Favorite entries 2015

This year's best.

Kim Stanley Robinson – a giant among men (with some others)!

I am reading fiction for the fun of it. I don't have a lot of professional reading and for the first time in my life I am in very easy walking distance of a branch of a decent public library system. I don't have to plan a trip to the library, I just have to remember when the branch is open.

One of the things that I am reading is science fiction that's strong on presenting future (and past) history. I have in the past read Neil Stephenson, whose work sometimes falls into that category; now I am getting into Kim Stanley Robinson. KSM wrote what I think is the best American utopian SF ever created, the Mars trilogy. I read it a ways back and I enjoyed it tremendously. In the last month or so I have read two large KSM books that rethinks the developments of world history in the early modern and modern eras by creating alternative histories.

One of them is Galileo's Dream which follows Galileo Galilei both through his own life in the 17th century and his quantum-theory-implemented trips to the Galilean moons of Jupiter in the year 3000. There is a tremendous amount of philosophical thinking embedded in this book, as we follow Galileo's life and researches in great detail and the efforts of human colonists in the Jupiter system to encourage and protect and even sacrifice him to make sure that Galileo's thought develops and is disseminated in such a way that humanity benefits from the Scientific Revolution and is not destroyed by it. There is a great deal of discussion of physics, ancient and modern, and more about the politics of the 17th century Vatican than you want to know.

Another KSM book that I am finishing up is the Years of Rice and Salt, which almost reads like a first draft of Galileo's Dream. It is an alternate history based on what might have happened if the Black Death had killed off the people of Western, Eastern and Northern Europe while only diminishing the population of the rest of Eurasia. It is a world where Christianity has been eliminated as a cultural influence, and the major cultures are Chinese, Muslim and Iroquois. Plus Buddhism.

Rice and Salt has a lot of explication but it does not lack human interest. We are given to understand that many of the characters we meet in different eras are reincarnations who meet occasionally in the bardo, the Buddhist hell to talk about how tough it is to make a difference in the earthly life. The characters are interesting in their earthly existence and every once in a while KSM throws in a vivid description of a place or a situation. For instance, here is KSM discussing the lack of trees in the Chinese capital after the tremendous sufferings and dislocations of the Long War (sort of like World Wars I and II, but much longer):

Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide.

Do you have to be a historian to like these books? No, KSM sells a lot of books and the readers can't possibly be all historians.

I should mention a third author who has a touch of this alternative history but who actually explores even bigger ideas. Robert Charles Wilson is somebody who I met on my first month in Toronto, back in the early 70s. He is one smart guy and it shows in his fiction. RCW has written a variety of books, but some of the best ones combine a lot of contemplation of the history of the whole universe (sort of like Olaf Stapledon) with individual human characters. If you know Stapledon, you know that's an unusual combination.

Justin Trudeau – a giant among men?

I have not made up my mind about Justin Trudeau. I expect that he will disappoint (not so much me as the large number of his current fans). And hey, he is Liberal. And finally, I was never that fond of his father (not that I expected J. Trudeau to be a reincarnation of his father).

But OMG! Have you seen that video of Trudeau greeting the first Syrian refugees to land in Toronto two or three days ago? Telling them that they will leave the buildings as Canadians?

Trudeau greets the refugees

Canada is coming out of ten years of the rule of the man without a heart – a characterization that the man so characterized pretty much owned up to himself. If there was a way of making a policy less generous and more divisive, he found it. If a policy used up some of the reputational capital that previous governments and private individuals had earned, or sucked up to the great powers while ignoring Canada's need and desire to maintain an independent international identity, our just past prime minister enthusiastically adopted it. And the extent of the rot he encouraged and promoted in Canada's institutions – the civil service and Parliament in particular -- will only be revealed over years and years of investigation and the testimony by people no longer afraid to speak up.

This is a man who was perfectly happy to say that he was unmoved by a picture of a dead baby on a beach. It's not that the past PM lacked a certain degree of support. Any country has its fearful and ungenerous elements. But when those elements are made the foundation of the ruling party's efforts to create a permanent ruling coalition, god help the country so afflicted.

But that dead baby reminded Canadians that they are by and large more generous than that. Justin Trudeau was given the opportunity to embody the generous side of Canadians, and he took it. Enthusiastically and without compromise. While people all over the world were freaking out about the supposed dangers of admitting refugees, Trudeau (however sincerely, however calculatedly) made a major commitment to work with private organizations (who were already gearing up) to do something to help the Syrians. And has stuck to that commitment, despite the supposed political dangers.

To look at the situation from the crass political angle, the ungenerous approach taken by the past government may go down as one of the most amazing own goals in Canada's history. A year ago, six months ago, the past government could gain a certain amount of traction by presenting Trudeau as "not ready for prime time." Then they handed him an issue that he could exploit, not just during the election campaign but after. Has there ever been a newly elected PM whose stature was so great so soon after his initial victory? Who has identified himself with what many Canadians like to think is the best aspect on this country? Who in fact has made it clear that if the government wants to do something, and has the backing of a good part of the citizenry, it can DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE?

This could all blow over and the Liberals may end up looking like a group of sad sacks – hey, they've done it before. But maybe not. This could be an important turning point.

BS on the gender-equity cabinet in the new Canadian government.

I have heard a lot of people complaining about the artificiality of the 50-50 split in the membership of the new Canadian Cabinet – it’s half men half women. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised this during the campaign and he delivered on his promise immediately. His action became controversial and a whole bunch of people seem to still be talking about if it were some great crime against democracy and good government. Trudeau is guilty of the crime of arbitrarily appointing people who might not be the best candidates for the job. Even people I generally respect, like a columnist in the Globe and Mail, have said similar things. Both men and women are upset.

I have to say I think the whole fuss is ridiculous. Exactly when was this golden age when the best people in the country or even in parliament or even in the ruling party got their positions purely on the basis of objective criteria, of fitness for the job? For a long time there were no women at all in parliament and thus none in the cabinet either. Since women got the right to vote and the right to sit in parliament, they have been a distinct minority in parliament. Was this based on objective criteria?

Let’s look at how the sausage is made when picking a cabinet. Objective criteria? Anybody knows anything about Canadian politics knows and that if there is one and only one member of the victorious party elected from Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, that person will be in the cabinet. The winning party needs a representative in that province, it needs to convince people in that province that the federal government takes them seriously. If the government neglects to include people from that area, they can kiss goodbye the possibility of winning seats there next time around. Would anybody seriously put forward the idea that the single MP from Saskatchewan miraculously is one of the 20 or 30 most capable people in parliament or even in the ruling party as a whole? That this person deserves their seat at the cabinet table because they fulfil certain objective criteria?

No, cabinets are chosen by looking at what candidates you have and deciding, yes, some of them are more talented than others, but also by deciding some of them will appeal to one constituency or another. Cabinets are chosen to put together a political coalition, but also to advertise the party to the public and give people an indication of what and who the ruling party thinks is important.

The Liberals are saying to the Canadian public that they think women have been undervalued in the past, and they will not be undervalued now. How sincere the Liberals are and how they will actually act is another matter entirely. The promise Justin Trudeau made and the actions that he took in choosing his parliament were advertising. If you are not impressed, well, that’s perfectly all right, but let’s not pretend this is some horrendous deviation from good government.

What we've lost

Will McLean, who I knew primarily as a medieval re-enactor, recently died, all too young.

