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Charles’ Personal Rule: A Stable or Tyrannised England?

By Daniel Hawker — 1 month ago

Within discussions of England’s political history, the most famous moments are known and widely discussed – the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Cromwell Protectorate of the 1650s spring immediately to mind. However, the renewal of an almost-mediaeval style of monarchical absolutism, in the 1630s, has proven both overlooked and underappreciated as a period of historical interest. Indeed, Charles I’s rule without Parliament has faced an identity crisis amongst more recent historians – was it a period of stability or tyranny for the English people?

If we are to consider the Personal Rule as a period in enough depth, the years leading up to the dissolution of Charles’ Third Parliament (in 1629) must first be understood. Succeeding his father James I in 1625, Charles’ personal style and vision of monarchy would prove to be incompatible with the expectations of his Parliaments. Having enjoyed a strained but respectful relationship with James, MPs would come to question Charles’ authority and choice of advisors in the coming years. Indeed, it was Charles’ stubborn adherence to the Divine Right of King’s doctrine, writing once that “Princes are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone”, that meant that he believed compromise to be defeat, and any pushback against him to be a sign of disloyalty.

Constitutional tensions between King and Parliament proved the most contentious of all issues, especially regarding the King’s role in taxation. At war with Spain between 1625 – 1630 (and having just dissolved the 1626 Parliament), Charles was lacking in funds. Thus, he turned to non-parliamentary forms of revenue, notably the Forced Loan (1627) – declaring a ‘national emergency’, Charles demanded that his subjects all make a gift of money to the Crown. Whilst theoretically optional, those who refused to pay were often imprisoned; a notable example would be the Five Knights’ Case, in which five knights were imprisoned for refusing to pay (with the court ruling in Charles’ favour). This would eventually culminate in Charles’ signing of the Petition of Right (1628), which protected the people from non-Parliamentary taxation, as well as other controversial powers that Charles chose to exercise, such as arrest without charge, martial law, and the billeting of troops.

The role played by George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was also another major factor that contributed to Charles’ eventual dissolution of Parliaments in 1629. Having dominated the court of Charles’ father, Buckingham came to enjoy a similar level of unrivalled influence over Charles as his de facto Foreign Minister. It was, however, in his position as Lord High Admiral, that he further worsened Charles’ already-negative view of Parliament. Responsible for both major foreign policy disasters of Charles’ early reign (Cadiz in 1625, and La Rochelle in 1627, both of which achieved nothing and killed 5 to 10,000 men), he was deemed by the MP Edward Coke to be “the cause of all our miseries”. The duke’s influence over Charles’ religious views also proved highly controversial – at a time when anti-Calvinism was rising, with critics such as Richard Montague and his pamphlets, Buckingham encouraged the King to continue his support of the leading anti-Calvinist of the time, William Laud, at the York House Conference in 1626.

Heavily dependent on the counsel of Villiers until his assassination in 1628, it was in fact, Parliament’s threat to impeach the Duke, that encouraged Charles to agree to the Petition of Right. Fundamentally, Buckingham’s poor decision-making, in the end, meant serious criticism from MPs, and a King who believed this criticism to be Parliament overstepping the mark and questioning his choice of personnel.

Fundamentally by 1629, Charles viewed Parliament as a method of restricting his God-given powers, one that had attacked his decisions, provided him with essentially no subsidies, and forced him to accept the Petition of Right. Writing years later in 1635, the King claimed that he would do “anything to avoid having another Parliament”. Amongst historians, the significance of this final dissolution is fiercely debated: some, such as Angela Anderson, don’t see the move as unusual; there were 7 years for example, between two of James’ Parliaments, 1614 and 1621 – at this point in English history, “Parliaments were not an essential part of daily government”. On the other hand, figures like Jonathan Scott viewed the principle of governing without Parliament officially as new – indeed, the decision was made official by a royal proclamation.

Now free of Parliamentary constraints, the first major issue Charles faced was his lack of funds. Lacking the usual taxation method and in desperate need of upgrading the English navy, the King revived ancient taxes and levies, the most notable being Ship Money. Originally a tax levied on coastal towns during wartime (to fund the building of fleets), Charles extended it to inland counties in 1635 and made it an annual tax in 1636. This inclusion of inland towns was construed as a new tax without parliamentary authorisation. For the nobility, Charles revived the Forest Laws (demanding landowners produce the deeds to their lands), as well as fines for breaching building regulations.

The public response to these new fiscal expedients was one of broad annoyance, but general compliance. Indeed, between 1634 and 1638, 90% of the expected Ship Money revenue was collected, providing the King with over £1m in annual revenue by 1637. Despite this, the Earl of Warwick questioned its legality, and the clerical leadership referred to all of Charles’ tactics as “cruel, unjust and tyrannical taxes upon his subjects”.However, the most notable case of opposition to Ship Money was the John Hampden case in 1637. A gentleman who refused to pay, Hampden argued that England wasn’t at war and that Ship Money writs gave subjects seven months to pay, enough time for Charles to call a new Parliament. Despite the Crown winning the case, it inspired greater widespread opposition to Ship Money, such as the 1639-40 ‘tax revolt’, involving non-cooperation from both citizens and tax officials. Opposing this view, however, stands Sharpe, who claimed that “before 1637, there is little evidence at least, that its [Ship Money’s] legality was widely questioned, and some suggestion that it was becoming more accepted”.

In terms of his religious views, both personally and his wider visions for the country, Charles had been an open supporter of Arminianism from as early as the mid-1620s – a movement within Protestantism that staunchly rejected the Calvinist teaching of predestination. As a result, the sweeping changes to English worship and Church government that the Personal Rule would oversee were unsurprisingly extremely controversial amongst his Calvinist subjects, in all areas of the kingdom. In considering Charles’ religious aims and their consequences, we must focus on the impact of one man, in particular, William Laud. Having given a sermon at the opening of Charles’ first Parliament in 1625, Laud spent the next near-decade climbing the ranks of the ecclesiastical ladder; he was made Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1626, of London in 1629, and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Now 60 years old, Laud was unwilling to compromise any of his planned reforms to the Church.

The overarching theme of Laudian reforms was ‘the Beauty of Holiness’, which had the aim of making churches beautiful and almost lavish places of worship (Calvinist churches, by contrast, were mostly plain, to not detract from worship). This was achieved through the restoration of stained-glass windows, statues, and carvings. Additionally, railings were added around altars, and priests began wearing vestments and bowing at the name of Jesus. However, the most controversial change to the church interior proved to be the communion table, which was moved from the middle of the room to by the wall at the East end, which was “seen to be utterly offensive by most English Protestants as, along with Laudian ceremonialism generally, it represented a substantial step towards Catholicism. The whole programme was seen as a popish plot”. 

Under Laud, the power and influence wielded by the Church also increased significantly – a clear example would be the fact that Church courts were granted greater autonomy. Additionally, Church leaders became evermore present as ministers and officials within Charles’ government, with the Bishop of London, William Juxon, appointed as Lord Treasurer and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1636. Additionally, despite already having the full backing of the Crown, Laud was not one to accept dissent or criticism and, although the severity of his actions has been exaggerated by recent historians, they can be identified as being ruthless at times. The clearest example would be the torture and imprisonment of his most vocal critics in 1637: the religious radicals William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick.

However successful Laudian reforms may have been in England (and that statement is very much debatable), Laud’s attempt to enforce uniformity on the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the 1630s would see the emergence of a united Scottish opposition against Charles, and eventually armed conflict with the King, in the form of the Bishops’ Wars (1639 and 1640). This road to war was sparked by Charles’ introduction of a new Prayer Book in 1637, aimed at making English and Scottish religious practices more similar – this would prove beyond disastrous. Riots broke out across Edinburgh, the most notable being in St Giles’ Cathedral (where the bishop had to protect himself by pointing loaded pistols at the furious congregation. This displeasure culminated in the National Covenant in 1638 – a declaration of allegiance which bound together Scottish nationalism with the Calvinist faith.

Attempting to draw conclusions about Laudian religious reforms very many hinges on the fact that, in terms of his and Charles’ objectives, they very much overhauled the Calvinist systems of worship, the role of priests, and Church government, and the physical appearance of churches. The response from the public, however, ranging from silent resentment to full-scale war, displays how damaging these reforms were to Charles’ relationship with his subjects – coupled with the influence wielded by his wife Henrietta Maria, public fears about Catholicism very much damaged Charles’ image, and meant religion during the Personal Rule was arguably the most intense issue of the period. In judging Laud in the modern-day, the historical debate has been split: certain historians focus on his radical uprooting of the established system, with Patrick Collinson suggesting the Archbishop to have been “the greatest calamity ever visited upon by the Church of England”, whereas others view Laud and Charles as pursuing the entirely reasonable, a more orderly and uniform church.

Much like how the Personal Rule’s religious direction was very much defined by one individual, so was its political one, by Thomas Wentworth, later known as the Earl of Strafford. Serving as the Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1632 to 1640, he set out with the aims of ‘civilising’ the Irish population, increasing revenue for the Crown, and challenging Irish titles to land – all under the umbrella term of ‘Thorough’, which aspired to concentrate power, crackdown on oppositions figures, and essentially preserve the absolutist nature of Charles’ rule during the 1630s.

Regarding Wentworth’s aims toward Irish Catholics, Ian Gentles’ 2007 work The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms argues the friendships Wentworth maintained with Laud and also with John Bramhall, the Bishop of Derry, “were a sign of his determination to Protestantize and Anglicize Ireland”.Devoted to a Catholic crackdown as soon as he reached the shores, Wentworth would subsequently refuse to recognise the legitimacy of Catholic officeholders in 1634, and managed to reduce Catholic representation in Ireland’s Parliament, by a third between 1634 and 1640 – this, at a time where Catholics made up 90% of the country’s population. An even clearer indication of Wentworth’s hostility to Catholicism was his aggressive policy of land confiscation. Challenging Catholic property rights in Galway, Kilkenny and other counties, Wentworth would bully juries into returning a King-favourable verdict, and even those Catholics who were granted their land back (albeit only three-quarters), were now required to make regular payments to the Crown. Wentworth’s enforcing of Charles’ religious priorities was further evidenced by his reaction to those in Ireland who signed the National Covenant. The accused were hauled before the Court of Castle Chamber (Ireland’s equivalent to the Star Chamber) and forced to renounce ‘their abominable Covenant’ as ‘seditious and traitorous’. 

Seemingly in keeping with figures from the Personal Rule, Wentworth was notably tyrannical in his governing style. Sir Piers Crosby and Lord Esmonde were convicted by the Court of Castle Chamber for libel for accusing Wentworth of being involved in the death of Esmond’s relative, and Lord Valentina was sentenced to death for “mutiny” – in fact, he’d merely insulted the Earl.

