society is subtly deconstructed by pointing out one of the principle holes in the proposal of utopia: Who's going to make it all happen?

Many utopias, especially those based on the principles of socialism, profess that given the proper conditions, a classless, stateless society will emerge in which everyone works for the common good. Of course, this has never happened in reality, with attempted experiments with such models resulting in oppressive dictatorships such as Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Revolutionary France, and countless other nasty historical episodes. The main problem with this idea is that human nature is, by default, self-serving and uncharitable. The only way to organize a group of such creatures to work for the common good is through coercion, such as in a dictatorship or an oligarchy. But if that happens, then the ideal of a classless, stateless society is lost, and the whole experiment is for nothing. Due to their inherently faulty natures, the economies produced by socialism and its ilk generally descend into kleptocracy, or in a few extreme cases, anarchy. In many cases across the modern developing world, multiple dictatorships have risen and fallen in succession, calling to mind the French proverb, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." As Lois H. Sargent wrote in her essay "Anyone for Utopia?" in 1977, "Utopians seem never to give thought to the mechanics of management and operation of their imagined systems."

Cincinnatus (519-430 B.C.)

Part of the reason societies like the Soviet Union developed into dictatorships was because the dictators in question typically don't want to relinquish their power. (The rest of the reason for these particular events have to do with a discussion of Communism, which is beyond the scope of this post.) Rare in history is the benign ruler who, when given absolute power in a time of crisis, resists the temptation to take hold of it until someone else can take it back by force. The Roman statesman Cincinnatus (519-430 B.C.) comes to mind, as does George Washington, who refused the opportunity to become King George I of America after the American War of Independence. In the Soviet Union, people like Lenin and Stalin, despite their ostensibly sincere belief in the Communist Utopia, were evil tyrants who used their power to bring about many deaths, if for Lenin it was thousands and Stalin millions. Later Soviet dictators weren't much better, using their power to line the pockets of they and their friends while the people lived in squalor. 

It is this element of corruption which all dictatorships and oligarchs have in common that exposes a chief vulnerability of any kind of utopia. In The Legend of Korra, a principle leader of Zaofu is revealed to have been in league with the villains. The reason this is significant is because it shows that Utopia can't be accomplished as long as there are imperfect humans trying to make things perfect. All civilizations have rulers, and if a ruler is corrupt, the whole civilization will be corrupt along with him. As we have seen, corruption is often the case in dictatorships. Imagine if the aforementioned Zaofu leader had used his position to accumulate illicit wealth, curry favors, accept bribes, or pervert justice for his own ends, which nearly does happen? What would we make of this Utopian community then?

The other big problem with Utopianism, an extension of the problem outlined above, has to do with the nature of government. Government is designed to restrain the corrupted nature of man, as the founders of the United States set out to do, with successful results. The American experiment is unique in that it went about this task by restraining the government; that is, by setting in place certain safeguards, such as separation of powers and elected representatives, so that the government would not grow too big or oppressive. The founders had no illusions, however, that they could produce a perfect society. James Madison, widely known as "the Father of the Constitution," wrote in The Federalist #51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." The long and short of it is that there will always be iniquities in any society made up of imperfect men. Even the nation of Israel, whose law codes (forming the first five books of the Bible) were provided by God Himself, and was supposed to be a model for the rest of the world, was a less than perfect society, frequently veering into apostasy, war, civil unrest, and other blights, to the point of being split into two separate kingdoms after the death of Solomon. (See 1 Kings 12)

Oddly enough, Israel in the days of the judges was little more than a loosely federated coalition of tribes led by a council of elders, and yet things were usually just as chaotic then as they were during the period of the kings, if not more so. (See Judges.) Thus, not even a semi-democratic theocracy such at this could bring about Utopia, not by a long shot! If all of this tells us anything, it's that there is no hope of a truly perfect society, not one made by human hands, until the coming of the Lord in His power, when there will be a new Heaven and a new Earth. Imperfect man can never make anything truly perfect, permanent, or stable. This world is, after all, transient and temporary.