To give you some idea of his humane intelligence, and what we have lost in his death,  I offer this post from his blog, A Commonplace Book:

sUNDAY, JANUARY 06, 2013

"Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy."

In the middle of a very wise post about the long term value of accumulated intellectual capital that is often difficult or impossible to measure in monetary terms when it is first produced, Kevin Kelly uses the above example of Picasso as an argument.

It's a very poor choice, because Picasso was enormously successful at monetizing his intellectual output, and acutely aware that he could produce more faster by selling prints and book illustrations than by making individual drawings.

It's a poor example, but his fundamental argument is correct and important. There's a tremendous amount of intellectual output that's completely invisible to conventional measures of GDP. I learned about Kelly's article through Steve Muhlberger's blog. Steve doesn't carry advertising, so his blog is a free gift to the world. In conventional terms, its direct contribution to the economy is zero, but so much the worse for conventional measures of economic activity.

There's a whole enormous but difficult to quantify gift economy where we spend time making things for friends and strangers: blog posts and cat photos and Improv Everywhere performances, mostly unmediated by the exchange of money. We're like a planet of Kirstendalers, living well by spending time as each others' servants.

And one of the great strengths of this gift economy is that transaction costs can be very low. As the citizen of a rich society I can afford to spend my leisure as I wish. I can give it away if I want to.

Now a lot of this simply gives pleasure to friends and strangers, not that there's anything wrong with that. Those that do this do well.

Some fields, like my primary interest of history, don't do a lot to put bread on the table of the poor. Still, those that know their own past better are richer for it. Those that do that do better.

But, some ideas are so powerful that they can clearly make a society richer as long as the society survives, and successors that inherit it until they perish, and so on until the end of time. Those that do this do best of all.

One of the great ideas of the 20th century was nonviolent civil disobedience. It made the world better, and once invented could not be uninvented. But the inventors who brought it forward drew no worldly profit from it, but the reverse.

But think of the unlocked potential at the end of the struggle! How many U.S. citizens would prefer the laws and norms of 1954 to those of today? Few, I hope.

There are a lot of ideas like that, although few as powerful. Sometime the first draft is flawed (See: French Revolution 1.0) The second great strength of the 21st century gift economy is that each of us can throw our thoughts into the marketplace of ideas, and others can refute them or improve  on them, and we can respond to do better. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Remembering the music of the 60s

A few days ago a friend posted to Facebook a poster for the late-1960s band "It's a Beautiful Day," whose album of the same name came out in 1968.  I was inspired to go to YouTube and listen to the most popular track, "White Bird."  Now that song did not make much of an impact on mainstream radio, as I recall, but that video has nearly a million and a half plays and a long list of testimonials from listeners about how much it meant to them.

I am about the same age as these people, and I too have very fond memories of "White Bird." Of course one reason I feel that way is that I was in my late teens, when (according to a cliche that seems to be true) I was acquiring "the music of my life."  But I also am convinced that between about 1967 and 1973 there was an unusual explosion of creativity during which an amazing variety of music was produced by young people.

It's a Beautiful Day (the band) is a good example of the riches that we (those of us who were lucky enough to have alternative sources of music) had thrown at our feet in the late 60s.  Listen to their Top Tracks on YouTube and ask yourself, what genre is this music?  Rock and roll? Folk-rock? Hard rock? There are elements of all sorts of music that would soon enough become traditions of their own.  One has the thought that if there had been no popular music in 1967, and highly cultured aliens had given Earth It's A Beautiful Day all of the music of the 1970s could have been created from that single seed.

But it's not just IABD.  Dozens and dozens of other bands might have played the same roll.

I feel privileged to have experienced this amazing era in music.

My interview with Medievalists.net: chivalry in the era of the Hundred Years War

Five Medieval Minutes with Steven Muhlberger
SEPTEMBER 24, 2015 BY MEDIEVALISTS.NET

By Danièle Cybulskie

This week at Medievalists.net, we’ve been thinking a lot about The Hundred Years’ War, so we thought we’d bring you five minutes with an expert on fourteenth-century chivalry and combat. Like so many things in the Late Middle Ages, The Hundred Years’ War was deeply influenced by chivalric ideals, like personal honour and prowess on the battlefield. Professor Emeritus Steven Muhlberger, scholar and avid member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, has written many books on fourteenth century chivalry and combat, a full list of which can be found below. Here are five medieval minutes with Steven Muhlberger.

DC: How did you get interested in the fourteenth century and its culture of chivalry and deeds of arms?

SM: First, the entire Society for Creative Anachronism was based on re-creating a tournament, and when that was a lot of fun, continuing to do so. The founders of the SCA were influenced by a number of writers, in particular Jean Froissart, a 14th century historian who specifically wrote to promote chivalry as he understood it. So when I joined the SCA in my university years, I was already being influenced by the 14th century. I started to take a more scholarly interest in the 14th century and chivalry in the late 1990s. Again, Jean Froissart was my main influence. Froissart is an amazing writer. His book is full of vivid stories. Your readers can easily find some of them on the web.

DC: In your work, you’ve looked closely at how chivalric ideals like honour and valour affected medieval identities. How much did chivalry influence people’s sense of self in the fourteenth century, both men and women?

SM: When people talk about chivalry today, they are often talking about relations between men and women. The classic example is, should men these days open doors for women, and if they don’t is chivalry dead? A friend of mine once said, the difference between courtesy and chivalry is that chivalry involves killing people. Chivalry in the 14th century was a warrior’s ideal.

Since most of society was run by warriors in the Middle Ages, the answer to your question is that chivalry was very important, but it affected men more directly than women. Even men who were not of the upper class might imitate the manners of upper-class warriors. In earlier centuries, warriors who were armed servants had climbed up the social scale by inventing the idea of chivalry – which were the virtues and practical skills that a good soldier needed – and promoted it as an ideal that improved their standing. Women participated in this by being judges and observers of the efforts of those men. People acting out chivalry had a number of audiences that they played to and one of them was noble women.

DC: I think it’s so important that you pointed out the interest of non-noble people in deeds of arms. While many (if not most) people think of formal deeds of arms as solely being the domain of the nobility, you’ve said in Formal Combats in the Fourteenth Century that “the popular enthusiasm for formal combats depicted in the movie A Knight’s Tale is closer to the facts of the matter”. What do you think drew people from all walks of life to love formal combats like tournaments?

SM: The association between chivalry and ruling meant that activities associated with knights had a special prestige. Formal deeds of arms were an opportunity for one group of people to show off their skills – particularly their horsemanship – and for other people to appreciate how bold and daring they were. If you have ever seen a joust in person, you know how exciting it is just to watch. Today’s tamer horse sports are exciting enough; 14th century horsemanship was even more impressive.

DC: Also in Formal Combats in the Fourteenth Century (I love this book, by the way), you mention war as a kind of “trial by battle writ large”, citing Edward III’s challenge to Philip VI to a trial by combat as an essential part of what became The Hundred Years’ War. How much of an influence did chivalric ideals have on The Hundred Years’ War? Did most of the commoners forming the infantry subscribe to these ideals?

SM: The influence of chivalry on different classes of people is an interesting question. One aspect of chivalry is that at least some of the time noble warriors on either side treat each other with respect. The common practice of capturing nobles and holding them for ransom moderated the effects of warfare on the high-ranking warriors. Ordinary soldiers could generally not expect that kind of good treatment. Nobles however in their dealings with each other very often played to the political public by advertising themselves as behaving in line with chivalric ideals.