In considering Wentworth as a political figure, it is very easy to view him as merely another tyrannical brute, carrying out the orders of his King. Indeed, his time as Charles’ personal advisor (1639 onwards) certainly supports this view: he once told Charles that he was “loose and absolved from all rules of government” and was quick to advocate war with the Scots. However, Wentworth also saw great successes during his time in Ireland; he raised Crown revenue substantially by taking back Church lands and purged the Irish Sea of pirates. Fundamentally, by the time of his execution in May 1641, Wentworth possessed a reputation amongst Parliamentarians very much like that of the Duke of Buckingham; both men came to wield tremendous influence over Charles, as well as great offices and positions.

In the areas considered thus far, it appears opposition to the Personal Rule to have been a rare occurrence, especially in any organised or effective form. Indeed, Durston claims the decade of the 1630s to have seen “few overt signs of domestic conflict or crisis”, viewing the period as altogether stable and prosperous. However, whilst certainly limited, the small amount of resistance can be viewed as representing a far more widespread feeling of resentment amongst the English populace. Whilst many actions received little pushback from the masses, the gentry, much of whom were becoming increasingly disaffected with the Personal Rule’s direction, gathered in opposition.  Most notably, John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and other figures, collaborated with the Scots to launch a dissident propaganda campaign criticising the King, as well as encouraging local opposition (which saw some success, such as the mobilisation of the Yorkshire militia). Charles’ effective use of the Star Chamber, however, ensured opponents were swiftly dealt with, usually those who presented vocal opposition to royal decisions.

The historiographical debate surrounding the Personal Rule, and the Caroline Era more broadly, was and continues to be dominated by Whig historians, who view Charles as foolish, malicious, and power-hungry, and his rule without Parliament as destabilising, tyrannical and a threat to the people of England. A key proponent of this view is S.R. Gardiner who, believing the King to have been ‘duplicitous and delusional’, coined an alternative term to ‘Personal Rule’ – the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. This position has survived into the latter half of the 20th Century, with Charles having been labelled by Barry Coward as “the most incompetent monarch of England since Henry VI”, and by Ronald Hutton, as “the worst king we have had since the Middle Ages”. 

Recent decades have seen, however, the attempted rehabilitation of Charles’ image by Revisionist historians, the most well-known, as well as most controversial, being Kevin Sharpe. Responsible for the landmark study of the period, The Personal Rule of Charles I, published in 1992, Sharpe came to be Charles’ most staunch modern defender. In his view, the 1630s, far from a period of tyrannical oppression and public rebellion, were a decade of “peace and reformation”. During Charles’ time as an absolute monarch, his lack of Parliamentary limits and regulations allowed him to achieve a great deal: Ship Money saw the Navy’s numbers strengthened, Laudian reforms mean a more ordered and regulated national church, and Wentworth dramatically raised Irish revenue for the Crown – all this, and much more, without any real organised or overt opposition figures or movements.

Understandably, the Sharpian view has received significant pushback, primarily for taking an overly optimistic view and selectively mentioning the Personal Rule’s positives. Encapsulating this criticism, David Smith wrote in 1998 that Sharpe’s “massively researched and beautifully sustained panorama of England during the 1630s … almost certainly underestimates the level of latent tension that existed by the end of the decade”.This has been built on by figures like Esther Cope: “while few explicitly challenged the government of Charles I on constitutional grounds, a greater number had experiences that made them anxious about the security of their heritage”. 

It is worth noting however that, a year before his death in 2011, Sharpe came to consider the views of his fellow historians, acknowledging Charles’ lack of political understanding to have endangered the monarchy, and that, more seriously by the end of the 1630s, the Personal Rule was indeed facing mounting and undeniable criticism, from both Charles’ court and the public.

Sharpe’s unpopular perspective has been built upon by other historians, such as Mark Kishlansky. Publishing Charles I: An Abbreviated Life in 2014, Kishlansky viewed parliamentarian propaganda of the 1640s, as well as a consistent smear from historians over the centuries as having resulted in Charles being viewed “as an idiot at best and a tyrant at worst”, labelling him as “the most despised monarch in Britain’s historical memory”. Charles however, faced no real preparation for the throne – it was always his older brother Henry that was the heir apparent. Additionally, once King, Charles’ Parliaments were stubborn and uncooperative – by refusing to provide him with the necessary funding, for example, they forced Charles to enact the Forced Loan. Kishlansky does, however, concede the damage caused by Charles’ unmoving belief in the Divine Right of Kings: “he banked too heavily on the sheer force of majesty”.

Charles’ personality, ideology and early life fundamentally meant an icy relationship with Parliament, which grew into mutual distrust and the eventual dissolution. Fundamentally, the period of Personal Rule remains a highly debated topic within academic circles, with the recent arrival of Revisionism posing a challenge to the long-established negative view of the Caroline Era. Whether or not the King’s financial, religious, and political actions were met with a discontented populace or outright opposition, it remains the case that the identity crisis facing the period, that between tyranny or stability remains yet to be conclusively put to rest.

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John Galt, Tom Joad, and other Polemical Myths

By Dustin Lovell — 1 month ago

Just about the only titles by Ayn Rand I’d feel comfortable assigning my students without previous suggestion by either student or boss would be Anthem or We the Living, mostly because they both fit into broader genres of dystopian and biographical fiction, respectively, and can, thus, be understood in context. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to teach The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, if I could find a student nuanced (and disciplined) enough to handle those two; however, if I were to find such a student, I’d probably skip Rand and go straight to Austen, Hugo, and Dostoevsky—again, in part to give students a context of the novelistic medium from which they can better understand authors like Rand.

My hesitation to teach Rand isn’t one of dismissal; indeed, it’s the opposite—I’ve, perhaps, studied her too much (certainly, during my mid-twenties, too exclusively). I could teach either of her major novels, with understanding of both plot and philosophy, having not only read and listened to them several times but also read most of her essays and non-fiction on philosophy, culture, art, fiction, etc. However, I would hesitate to teach them because they are, essentially, polemics. Despite Rand’s claiming it was not her purpose, the novels are didactic in nature: their events articulate Rand’s rationalistic, human-centric metaphysics (itself arguably a distillation of Aristotelian natural law, Lockean rights, and Nietzschean heroism filtered through Franklin, Jefferson, and Rockefeller and placed in a 20th-century American context—no small feat!). Insofar as they do so consistently, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged succeed, and they are both worth reading, if only to develop a firsthand knowledge of the much-dismissed Rand’s work, as well as to understand their place in 20th-century American culture and politics.

All that to say that I understand why people, especially academics, roll their eyes at Rand (though at times I wonder if they’ve ever seriously read her). The “romantic realism” she sought to develop to glorify man as (she saw) man ought to be, which found its zenith in the American industrialist and entrepreneur, ran counter to much that characterized the broader 20th century culture (both stylistically and ideologically), as it does much of the 21st. Granted, I may have an exaggerated sense of the opposition to Rand—her books are still read in and out of the classroom, and some of her ideas still influence areas of at least American culture—and one wonders if Rand wouldn’t take the opposition, itself, as proof of her being right (she certainly did this in the last century). However, because of the controversy, as well as the ideology, that structures the novels, I would teach her with a grain of salt, not wanting to misuse my position of teaching who are, essentially, other people’s kids who probably don’t know and haven’t read enough to understand Rand in context. For this fact, if not for the reasoning, I can imagine other teachers applauding me.

And yet, how many academics would forego including Rand in a syllabus and, in the same moment, endorse teaching John Steinbeck without a second thought?

I generally enjoy reading books I happened to miss in my teenage years. Had I read The Great Gatsby any sooner than I did in my late twenties, I would not have been ready for it, and the book would have been wasted on me. The same can be said of The Scarlet Letter, 1984, and all of Dostoevsky. Even the books I did read have humbled me upon rereading; Pride and Prejudice wasn’t boring—I was.

Reading through The Grapes of Wrath for the first time this month, I am similarly glad I didn’t read it in high school (most of my peers were not so lucky, having had to read it in celebration of Steinbeck’s 100th birthday). The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the book (though it certainly has faults) but in ourselves—that we, as teenagers who lack historical, political, and philosophical context, are underlings. One can criticize Atlas Shrugged for presenting a selective, romanticized view of the capitalist entrepreneur (which, according to Rand’s premises, was thorough, correct, consistent, and, for what it was, defensible) which might lead teenagers to be self-worshipping assholes who, reading Rand without nuance, take the book as justification for mistaking their limited experience of reality as their rational self-interest. One can do much the same, though for ideas fundamentally opposed to Rand’s, for The Grapes of Wrath.

A member of the Lost Generation, John Steinbeck was understandably jaded in his view of 19th-century American ideals. Attempting to take a journalistic, modern view of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl from the bottom up, he gave voice to the part of American society that, but for him, may have remained inarticulate and unrecorded. Whatever debate can be had about the origins of Black Tuesday (arguably beginning more in Wilson’s Washington and Federal Reserve than on Wall Street), the Great Depression hit the Midwest hardest, and the justifiable sense that Steinbeck’s characters are unfair victims of others’ depredations pervades The Grapes of Wrath, just as it articulates one of the major senses of the time. When I read the book, I’m not only reading of the Joad family: I’m reading of my own grandfather, who grew up in Oklahoma and later Galveston, TX. He escaped the latter effects of the Dust Bowl by going not to California but to Normandy. I’m fortunate to have his journal from his teenage years; other Americans who don’t have such a journal have Steinbeck.

However, along with the day-in-the-life (in which one would never want to spend a day) elements of the plot, the book nonetheless offers a selectively, one might even say romantically, presented ideology in answer to the plot’s conflict. Responding to the obstacles and unfairness depicted in The Grapes of Wrath one can find consistent advocacy of revolution among the out-of-work migrants that comprise most of the book. Versus Rand’s extension of Dagny Taggart or Hank Rearden’s sense of pride, ownership, and property down to the smallest elements of their respective businesses, one finds in Steinbeck the theme of a growing disconnect between legal ownership and the right to the land.

In the different reflections interpolated throughout the Joads’ plot Steinbeck describes how, from his characters’ view, there had been a steady divorce over the years between legal ownership of the land and appreciation for it. This theme was not new to American literature. The “rural farmer vs city speculator” mythos is one of the fundamental characteristics of American culture reaching back to Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans’ opposition to Adams’s Federalists, and the tension between the southwest frontiersman and the northeast banker would play a major role in the culture of self-reliance, the politics of the Jacksonian revolution onward, and the literature of Mark Twain and others. Both sides of the tension attempt to articulate in what the inalienable right to property inheres. Is it in the investment of funds and the legal buying and owning of land, or is it in the physical production of the land, perhaps in spite of whoever’s name is on the land grant or deed? Steinbeck is firmly in the latter camp.

