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I have been thinking about Sam Winchester, over the course of this season, and wondering whether he will worm his way into the John-shaped hole in the SPN-loving portions of my heart. Not yet, but I don't rule it out.

What's fascinating, of course, is that what came back from the dead is 100% pure unadulterated Sam Winchester. He's always been ruthless, and he's always been willing to sacrifice other people's wellbeing for his own: this is the boy who at 18 cut his ties with his only family because they would interfere with the life he'd chosen for himself. Now he's more mature and less selfish, but the ruthlessness is still there.

One of the many wonderful things about the first season was seeing Sam move through the grief he starts with -- at Jessica's death -- by coming to care about his brother again. Dean gets Sam to look outside himself, first with the ordinary (for them) tasks of hunting -- saving people who don't mean anything to them, which is not something that comes easily to Sam at first -- and then by pushing him to reconsider the family and his place within it, and the question of whether he can become what he wants and still be a Winchester. Or at least, whether he can be what he wants and still be Dean's brother. And the season culminates in Sam choosing his family over his own revenge: listening to Dean and not shooting John.

But think of "Faith": Sam has been willing to trade other people's lives for Dean's for a long time now. Sam can be very focused when he wants to be, and right now, he wants to be focused.

Sam in Season 2 was a little harder to track, because it was the season of Dean, and Dean's grief -- but it was also the season of Sam's fear, in particular, his fear of himself. And I think he's right to be afraid of himself, although not because there's anything particularly demonic about him. He's right to be afraid of himself because when he forgets to be afraid of himself, he starts killing people. Madison, Jake, now all the hosts of all these demons. And Sam doesn't care, because he doesn't have time to think of himself -- he's too busy thinking about Dean, and how to save Dean. He's selfless in exactly the wrong way.

Characters who do exactly the wrong thing because they love too deeply or care too much are a major kink of mine, so I am exceedingly happy with Sam right now. Or rather, with Sam's character arc; I also want to shake him gently and point out that his Winchester genes are leading him straight into in a whole new set of stupid choices. He is exactly as self-sacrificing as Dean or John, he's just going about it in a somewhat different way.

I wonder, a little, whether Sam thinks that if he can prove to Dean that he isn't worth it, Dean will help him find a way out of the deal -- but I think that's too Dean-like, and not the way Sam thinks. Sam knows he wants to live, and doesn't care how many rules he breaks. And really, what are a few dead demons (and dead humans) along the road, so long as he gets where he wants to in the end?

Oh, Sam. You are so smart, and yet so dumb.

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There's a theory about morality that goes back to Margaret Mead's time, that says that for some people, the moral compass is internal, and for some people, it comes from an external source. At the time, the division was roughly described as the shame culture v. the guilt culture, but really, both can feel guilt--but for different things. The internally directed person feels guilt for what they do that is immoral, the externally driven guilt is for letting down the source of the moral direction, for breaking the rule.

I think in the Winchester house, Dean is driven by an internalized sense of morality, and he has chosen to take on the burden for both of them rather than expose Sam to those feelings of guilt and low self-worth for his moral flaws.

Sam's morality is externalized. It's no accident Sam wanted to be a lawyer, because the law would serve the purpose that Dean had served until then--giving him a moral direction. But with the law gone, and with Sam deciding that Dean's judgment can't be trusted on the subject of saving Dean, his moral compass has been replaced with an objective, a goal. It's not that he's a sociopath--he would be fully capable of feeling guilt in general and for letting Dean down in particular. But the letting Dean down would trump just about everything else.

John, I would think, also relied on external moral compasses, like the Marines, and possibly to some extent the Church, or Mary. but all that was burnt away in his grief, and I don't think he had much of a moral compass at all for most of the boys' lives. Hell of a goal, though.

Like any dichotomy, I think the absolutes work best in theory, and real people are a crapshoot. Anyone with an internal moral compass can need to look outside when the situation surpasses the person's experience or understanding. And someone who intrinsically looks to external guidance for the moral compass can cobble together a moral position for a new situation by finding an analogy in the rules they already have.

But we've actually seen Sam grasping for an new external moral compass in season two--it's why he could be influenced by the ghost he thought was an angel. Dean never thought the entity was an angel, because he knew it was telling people to do bad things. Sam thought that because it was an angel, the things it said to do must by definition be good.

Like any dichotomy, I think the absolutes work best in theory, and real people are a crapshoot.

*g* True, so true.

And ooh, that episode is an excellent example.

Also -- fascinating comment! -- your analysis of Sam as a lawyer made me smile. Now, after so many years of study and more than a glimpse of practice, what we learned in our very first lesson was confirmed: Law is not about morality; it gives you no ethical guidance. It does, of course, set certain limits/ for moral conduct, but as all moral judgements are implied and often vague as well as arbitrary, within that framework, you still have to look away from the codes and sections and either inside (which wouldn't work for your Sam, yeah) or to others (preferably not attorneys-at-law).

Oh, there is no question that the law is a bad place to find your moral compass, and not all lawyers go into law to find one. But it's a danger, or there wouldn't be a warning. It's generally not conscious, though. But that is why rule-bound people like the clarity of rules, and the law is a place where rules govern behavior.