One example from the 1340s: King Edward of England besieged the French town of Calais and built a fortification outside its walls to keep the French from relieving the garrison. The French king eventually showed up and challenged Edward to come out from his fortification and fight an open field of battle for possession of Calais. Edward refused to do that because he was very close to forcing Calais to surrender and he was safe in his fortified camp. We know that this was criticized by the French as being an unworthy way to fight. Edward was claiming to be King of France, and what kind of king could he be if he would not fight his rival when he had the opportunity? But as a practical strategy of warfare Edward was right to hold back and he took Calais.

DC: Speaking of French chivalric challenges, in Royal Jousts at the End of the Fourteenth Century, you look at jousts, especially the St. Inglevert jousts, as a way of building bridges between England and France during The Hundred Years’ War. How might combat have brought nations together in friendship?

SM: A joust between people who were on opposite sides in a war could either intensify their hostility or moderate it. In the case of St. Inglevert the French champions began by wanting to challenge the English to a competition in which they could prove that despite serious defeats in the past the French were the best chivalric warriors (warriors on horseback). Politicians on both sides – and these were nobleman themselves — were looking for an opportunity to negotiate a peace treaty so the challenges were repackaged as a friendly competition between the French champions who proposed it and anybody from any country who wanted to show up. It turned into something of an Olympic competition in jousting. Since the skill they were exercising in this competition was a specifically noble style of warfare the joust ended up being a very friendly occasion, emphasizing what these nobles had in common despite the war. I don’t know any Olympians myself but I’m sure they come back from the games with stories about how great the people in the other teams were. And I bet the Olympic Village has some great parties. St. Inglevert was a month of parties interspersed by very high level athletic competition.

DC: No wonder it was so well-chronicled! Given your expertise on formal combat and all things chivalric, I have to ask the most important question of all before you go. Who would win at a tournament: Lancelot or Gawain?

SM: We only know what the storytellers give us, and it seems to me that they unreasonably favor Lancelot. Who would you like to lead your army? Gawain for sure.

To learn more about fourteenth-century chivalry and formal combats, check out Steven Muhlberger’s many books on the subject (I recommend Formal Combats in the Fourteenth Century as a great starting place for Kindle readers). Volume four of the Deeds of Arms series, Will a Frenchman Fight?, will be available shortly from Freelance Academy Press. In the meantime, check out his blog Muhlberger’s World History.

Folk of the Air

I promised a couple of weeks ago to discuss The Folk of the Air, a novel by Peter S Beagle, which contrary to the opinion of some readers I think is a very successful piece of literature.

It might be considered a novel of hippy-dom in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1970s. It is also a book about the intrusion of supernatural elements into a modern community. And most of all, it is a contemplation of the ideas and attitudes that in real life created the Society for Creative Anachronism in that same Bay Area in that same era.

Peter Beagle, who enjoys a very high reputation among a certain group of fantasy readers, is in this novel perhaps not as careful to construct a unified work of art as in some others. There are a few weak spots in the book that support that analysis. However, one can also argue that Beagle has got countervailing strengths which allow him to deal with a number of themes in interesting ways. The novel is complicated and diverse, just like life.

My own interest in the book is unsurprisingly in the way he portrays the early SCA (as the League of Archaic Pleasures), not as it was but as it might have been. Beagle says a lot about the SCA, especially the SCA in its earliest days, and he is very fair in his portrayal. He shows the good the bad the mundane and the bizarre that can accompany a serious effort to revive historic activities and culture. Like the early SCA, Beagle's League of Archaic Pleasures exists for good reasons and bad. People have a variety of motivations, not all of them good, and not all of them contemptible either. If you are a long-time member of the SCA like I am, you recognize people thinking and talking about the activities they have taken up and the Society they have created, taking pleasure in them, and wondering whether what they're doing makes any sense. Beagle does not answer their question.

One can argue that this kind of social fantasy is dangerous, and Beagle is quite aware of that. He deals with the dangers by portraying them as age-old supernatural forces that reemerge from elsewhere to intervene in and exploit the favourable environment created by the existence of the League. Beagle is able to make the reader shiver almost as much as the characters in the book do when confronting unexpected and uncanny manifestations.

I was talking about this book to a friend who had had it unread on the shelf for years and realized that my younger friend might find this to be a historical novel about a certain time in California's history. It is after all nearly a half-century old.

Some of the flavor of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz

Here is the author summarizing a northern Republican looking back over the 1850s from just before the Civil War.

(Page 705):

As Seward remarked, the events of the mid-1850s threw into sharp relief how two different democracies, shaped by slavery, had arisen within the same nation. Although some southern franchises and systems representation were, in fact, more equal than others, slaveholders, normally wealthy slaveholders, held a commanding power in the courts and legislatures throughout the South. By contrast, power was more dispersed and most of the North, where ordinary farmers and even wage earners not only voted but also held state offices. Southern politics could brook no criticism of slavery for fear of destabilizing the system; northerners were free to write and say whatever they wanted to about any political subject. In Kansas, upholders of southern- style popular sovereignty had flagrantly rigged elections, violently seized control of polling places, and turned democracy into a mockery – and had gained federal sanction from a doughface Democrat bullied into compliance by Slave Power congressmen and cabinet members. When an elected northern Republican had the temerity to call the bullies to account, one of them cut him down and beat him mercilessly on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Fintan O'Toole and the imaginative foundations of political structures

From the Guardian:

Has Europe lost its hold on our collective imagination?

Fintan O'Toole

When I was a teenager in Dublin in the early 1970s, the phrase “We’re into Europe!” gained a peculiar currency. It was half-jokey but not really sardonic. You used it for good things that promised even better things – when a girl you fancied smiled at you or your team scored the first goal.

We were into Europe [the EEC].

...

But what did “Europe” mean in this sense? It was not a physical place. Ireland had, after all, always been part of Europe. And the EEC was not, in any case, Europe – it was a small fraction of the continent. But it wasn’t a mere set of trading and institutional arrangements either. It was a story, an imaginative fiction of the kind that Yuval Noah Harari evokes in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He makes the point that the capacity to believe in fictional constructs is a defining element of what makes us human, because without it we cannot co-operate with people we do not know: “At the heart of our mass co-operation networks, you will always find fictional stories that exist only in people’s collective imagination... There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”

One of these enabling fictions is “Europe”. It is a story that most of the central and western nations of the continent agreed to tell themselves and each other in order to deal with the legacies of the second world war and the cold war. And like all stories, it sustained itself, if not exactly with belief, then at least with a willing suspension of disbelief. The question now is whether it still exists at all, whether “Europe” has lost its hold on our collective imagination. All the evidence suggests that it has.

In a remarkable outburst reported last week by the Observer, the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, denounced the failure of his fellow EU leaders to agree on more than a voluntary plan to deal with the thousands of refugees and migrants landing on his country’s shores: “If this is your idea of Europe, keep it for yourself… you do not deserve to call yourself Europe. Either we have solidarity or we waste our time!”

In recent weeks, too, the appeals by leaders of Syriza in Greece to “our shared European values” have come to seem not just desperate but naive. It is as if the Greeks were appealing to medieval codes of chivalry or expecting Premier League footballers to respect 19th-century Corinthian values. “Europe” and “European values” seem, even as rhetorical gestures, entirely hollow. They are evoked now only to underline their absence.

One by one, the elements of the Europe story have fallen away. Democracy? ... The free movement of people? ... Thresholds of decency? Formulaic expressions of sympathy aside, there is little sense that the European Union as a whole finds it intolerable that hundreds of thousands of Greeks are living without electricity or that millions have no access to public health care.