In sum, we see from The Legend of Korra than even a society as wonderful and idyllic as that of the Metal Clan is not invulnerable to fault. For all its veneer of Utopia, it is still shown to be fallible in some key respects. It brings to mind another location from Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra's predecessor. This location, the city of Ba Sing Se, is a dystopia controlled by the villainous Grand Secretariat Long Feng, who through the use of the Dai Li, the sinister secret police, claims to be maintaining "an orderly utopia. The last one on Earth." Unfortunately, poor Long Feng is just as deluded as Marx, Wells, and Lenin. The only Utopia to ever exist will come at a time when all of them have faded away, and this one will never fade away: The kingdom of Christ, the Son of the Living God. And unlike any human made utopia, its coming is inevitable and everlasting.

Follow Levi on Twitter at @levi_sweeney, and submit questions and post ideas with the hashtag #QLevi

Image 1 courtesy tv.com. Image 2 courtesy kids.britannica.com.

The Legend of Korra - Book 3: Change: Zaheer and Moral Syncretism

I'm not gonna lie, Book 3 of The Legend of Korra is easily the best season of the show that I've seen yet. I haven't seen Book 4, however, so I'll have to wait until then to judge whether or not this is in fact the best season yet. A word of warning though: Due to the nature of the post's content, some substantial spoilers regarding Zaheer's motivations will be mentioned.

The Legend of Korra - Book 3: Change is everything that this sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender was hyped to be from the start: bigger, better, and more beautiful than we've seen yet. Taking place a couple weeks after the events of the sadly mediocre Book 2: Spirits, we see that Harmonic Convergence (long story) left dozens of random non-benders across the world -including Tenzin's brother Bumi- with the ability to airbend. This prompts Korra, Mako, Bolin, Tenzin, Asami, Bumi, and Jinora to embark on a quest to gather the new airbenders and rebuild the Air Nomads from the ground up. Unbeknownst to them, however, a mysterious warrior poet named Zaheer (voiced by Henry Rollins) has broken out of prison under the watch of the strangely incompetent White Lotus, with airbending abilities of his own. He pulls together his own team of elite benders to strike at Team Avatar for enigmatic purposes. Will Korra and company succeed in their quest before Zaheer achieves his mysterious plan? (Good grief, I'm beginning to sound like Shiro Shinobi.)

Aside from the intense emotion, high drama, funny dialogue, stunning visuals, great voice acting, and cool action that is by now par for the course on this show, Book 3 boasts what is quite easily the best villain we've seen yet. Unalaq and Vaatu were just two more generic evil bad guys at the end of the day, and Amon, while getting an awesome build-up, was the victim of a lousy payoff. It didn't help that he and Tarrlok went out kind of stupidly, and don't even get me started on Hiroshi Saito. Zaheer though, Zaheer is a whole different animal. Zaheer is quite easily one of the best TV villains I've seen yet, and the best I've ever seen in an animated series. I'd even say that he's one of the best villains we've seen in the entire Avatar-franchise, up there with Azula, Long Feng, and Ozai. What makes Zaheer such a great villain? Simple: He has the most complex, well-developed, interesting, and well-executed motivation we've ever seen on this entire show, and in my book is tied with Zuko for that category in the entire franchise.

But what is that motivation, and why is it so important to Zaheer's character?

As any seasoned writer who might be reading this blog would know, in a story, character motivation is everything. Without a motivation, a character is just a random blip on the screen with no purpose and no place in the story. They're just there, doing nothing, affecting nothing, and that makes for a pretty boring story. Believe it or not, making up a character motivation is a lot harder than it sounds if you're a writer. I can't begin to tell you of the ribbings I endured in an old creative writing class I took a few years ago that stemmed from my characters having terrible, poorly thought out motivations. Simply put, the better motivation a character has, the better odds he (or she!) has of being a great character. And remember what Zaheer has?