However, in The Grapes of Wrath one finds not a continuation of the yeoman farmer mythos but an arguable undermining of the right to property and profit, itself, that undergirds the American milieu which makes the yeoman farmer possible, replacing it with an (albeit understandable) “right” based not on production and legal ownership, but on need. “Fallow land’s a sin,” is a consistent motif in The Grapes of Wrath, especially, argue the characters, when there are so many who are hungry and could otherwise eat if allowed to plant on the empty land. Steinbeck does an excellent job effecting sympathy for the Joads and other characters who, having worked the soil their whole lives, must now compete with hundreds of others like them for jobs paying wages that, due to the intended abundance of applicants, fall far short of what is needed to fill their families’ stomachs.

Similarly, Steinbeck goes to great pains to describe the efforts of landowners to keep crop prices up by punishing attempts to illegally grow food on the fallow land or pick the fruit left to rot on trees, as well as the plot, narrowly evaded by the Joads, to eradicate “reds” trying to foment revolution in one of the Hoovervilles of the book (Tom Joad had, in fact, begun to advocate rising up against landowners in more than one instance). In contrast to the Hoovervilles and the depredations of locals against migrant Okies stands the government camp, safely outside the reach of the local, unscrupulous, anti-migrant police and fitted out with running water, beneficent federal overseers, and social events. In a theme reminiscent of the 19th-century farmers’ looking to the federal government for succor amidst an industrializing market, Steinbeck concretizes the relief experienced in the Great Depression by families like the Joads at the prospects of aid from Washington.

However, just as Rand’s depictions of early twentieth-century America is selective in its representation of the self-made-man ethos of her characters (Rand omits, completely, World War I and the 1929 stock market crash from her novels), Steinbeck’s representation of the Dust Bowl is selective in its omissions. The profit-focused prohibitions against the Joads’ working the land were, in reality, policies required by FDR’s New Deal programs—specifically the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which required the burning of crops and burying of livestock in mass graves to maintain crop prices and which was outlawed in 1936 by the Supreme Court. It is in Steinbeck’s description of this process, which avoids explicitly describing the federal government’s role therein, where one encounters the phrase “grapes of wrath,” presaging a presumable event—an uprising?—by the people: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” Furthermore, while Rand presents, if in the hypothetical terms of narrative, how something as innocuous and inevitable as a broken wire in the middle of a desert can have ramifications that reach all the way to its company’s highest chair, Steinbeck’s narrative remains focused on the Joads, rarely touching on the economic exigencies experienced by the local property and business owners except in relation to the Joads and to highlight the apparent inhumanity of the propertied class (which, in such events as the planned fake riot at the government camp dance party, Steinbeck presents for great polemical effect).

I use “class” intentionally here: though the Great Depression affected all, Steinbeck’s characters often adopt the class-division viewpoint not only of Marx but of Hegel, interpreting the various landowners’ actions as being intentionally taken at the expense of the lower, out-of-work, classes. Tom Joad’s mother articulates to Tom why she is, ultimately, encouraged by, if still resentful of the apparent causers of, their lot:

“Us people will go on living when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people—we go on.”

“We take a beatin’ all the time.”

“I know.” Ma chuckled. “Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin’. Don’ you fret none, Tom. A different time’s comin’.”

Describing, if in fewer words than either Hegel or Marx, the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” process of historical materialism, where their class is steadily strengthened by their adverse circumstances in ways the propertied class is not, Mrs. Joad articulates an idea that pervades much of The Grapes of Wrath: the sense that the last, best hope and strength of the put-upon lower classes is found in their being blameless amidst the injustice of their situation, and that their numbers makes their cause inevitable.

This, I submit, is as much a mythos—if a well-stylized and sympathetically presented one—as Rand’s depiction of the producer-trader who is punished for his or her ability to create, and, save for the discernible Marxist elements in Steinbeck, both are authentically American. Though the self-prescribed onus of late 19th- and early 20th-century literature was partially journalistic in aim, Steinbeck was nonetheless a novelist, articulating not merely events but the questions beneath those events and concretizing the perspectives and issues involved into characters and plots that create a story, in the folk fairy tale sense, a mythos that conveys a cultural identity. Against Rand’s modernizing of the self-made man Steinbeck resurrects the soul of the Grange Movement of farmers who, for all their work ethic and self-reliance, felt left behind by the very country they fed. That The Grapes of Wrath is polemical—from the Greek πολεμικός for “warlike” or “argumentative”—does not detract from the project (it may be an essential part of it). Indeed, for all the license and selectivity involved in the art form, nothing can give fuel to a cause like a polemical novel—as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, and many others show.

However, when it comes to assigning polemics to students without hesitation, I…hesitate. Again, the issue lies in recognizing (or, for most students, being told) that one is reading a polemic. When one reads a polemical novel, one is often engaging, in some measure, with politics dressed up as story, and it is through this lens and with this caveat that such works must be read—even (maybe especially!) when they are about topics with which one agrees. As in many things, I prefer to defer to Aristotle, who, in the third section of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, cautions against young people engaging in politics before they first learn enough of life to provide context:

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs.

Of course, the implicit answer is to encourage young people (and ourselves) to read not less but more—and to read with the knowledge that their own interests, passions, neuroses, and inertias might be unseen participants in the process. Paradoxically, it may be by reading more that we can even start to read. Rand becomes much less profound, and perhaps more enjoyable, after one reads the Aristotle, Hugo, and Nietzsche who made her, and I certainly drew on American history (economic and political) and elements of continental philosophy, as well as other works of Steinbeck and the Lost Generation, when reading The Grapes of Wrath. Yet, as Aristotle implies, young people haven’t had the time—and, more importantly, the metaphysical and rhetorical training and self-discipline—to develop such reflection as readers (he said humbly and as a lifelong student, himself). Indeed, as an instructor I see this not as an obstacle but an opportunity—to teach students that there is much more to effective reading and understanding than they might expect, and that works of literature stand not as ancillary to the process of history but as loci of its depiction, reflection, and motivation.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating my case. I have, after all, taught polemical novels to students (Anthem among them, as well as, most recently, 1984 to a middle schooler), and a novel I’ve written and am trying to get published is, itself, at least partially polemical on behalf of keeping Shakespeare in the university curriculum. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s polemical burlesque of the psychology behind Russian socialism, Devils, or The Possessed, so specifically predicted the motives and method of the Russian Revolution (and any other socialist revolution) more than fifty years before it happened that it should be required reading. Nonetheless, because the content and aim of a work requires a different context for teaching, a unit on Devils or The Grapes of Wrath would look very different from one on, say, The Great Gatsby. While the latter definitely merits offering background to students, the former would need to include enough background on the history and perspectives involved to be able to recognize them. The danger of omitting background from Fitzgerald would be an insufficient understanding of and immersion in the plot, of Steinbeck, an insufficient knowledge of the limits of and possible counters to the argument.

Part of the power and danger of polemical art lies in its using a fictional milieu to carry an idea that is not meant to be taken as fiction. The willing suspension of disbelief that energizes the former is what allows the latter idea to slip in as palatable. This can produce one of at least two results, both, arguably, artistic aberrations: either the idea is caught and disbelief is not able to be suspended, rendering the artwork feeling preachy or propagandistic, or the audience member gives him or herself over to the work completely and, through the mythic capability of the artistic medium, becomes uncritically possessed by the idea, deriving an identity from it while believing they are merely enjoying and defending what they believe to be great art. I am speaking from more than a bit of reflection: whenever I see some millennial on Twitter interpret everything through the lens of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, I remember mid-eye-roll that I once did the same with Dagny, Francisco, and Hank.

Every work of art involves a set of values it seeks to concretize and communicate in a certain way, and one culture’s mythos may be taken by a disinterested or hostile observer to be so much propaganda. Because of this, even what constitutes a particular work as polemical may, itself, be a matter of debate, if not personal taste. One can certainly read and gain much from reading any of the books I’ve mentioned (as The Grapes of Wrath‘s Pulitzer Prize shows), and, as I said, I’m coming at Grapes with the handicap of its being my first read. I may very well be doing what I warn my students against doing, passing judgment on a book before I understand it; if I am, I look forward to experiencing a well-deserved facepalm moment in the future, which I aim to accelerate by reading the rest of Steinbeck’s work (Cannery Row is next). But this is, itself, part of the problem—or boon—of polemics: that to avoid a premature understanding one must intentionally seek to nuance their perspective, both positively and negatively, with further reading.

Passively reading Atlas Shrugged or The Grapes of Wrath, taking them as reality, and then interpreting all other works (and, indeed, all of life) through their lens is not dangerous because they aren’t real, but because within the limits of their selective stylization and values they are real. That is what makes them so powerful, and, as with anything powerful, one must learn how to use them responsibly—and be circumspect when leading others into them without also ensuring they possess the discipline proper to such works.

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Eve: The Prototype of the Private Citizen

By Dustin Lovell — 1 month ago

Written in the 1660s, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the type of book I imagine one could spend a lifetime mining for meaning and still be left with something to learn. Its being conceived as an English Epic that uses the poetic forms and conventions of Homeric and Ovidic antiquity to present a Christian subject, it yields as much to the student of literature as it does to students of history and politics, articulating in its retelling of the Fall many of the fundamental questions at work in the post-Civil-War body politic of the preceding decade (among many other things). Comparable with Dante’s Inferno in form, subject, and depth, Paradise Lost offers—and requires—much to and from readers, and it is one of the deepest and most complex works in the English canon. I thank God Milton did not live a half century earlier or write plays, else I might have to choose between him and Shakespeare—because I’d hesitate to simply pick Shakespeare.

One similarity between Milton and Shakespeare that has import to today’s broader discussion involves the question of whether they present their female characters fairly, believably, and admirably, or merely misogynistically. Being a Puritan Protestant from the 1600s writing an Epic verse version of Genesis 1-3, Milton must have relegated Eve to a place of silent submission, no? This was one of the questions I had when I first approached him in graduate school, and, as I had previously found when approaching Shakespeare and his heroines with the same query, I found that Milton understood deeply the gender politics of Adam and Eve, and he had a greater respect for his heroine than many current students might imagine.

I use “gender politics” intentionally, for it is through the different characterizations of Adam and Eve that Milton works out the developing conception of the citizen in an England that had recently executed its own king. As I’ve written in my discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays, justified or not, regicide has comprehensive effects. Thus, the beheading of Charles I on 30 January 1649 had implications for all 17th-century English citizens, many of which were subsequently written about by many like Margaret Cavendish and John Locke. At issue was the question of the individual’s relation to the monarch; does the citizen’s political identity inhere in the king or queen (Cavendish’s perspective), or does he or she exist as a separate entity (Locke’s)? Are they merely “subjects” in the sense of “the king’s subjects,” or are they “subjects” in the sense of being an active agent with an individual perspective that matters? Is it Divine Right, conferred on and descended from Adam, that makes a monarch, or is it the consent of the governed, of which Eve was arguably the first among mankind?