The “ever closer union” envisaged by the EU’s founders has been replaced in effect by a deeply incoherent mixture of one-size-fits-all thinking and double standards. On the one hand, there is the absolute insistence that there can be no challenge to the technocratic formula for solving the eurozone crisis: austerity plus massive bank bailouts plus privatisation and the dismantling of social and labour protections.

On the other, there is a sharp moral and political divide between the creditor states and the debtor states, with a supposedly virtuous, prudent and righteous core beset by a feckless, reckless periphery. Or, if viewed from that periphery, between victimised citizens and a European political elite bent on punishing them for sins they did not commit on their own.

There is no “collective imagination” of the crisis – in one Europe, it is respectable, hard-working people being exploited by chaotic layabouts from the hot south; in the other, it is hard-pressed and equally hard-working people being sucked dry to feed foreign banks. The stories Europeans are telling themselves about what’s going on around them are not just different but mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic.

... the generation of leaders with memories of the Second World War – the likes of Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt, François Mitterand and Jacques Delors – passed on. With them has gone the urgency of imagining a European story, not as an abstract fable, but as a necessary alternative to the other European stories of Hitler and Stalin.

... In the technocratic mindset that has filled the vacuum where “Europe” used to be, the old story is just a sentimental romance. But there’s always a story – the old fable of democracy, solidarity and decency hasn’t been replaced by simple dull reality. What has taken its place is a narrative that poses as hard-headed realism but that is actually much more fantastical than the one that was constructed by the postwar generation. It has a wildly improbable plot in which years of austerity magically produce economic growth; mountains of public debt are paid off by shrinking economies; unaccountable experts know more about other countries than their own elected governments; and everyone lives happily ever after. The good are rewarded. The bad are punished but they repent in the end and return to the fold. There’s certainly a lot of imagination in this story. But its ability to sustain a collective enterprise among 28 stubbornly individual nations is negligible.

It is not entirely true, of course, that no one at all believes the old story of Europe. The last true believers are on rickety boats in the Mediterranean, trying to make their way to an imagined continent of compassion, solidarity and security. If they ever get to shore, they will find at best a grudging welcome. But those who purport to share their belief in what Europe means badly need some of their desperate optimism.

Violence prevention through public health methods

For a long time I've thought that public health perspectives and strategies were valuable in dealing with social problems -- or should be. Here's an excerpt in Salon from a book by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips, which discusses Gary Slutkin's informed implementation of that idea.

He returned to the United States and soon found himself asking, “What next?” He started hearing about kids shooting each other. “I was reading these horrific stories of ten- and twelve-year-old kids killing each other in the streets, and I asked people what was being done about it.” It was a simple question, one that might be posed by any concerned citizen. But it was a question that Slutkin would spend the next fifteen years attempting to answer.

Slutkin was stunned and disappointed by the so-called solutions that existed for treating violence. “We knew that punishment wasn’t a main driver of behavior,” he told us.“This was a problem that was stuck.” Discouraged, Slutkin began to study patterns of violent outbreaks and made a startling observation: Violence spreads much like infectious disease. “What I saw in the maps of violence I studied was characteristic clustering— just like the maps that I had seen in other epidemics, such as cholera.” That was Slutkin’s “aha moment.” “I thought, what if we started treating violence as a contagion?”

One of the biggest and most insidious plagues on our society is violence. Yet too often the discourse focuses on labeling the violent individuals as deviants or “evil.” What if, Slutkin wondered, we removed the labels and the judgment and began to treat violence objectively—like a disease that is transmitted and spread, much like the common cold? He joked, “You can’t even see bad under the microscope. There is no place in science for the concept of bad or the concept of enemy.”

His leap from A to B was slow. It took him about five years to reframe the problem of violence in his own mind. He lost himself in debate and discussions about the drivers of violence. He read all the latest reports and white papers. He became obsessed with the topic and with the ways he thought he could bring a “cure” to the world. This kind of obsessive knowledge of the system you’re trying to fix is essential for any hacker. You need to understand the rules in order to know how to break them or pioneer something different. Having one foot in the system you’re trying to change, and one foot outside to maintain perspective, allows you to maintain an insider/outsider mind-set and approach.

Slutkin’s background in health and his immersion in the field of violence prevention allowed him a unique vantage point to see through the bias of the system. For example, a lot of existing practice focused on punishment as a solution to violence, but based on his work in the health field, Slutkin knew punishment was never used as a tool for behavior change. A lot of those who advocated punishment reminded Slutkin of a historic period in epidemic history when people didn’t have an understanding of diseases and thought things like plague, leprosy, and smallpox were caused by bad people or “bad humors.” Slutkin told us how these misunderstandings often led people to blame, exclude, and punish the victim of disease, which caused additional suffering.

Seeing violence outside a moralistic lens required a radically different approach. But compounding systemic problems of poverty, racism, drugs, and other chronic issues impacting violent communities wasn’t efficient or actionable. Even choosing to work with political systems to regulate gun control could take decades and hadn’t seen much success to date, at least in the United States. So rather than wait for a magical silver-bullet solution, Slutkin realized he could help stop the spread of violence, in much the same way that he had stopped the spread of disease in Somalia.

From there, Slutkin’s organization, Cure Violence, was framed around a simple hypothesis: The most critical thing is to disrupt the transmission of violence.

Slutkin then developed a community role for “violence interrupters”: outreach workers called in to delicate situations where violence could occur, much like the community outreach workers he employed in the refugee camps. So if people in a particular neighborhood hear about a potential retaliatory shooting or a conflict brewing between gangs, they can call in violence interrupters, who go into the neighborhood and attempt to prevent the violence from being transmitted.

For example, a mom in Chicago discovered that her teenage son was loading weapons with his friends in their house. She was frantic and didn’t know what to do because it was her son and his friends, and she wasn’t going to call the police on her kid. But she needed someone to do something. So she called Cure Violence, and they sent over a few interrupters to talk to the teenagers. Over the course of a few hours, they were able to calm the group of kids. The interrupters know how to buy time and allow people to cool down; most important, they listen. A lot of their method is about the art of persuasion.

Somehow we slipped into the mainstream

Phil Paine writes:

One thing that has struck me repeatedly in recent years is that almost everything that I grew up with and experienced as an intimate world of "outsider" stuff is now the stuff of mainstream experience. ... Here's an example I ran across this week:

In Clive Gamble's Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History, there is a discussion about intentionality in theories of mind. Gamble discusses how the neurobiologist J.N. Cole distinguishes four levels of intentionality. Gamble illustrates the levels with these examples:

level 1: Dave, the re-enactor, believes he is a Crusader.

level 2: Dave believes that Ben, a fellow re-enactor, thinks he is a crusader.

level 3: Dave desires that Ben believe that Dave thinks he is a Crusader.

level 4: Dave knows that the re-enactment group is aware that Ben believes that Dave thinks he is a Crusader.

Apparently, medieval re-enactors are now so broadly familiar a feature of life that a scientist assumes that they are what you would call upon to illustrate a point in theory of mind, expecting the reader to visualize it instantly.

I remember, many years ago, when I first realized that you could tell whether a historian was of the generation that read science fiction or not, not just from specific references, but from their attitudes toward history.

A review of my book Charny's Men-at-Arms: Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War. Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 111. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1-9374390-5-7

From The Medieval Review

Muhlberger, Steven. Charny's Men-at-Arms: Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War. Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 111. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1-9374390-5-7.

