How do values and morals shift in Station Eleven from the pre-collapse world to the post-collapse world? What about in the Traveling Symphony? Is there a common set of values that humanity embodies in spite of outside events?
How do values and morals shift in Station Eleven from the pre-collapse world to the post-collapse world? What about in the Traveling Symphony? Is there a common set of values that humanity embodies in spite of outside events?
Morals nearly dissipate after the breakout. As people struggle to survive, the values of respect and sophistication are wiped away and people commit ugly procedures, understandably, in order to survive. This is shown in the various times that members of the Symphony loot houses. I think there are a common set of values that all humanity deems to be true, regardless of culture or upbringing.
The collapse of society is accompanied by a collapse of government which means that there are no laws holding people accountable. The loss of the laws coincides with a loss, or at least degredation of, peoples personal morals. Most of the survivors wouldn’t do horrible things because they wanted to, but because they need to in order to survive. Without society, and with the threats of other people, disease or wild animals people will do whatever they have to to survive. In the time shortly after society collapses peoples only goal is survival, of themselves and possibly their family/loved ones. The loss of morals isn’t a bad thing for these people it is a necessity, they have to survive. However after a few years settlements start to pop up and groups start to form. As time goes on these places will develope rules and laws because after the early chaos of trying to survive, once there is a level of self sufficiancy, laws have to be formed to make society stable. The Traveling Sympnony is a society like any one of the towns, and as such they have their own set of rules.
I do think that morality if fairly consistent between groups of people, but some slight variation is always to be expected based on the history and circumstances of the society. Murder is the best example of this, basically every culture condems killing an innocent person. It only harms society if you allow people to be killed for little to no reason.
The commonplace value I find in pre and post collapse society (besides in the anarchy between) is the value of family–of small communities. People group together for defense, and for mutual survival. This is evident with the small towns that form, mostly by families.
In Station Eleven, the values and morals of the pre-collapse world differ greatly from that of the post-collapse world. In the post-collapse world of Station Eleven, twenty years after a devastating pandemic has destroyed modern civilization, there is a greater sense of a survivalist mentality, allowing people to better justify what many would call morally questionable actions. Such actions in need of justification in the post-collapse world are killing for survival and stealing from abandoned houses, justified by the lack of personal security and the fact that the owners of said abandoned houses have been dead or gone for years, respectively.
While not without survivalist justifications, the Traveling Symphony as a group has a greater sense of pre-collapse values, unsurprising since the motto that which is written alongside their name on their lead caravan is “survival is insufficient” (Mandel 58). In the book, the members of the Symphony show a greater hesitation to kill than other travelers, believing that the deaths of others hang down upon those that took these lives, even marking themselves with knife-like tattoos to represent the amount of people they have killed.
Despite the obstacles and tribulations of the post-collapse world, in certain ways humanity is still capable of showing great compassion for their fellow person. Even in this broken civilization humanity will help those that truly need help, despite the danger it may bring about. Such compassion can be seen within the Traveling Symphony when its members decide to keep the stowaway girl, even though it may bring about the wrath of the prophet and his followers, whom the girl ran away from.
Almost immediately after the collapse, Mandel shows how morality slowly begins to waver in the chaos of fear. In the airport during the days following the outbreak, Clark’s group steals food from a Mexican restaurant. They seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of stealing, but they do it anyway because it is necessary for their survival. As time passes, looting businesses and houses becomes a normal aspect of survival. For example, August and Kirsten loot a house on their way to the airport without even thinking if its contents belong to somebody else. The prophet and his extremist group are an example of how somebody can get away with being immoral because there is nobody that is willing to stand in their way. When survival and power become a crucial aspect of a person’s character, they begin to care more about their own personal well being than the morality of their actions.
Despite the fact that the world has spiraled into anarchy, many of the novel’s characters hold strong moral values. In the Traveling Symphony, the musicians and actors form a close bond. They bring happiness into the settlements they visit and fight for each other in dangerous situations. The tattoos that the symphony members receive after they kill another person are permanent reminders that death is an irreversible event and ending a person’s life should not be taken lightly.
I agree with Nick that the looting of the Mexican restaurant in the airport was the first obvious example of the breakdown of morality and social values after the virus. After a sudden loss of all social structure, people everywhere are terrified by the endless possibility of crime and lawlessness – thus the novel divulges into a survivalist mentality of a dog eat dog world. Another example of the initial loss of morality is the newscaster who uses his position as a television broadcaster to his advantage and communicates with his family: “…and then he blinked at the camera and something in him seemed to stutter, a breaking down of some mechanism that had previously held his personal and professional lives apart, and he addressed the camera with new urgency” (234). Even before a full week of society collapsing people realized the severity of the situation and all previous expectations for the morality of their fellow human beings were completely discarded.
A survivalist mentality rationalizes and justifies the acts of murder, stealing, and trespassing. However, when this mentality is combined with a different logic, it is the unpredictability that makes an individual so dangerous. The prophet, for example, dictated his life by a separate kind of twisted logic developed from excerpts of both Station Eleven and the New Testament. As Kirsten summarized, “‘If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s noting you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do”‘ (139). This illogical morality created by one individual gave him he ability to manipulate the mindset and morality of countless people in the post-collapse world.
Aside from the prophet and post-collapse cults with a similar mentality, the remainder of people who survive to Year Twenty seem to develop a certain set of morals which differ only slightly from the pre-collapse world. These morals are adequately represented by the post-collapse microcosm of the Traveling Symphony. There is still the remaining guilt after killing a person (represented by the knife tattoos) although not accompanied by a physical punishment such as jail or the death penalty. Looted houses are respected and a prayer is said for any deceased found inside. There is a sense of community and loyalty among them and their separation protocol ensures a minimal loss of members.
While morality and social values shifted drastically from pre to post-collapse worlds, there remained a common sense of values embodied by the remnants of humanity.
Hi Usborn! I like your comment a lot and I think there is a shift in morals in the sense that what people value changes. At the beginning of the collapse there is chaos and people resort to instinctual, and at times immoral, behavior. But I was also thinking about the people at the Museum and how they handled the collapse. I thought about the rape that was committed after a few months because the whole community exiled the man who committed the assault. You could say that the rape itself shows a decline or shift in morality but sexual assault is already prevalent in our society now. Morality is very closely related to values but I think one’s moral compass can remain unchanged even if what one values day-to-day changes. For example, I don’t think it’s morally wrong to loot people’s houses the way the Symphony does, because their actions are in context with an epidemic. If they looted houses right now, I would probably find that pretty messed up, but I don’t think that is a shift in morality, I think that has to do with context.