Before approaching such topics in Paradise Lost, Milton establishes the narrative framework of creation. After an initial prologue that does an homage to the classical invoking of the Muses even as it undercuts the pagan tradition and places it in an encompassing Christian theology (there are many such nuances and tensions throughout the work), Milton’s speaker introduces Satan, nee Lucifer, having just fallen with his third of heaven after rebelling against the lately announced Son. Thinking, as he does, that the Son is a contingent being like himself (rather than a non-contingent being coequal with the Father, as the Son is shown to be in Book III), Satan has failed to submit to a rulership he does not believe legitimate. He, thus, establishes one of the major themes of Paradise Lost: the tension between the individual’s will and God’s. Each character’s conflict inheres in whether or not they will choose to remain where God has placed them—which inerringly involves submitting to an authority that, from their limited perspective, they do not believe deserves their submission—or whether they will reject it and prefer their own apparently more rational interests. Before every major character—Satan, Adam, and Eve—is a choice between believing the superior good of God’s ordered plan and pursuing the seemingly superior option of their individual desires.

Before discussing Eve, it is worth looking at her unheavenly counterpart, Sin. In a prefiguration of the way Eve was formed out of Adam before the book’s events, Sin describes to Satan how she was formed Athena-style out of his head when he chose to rebel against God and the Son, simultaneously being impregnated by him and producing their son, Death. As such she and Satan stand as a parody not only of the parent-progeny-partner relationship of Adam-Eve but also of God and the Son. Describing her illicit role in Lucifer’s rebellion, Sin says that almost immediately after birth,

I pleased and with attractive graces won

The most averse (thee chiefly) who full oft

Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing

Becam’st enamoured and such joy thou took’st

With me in secret that my womb conceived

A growing burden.

—Paradise Lost II.761-767

In here and other places, Sin shows that her whole identity is wrapped up in Satan, her father-mate. In fact, there is rarely any instance where she refers to herself without also referring to him for context or as a counterpoint. Lacking her own, private selfhood from which she is able to volitionally choose the source of her identity and meaning, Sin lives in a state of perpetual torment, constantly being impregnated and devoured by the serpents and hellhounds that grow out of her womb.

Sin’s existence provides a Dantean concretization of Satan’s rebellion, which is elsewhere presented as necessarily one of narcissistic solipsism—a greatness derived from ignoring knowledge that might contradict his supposed greatness. A victim of her father-mate’s “narcissincest” (a term I coined for her state in grad school), Sin is not only an example of the worst state possible for the later Eve, but also, according to many critics, of women in 17th-century England, both in relation to their fathers and husbands, privately, as well as to the monarch (considered by many the “father of the realm”), publically. Through this reading, we can see Milton investigating, through Sin, not only the theology of Lucifer’s fall, but also of an extreme brand of royalism assumed by many at the time. And yet, it is not merely a simple criticism of royalism, per se: though Milton, himself, wrote other works defending the execution of Charles I and eventually became a part of Cromwell’s government, it is with the vehicle of Lucifer’s rebellion and Sin—whose presumptions are necessarily suspect—that he investigates such things (not the last instance of his work being as complex as the issues it investigates).

After encountering the narcissincest of the Satan-Sin relationship in Book II we are treated to its opposite in the next: the reciprocative respect between the Father and the Son. In what is, unsurprisingly, one of the most theologically-packed passages in Western literature, Book III seeks to articulate the throneroom of God, and it stands as the fruit of Milton’s study of scripture, soteriology, and the mysteries of the Incarnation, offering, perhaps wisely, as many questions as answers for such a scene. Front and center is, of course, the relationship between the Son and Father, Whose thrones are surrounded by the remaining two thirds of the angels awaiting what They will say. The Son and Father proceed to narrate to Each Other the presence of Adam and Eve in Eden and Satan’s approach thereunto; They then discuss what will be Their course—how They will respond to what They, omniscient, already know will happen.

One major issue Milton faced in representing such a discussion is the fact that it is not really a discussion—at least, not dialectically. Because of the triune nature of Their relationship, the Son already knows what the Father is thinking; indeed, how can He do anything but share His Father’s thoughts? And yet, the distance between the justice and foresight of the Father (in no ways lacking in the Son) and the mercy and love of the Son (no less shown in the words of the Father) is managed by the frequent use of the rhetorical question. Seeing Satan leave Hell and the chaos that separates it from the earth, the Father asks:

Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage

Transports our Adversary whom no bounds

Prescribed, no bars…can hold, so bent he seems

On desperate revenge that shall redound

Upon his own rebellious head?

—Paradise Lost III.80-86

The Father does not ask the question to mediate the Son’s apparent lack of knowledge, since, divine like the Father, the Son can presumably see what He sees. Spoken in part for the sake of those angels (and readers) who do not share Their omniscience, the rhetorical questions between the Father and Son assume knowledge even while they posit different ideas. Contrary to the solipsism and lack of sympathy between Sin and Satan (who at first does not even recognize his daughter-mate), Book III shows the mutual respect and knowledge of the rhetorical questions between the Father and Son—who spend much of the scene describing Each Other and Their motives (which, again, are shared).

The two scenes between father figures and their offspring in Books II and III provide a backdrop for the main father-offspring-partner relationship of Paradise Lost: that of Adam and Eve—with the focus, in my opinion, on Eve. Eve’s origin story is unique in Paradise Lost: while she was made out of Adam and derives much of her joy from him, she was not initially aware of him at her nativity, and she is, thus, the only character who has experienced and can remember (even imagine) existence independent of a source.

Book IV opens on Satan reaching Eden, where he observes Adam and Eve and plans how to best ruin them. Listening to their conversation, he hears them describe their relationship and their respective origins. Similar to the way the Father and Son foreground their thoughts in adulatory terms, Eve addresses Adam as, “thou for whom | And from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh | and without whom am to no end, my guide | And head” (IV.440-443). While those intent on finding sexism in the poem will, no doubt, jump at such lines, Eve’s words are significantly different from Sin’s. Unlike Sin’s assertion of her being a secondary “perfect image” of Satan (wherein she lacks positive subjectivity), Eve establishes her identity as being reciprocative of Adam’s in her being “formed flesh,” though still originating in “thy flesh.” She is not a mere picture of Adam, but a co-equal part of his substance. Also, Eve diverges from Sin’s origin-focused account by relating her need of Adam for her future, being “to no end” without Adam; Eve’s is a chosen reliance of practicality, not an unchosen one of identity.

Almost immediately after describing their relationship, Eve recounts her choice of being with Adam—which necessarily involves remembering his absence at her nativity. Hinting that were they to be separated Adam would be just as lost, if not more, than she (an idea inconceivable between Sin and Satan, and foreshadowing Eve’s justification in Book IX for sharing the fruit with Adam, who finds himself in an Eve-less state), she continues her earlier allusion to being separated from Adam, stating that, though she has been made “for” Adam, he a “Like consort to [himself] canst nowhere find” (IV.447-48). Eve then remembers her awakening to consciousness:

That day I oft remember when from sleep

I first awaked and found myself reposed

Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where

And what I was, whence thither brought and how.

—Paradise Lost IV.449-452

Notably seeing her origin as one not of flesh but of consciousness, she highlights that she was alone. That is, her subjective awareness preexisted her understanding of objective context. She was born, to use a phrase by another writer of Milton’s time, tabula rasa, without either previous knowledge or a mediator to grant her an identity. Indeed, perhaps undercutting her initial praise of Adam, she remembers it “oft”; were this not an image of the pre-Fall marriage, one might imagine the first wife wishing she could take a break from her beau—the subject of many critical interpretations! Furthermore, Milton’s enjambment allows a dual reading of “from sleep,” as if Eve remembers that day as often as she is kept from slumber—very different from Sin’s inability to forget her origin due to the perpetual generation and gnashing of the hellhounds and serpents below her waist. The privacy of Eve’s nativity so differs from Sin’s public birth before all the angels in heaven that Adam—her own father-mate—is not even present; thus, Eve is able to consider herself without reference to any other. Of the interrogative words with which she describes her post-natal thoughts— “where…what…whence”—she does not question “who,” further showing her initial isolation, which is so defined that she initially cannot conceive of another separate entity.

Eve describes how, hearing a stream, she discovered a pool “Pure as th’ expanse of heav’n” (IV.456), which she subsequently approached and, Narcissus-like, looked down into.

As I bent down to look, just opposite

A shape within the wat’ry gleam appeared

Bending to look on me. I started back,

It started back, but pleased I soon returned,

Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks

Of sympathy and love.

—Paradise Lost IV.460-465

When she discovers the possibility that another person might exist, it is, ironically, her own image in the pool. In Eve, rather than in Sin or Adam, we are given an image of self-awareness, without reference to any preceding structural identity. Notably, she is still the only person described in the experience—as she consistently refers to the “shape” as “it.” Eve’s description of the scene contains the actions of two personalities with only one actor; that is, despite there being correspondence in the bending, starting, and returning, and in the conveyance of pleasure, sympathy, and love, there is only one identity present. Thus, rather than referring to herself as an image of another, as does Sin, it is Eve who is here the original, with the reflection being the image, inseparable from herself though it be. Indeed, Eve’s nativity thematically resembles the interaction between the Father and the Son, who, though sharing the same omniscient divinity, converse from seemingly different perspectives. Like the Father Who instigates interaction with His Son, His “radiant image” (III.63), in her first experience Eve has all the agency.

As the only instance in the poem when Eve has the preeminence of being another’s source (if only a reflection), this scene invests her interactions with Adam with special meaning. Having experienced this private moment of positive identity before following the Voice that leads her to her husband, Eve is unique in having the capacity to agree or disagree with her seemingly new status in relation to Adam, having remembered a time when it was not—a volition unavailable to Sin and impossible (and unnecessary) to the Son.

And yet, this is the crux of Eve’s conflict: will she continue to heed the direction of the Voice that interrupted her Narcissus-like fixation at the pool and submit herself to Adam? The ambivalence of her description of how she would have “fixed | Mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire,” over her image had the Voice not come is nearly as telling as is her confession that, though she first recognized Adam as “fair indeed, and tall!” she thought him “less fair, | Less winning soft, less amiably mild | Than that smooth wat’ry image” (IV.465-480). After turning away from Adam to return to the pool and being subsequently chased and caught by Adam, who explained the nature of their relation—how “To give thee being I lent | Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart, | Substantial life to have thee by my side”—she “yielded, and from that time see | How beauty is excelled by manly grace | And wisdom which alone is truly fair” (IV. 483-491). One can read these lines at face value, hearing no undertones in her words, which are, after all, generally accurate, Biblically speaking. However, despite the nuptial language that follows her recounting of her nativity, it is hard for me not to read a subtle irony in the words, whether verbal or dramatic. That may be the point—that she is not an automaton without a will, but a woman choosing to submit, whatever be her personal opinion of her husband.

