Authenticity

I don't consider the Society for Creative Anachronism to be neo-primitivism, exactly, but what Mr. Potter says about authenticity hits close to home.  I've been thinking of authenticity as a near-religious term for quite a while now:

The moral imperative driving  this is what we can call the quest for authenticity. This is the search for meaning in a world that is alienating, spiritually disenchanted, socially flattened, technologically obsessed, and thoroughly commercialized. To that end, “authenticity” has become the go-to buzzword in our moral slang, underwriting everything from our condo purchases and vacation stops to our friendships and political allegiances.

There are two major problems with this.

The first is that authenticity turns out to be just another form of hyper-competitive status seeking, exacerbating many of the very problems it was designed to solve. Second, and even more worrisome, is that the legitimate fear of the negative effects of technological evolution has given way to a paranoid rejection of science and even reason itself.

Modernity, as a civilization, sits at the confluence of secularism, liberalism, and capitalism, and it is not everyone’s cup of coffee. The promise of the authentic is that it will help us carve out a space where true community can flourish outside of the cash nexus and in a way that treads lightly upon the Earth. More often than not, this manifests itself through nostalgia, for a misremembered time when the air was cleaner, the water purer, and communities more nurturing.

It was never going to work out that way. From its very origins, the quest for the authentic was motivated by that most ancient and base of human urges, the desire for status. The authenticity craze of the past decade is simply the latest version of what the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, called “conspicuous display.” Veblen was mostly concerned with the pretensions of the failing aristocracy and their obsession with obsolete endeavours such as hunting, swordfighting, and learning useless languages. Yet his basic insight – that consumption is first and foremost about social distinction – remains the key to decoding our consumer driven cultural shivers.

As recently as a decade and a half ago, organic food was the almost exclusive bastion of earnest former hippies and young nature lovers — the sort of people who like to make their own granola, don’t like to shave, and use rock crystals as a natural deodorant. But by the turn of the millennium, organic was making inroads into more mainstream precincts, driven by an increasing concern over globalization, the health effects of pesticide use, and the environmental impact of industrial farming. The shift to organic seemed the perfect alignment of private and public benefit.

In the past few juice cleansing has become a 5 billion dollar industry in the U.S., appealing to those who want to lose weight and “detox” their bodies.

It also became an essential element of any “authentic” lifestyle. Yet as it became more popular, the rumblings of discontent within the organic movement became harder to ignore. What was once a niche market had become mainstream, and with massification came the need for large-scale forms of production that, in many ways, are indistinguishable from the industrial farming techniques that organic was supposed to replace. Once Walmart started selling organic food, the terms of what counts as authentic shifted from a choice between organic and conventional food to a dispute between supporters of the organic movement and those who advocate a far more restrictive standard for authenticity, namely, locally grown food.

But when it comes to shopping locally, how local is local enough? If we want to live a low-impact, environmentally conscious lifestyle, how far do we need to go?

The short answer is, you need to go as far as necessary to maintain your position in the status hierarchy.


The problem is you can only be authentic as long as most of the people around you are not, which has its own built-in radicalizing dynamic. You start out getting an organic-vegetable delivery service once a month, then you try growing chickens in your urban backyard. Then the next thing you know, your friends have gone all-in on paleo, eschewing grains, starches, and processed sugar and learning how to bow-hunt wild boar on weekends.


The Whole Food chain plans to start rolling out a system that ranks fruits and vegetables as “good,” ”better” or “best” based on the supplier’s farming practices.

There’s a deeper issue here though, which is that the problem with radicalization is that it breeds extremism. It is one thing to play at being anti-modern by eating only wild game, becoming an expert in axe-throwing, or building a whisky still in your backyard. It is something else entirely to push that ethos into a thoroughgoing rejection of science, technology, and reason itself.

Yet this is where we have ended up. The neoprimitivist logic of authenticity has pushed its way into every corner of how we think, act and consume. 

More (and more chilling) German folk tales

This Salon article talks about "darker-than-Grimm stories" recently discovered in a German archive and now published in English translation.  That cutesy description rang alarm bells for me, but to my surprise the interview with the translator, Maria Tatar, is really substantial. Congrats to the interviewer, Laura Miller, for doing such a good  job.

Some excerpts:

[MILLER] I was struck by several themes that came up repeatedly in these tales. There are a few stories where parents turn against their son because he’s too strong. It doesn’t seem that different from the more familiar stories where the stepmother takes against the daughter who’s prettier than her. We’re always hearing about the wicked stepmother and how she hates Snow White for being the fairest of all. That is a real generational rivalry, but the same rivalry happens between fathers and sons, except it’s about virility or strength instead of beauty. I was fascinated to see that there is a male equivalent of the beauty rivalry.

[TATAR] It’s remarkable, in one particular story, how the parents team up against the son. You would think they would make his strength work for them. Instead, they try to do him in! That’s another great difference between Schönwerth and the Grimms. For the Grimms, it is always the evil stepmother. The fathers tend to be exonerated. Sometimes they just go along with the stepmother, and they’re not described as complicit in any way, just overpowered by this demonic wife. Whereas in Schönwerth, there’s the story of Prince Goldilocks, where the father sends the boy into the wilderness and wants to kill him. That is unheard of in the Grimms’ tales.

  [MILLER] You point out that we have this one-sided view of the way gender works in fairy tales partly because of how the Grimms edited their collection, but don’t you also feel that partly it’s because over time, as the oral storytellers became overwhelmingly female, they also might have focused on female characters more? 

 [TATAR] I’m not so sure. The Grimms picked and chose their stories, and I think that they just had some sort of deep reverence for fathers. Fathers could do no wrong for them. For example, take the story of Cinderella, where the villain is the evil stepmother. But there’s another version of Cinderella that circulated in the 19th century that is called “Donkeyskin” or “Thousandfurs,” and in that one it’s a father who loves his daughter too much. When his wife dies, he wants to replace her with his daughter. So you have a father who is totally out of control. Then he disappears in the course of the 19th century. I guess you’re right, I shouldn’t put it all on the Grimms. It could be part of a general trend toward focusing on evil women. 

[MILLER] Reading this collection made me realize the degree to which intergenerational conflict in fairy tales is not just about the female characters but is a really pervasive theme. It’s about the child’s awareness that as much as their parents might love them, parents also know that their children will supplant them. Children can be threatening in this weird way, as well as being very much desired at times. The parents will fade as the children come into strength, and so the children also represent the parents’ own deaths. So there’s this ambivalence to the relationship. I didn’t really see that before because it had always been presented in such a gendered way in the more familiar fairy tales, presented as a conflict between women about desirability as opposed to something even more universal than that. 

 [TATAR] Fairy tales are about the hyper-dysfunctional family. Think of “Jack the Giant-Killer”: The giant is a proxy for the father. There’s always something terrible going on, these domestic dramas that are larger than life and twice as unnatural. 

[MILLER] What do you in particular find so compelling about this form?

[TATAR] What I really love about fairy tales is that they get us talking about matters that are just so vital to us. I think about the story of Little Red Riding Hood and how originally it was about the predator-prey relationship, and then it becomes a story about innocence and seduction for us. We use that story again and again to work out these very tough issues that we have to face. My hope is that this volume will get people talking about not just the stories and the plot but the underlying issues. >

Timbuktu

Gotta see this film.

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?

Bronze-age Iraq today -- thanks to Salon