While I was making sure to get one of every class to max level and finish the transmog sets before this raid becomes obsolete and people don’t run it anymore…I needed something to listen to on a second monitor. And so as a bit of a guilty pleasure, I was watching youtube videos on gardening. I happened upon a channel of a guy named Charles Dowding, who operates a relatively small garden using a No Dig methodology. He does most of the work himself, with two or three paid helpers, and maybe an intern that gets replaced each year from a local university. He also is very active in outreach and educating people about his No Dig method, and encouraging other people to create their own gardens. But anyway… that could all be ignored, yet the reason I bring it up is that seeing his motivations and methods and listening to him talk about the threats to his garden that he must combat very much reminds me about how I view the Titans in World of Warcraft, at least as written by Chris Metzen.
Charles Dowding faces threats like disease and blight, pests like slugs or beetles or rabbits, tragic fires, nuissance bindweeds trying to choke out everything else and claim all the sunlight/water for itself, drought at times, and the impulse for outside greedy venture capitalists that want to force him to run his farm like Bobby Kotick ran blizzard. These kinds of threats could almost be reframed as:
Void is like disease or blight
Death is like pests wanting to steal all the anima from worlds
Disorder is like a tragic fire or lava that leaves only a wasteland
Life is like nuissance bindweeds that choke everything else out
Light is like too much sun and not enough rain
Order is like a lonely gardener trying to prevent or keep out the excesses of all of the above and instead maintain the garden with hierarchy, sustainability, complexity, reliability, longevity…order.
Now, there is nothing perfect about Charles Dowding, nor the No Dig method. Nobody should be worshipping him. Does the universe morally require more tomatoes over here, and beetroot over there, and a certain number of broccoli plants? No, not really. But do I consider that garden to be “a” moral option which is better than a wasteland or a field of bindweed or a blighted and diseased dessicated hillside? Sure, I definitely think it is better, even in a moral sense.
And when there is a breakout of blight or disease, sometimes Dowding is required to keep an eye out for it, and quickly try to remove individual plants that have a blight so it doesn’t spread to the rest of the garden. Then when possible, he tries to replant seedlings of the same kind that he was preparing in his side greenhouse. From Dowding’s point of view, he is trying to grow “broccoli-kind” sufficiently in his garden…not specifically broccoli plant number 1675. If he finds that broccoli plant number 1675 has blight and needs to be removed, he does not hate that 1675 plant, nor does he hate broccoli at all. He cares for broccoli-kind and wants it to succeed and thrive. From the point of view of a gardener, the purpose of the garden is not broccoli plant number 1675; rather, broccoli plant number 1675 is put there as a method of replicating and improving broccoli-kind as a whole. Any moral judgements the gardener is applying are for broccoli-kind and not just one individual plant. When considering Algalon and the Reorigination device…very many people constantly miss the fact that Azeroth is not the only planet full of life in the great dark beyond; and so losing it to a Void disease that could wipe out all of those other planets full of life is a moral failure. You are not being morally “good” by insisting that a blighted and diseased broccoli should be left where it is to spread and kill the entire garden. Having the power and knowledge to prevent that damage, but refusing to prevent it…is a moral failure.
The greatest difference of the Garden model for morality is in realizing that unlike all the other cosmic forces…the Gardener (those pursuing order) is the only one committed to replacing and restoring any corrupted life that it needs to cut out or smother. Death doesn’t do that (ardeneald only sends back wild gods, not mortals) . Disorder doesn’t do that. Light doesn’t have any evidence of doing that. Void absolutely does not replace or restore what it destroys. Cosmic Life doesn’t even value sentient mortals…so they do not replace or restore what their Bindweed (world trees) chokes out. Only those who pursue order in the Gardener model actually concern themselves with balance and sustainability and complexity and hierarchy leading toward sentience. The Algalon assumption that is so popular on this forum, is never allowed to have the counterpoint that if there were millions of lives reoriginated, there must have also been millions of billions of lives created on planets all over the great dark beyond that would never have been there without Titan gardening effort. Millions of billions of lives at risk from the vulnerabilities of some free will self-hedonism individual being corrupted to serve as a slave to forces that want to infect and decay every mortal, or burn and turn to glass every bed of soil that could have life.
However, let me introduce some doubt about my model based on missing information. As I said, we have no evidence of Light replacing or restoring what they smite or crystallize. But could this be about us just not seeing some of their activity written about in game? One possibility, since Reorigination beams look like Holy Light, is that maybe every sentient mortal soul which gets reoriginated is cleansed and then preserved in some sort of Holy afterlife dimension where they join together as one in joy and peace and contentment and they do not suffer thereafter? If N’Zoth was not a mortal soul and outside the cycle of life and death then him being zapped with a Reorigination beam would not send him to any Holy afterlife. He would either cease to exist or maybe be sent back as a void spirit to the Void realm, whatever that means. Whereas any mortal souls on Reoriginated worlds would not be forced to go to Shadowlands ever, and never suffer eternally there. Maybe that would be why Shadowland expansion never had any souls that were from reoriginated worlds and no rumors or hints that anybody anywhere else in shadowland was from any reoriginated world.
But now back to Titans as Gardeners. I don’t think that just having a “Gardener model” is enough, because the writing for Titans in game seems to have some strong emotions and moral philosophy being employed by Titans in how they spoke to us, and how they reportedly spoke to the Dragon Aspects back when they were ascended originally. Disagree with them all you like, but they were not responding with any lack of emotion or robotic indifference. They have reasons to emotionally care about whether life thrives on planets all over the great dark beyond. So I think it necessary to add the term Lonely to the Gardener Model. I think the Titans developed their own model of morality out of an absence of knowledge about precisely how they came into existence. Meaning they are having to make guesses and looking at things that might have existed on the planets that birthed themselves but not being able to prove that there was causation between those things existing and then developing an awakened World Soul. So as far as they are concerned, it could be just coincidence that life existed on all of them, or that sentient mortals developed within that life, or that arcane magic was discovered and organized as a technology by sentient mortals on the worlds that birthed them. All those things may not be necessary or may not be ‘the cause’ of themselves awakening as World Souls… but the Titans don’t know for sure. So they might just be creating all those things on more and more worlds everywhere in the universe that they can. Just in case those are what make more World Souls to be Titans along with them. In that sense, the Titans are lonely and they want other Titans like themselves to have companionship with and to compare and contrast what they are thinking about their powers with others who share their powers. Which, to a degree, is kind of what human philosophers are doing when they notice a difference between their sentience and other animals or plants. And then they want to seek out other humans to have companionship with and to compare and contrast what they think about their own sentience and abilities. Our ethics is kind of like us trying to solve the problem of us not knowing what responsibilities we have now that we have enough powers to realize that inaction or failure to act is also a cause of moral consequences.
Titans seem like flawed heroes that do heroic things because of their flawed emotions of loneliness and ethical obligations from having power and knowledge… they want to have friends in the form of other Titans but they might have to expand and multiply life to make that happen…but since they have power to create and shape that means if they fail or refuse to act when they could protect something then the bad outcome is sort of their fault in some ways. By contrast, the First Ones have no emotions and no soul and they are doing unethical things by squeezing and causing suffering to souls to exploit and steal soul energy. The First Ones are like a greedy evil factory farm wanting as many souls to steal energy from as possible, but since they have no emotions then they don’t care about any of that suffering and have no ethics and feel no obligation to use any of their power to avoid unethical consequences for those souls based on inaction.