Of course, the whole work must be read in reference to the Fall—not merely as the climax which is foreshadowed throughout, but also as a condition necessarily affecting the writing and reading of the work, it being, from Milton’s Puritan Protestant perspective, impossible to correctly interpret pre-Fall events from a post-Fall state due to the noetic effects of sin. Nonetheless, in keeping with the generally Arminian tenor of the book—that every character must have a choice between submission and rebellion for their submission to be valid, and that the grace promised in Book III is “Freely vouchsafed” and not based on election (III.175)—I find it necessary to keep in mind, as Eve seems to, the Adam-less space that accompanied her nativity. Though one need not read all of her interaction with Adam as sarcastic, in most of her speech one can read a subtextual pull back to the pool, where she might look at herself, alone.

In Eve we see the fullest picture of what is, essentially, every key character’s (indeed, from Milton’s view, every human’s) conflict: to choose to submit to an assigned subordinacy or abstinence against the draw of a seemingly more attractive alternative, often concretized in what Northrop Frye calls a “provoking object”—the Son being Satan’s, the Tree Adam’s, and the reflection (and private self it symbolizes, along with an implicit alternative hierarchy with her in prime place) Eve’s. In this way, the very private consciousness that gives Eve agency is that which threatens to destroy it; though Sin lacks the private selfhood possessed by Eve, the perpetual self-consumption of her and Satan’s incestuous family allegorizes the impotent and illusory self-returning that would characterize Eve’s existence if she were to return to the pool. Though she might not think so, anyone who knows the myth that hers parallels knows that, far from limiting her freedom, the Voice that called Eve from her first sight of herself rescued her from certain death (though not for long).

The way Eve’s subjectivity affords her a special volition connects with the biggest questions of Milton’s time. Eve’s possessing a private consciousness from which she can consensually submit to Adam parallels John Locke’s “Second Treatise on Civil Government” of the same century, wherein he articulates how the consent of the governed precedes all claims of authority. Not in Adam but in Eve does Milton show that monarchy—even one as divine, legitimate, and absolute as God’s—relies on the volition of the governed, at least as far as the governed’s subjective perception is concerned. Though she cannot reject God’s authority without consequence, Eve is nonetheless able to agree or disagree with it, and through her Milton presents the reality that outward submission does not eliminate inward subjectivity and personhood (applicable as much to marriages as to monarchs, the two being considered parallel both in the poem and at the time of its writing); indeed, the inalienable presence of the latter is what gives value to the former and separates it from the agency-less state pitifully experienced by Sin.

And yet, Eve’s story (to say nothing of Satan’s) also stands as a caution against simply taking on the power of self-government without circumspection. Unrepentant revolutionary though he was, Milton was no stranger to the dangers of a quickly and simply thrown-off government, nor of an authority misused, and his nuancing of the archetype of all subsequent rebellions shows that he did not advocate rebellion as such. While Paradise Lost has influenced many revolutions (political in the 18th-century revolutions, artistic in the 19th-century Romantics, cultural in the 20th-century New Left), it nonetheless has an anti-revolutionary current. Satan’s presumptions and their later effects on Eve shows the self-blinding that is possible to those who, simply trusting their own limited perception, push for an autonomy they believe will liberate them to an unfettered reason but which will, in reality, condemn them to a solipsistic ignorance.

By treating Eve, not Adam, as the everyman character who, like the character of a morality play, represents the psychological state of the tempted individual—that is, as the character with whom the audience is most intended to sympathize—Milton elevates her to the highest status in the poem. Moreover—and of special import to Americans like myself—as an articulation of an individual citizen who does not derive the relation to an authority without consent, Eve stands as a prototype of the post-17th-century conception of the citizen that would lead not only to further changes between the British Crown and Parliament but also a war for independence in the colonies. Far from relegating Eve to a secondary place of slavish submission, Milton arguably makes her the most human character in humanity’s first story; wouldn’t that make her its protagonist? As always, let this stimulate you to read it for yourself and decide. Because it integrates so many elements—many of which might defy new readers’ expectations in their complexity and nuance—Paradise Lost belongs as much on the bookshelf and the syllabus as Shakespeare’s Complete Works, and it presents a trove for those seeking to study the intersection not only of art, history, and theology, but also of politics and gender roles in a culture experiencing a fundamental change.

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A Romantic Case for Anime

By Dustin Lovell — 1 month ago

We’ve all felt it—the mixed excitement and dread at hearing a beloved book is set to be made into a movie. They might do it right, capturing not only key plot events but also (and more importantly) how it feels to be swept up in the work as a whole; 2020’s Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy comes to my mind, most of all for the way it captures how someone who understands and loves Austen’s ubiquitous irony might feel when reading her work. However, they also might do it poorly; despite both 1974 and 2013 attempts’ being worth watching, I’ve yet to see a rendition of The Great Gatsby that captures the book’s plot and narrative tone in the right proportion (in my opinion, the 1974 version emphasizes the former but misses some of the latter, while parts of the 2013 version exagerrate the latter just to the border of parody). My readers have, no doubt, already imagined examples of works they’ve always wished could be faithfully put onto the screen and others they’d rather not be risked to the vicissitudes of translating from one medium to another.

The last decade has thankfully seen a growth in long-form, box-office quality productions that makes it more possible than ever to imagine longer works being produced without curtailing their lengthy plotlines—example, the BBC’s 2016 rendition of War and Peace. However, this leaves another, perhaps more important, hurdle to hazard: while live-action media can now faithfully follow the plots of the originals, there still remains the difficulty of conveying the tone and feel of the works, especially when different media necessarily have different capacities and limitations of representation. Though I’ve enjoyed productions that have been made, I don’t know that I would expect live-action renditions to reproduce the aesthetic impression of, say, Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Crime and Punishment, and I worry that attempts to do so might mar more than measure up. The problem lies in the difficulty of translating characters’ inner experience—which is usually conveyed by a stylizing narrator—via the essentially externalistic medium of the camera eye.

While a live action movie or series might remain faithful to the selective events in a plot, the lack of an interpretive narrator removes a key element of what defines epic poems and novels. Paradoxically, the narrowing of perspective through a stylizing narrator allows story to move from the limits of natural events into the limitlessness of human perception and interpretation. Voiceover narrators can provide thematic stylization in film, as well as essential plot coherence, but it is still primarily the camera that replaces the literary narrator as the means of conveyance. Furthermore, if too ubiquitous, voiceovers can separate the audience from the action, which is the focus of film. Film’s power inheres in its ability to place the audience in the midst of a plot, removing as many frames between the watcher and the story’s events as possible. However, this is also why books are so difficult to translate: motion pictures focus on events when the aesthetic experience of literature inheres in how characters and narrator experience said events.

The literary movement that focused most on the character’s experience (and, vicariously, ours) as the purpose of art was Romanticism. Romantic literature and poetry were less concerned about the subject matter than about their effect on the character’s emotions—in the sense that, from the generally Platonic metaphysics of the Romantics, the incidental reaches its fullest meaning by provoking an aesthetic experience far beyond it. From Hawthorne’s rose bush growing outside Salem’s prison, to Shelley’s secondhand rumination on the ruined feet of Ozymandias, to Keats’s apostrophe to the Grecian urn, the Romantics showed how part of the reality of an object involves its significance to the observer, and it was the role of the Romantic narrator and speaker to draw out that effect for the reader.

It is this essential influence of the narrator and characters’ inner lives on the great works’ aesthetic experience that makes me skeptical of even the best acting, camera work, and post-production effects to sufficiently replace them. It may be possible, and, again, I have very much enjoyed some renditions. Furthermore, not wanting to be the audience member who misses the Shakespeare performance for the open copy of the play on their lap, I tend to watch movie adaptations as distinct works rather than in strict relation to the originals. However, this, itself, may be a concession to my hesitance to trust film to live up to the aesthetic experience of certain books. I would, however, trust anime to do so.

While a history of Japanese manga and anime is beyond the scope of this piece (or my expertise), since choosing to explore the artform as a post-grad-school reward (or recovery—one can only stare at the sun that is Paradise Lost for so long) I’ve watched plenty of anime over the past ten years, and I have become convinced that it might serve as, at least, a middle ground when seeking to capture plot, narrative tone, and inner character experience in a motion medium. Anime is capable of handling virtually every story genre, and while it contains many of the same ridiculous hi-jinks and satire of Western cartoons and CG animation, it can also capture tragic pathos and sublime catharsis in ways that would be out of place in the vast majority of Western animation. This makes sense: originating in early 20th-century Japan, manga and anime were not subject to the same skepticism about artistic representations of transcendent value that characterized Western art after the move from 19th-century Romanticism and Realism to 20th-century modernism and post-modernism.

Of course, there have been exceptions; 20th-century Disney animation, or Marvel and DC Comics, were iconic because they attempted to be iconic—they unironically tried to depict in images those values and stories that are transcendent. However, even these were created predominantly with the child (or the childlike adult) in mind. Furthermore, while anime certainly has deserved elements of ambivalence, if not cynicism, and while there are many incredibly satirical and humorous series, anime as an artform is not implicitly dismissive of narrative trustworthiness and characters’ experience of the transcendent in the same way that much of Western motion art is. Rather, anime conventionally allows for the sublime heights and deepest horrors that previously characterized Romanticism, all of which it presents through the stylization of animation. This stylization is able to act as an interpretive medium just like a novel’s narrator, contextualizing events through the experience of those involved in a way often eschewed by, if not unavailable to, film.

For an example, I submit Kaguya-sama: Love is War (Japanese Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai – Tensai-tachi no Ren’ai Zunōsen, “Kaguya Wants to Make Them Confess: The Geniuses’ War of Hearts and Minds”). Though a romantic comedy in the Slice-of-Life genre, it exemplifies anime’s ability to convey the heights and depths of inner experience of the characters—here Kaguya and Miyuki, a pair of high school teenagers who, as student council president and vice president, compete to be top of their class while being secretly in love with each other and too proud to admit it. As the English title conveys, a running metaphor through the show is the bellicose subtext of their attempts to maneuver each other into confessing their love first and, thus, losing the war; think Beatrice and Benedick with the extremizing effect of teenage hormones and motifs of heavy artillery.