You really find it in fundamentalist religion of pretty much any kind, because fundamentalism subsumes the will, and the thus the internal compass, for a set of rules and someone else's determination of what is and is not moral

not all lawyers go into law to find one

I'd say most lawyers I know go into it for the money and the power securing their chances of finding a decent job. 0 ;-) But I agree that they -- we -- all have, if not an affinity to or an affection for, then at least a certain fascination with rules and regulations.

fundamentalism subsumes the will, and the thus the internal compass, for a set of rules and someone else's determination of what is and is not moral

Yes, exactly! It's the dangerous conflagration of law & morality -- from my perspective; from theirs, there is no difference, of course -- and of course, as a European, one cannot help but notice how common this still is Western society, some countries more than others.

I had thought, to be honest, that Sam saw the law as a set of tools, a way of doing things in the world. I mean, he grew up with men who used tools to fix things -- whether it's the car, or setting a ghost to rest, or killing some kind of monster. I think he walked away from the specific tools, but not from the general mindset.

But that's just my personal explanation -- I don't know how much evidence there is for it.

I like this idea. As a lawyer who IRL knows mostly other lawyers, though, I must say this is not a very common motivator.

Still pondering if it fits my view of Sam -- more so, I think, in the context of his family, as you outline here; to me, Sam seems less driven to set things right in general than his brother (unless said brother is concerned, of course).

As a lawyer who IRL knows mostly other lawyers, though, I must say this is not a very common motivator.

Ha! No, I expect a large paycheck must figure into many people's motices. And of course, for Sam it looks like the complete opposite of everything he grew up with -- white-collor, working with his mind and perhaps his voice, on the right side of the law, etc.

I forget that kind of thing-- because when you study law from an academic perspective, "what does this do?" or "what could people do with this?" is the big question.

to me, Sam seems less driven to set things right in general than his brother

I know I used to think the same, but I can't tell, right now, whether that's mostly because that's how he was when we met him in S1 -- when he was completely focused on himself, and on the task he's set for himself.

I'm not very well studied, and so I've never heard about the theory about morality that you described until now. Very interesting. Thank you!

Was that Meade, the guilt-culture/shame-culture thing? I'd forgotten that. People use it a lot to talk about Homeric society; I didn't know they used it to talk about real people. (As you can imagine, given the splitter that I am, I find it over-schematized.) Oddly, I might argue the reverse: that Dean is externally driven, with John setting his moral direction, and that his sense of inadequacy comes from a perceived failure to live up to John's standards, not to his own inner moral compass. Sam is hard to judge, because so much of him is surface, and he's such a chameleon. I think he takes on other people's opinion easily, but I don't know how much they affect what goes on within him these days.

I hadn't thought of law as a way of finding a moral compass, for Sam -- that's interesting. I'd thought of it as a set of tools: law is something you do things with, rather than something that does things to you.

There was a whole crew working on the theory, but actually it was Ruth Benedict who wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The theory was used to explain Japanese culture during World War II. Japan being the shame culture, of course, and American culture being the guilt culture. It doesn't work that neatly, and certainly doesn't take into consideration the extrinsic morality of many Americans. I don't buy the extremes, and certainly don't buy that large and heterogeneous cultures can be characterized as preferentially one way or another--I don't know enough about small, homogeneous cultures to say one way or another.

As for SamnDean, I think it depends on which set of writers you are looking at. First season, I would have agreed with you, that Dean rooted his moral certainties in his dad and Sammy had his own moral center. I think once John was dead, part of Dean's dissolution was sorting out where his moral compass pointed. And Sam had to show Dean that the monsters weren't always evil, and didn't always need to be killed. Now, however, they seem to have switched roles.

Sam's craving for normalcy in the first season could be seen as finding his internal morality more clearly reflected there. I tend to see it as similar to his belief that the ghost was an angel and therefore the bad things it told people to do were okay. He saw in "normal life" a regulated, rule-defined moral compass that he needed but didn't find at home, just like the angel's instructions must be good because it was a moral authority. And it explains his terrible fear that he would go evil in second season--if he relied on external sources to determine his morality, then he might have feared the influence of the demon. But he had free choice, and he chose Dean for that role instead.

I think how a person views the law depends on what they need from it, and their experience with it. It can certainly be a tool, but tools are only value-neutral until you use them. I don't think you can listen to the debates here about what constitutes torture, and whether it is legal to use torture, and whether we need a constitutional amendment to keep gay people from marrying each other, and not realize that at least in the United States, law is indeed where we grapple for control of the moral compass.

I would argue that Dean is internally motivated, too.

You can really tell that he doesn't give a shit about what other people think by his assholish behavior a lot of the time. If he was shame motivated, he'd be worried about what everyone thought, not just what John and Sam thought. Dean essentially has no shame.

What he does have is an internalized sense of mission and responsibility toward other human beings. It's a value system where everyone in the universe is more important than Dean. Outside of religious orders, I can't imagine a culture strong enough to have that much shame-motivation on somebody. Now, this was instilled in him by John, and by the massive trauma of his mother's death, but it's coming from Dean now, when John is gone.

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