Reviewed by Peter W. Sposato

Indiana University Kokomo

psposato@iuk.edu

Charny's Men-at-Arms: Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments and War is the latest in a series of important contributions made by Steven Muhlberger to the historical study of medieval chivalry. Muhlberger's previous publications have focused generally on "deeds of arms" (faits d'armes), whether in the guise of "chivalric sports," such as tournaments and jousts, or the bloody business of war. [1] In Charny's Men-at-Arms, Muhlberger continues his investigation of these major chivalric themes by focusing on a series of questions composed in the early 1350s by Geoffroi de Charny, a famous fourteenth century French knight. Charny's intended audience for his Questions were the members of the French royal chivalric Order of the Star: all strenuous, professional practitioners of chivalry. [2] Charny was himself a strenuous knight, who through his personal prowess and honorable conduct both on and off the battlefield climbed, during the course of a long and distinguished career, to the upper echelons of the chivalric hierarchy in France. As Muhlberger powerfully argues, however, Charny should be seen not only as a practitioner, but also as a "theorist of the life of chivalry," a "professor and follower of chivalry...[who] set out first and foremost to praise, to define, and to teach chivalry" (9, 14). Indeed, in addition to composing The Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War, he also wrote the Livre de chevalerie (Book of Chivalry) and the Livre Charny (Charny's Book). [3] Thus, unlike many contemporary writers on chivalry, he not only talked the talk, he decidedly walked the walk: participating in tournaments; commanding soldiers in battle; and fighting with distinction in numerous engagements during the Hundred Years War, including at the battle of Poitiers (1356) where he was killed defending the Oriflamme (the sacred battle banner of France).

Charny's Questions are therefore crucially important to our understanding of chivalric mentality and the practical application of chivalric ideas in Late Medieval France in particular, and Europe in general. Muhlberger successfully makes the case for the importance of Charny's Questions in the very first line of his introduction, writing "The Questions Concerning the Joust, Tournaments, and War is a lost classic work of European chivalry. It is the only record we have of a dramatic occasion when crucial questions on the nature of war and the proper conduct of the warrior's life--one definition of chivalry--were posed to an audience of experts, professional men-at-arms of rank and influence" (1). Indeed, Charny's Questions deal with major issues that arose in the three main contexts in which strenuous men-at-arms (i.e. men of rank and status who lived the "life of arms") operated: jousts, tournaments, and war. (14) The Questions, one hundred and thirty four in number and divided into three categories (jousts, tournaments, and war), range from the practical ("Charny asks: Knights joust with steel lances in an emprise. One knocks the other to the ground with a stroke of his lance. Will the one who has knocked the other to the ground and out of the saddle win the horse? How will it be judged by the law of arms?" [88]) to the abstract ("Charny asks: When should a battle be called a battle and why that rather than something else?" [90]). By offering such a broad array of questions, Charny highlights both the formal and the informal rules that governed chivalric conduct, while also providing historians with a sense of the motivations, ideals, and behaviors that underpinned the chivalric lifestyle.

Equally important is the reformative nature of Charny's Questions, which Muhlberger highlights and deftly places into the larger historical context, namely the efforts of King Jean II of France to restore order in his kingdom and to turn the tide of the Hundred Years War. Muhlberger argues the ultimate purpose of Charny's Questions, given the strong reform currents found therein and the timing of their composition, was to buttress such royal initiatives and, importantly, future royal legislation "on matters of arms" (22). No doubt Charny envisioned the Questions as a means to reform and reinvigorate his fellow men-at-arms who had thus far failed to fulfill the sacred function associated with their divine ordo: to protect the French people through their prowess and bravery. Given the clear importance of this work, it is striking that Muhlberger provides in Charny's Men-at-Arms the first and only complete translation of the Questions into English. [4]

Muhlberger has done both scholars and students a great service by adeptly translating the Questions, but Charny's Men-at-Arms is much more than a simple translation: it is also an informed and insightful historical study of the Questions, of the values and attitudes that underpinned them, of the larger historical context in which they were composed, and of their intended audience. Indeed, Muhlberger's study penetrates far beneath the surface of these questions to shed considerable light on the author, the cultural milieu that shaped him, and the social circles in which he operated. Muhlberger's analysis is concise and intelligent, providing insight into Charny's Questions as they relate to a multitude of significant topics, including the nature of chivalry, the laws of war, royal ordinances on war (like King Jean II's Reglement pour le gens de guerre [issued April 30, 1351]), and theoretical treatises on war (like those of Giovanni Legnano and Honore Bouvet). Similarly insightful is Muhlberger's analysis of Charny's Questions relating to "chivalric sport" (Chapter 3: "Charny's Jousters and Tourneyers"), the practical and legal concerns about chivalric conduct in war (Chapter 5: "What Men-at-Arms Worried About"), and honor (Chapter 6: "Honor and the Lore of Chivalry"). Considering the complexity of these topics and the quagmire of scholarship associated with them, Muhlberger deserves praise for adding a great deal to the discussion. Finally, readers, especially students, will also appreciate Muhlberger's efforts to make sense of Charny's tricky terminology (Chapter 4).

There can be little doubt that Charny was a prominent practitioner and theorist of chivalry in his own time and that his writings are crucial to our modern understanding of the dominant ideology that shaped the mentality and lifestyle of the medieval warrior elite. Therefore, it is all the more remarkable that Charny's Questions, which "can be read as a reflection of the priorities and opinions of one of the most experienced and renowned warriors of his time," has been largely neglected by other scholars (23). Fortunately, such an important work on medieval chivalry has been very well served by Muhlberger's translation and study. Indeed, Charny's Men-at-Arms makes an important contribution to the historical study of medieval chivalry, chivalric sports, and warfare. Muhlberger's analysis is succinct and approachable, making it accessible to students, while still providing enough scholarly rigor and insight to earn the approbation of seasoned historians. Charny's Men-at-Arms will undoubtedly facilitate considerable discussion and future research.

------ Notes: 1. Prominent among Muhlberger's other publications on chivalry are: Jousts and Tournaments: Charny and the Rules for Chivalric Sport in Fourteenth-Century France (Union City, CA: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2002); Deeds of Arms: Formal Combats in the Late Fourteenth Century (Union City, CA: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2005); Royal Jousts at the End of the Fourteenth Century (Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2012); The Combat of the Thirty (Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2013); The Twelve of England (Wheaton, IL: Freelance Academy Press, 2013).

2. Other important studies of Charny include: Craig Taylor, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 1999); idem, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); idem and Elspeth Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

3. In addition to the facing page translation listed above (op. cit., n. 2), see also the slimmed down version: Kaeuper and Kennedy, A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry: Geoffroi de Charny (University of Pennsylvania, 2005).

4. The questions concerning tournaments and jousts were translated and studied in Muhlberger's Jousts and Tournaments: Charny and the Rules for Chivalric Sport in Fourteenth-Century France (op. cit., n. 1).

"The gleaming cities of Earth...

...Where peace reigns, and hatred has no home."

These are the last lines of the episode "Muse" from the series "Star Trek: Voyager." The episode is characteristic of the series as a whole.


Voyager is not the most popular series in the Star Trek franchise. Like some of the other series – maybe all of them – it started out rather weak, and with characters that were not particularly well developed. But I have seen the series twice now and I think that once the series got rid of the character Kes and brought Seven of Nine into the story, about halfway through, it got a lot better. Sure, there are some fairly dumb and typically dumb stories, but there is some very good science fiction as well.