Plot-wise, Love is War follows a standard rom-com formula, with tropes recognizable to Western audiences: the pride and prejudices of the characters, the much ado about things that end up being really nothing, the presence of a mutual friend who acts as an oblivious catalist and go-between in the relationship, etc. However, the show reinvigorates these tropes by portraying via hyperbolic narrator the deuteragonists’ experience of the episodes’ conflicts, bringing audience members into the all-consuming tension of how a teenager might see something as minor as whether to share an item from their lunch. The combination of chess and military metaphors conveys the inner conflicts of the initially cold but gradually warming characters (the “tsundere” character type common in such animes), and the consistency of such motifs creates a unified aesthetic that, due in large part to the disconnect between the over-the-top tone and, in reality, low-stakes subject matter, is hysterical. Another unique aspect about Love is War is that, due to its focus on the characters’ experience of the plot (all the better for being trivially mundane), it’s a technically Romantic romantic comedy.

Love is War is, of course, a low-stakes example of what modern anime can do, though it did score three awards, including Best Comedy, at the 2020 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. A more serious example, Death Note, similarly conveys much of its gravitas through voiceover—this time the first-person narration of protagonist Light Yagami, a high schooler who with the help of a book from the realm of the dead is able to kill anyone whose name and face he knows, and L, a mysterious and reclusive detective charged by Interpol to find him. Throughout the series—which employs similar, if non-parodic, attempts by characters to outwit each other as Love is War—Light and L articulate their planned maneuvers and the implications thereof through inner voiceover. Not only does the narration lay out elements of their battle of wits that the audience might have missed, but it conveys the growing tension the two experience—especially Light, who, as he amasses fame as both a menace and cult hero experiences a growing egotism and subsequent paranoia around the possibility of being found out.

Just as Love is War is, in many ways, a parallel of Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth and Darcy, themselves, both being tsundere characters), Death Note’s focus on a young man who wishes to achieve greatness by killing those deserving of death and who subsequently develops a maddening neurosis is virtually the same as Crime and Punishment—however enormously their plots and endings differ (Crime and Punishment lacks an explicit demonic presence like Death Note’s Shinigami Ryuk, the Death Note’s otherworldly owner; Dostoevsky would not employ the spectre of a conversant devil until The Brothers Karamazov—yet another point of consanguinity between anime like Death Note and his writing). Regardless of their differing plots, the anime’s inclusion of the characters’ inner thoughts and imaginations convey an increasingly tense tone similar to how Dostoevsky steadily shows Raskalnikov’s moral unmooring, and the explanations and attempted self-justifications by both Light and L convey more than I think even the best cinema would be capable of showing.

I am not advocating that every narrative motif or figuration be included in page-to-screen renditions, nor that we cease trying to actively reinvigorate great works of art through judicious adaptations into new media. Yet, if the inner lives of teenagers—which are often exaggerated, if at times unnecessarily, to Romantic proportions—can be portrayed by anime to such comic and tragic effect, with the figuration and tone of the characters’ perceptions seamlessly paralleling the literal events without obscuring them, then I’d be interested to see what an anime Jane Eyre, The Alchemist, or Sula might look like. Based on the above examples, as well as anime heavyweights like Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, and, if one is not faint of heart, Berserk, all of which present events in some measure through the background and perspective of the main characters, I could imagine the works of Milton, Hugo, Austen, Dostoevsky, and others in anime form, with the aesthetic experience of the original narration intact.

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Culture

The Obsession with News

By Sarah Stook — 1 month ago

In 1980, Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld co-founded the Cable News Network (CNN). Despite derision over the idea of a 24 hour rolling news channel, CNN became a massive hit and would become the forefather to the news system today. In the 43 years since CNN first aired, news channels have changed from having bulletins every few hours to being on air 24/7. Our parents would have to wait for the top of the hour for news, unless breaking news broke into programming, whilst we can just turn it on with a press of a button.

Whilst many may marvel at the idea of 24 hour news, it is part of why news today has its problems. As a result of constant media absorption, competition from social media and the internet, as well as a fast-paced world, society itself has become obsessed with the news. Every tiny little story becomes splashed across screens, both large and small, in a desperate attempt to capture the moment before it vanishes. 

Everything is Breaking News

If, like me, you have the BBC news app alert on your phone, then this will be a similar tale. The alert goes off. You check it. Whilst it’s officially classed as ‘Breaking News,’ it’s not really that important. Some things are of course important. Look at the death of Her Majesty The Queen last year. That was a news story that knocked everything else off the air. Considering that she had been our monarch since 1952, it’s fair to say that this was incredibly important breaking news. 

Generally, the app applies the term ‘Breaking News’ rather liberally. Holly Willoughby leaving This Morning after fourteen years is not worth your phone going off. Beyoncé removing ‘offensive lyrics’ from an old song isn’t worth it either.

That also applies to news channels. Sky News and BBC will have that ticket going across the bottom of the screen quite happily for just about any reason. Rare is the day where the bottom of Sky News is not a flash of yellow and black. Even a slow news day will have breaking news just to keep things a bit fresh.

It’s understandable really. In this day and age, news travels fast. It comes and goes in the blink of the eyes. News companies want to have their hold on the story before the next one comes. When Twitter/X or Facebook gets the news first, well, that’s one less story that they’ve managed to break to viewers. The big media organisations may have the means to research the stories and get the scoops, but they don’t ever get it out first. One is more likely to find out a story through social media than they are the 24 hour news or their app. 

Considering the point of the 24 hour news cycle is to be fresh, that’s not really a good thing.

Every Little Story, Made Bigger 

On the 18th April 1930, BBC news would announce that “there is no news.”

Can you imagine that today? Another issue with the 24 hour cycle and news today is the fact that there’s a desperation to find something to report on. When channels and apps are never off, they can’t have a rest. Something must be going on. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it must be something.

Perhaps it’s a take on a news story through the issue of race, gender or sexuality. Perhaps it’s a random study from Australia. Whatever it is, it’s got a place in the news because it’s something.

Take for example the Daily Climate Show on Sky News. What was originally a daily, thirty minute slot on prime time was axed to a weekend event. It’s not hard to see why this was. In its desperation to make more news out of something, Sky took a risk by devoting half an hour everyday to the exact same topic. Considering how climate change and its presentation is a divisive subject, it was hardly a risk worth taking. Changing it to every weekend was still a poorly thought out move. 

Repetition

You might turn the news on when you get up at seven in the morning. You might turn the news on at ten before you go to bed. What might link those two viewings is that they are exactly the same.

When the media can’t slot a new story in, they’ll just repeat it. If it’s an unfolding story, then of course you’ll see it or read about it again later because there are news things to be said. The problem occurs when it’s the same story over and over again. 

Nobody wants to hear the same story they did fifteen hours ago without new information. It’s tiresome.

The Fear Factor

Then there’s the fear in which the media thrives.

From the moment that Boris Johnson told us that we now had to stay in our homes because of COVID, the media was all over the pandemic- perhaps even before then. With nothing else happening because everyone was locked down, all the media could do was run constant stories about the ever climbing death toll. At first, well, it was what we expected. Then it started to get a bit repetitive. 

These stories tend to get a much frostier reception if reported today. Commentators scold the media for trying to scare us or create fear. 

They could, however, get away with it during those early months. With nothing else to do, we had more time for the news. Their stories were constantly about the deaths and after effects of COVID. We were already unable to leave our homes and live our daily lives, with constant mask wearing when we went out, so did we need to be intimidated even more?

It’s not just COVID. Look at the climate protestors, especially the young ones, when interviewed. Some of them cry in fear for their future, weeping about the thought of a planet that could be gone when they have reached adulthood. Considering the constant doomsday coverage of climate change in the news, it’s easy to see where this fear comes from. Kids’ news shows like Sky’s awful FYI focus on the topic regularly. It’s constantly on mainstream news. 

Children are more in tune with the world today. With all the darkness in the news and on social media, some will blame it for the declining mental health we are seeing in young people. Indeed, where is the hope? Well, people don’t watch the news to hear about new innovations or cute animals being born in zoos. Fear is more gripping than hope, and a bigger seller too, but it’s not good for morale.

It’s vitally important that we know what’s going on in the world, but too much news is bad for the soul. In a world where it’s all too accessible and the media makes money on constant news, we can’t rely on it for real information. We’re either fed fear or repetitiveness. The obsession with news is, ironically, making us less knowledgeable. Resist the urge to keep up behind what is needed. It’s better for you.

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Culture

A Plague Tale: A Post-apocalyptic Light Held Aloft

By Dustin Lovell — 2 months ago

Respectively released by Asobo Studio in May 2019 and October 2022, A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem follow siblings Amicia and Hugo de Rune through a 14th-century France being torn apart by the Hundred-Years-War, the French Inquisition, and the Black Plague. Through the stories of both games, Amicia and Hugo must try to stay alive while maintaining hope in the things worth living for, all while searching for a way to save Hugo from a yet unknown sickness, the ‘macula.’

Having in my twenties platinum ranked several Metal Gear Solid games and The Last of Us, I felt right at home in A Plague Tale. However, inspired by, in addition to other post-apocalyptic games like TLOU, titles like ICO and even a Studio Ghibli film, the games’ stealth, buddy tactics, and progression of unlockables mesh the elements of several genres into an excellent gaming experience that goes far beyond formulaic stealth-action. Indeed, when not sneaking around guards, players must puzzle their way through swarms of rats with torches held aloft in what becomes the central motif of the franchise.

The two games form a unified whole, in my opinion, with the denouement of Innocence leading directly into Requiem; thus, if not explicitly specifying one or the other, when referencing A Plague Tale I will henceforth mean both games together. While an outstanding work on its own, with few areas that really stretch the player outside of the higher difficulties and character revelations too significant for merely the last third of a single game, Innocence is clearly a preparation for something larger in both gameplay and story. Fulfilling the expectation, Requiem increases the franchise’s breadth in length, map layouts, tools accessible to players, and the dynamic roles of side characters in both plot and puzzle. And yet, while changes are, of course, made between the two games (not all positive, in my opinion), the core narrative elements are consistent through both.

How the games tell the story is their best attribute, and one that was a major focus of Asobo Studio: they incorporate most of the plot-driving dialogue and characterization in the midst of the stealth and puzzle scenes. In previous-generation stealth games, one sneaks through a certain area and is rewarded with a cutscene or discovery that advances the story. This could often cause the stealth sections to become a bit utilitarian, with the back-and-forth between action and narration feeling like switching between two halves of the brain—not the best for maintaining story immersion or emotional investment. 

However, with its use of furtive commentary and context-specific actions from side characters, A Plague Tale incorporates the narrative into the gameplay so seamlessly that the tension of the sneaking and action enhances the tension of the story conflicts, both external and internal, thus  maintaining story immersion and blending all into a level of aesthetic experience I had rarely experienced. The tension as Amicia protects but also relies on Hugo and others with different sources of light as they traverse fields of dark, writhing rat swarms builds the sense not just of fear of failure, but of connection among and investment in the characters. This narrative aspect, alone—this integration of action and narrative—is enough reason to play the games, in that they show how modern games can tell a story in a new, verisimilar way that invests one in the increasingly layered characters more than just passive watching or trophy-focused strategizing might. 