That's the thing about Zaheer though: His motivation is so complex and mysterious that even Korra and the rest of Team Avatar doesn't know what's driving him and his pals until about halfway through the season, and even then it blows their minds even more than it does the audience's. The long and short of it is that the guiding philosophy of Zaheer's group is that the natural order of the world is, in fact, disorder, and that they are on a righteous mission to topple all the world's governments and throw the world into anarchy. Throw in a smattering of humanism, and you've got what amounts to Zen Anarchism, which is probably the most bizarre philosophical label I've ever seen, discussed, or otherwise conceived of.

It's also inherently unworkable.

I don't know exactly what the show's illustrious creators (Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko) were trying to do when they introduced Zaheer, but Zen Anarchism as a practical philosophy is fundamentally irreconcilable with its very self. Zen, insofar as I understand it, is the attainment of wisdom through meditation, which in Eastern philosophical thought is basically thinking really, really hard. Anarchism, on the other hand, advocates for a stateless society where no government exists, based on the premise that any kind of governance only leads to more suffering, which is right where Zaheer stands. But the entities that cherish the obtaining of knowledge and wisdom, such as institutions of higher learning and many religious bodies, are historically shown to be byproducts of an established society in which there exists some sort of governing authority. The environment of peace and safety required to pursue a Zen-like lifestyle is unattainable in an environment of anarchy. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." 


If men were angels. The key problem with with Zaheer's outlook is that he's got all backwards. Men aren't angels because of bad governments; certain governments are bad because men aren't angels. One particularly memorable scene from episode 3 of Book 3: Change ("The Earth Queen") features Team Avatar arriving at Ba Sing Se. In an obvious parallel to a similar scene in Book 2: Earth of Airbender, they come into the city, only to find that it's a old, broken down cesspit of poverty and pestilence, ruled over by a despotic dragon-lady of a monarch who bleeds the people of their tax-money and then leaves them to rot. The message: Things haven't changed at all. If anything, they've gotten worse. In universe, the Ba Sing Se of 75-plus years prior was, in Troper parlance, a Crapsaccharine World. At least there was a semblance of order, and things were relatively safe and peaceful. Now, it's a full-on kleptocracy, where the kingdom and its citizens are the chattels of the Earth Queen. 

Does this mean that all government is inherently bad? Not quite. While any human effort to erect a lasting authority based on its own principles, borrowed or invented, is doomed to fail, almost any government is worse than no government. An every-man-for-himself mentality, where the rule of law is defined by who carries the biggest stick, is unquestionably a chaotic nightmare that only a shortsighted fool would really want. Look no further than Somalia. Is Zaheer such a shortsighted fool? He's no dummy, but I think we'll have to wait until Book 4 to find out the real answer to that question, owing to the inevitable consequences of the back half of Book 3: Change.

In short, man was never meant to live apart from his neighbor, a situation which Anarchism cannot resolve. You can talk all you want about mutual cooperation without government, but again, men are not angels. A mirror of the ultimate authority is needed if the ends of God are to be met, that is, if mercy, justice, peace, love, and gentleness are to be the ruling attributes of a society. The common refrain in the book of Judges was, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Scary, huh? In the book of Romans, Paul wrote, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Jesus Christ himself said in the book of Luke, concerning taxes, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” Zaheer may think he knows what's best for the world, but Korra and company would be happy to know that he's wrong, rightfully rejecting Zaheer's worldview.

In sum, Zaheer has great appeal as a villain. He's smart, cunning, cool, has a complex and compelling motivation, and feels like a flesh-and-blood person. He's not a megalomaniac like Ozai, nor is he a destructive tyrant like Unalaq. He has a lot more in common with Amon than anyone else, even though they fall on two opposite extremes of the ideological spectrum. He even has a girlfriend, for Pete's sake! (Incidentally, I think that "The Earth Queen" features the franchise's first onscreen lip-lock between two consenting adults.) I love how he quotes poetry and airbends like a boss, because he's just that awesome. It helps that he has some real badbutt friends. His "philosophical mumbo-jumbo," as Korra put it, may be unsound, but he's nonetheless a very charismatic villain.

Next time, we'll be talking about another interesting faucet of The Legend of Korra: The Metal Clan.

Images courtesy of avatar.wikia.com