The episode "Muse" is an example of how serious television, if the creators take it seriously themselves,  can give writers and directors and actors space do all sorts of interesting stuff. The existence of Netflix shows us how some series work very well as they build on previous strengths.
 The characters of Voyager are very good examples of this. They aren't brilliantly done, but they are increasingly good as things progress. The character of the doctor by Robert Picardo and Seven of Nine by Jeri Ryan come to mind. In both cases, incomplete human beings turn into something else as they mature, and as is repeatedly emphasized by the development of the series as a whole, they have to be accepted by the flesh and blood human beings as equals. I think Ryan, whom many people think got the job sheerly on the basis of astonishing physical beauty, had a very tough assignment here and did it very well.

In the case of "Muse" we see an alien culture that seems to have developed to an era similar to archaic Greece. A local poet rescues one of the members of the Starfleet expedition and uses her story to create a drama far away better than anything that has existed in his culture before. It's not really a very believable story when it comes down to it  but it does make you think about how astonishing the effect of early Greek drama must've been. Classicists know this, but how often has this been explored on TV or in any other popular genre of fiction?

The quote I used for a title for this post indicates a final characteristic worth noting. It is spoken by the poet of the alien culture who has visualized Earth as the home of peace and perfection. According to the series, he's absolutely right. The 24th century according to the writers of the series is a time when the most optimistic dreams we have for our future have come true. Sometimes that optimism seems a bit overdone, but I would say that the whole dramatic interest of the series is that it argues that even when peace and concord have come to Earth, there will still be plenty of problems in applying all our best ideas to real-life situations.

A twelfth-century description of a judicial duel on horseback

A new site dedicated to the "Song of My Cid" -- the famous Spanish epic -- includes this interesting account of the judicial duel between three of the Carrion clan whose "enfantes" mistreated the Cid's daughters and three of the Cid's chief vassals. Note that the bad guys are unwilling to face the famously sharp swords wielded by the good guys, and bail out by running out of the boundaries. I can't help thinking that structurally this combat may have been like a tournament. Get up and go out to the field, infantes of Carrión,

it is time for you to fight like men,

the Campeador's men will not fail in anything.

If you come off he field well, you will have great honor,

if you are defeated, don't blame us,

for everyone knows that you went looking for it.-

Now the infantes of Carrión are repenting,

for what they did they are filled with regret,

they wouldn't have done it for all there is in Carrión.

All three of the Campeador's men are armed,

King don Alfonso went over to see them,

the Campeador's men said,

-We kiss your hands as king and lord,

that you be field judge for them and for us,

help us fairly, allow no wrongs.

Here the infantes of Carrión have their band,

we know not what they will plan or what they won't,

in your hand our lord placed us,

protect our rights, for the love of the Creator.-

At that moment the king said, -With all my heart and soul.-

They bring them their horses, good ones and swift,

they blessed the saddles and mount confidently,

the shields that are well reinforced at their necks,

in their hands they take the shafts of the sharp lances,

these three lances have their own pennons,

and around them many fine men.

They now went out to the field where the markers were.

All three of the Campeador's men are in agreement

that each one of them should strike his adversary hard.

Behold at the other end the infantes of Carrión,

very well accompanied, for there are many relatives.

The king gave them judges to tell them what's right and what isn't,

that they not dispute with them about who is or isn't right.

When they were in the field King don Alfonso spoke,

-Hear what I say to you, infantes of Carrión,

this combat you might have had in Toledo, but you refused.

These three knights of my Cid the Campeador

I brought them safely to the lands of Carrión,

be in the right, don't commit any wrongs,

for whoever wishes to commit a wrong, I will severely prohibit it,

in all my kingdom he will not be welcome.-

Now it begins to grieve the infantes of Carrión.

The judges and the king point out the markers,

all those around them left the field,

they showed clearly to all six of them how they are laid out,

that there whoever went outside the marker would be defeated.

All the people cleared out around there,

that they not approach the markers by any more than six lance lengths.

They drew lots for field position, now they divided the sun equally,

the judges got out from between them, they are face to face,

then the Cid's men came at the infantes of Carrión

and the infantes of Carrión at the Campeador's men,

each one of them concentrates on his target.

They clasp their shields before their hearts,

they lower their lances along with the pennons,

they lower their faces over the saddlebows,

they struck their horses with their spurs,

the ground shook where they were riding.

Each one of them has his mind on his target,

all three on three have now come together,

those that are nearby think that at that moment they will fall dead.

Pedro Bermúdez, he who challenged first,

met with Fernán González face to face,

they strike each other's shield fearlessly.

Fernán González pierced the shield of Pedro Bermúdez,

he hit only air, he did not strike flesh,

in two places his lance shaft broke cleanly apart.

Pedro Bermúdez remained steady, he did lose his balance from it,

he received one blow, but he dealt another,

he broke the boss of the shield, he split it in two,

he went through it entirely, it didn't protect him at all,

he stuck his lance into his chest, it didn't protect him at all.

Fernando wore three layers of mail, this helped him,

two of them broke on him and the third held up,

the padded tunic with the shirt and with the mail

out from his mouth the blood came, his saddle-girths broke,

not one of them was of any use to him,

over the croup of the horse he was thrown to the ground.

In this way the people thought he is fatally wounded.

The other dropped the lance and the sword he took in hand,

when Fernán González saw it, he recognized Tizón,

rather than wait for the blow he said, -I am defeated.-

The judges granted it, Pedro Bermúdez let him be.

Martín Antolínez and Diego González struck each other with their lances,

the blows were such that both lances broke.

Martín Antolínez took his sword in hand,

it lights up all the field, it is so clean and bright,

he gave him a blow, he hit him a glancing blow,

it broke away the top of the helmet,

it cut away all the helmet straps,

it tore off the mailed hood, and reached the coif,

the coif and the hood all were ripped away,

it cut the hairs on his head, and it reached well into the flesh,

one part fell to the ground and the other remained.

When precious Colada has struck this blow,

Diego González saw that he would not escape with his soul,

he turned his horse to face his opponent.

At that moment Martín Antolínez hit him with his sword,

he struck him broadside, with the cutting edge he did not hit him.

Diego González has sword in hand, but he does not

use it,at that moment the infante began to shout,

-Help me, God, glorious Lord, and protect me from this sword!-

He reined in his horse and, dodging the sword,

rode it outside the marker, Martín Antolínez remained on the field

. Then said the king, -Come join my company,

by all you have done, you have won this battle.-

The judges grant it, that he says the truth.

Both men have won, I'll tell you of Muño Gustioz,

how he fared against Asur González.

They strike each other on their shields with such great blows,

Asur González, rugged and valiant,

struck the shield of don Muño Gustioz,

through the shield he broke his armor,

the lance hit only air, for it did not strike flesh.

This blow struck, Muño Gustioz struck another one,

through the shield he broke his armor,

he broke through the shield's boss,

it could not protect him, he broke through his armor,

he hit him on one side, not near the heart,

he thrust his lance and the pennon right through his flesh,

pushing it through the other side an arm's length,

he gave it a twist, he tipped him from the saddle,

when he pulled back on the lance he threw him to the ground,

the shaft came out red as did the lance-tip and the pennon.

Everyone thinks that he is mortally wounded.

He repositioned his lance and halted over him, said Gonzalo Ansúrez,

-Don't strike him, for God's sake!