Leaving more thorough gameplay reviews to others (or, better, to players who will experience the games for themselves), I will focus below on the stories of each game. Each game has elements one doesn’t always encounter in today’s media and which make their plots deeper and more dynamic than are many other current post-apocalyptic, female-centric games. (Also, needless to say, spoilers ahead).

Innocence: ‘You can run…but no one can escape their own blood.’

A Plague Tale: Innocence’s opening chapter, titled ‘The De Rune Legacy,’ immediately places the game in terms of both aristocracy and historical context, motifs that thread throughout both games. Through the initial tutorial scenes of main deuteragonist Amicia walking the De Rune estate with her father, we learn that, a noble family in fourteenth-century France, the De Runes are beset by the wars afield with Plantagenet England and the steady growth of a new plague at home. We also learn that, due to the boy’s strange sickness, the macula, Amicia’s five-year-old brother, Hugo, has been kept separate from his fifteen-year-old sister for most of his life, with Amicia being closer to their father due to their mother’s being focused on healing the cloistered Hugo. 

In the same sequence, Amicia and her father discover an obscure underground menace plaguing the forest, and the family estate is raided by the Inquisition in search of Hugo. Soon separated from both parents, the two estranged children must make their way to the boy’s doctor, secretly an alchemist, discovering along the way that the menace beneath the ground are actually floods of rats that literally pop up whenever the two children—specifically Hugo—undergo stress.

From the start it is apparent that Innocence is a story of children of good aristocrats thrust into a world falling apart. As often happens with such stories of upending times, the changes necessarily involve and are bound up with the aristocrats, themselves, their being the holders and maintainers of their culture’s values. Foreshadowed by the heightened rat activity whenever Hugo has his debilitating headaches, it is revealed that the plague of rats destroying France is somehow connected to the macula inherited through Hugo’s family line. 

Thus, threaded through this story of siblings trying to survive is the subtext that the conflict involves their bloodline—the children’s aristocracy. Like countless other stories of chosen children of unique birth thrust from comfort into a world of flux, Innocence becomes a bildungsroman of learning to survive in a world that, because of their bloodline, is suddenly suspicious of and antagonistic towards them, and which may be falling apart because of them. Implicit in the story is how much blame they should assume for the heritage they did not choose and know little about. 

Besides the ubiquitous rats, Amicia and Hugo’s major antagonist is the Inquisition. While the trope of ‘ackshually, big church bad’ is tired, at best (and usually unbelievable for anyone with a working knowledge of history), in the game’s fantasy world the Inquisition works excellently, without breaking immersion with an anti-church bias too common in modern works. A quasi-official sect focused not on pursuing heretics but, rather, on harnessing and using the plague, the Inquisition actually serves to illuminate Hugo’s condition for the children and players. 

The Grand Inquisitor Vitalis Benevent—ironically named, his being a decrepid old man of failing health—is a typical but no less excellent character, and his Captain of the Guard, Nicholas, has easily one of the best character designs I’ve seen in a while. Together they concretise an archetypal threat to young nobles: those who would use them and their blood to amass power. This is only made more insidious when the innocent and naive Hugo comes to the forefront for a section of the game.

Thus, as is common to such stories of a time of shifting values and structures, the question of who is friend and who is foe is foremost, and Amicia and Hugo must learn to be circumspect about whom they trust, a theme that will continue into the next game. Yet, at the same time, Amicia must balance exposing Hugo to the world’s dangers with maintaining his innocence; one of game’s most charming yet unnerving dynamics is the double layer of Amicia’s vigilance for possible threats and Hugo’s playful ignorance of their danger—as well as Amicia’s suggesting such things to distract Hugo (and herself) from their plight. It is through this interplay—the need to maintain innocence as a resistance against the darkness around them while facing and surviving it—that the siblings get to know each other and the story is told.

Added to the moderating effect Hugo’s youth has on the usual nihilistic brutality of such games, the world of Innocence, as well as of its sequel, does not come off as a standard postapocalyptic setting. The greatest reason for this is the studio’s choice of its historical place, which lends it a paradoxical undertone of familiarity. Whether or not players have a ready knowledge of the Justinian Plague which serves as the background for the game’s sickness, we’ve all heard of the medieval Black Death. We know it was horrible. We also know it was survived—and served as the threshold of the Renaissance. 

Placed in this context not of annihilation but of survival, the games implicitly lend themselves to a conservative undertone. Horrible times have happened, and horrible people have made them worse, but so long as one can keep a localized light burning, the seeds of civilization will survive even in the smallest communities. Exactly this happens in one of the game’s many poignant images, that of the De Rune children and their by-then found family of vagrants living, growing, and learning to thrive in a broken down castle. 

Furthermore, the growing relationship between Amicia and Hugo hinges on the implicitly conservative principle of personal responsibility and moral agency—especially regarding the exigencies of circumstance and one’s relationship to power, especially over those closest to us. A theme not uncommon in post-apocalyptic stories is whether or not a rupture of society justifies a full abandonment of morality and regard for life. Throughout the story, Innocence’s answer is ‘No.’ Amicia’s killing to protect Hugo is suffused with hesitancy, sorrow, and apology—a motif established in Innocence and explored much more fully in Requiem. Hugo’s parallel relationship with violence—with the possible loss of innocence it entails—has the added complexity of his being a child, but the impetus to control himself is no less present and upheld.

Indeed, unlike other post-apocalyptic characters who grow increasingly solipsistic and nihilistic (*cough* Joel *cough*), it is Amicia and Hugo’s task to maintain moral responsibility and innocence in their respective ways when all others around them seem intent on dispensing with such things out of ambition or expediency. Virtue does not change, howevermuch the world around us seems to, nor does change relieve us of our basic nature as individual moral agents whose choices have real effects. 

Although not an explicitly named theme, it is only by superceding their circumstances and instead placing themselves within a broader historical context of their aristocratic family line, while drawing closer to each other—that is, by accepting their aristocratic heritage and actively manifesting it in the present through corresponding behavior—that Amicia and Hugo are able to overcome the game’s conflicts. And, in the end, what remains is the very image that started the story: that of a family, native and found, drawing together to keep lit and held aloft sundry moments of innocent joy in order to humbly produce a better future.

Requiem: ‘Stop trying to be so tough. You might learn something.’

Picking up roughly six months after Innocence leaves off, A Plague Tale: Requiem finds the De Runes and their alchemist companion Lucas continuing their journey to heal Hugo of his macula. As signaled by the game’s opening chapter, ‘Under a New Sun,’ the sequel’s problems will seem different from its predecessor’s, but only on the surface. The Inquisition is behind them, but the deeper conflict remains—the need to treat Hugo’s macula before it reaches the next ‘threshold’ and further overtakes the boy while also avoiding pursuit from those who might try to stop or manipulate them. 

After the game’s tutorial and introduction, the group visits a town in Provence to meet Magister Vaudin, another alchemist who might be able to help heal Hugo. However, Vaudin soon becomes a wedge in the relationship built through the previous game between Amicia (and the player) and Hugo. Foreshadowed previously by the minor dialogue of the tutorial, this and other events bring to the fore the question of whether or not the deuteragonists should trust potential allies. 

In Innocence the core conflict was simply to protect Hugo, which, considering the siblings’ shaky relationship, was rightly not undercut by a serious questioning of motives and methods. However, in Requiem Amicia becomes so focused on protecting Hugo that she ends up pushing away potential help, not only the questionable alchemical order but even their mother and companion, Lucas. Amicia’s arguable overprotectiveness shows itself in two ways, a growing comfortability with violence and an inability to judge friend from foe (or visa versa).

In the game’s best element of complexity, the suspicion of allies is eventually turned on the increasingly violent Amicia, herself, who sees her growing willingness to kill yet cannot seem to mitigate it. The theme of protecting Hugo becomes, in a game about a pathogen, a psychological pathology in Amicia—her own sublimated macula that, like Hugo’s literal one, can just as easily be misused to disasterous effect should she blindly give herself over to its prejudices. 

This type of storyline—that of the strong female suspicious of all purported help, especially from men, and whose toughness is altogether good and an end in itself—is, by now, nothing new. Those sympathetic to it will find many things to admire in Amicia, and can probably play the game without sharing my interpretation (a mark of a good work of narrative art in any medium). However, Requiem is, thankfully, not merely a story of a girlboss teenager giving the proverbial middle finger to allies who seem to hinder her in protecting Hugo. To be sure, despite admonitions from friends and family, Amicia does follow this arc—until the siblings fall in with Arnaud.

A mercenary whose soldiers have previously been thinned out by Amicia, the mercenary Arnaud pursues the De Runes at different portions of the game. However, Arnaud eventually saves the siblings from the uncontrollable effects of their own actions. Whereas the still childlike Hugo trusts Arnaud relatively quickly (Arnaud’s role as father figure for the siblings is a layer I don’t have time to examine here), Amicia remains skeptical—understandable, considering the concussion and remaining scar on her forehead he’d previously given her. However, implicit in the interactions between Amicia, Hugo, and Arnaud is the irony that by too bluntly rejecting Arnaud’s help in order to protect Hugo, Amicia might ruin the very innocence she has tried to preserve—a theme that has been there from the game’s beginning.

Perhaps more significant, the game thus reverses the ‘male allies = implicit enemies’ trajectory of many recent female-driven plots, instead arguably justifying Hugo’s trust rather than Amicia’s distrust. The game dares to introduce the complexity of an enemy actually turning out to be an ally—not unheard of in today’s stories, but rarely involving an older male. 

Arnaud’s place in the story is by no means clear-cut, nor is Requiem a mere reactionary tale of an overweening teenage girl being cut down to size (which would, itself, be formulaic, simplistic, and boring). Nonetheless, the fact that he is allowed to add complexity to Amicia’s development—in a way that highlights her shortsightedness—is refreshing in that it keeps Amicia from falling into the prescribed tropes and, by now, chauvinistic stereotypes of recent heroines. Rather, through his similarities and differences with her, Arnaud serves to highlight the capacity of the untutored, rash Amicia to go overboard. 

While, like the other side characters, he remains in the background for long portions of the game, the mercenary nonetheless continues to shift the story’s moral center away from Amicia, thus paradoxically allowing her to grow in how she responds to her own impulses. Inn my opinion the story could have used more of an explicit admission on Amicia’s part that Arnaud might have been right about a few things. Nonetheless, the mercenary adds a welcome complexity in that his presence—and the themes he concretises—keeps the story from falling into the simple formulae of other current media—something I, and many others, have been asking for for our female characters. 