He is defeated since this is finished.-

Said the judges, -This we hear.-

The good king don Alfonso ordered the field cleared,

the arms that remained there he took them.

The Campeador's men left fully honored,

they won this combat, thanks to the Creator.

Great is the grief through the lands of Carrión.

The king sent my Cid's men at night,

so that they not be attacked or have fear.

Like prudent men they ride day and night,

behold them in Valencia with my Cid the Campeador,

they left the infantes of Carrión in disgrace,

they have fulfilled their duty that their lord demanded of them,

my Cid the Campeador was pleased by this.

Great is the shame of the infantes of Carrión,

whoever scorns a good lady and then abandons her

may such befall him or even worse.

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991, by Eric J. Hobsbawm

It has been almost a quarter-century since Eric Hobsbawm the daring step of writing history from the outbreak of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And only now am I getting around to reading it.

This is not a book that I think I would ever read from cover to cover. It is a long one. However, it is so interesting in its many details and its many passages of analysis that I got a lot out of it even just reading a few pages at a time more or less at random.

Here's one fact of 1 million: Hobsbawm points out that of the leaders of the various countries of the world in 1970, a year when baby boomers were  coming of age, almost all were people who had been adults at the end or even at the beginning of the First World War. No wonder there was a lack of sympathy between the establishment and the young rebels! It is typical of Hobsbawm's style that he illustrates the point thus: professors of economic history in France were people who had grown up on or vacationed on farms, and had a pretty good idea of how agriculture worked. They faced students in their classes with no idea what  milkmaids did or the usefulness of manure piles to a working farmer.
Anecdotal history? I love it nonetheless.

Peregrine: Secundus, by Avram Davidson

I recently re-read Peregrine: Secundus, the second book in what seems like an unfinished series by science fiction and fantasy writer Avram Davidson.  Davidson, who seems to have been a classically-educated eccentric, judging by what he chose to write and what he actually produced, delights me.  The blurb on the Berkley Fantasy edition (above, 1981) is for once fairly accurate, "[a] journey to the lighter side of the Dark Ages," though it understates the comedic effects that Davidson achieves.  He knew a tremendous amount about late antiquity and poured it all in to this book, creating a world which is not quite our own past, one  with dozens of small-time Roman Emperors, a plethora of  fiercely competing Christian sects, and such remnants of the pagan past as the Sphinx outwitted by Theseus, now down on her luck.

Is this  book worth your efforts to hunt it (and its prequel Peregrine: Primus) up?

Some samples:

(A member of the Weefolk explains their situation.)

A Weewoman was speaking now, speaking soft and low: he listened. Och, the Gotha push down the Roma and the Roma push down the Kelta And the Kelta push down the Weefolk; thu knowedd this; thu knowedd the Weefolk be we. Indeed they were wee, though scarcely hop-o'-my-thumb wee; Perry realized that if one had to live in holes in the rock, it was a great help to be wee… We study, och, what arts we may, here in the greeny wood… We ferm not for why would we ferm? So they 'ould take our crops, och, and ot last, our lahnd? If we didt ought in metal 'ork, 'ould they not see and smell the forge-smoke and hear the clong of metal, metal-on? We gather the small fruits o' the soil, the thucket, the forest and the fens… The scronnel herbs ond the rune-thorns, the rune- roots ond the magic mosses… and we 'ork and that sort of wise… We spin spells, we weave webs, we moil in magic; these be our arts, such are our crops, in this wise 'lone do we ferm and delve and forge… 

(Christian sectaries react to apparent pagan magic.)

The Neognostic Heterodox Heretical Church thought of almost everything.

What was left of the congregation by this time (a part it had already fled) uttered sundry small anathemas (major anathemas, as was well known, could be issued only by members of the episcopate or by lower clergy under special episcopal license), made the sign of the cross in every conceivable manner, and in some few cases stooped to pick pebbles which they tossed up as a sort of surrogate stoning (indeed, only fairly recently, a sect in Syria had advanced the doctrine that stoning itself might be considered in itself a Sacrament; but they had all been stoned); these congregants may or may not have heard of the law of gravity under that or any other name but there were, very, very shortly, irritated little yelps in various regional accents, of, "Dawn't play the fool, now, I a'n't no fooking eretic, bounce another o' them off me pate and I'll have at yez, see if I dawn't;" and very similar disaffected outcries.

(The hero rides through a forest.)

Forests of oak, forests of pine, oak for goodly furnitures and the keels and timbers and the great ribs of ships, oak for wine barrels. Pine for tar and planks for said ships and pitch to caulk them with. Pine for resin to pour into the oak barrels to keep the air from the wine and so keep the wine from souring. Pine for kindling for a quick flame; oak for the great glowing beads of coal like lumps of amber, beds of glowing coals to last the night and Roast the ox. A many generation of pine planks would come and go in any one boat and ship, but the oak timbers were forever. Well, almost forever: when the oak went, the vessels went, too. For quickness and haste in rapid service: pine. For endurance, oak.

(One of the augurs makes a mistake.) 

 Very bad form, and enough to have softened the hard heart even of Cato of the Elder, whose coarse comment that "he did not understand how two augurs could pass each other without bursting out laughing," had never been forgiven by them: and never would.

The Crusades: defensive wars?

Recently experts on the Crusades have got a reasonable amount of press on whether the Crusades should be condemned or not. One statement made by several of them is that the Crusades were justifiable as defensive wars against Muslim aggression.

Iff you look at maps illustrating the course the Crusades, you usually will see a fairly clear back-and-forth boundary between Christian ruled countries and Muslim ruled countries.

Yet I have a hard time taking this argument all that seriously because I have my strong doubts that warriors in the 11^thcentury, whatever the ethnic or religious background, cared whether or not a war was “offensive” or “defensive”.

If you look at the 11^th century, the century that ended with the First Crusade, and you will find a large number of major wars that resulted in new rulers being imposed on the previous population, which sometimes practiced a different religion from the conquerors. Here is an incomplete list straight out of my head, done without referring to any reference works so there might be some mistakes. It is in roughly chronological order.

• Conquest of England by Knut (Canute)
•  Conquest of Norway by Canute
•  Conquest of England by William
•  Conquest of southern Italy and Sicily by various Normans
• Conquest of Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks
• Conquest of Central Spain by Castile
• First Crusade

Similarities

• It is extremely unlikely that any of the conquering armies saw themselves as ethnically or nationally unified. In some cases it is quite clear that they were ethnically heterogenous.
• People were willing to travel long distances to take part in wars that might result in conquest. 
• Also, it is pretty clear that warriors believed that if they were successful in their war they were entitled to all the wealth that they could confiscate, whether that might be lordship over wide territories for the highest ranking and most successful or whether it might be plunder, which just about everybody expected and hoped for.

Using this perspective, The First Crusade doesn’t seem to be all that different from the other wars listed here.

That doesn’t mean other reasons for wars were not present. William the Conqueror seems have considered himself to have been legitimately named as Edward the Confessor’s heir for the kingdom of England. Some of his followers may have gotten a bit of a thrill from fighting for the right of William to be King. But they did not go home after Hastings to sit around talking about how they had done the right thing. No, they got as much territory and profit out of William’s successful war as they possibly could. Also, the Pope did give William a papal banner to take to England as a sign of ecclesiastical support and a certain amount of religious justification was present in some of these other wars as well. Some people did go home after the first crusade and talk about how they done the right thing. But what plunder could be acquired was always part of the picture. It was a rare warrior – were there any? – who did not think that plunder was a legitimate source of profit in any war.

Visualizing these large groups of armed men roaming the countryside stealing stuff and conquering countries makes me sceptical that the big movements on the historical maps of the Crusades can be explained as “defensive wars.” Looking back over the larger sweep of history I wonder whether “defensive wars” were an important phenomenon in most people’s view of the world before the 20^th century. Certainly professional warriors have tended to look at war as a normal part of life, not some terrible breakdown of society as many people feel today. Perhaps a dislike for war was stronger among non-warrior groups such as the peasantry or the clergy (especially monks) and of course large numbers of women. But among the people who led wars and fought wars, did they really think about offense or defence as an important category affecting their decision-making?

The American Civil War as a global struggle

Excerpted “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War”by Don H. Doyle in a recent Salon:

While the war was being fought on the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, another contest was waged overseas. The Confederacy sought international recognition and alliances to secure independence, and the Union was determined not to let that happen. “No battle, not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness,” one historian claimed, “was more important than the contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion.” The history of Civil War diplomacy—that is, the formal negotiations among governments and the strategies surrounding them—has been told and told well. This book turns to the less familiar forum of public opinion, which was filled with clamorous debate for four years. It took place in print (in newspapers, pamphlets, and books) as well as oratory (in meeting halls, pubs, lodges, union halls, and parliaments). Wherever free speech was stifled, as it was in France, the debate continued over private dinner tables and at cafés. Whatever one’s views, there was general agreement that the American question mattered greatly to the world and to the future.

The Union and Confederacy each hired special agents, who usually operated under cover of some kind. They were typically veteran journalists and political operators whose job it was, as one of them deftly put it, to give “a right direction to public sentiment” and correct “erroneous” reports that favored the other side. Some bribed editors and hired journalists, while others published their own pamphlets, books, and even newspapers. Few were above planting rumors or circulating damaging stories, and some of what they produced can only be described as propaganda and misinformation. But that was only part of the story of what was more often a sophisticated appeal to ideology and values.

In today’s parlance the diplomatic duel that took place during America’s Civil War can be understood as a contest of smart power, the adroit combination of hard-power coercion with soft-power appeals to basic values. Hard-power diplomacy typically involves the threat or use of military force, but can also include economic coercion (blockades, embargoes) and inducements (low tariffs, commercial monopolies). The employment of soft power involves persuasion and information, but the underlying strategy is to appeal to the fundamental values and interests of the foreign country, to demonstrate that the two countries in question share common aspirations. Soft power resides in “the power of attraction,” not in crude propagandizing.

The Union won and the South lost this diplomatic duel abroad not because the Union possessed an obviously more appealing message. To the contrary, at the outset many foreigners found the South’s narrative of valiant rebellion against the North’s oppressive central government far more attractive. Slavery had never disqualified a nation from acceptance into the family of nations. The United States and most European powers had at some point sanctioned slavery with no loss of status under international law. Confederate emissaries abroad were nonetheless instructed to avoid discus.sion of slavery as the motive for secession, and they happily pointed to Lincoln’s own promises to protect slavery in the Southern states as proof that this was not the issue. Southern diplomats crafted an appeal that evoked widely admired liberal principles of self-government and free trade. The conflict, they told the world, was one arising naturally between industrial and agrarian societies, not freedom and slavery. The industrial North wanted high protective tariffs, while the agrarian South wanted free trade with Eur. Southern leaders had rehearsed their foreign policy for years, and they began their rebellion fully confident that Europe would bow to “King Cotton.” “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond asked in 1858. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.

The American crisis not only heartened the enemies of democracy; it also emboldened them to invade the Western Hemisphere, to topple governments, install European monarchs, and reclaim lost American empires. Suddenly, the Civil War rendered the Monroe Doctrine toothless. Republican regimes in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, not least, the United States were suddenly vulnerable to imperialist aggression, including nefarious plots to install European princes and recolonize their lands.

The most audacious of European schemes was Napoleon III’s Grand Design for  Latin Catholic empire. It began with an allied invasion of Mexico late in 1861 and led to the installation of the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Grand Design went far beyond Mexico to envision the unification of the “Latin race” in America and Europe, under the auspices of the French, and to reverse the advances of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and egalitarian democracy in the Western Hemisphere.As its bid to win support in Britain foundered, some thought due to popular antislavery sentiment, the Confederacy sought to align itself with Napoleon III by adopting a Latin strategy that would make common cause with the French and the Catholic Church against the “Puritan fanatics” of the North. The Confederacy sent emissaries to the vatican, appealing to Pope Pius IX, the archenemy of republicanism, to bless their “holy war” against the “infidels” of the North. They also contrasted the North’s “mobocracy” to the traditions of patrician rule among the South’s European-style gentry. Southerners even encouraged Europeans to think the Confederacy might prefer a monarchical form of government, perhaps under a European prince. on several occasions Southern leaders proposed some kind of permanent league with, or protectorate under, France, Britain, or Spain. All this portended far more than mere separation under a new flag.

Southerners also took pains to emphasize they were sympathetic with European designs to restore monarchy and Catholic authority in Latin America. Confederate diplomats were instructed to repudiate the South’s earlier imperialist ambitions for a tropical empire in Latin America. They assured Europeans that with an independent South, expansion would no longer be necessary.

... At the end of the war, Eugène Pelletan, a leading French republican, expressed eloquently what the American question had meant to the world: “America is not only America, one place or one race more on the map, it is yet and especially the model school of liberty. If against all possibility it had perished, with it would fall a great experiment."

Some readers may feel such unqualified admiration of America was undeserved. The Union, everyone knows, had been painfully slow to embrace emancipation, and America’s deeply ingrained racial prejudice would long outlast slavery. These were only some of the egregious flaws in the nation foreign admirers hailed as the Great Republic.

Yet we miss something vitally important if we view Pelletan and other foreigners who saw America as the vanguard of hope as naive or misguided. Foreign admirers typically regarded the United States not as some exceptional city upon a hill, but as exactly the opposite: an imperfect but viable model of society based on universal principles of natural rights and theories of government that originated in Europe but had thus far failed to succeed there. In the 1860s they were horrified to see government of the people seriously imperiled in the one place it had achieved its most enduring success. Abraham Lincoln was hardly boasting when he referred to America as the “last best hope of earth.” His was a forlorn plea to defend America’s—and the world’s—experiment in popular government.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it appeared to many that the world was moving away from democracy and equality toward repressive govern- ment and the expansion of slavery. Far from being pushed off the world’s stage by human progress, slavery, aristocratic rule, and imperialism seemed to be finding new life and aggressive new defenders. The Confederate South had no intention of putting slavery on the road to extinction; its very purpose in breaking away was to extend and perpetuate slavery— forever, according to its constitution. Had the Confederacy succeeded, it would have meant a new birth of slavery, rather than freedom, possibly throughout the Americas, and it would have been a serious blow to the experiment in egalitarian democracy throughout the Atlantic world.

Long after the defeat of the Confederacy, enemies of liberal, egalitarian society had every reason to look back on America’s Civil War with regret. In 1933, during an after-dinner discussion in Munich, Adolf Hitler bemoaned the South’s defeat in chilling terms: “The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.” Hitler’s reading of America’s history might have been grotesquely flawed, but his outburst echoed the same refrains against the evils of “extreme democracy” and “fanatical egalitarianism” heard in the 1860s.