The De Rune Legacy

By layering the themes of its predecessor with a variety of new elements and subsequent possible interpretations, Requiem more than fulfills the setup of Innocence, and it secures both parts of A Plague Tale at the top of the post-apocalyptic genre. Both show what games are capable of and are well worth playing by both stealth veterans and those looking for a unique and involved aesthetic experience.

Furthermore, as with Innocence, Requiem expands the tropes it employs. Added to the recurrence of civilization’s rise and fall (which could have just as easily been the topic of my commentary on the game) is the localization of such vicissitudes in the individual Amicia, herself. Parallelling Hugo’s literal macula, Amicia’s choice of whether or not to give over to her wrathful passion and lose perspective and self control—really, the classical virtues of Prudence and Temperance—is that upon which the future will hinge. 

Thus, whether intentional or not, for those willing to see it the games offer an implicitly conservative iteration of the post-apocalyptic setting. Considering that conservatism’s basic function involves, to paraphrase Mahler, the protection and preservation not of ashes but of flame—of that which we have and love, especially things like innocence, historical humility, and family connection, this is a fitting and timely nuance. The games are by no means simply ‘based cons do the apocalypse,’ but the inclusion of such elements does show how stepping from the path of prescribed ethos and character alignments can create an enriching work of art that will satisfy players of many stripes. With such diverse and complex elements—and, more importantly, the depth of immersion with which Asobo pulls them off—the franchise, itself, instantiates the very light that forms its central image, offering an implicitly brighter experience amidst a genre usually plagued and darkened by cosmic ambivalence and moral nihilism.

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Culture

Richard Weaver: A Platonist in the Machine Age

By Philip Diaz-Lewis — 2 months ago

“Modern man is a moral idiot.” – Richard M. Weaver. 1948. Ideas Have Consequences. 

The American cultural critic Richard Weaver (1910-1963) is unfortunately an obscure figure. However, I can’t conceive a thinker whose message would be of greater interest or novelty for the contemporary world. Weaver bewails the decadence and hopelessness of the twentieth century as much as Oswald Spengler or Jose Ortega y Gasset. Yet his account of their causes is far more philosophical: his explanation of the “dissolution of the west” is that it has abandoned its classical heritage.   

For Weaver was a latter-day High Tory. A Platonist who thought ancient Greek mores were still alive among folk in the rural American south (his first work was on this very topic, see: The Southern Tradition at Bay). Already an oddity in the 1930s, he was the sort of conservative that has barely existed in the mainstream Anglophone world since the nineteenth century.

Weaver’s great work is Ideas Have Consequences, from 1948. It carries a single thesis from beginning to end. Europe’s mental decadence began at the close of the Middle Ages. It was then that the English churchman William of Ockham decided to abandon a doctrine almost universally held before him. A doctrine common to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. A doctrine believed by Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and pagans. This doctrine is realism. 

This is my partial review and partial meditation on Weaver. His prose is vast, so I can only chew over a selection of what it covers. I shall focus on three issues which stand out to me: fragmentation, the spoiled child psychology, and what Weaver calls the “great stereopticon”. 

Realism is the view that abstract entities exist. For example, if I see the sun, a basketball, and a balloon, and call these all “spheres”, that word “sphere” refers to something separate from my mind. When I say, “All these things are spherical”, that term “spherical” describes a real feature of how the world truly is.  

It was the widespread opinion of ancient and medieval people that such concepts as “redness”, “roundness”, “catness” and “humanity” were the basic building blocks of reality. These were the patterns that individual things conformed to, to make them what they are. Each one acts like the blueprint for a building. In the same way a pile of bricks isn’t a dome unless it has roundness, a pile of bones and organs isn’t a dog unless it has “dogness”. That is, unless it conforms to the pattern of an idealised dog.

Realism then allows for nature to have a sort of duty inherent to it. For, if to be a dog is to conform to the pattern of an ideal dog, then this pattern is what dogs should be. A dog that doesn’t eat meat, doesn’t play fetch, and doesn’t wag his tail fails to be a proper dog; and so, we call it a “bad” dog. Likewise, to be human is to embody the ideal pattern of “humanity”. Good people embody it better, and bad people embody it less. 

This means morality is a simple movement from how we are to how we ought to be if we fulfilled our ideal. Beings come into the world imperfect. They only arrive at their proper pattern through hard training and discipline. Moral rules like “don’t steal” and “don’t lie” are guides to help us get from one point to the other by telling us what being an ideal human consists of. Just like “eat meat”, “play fetch” and “wag your tail”, are commands telling the dog how to be a proper dog. This understanding is what, for example, informs Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius insists that the good man is virtuous regardless of what others do or say to him. Because his goodness consists of fulfilling an ideal pattern of conduct, which doesn’t change with the words or actions of others.  

What if we deny all this though? What if, like William of Ockham, we declare this all superstition, and say general terms only refer to our own thoughts? This would make us nominalists, a word derived from the Latin nomen meaning “name”. We’d be saying abstract terms are mere names in the mind; conventions for grouping things together, which truly have nothing in common. This is where Weaver is true to his name and weaves us the consequences. 

First, nature goes from how things should be to how things just are. Without ideals for things to aspire to, it becomes impossible to talk of imperfection. If there’s no ideal dog, for example, then there’s no such thing as a deficient dog. Dogs come in many shapes and sizes, some eat meat and live to fourteen, others never eat, and they die at one. But all are equally natural and morally neutral.

Applied to people, this causes the death of virtue. For, without an ideal human personality type, all our instincts, inclinations and desires also become morally neutral. Nature produces some people with an extreme hunger, and others with almost none. The human mind and body go from something that must be cultivated to meet an ideal, to a machine that runs on automatic. Passions just happen and calling them flawed now seems ridiculous. Weaver writes, “If physical nature is the totality and if man is of nature, it is impossible to think of him as suffering from constitutional evil”.

Fragmentation results from the loss of an ideal to hold knowledge together. For, where the ideal concept of a thing is lost, there’s no one principle to explain its parts. The blueprint of a house, once in my mind, makes everything about it understandable at a glance. But without the blueprint, the atrium, room, and corridor lose all meaning (imagine explaining what a corridor is to someone without any notion of a house and what it should look like). Since, from the realist perspective, the ideal is what determines knowledge, the long-term consequence cannot be but the elimination of truth. 

As Weaver then says, modern man, “Having been told by the relativists that he cannot have truth, (…) now has “facts.”” Gentlemen of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, he notes, had a broad humanistic knowledge. They had it because they were schooled in a classical worldview. The gentleman of Ancien Regime Europe sought not pedantic obsession, but to know how ideals relate to each other. So he was like an architect, having the whole plan of the building before him. He could then inform the more expert workmen how best to make this plan a reality. 

 The gentleman has been gradually replaced by the specialised technocrat as the ruler of western societies. Every field (biology, economics, architecture, etc.) becomes isolated from the rest, and presents itself as the unique solution to all problems. Those who practice them, the technocrats, are each busy making the world in the image of their chosen subjects. The technocrat asks neither why, nor wherefore, but only how. This is, for Weaver, the “substitution of means for ends”. Since, having lost the plan which gives purpose to learning, the tool now becomes the aim. Statecraft becomes a competition between obsessives, who each advance only their own segregated hobbies because they no longer serve human nature. 

Modern man is a “spoiled child” according to Weaver. The path to this is indirect, but obvious when seen. Once ideals are denied, everything that seems fixed and permanent becomes liquid. The cosmos is a machine which we can take apart and reassemble to our own fancy. A cat, for example, isn’t a natural type which ought to have four legs, meow, eat meat, etc. It’s a pile of flesh and bones just so arranged into cat-like shape. We can therefore change it as we see fit. And since humans ourselves have no ideal pattern to conform to, what we see fit is anything whatsoever. This is what Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, sets out to do when he says nature should “be put on the rack”, for our benefit.

Our own goodness, in other words, has come apart from any natural limit. This means goodness is now limitless pleasure (pleasure being the only thing remaining when all purpose is removed from nature). So, man becomes a “spoiled child” because he demands the fabric of reality itself be bent to his delight. Science goes from the quest for wisdom to the slave of indulgence. Progress now means destroying whatever stands in the way of comfort and convenience. The masses get used to thinking of nature not as what exists, but as an enemy that must be overcome. Rights without duties are the inevitable result. 

Here Weaver, the abstract metaphysician, makes a practical point. The spoiled child endlessly consumes, because he sees no limit to his pleasure, and appetites grow with the feeding. Yet production means enduring discomfort for the sake of an end, and hedonists are averse to this. The hardest worker is the person who believes work improves him; the one who thinks the human ideal is fulfilled by work. But “The more [modern man] is spoiled, the more he resents control, and thus he actually defeats the measures which would make possible a greater consumption”. 

Nominalism is the philosophy of consumption, but realism is the philosophy of production. A nominalist culture thus runs the risk of collapse through idleness. 

A stereopticon, or stereoscope, is an old-fashioned machine used to look at three-dimensional stereoscopic images; the ancestor of 3D glasses. Weaver likens mass media in nominalist societies to a stereopticon because its aim is to maintain an illusion. For, Weaver thinks, the above modern project of specialisation, hedonism, and progress at all costs is fated to fail. If ideal concepts truly exist outside the mind, then all attempts to ignore them will end badly. They shall re-assert themselves at every attempt to destroy them, and thwart whatever projects are built on their denial.

As the ideal drops out, society fragments into myriad groups with incompatible perspectives. Like the blind men in the Buddhist proverb, each one touches the elephant and calls it a different animal. The biologist, the head of a social club, the accountant, and engineer; each fails to see the higher truth that unites his vision with the rest. Modern states face, then, the problem of getting these specialised obsessives to agree to a common action or set of beliefs. Thus, it presses mass media for this purpose. Radio, cinema, and television spin a narrative where endless consumption makes people happy, and progress is irresistible and unrelenting. Journalists and directors adopt a single “unvarying answer” to the meaning of life: pleasure, aided by technology and consumption. 

Weaver believes the effect is to re-create Plato’s cave through media. The prisoners, chained in a cave, are forced to watch the parade before them: vapid film stars, gung-ho newsreels, advertisements for cars and coffee makers. They are spiritually and mentally starved yet believe the cure to their trouble is the shallow, materialistic life portrayed on the cave wall. This is not grand conspiracy according to Weaver. Rather, a society with such bloodless aspirations is forced to use propaganda. The unhappiness it causes would otherwise be too obvious for people to bear: “They [media] are protecting a materialist civilization growing more insecure and panicky as awareness filters through that it is over an abyss.”

Such a propagandised civilisation, our author warns, will suffer cyclic authoritarian spasms. Conditioned to think progress is relentless, modern man “… is being prepared for that disillusionment and resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism.” Long gone are the gentlemen who could move us from how we are, to how we ought to be, if we fulfilled our ideal. When the stereopticon fails, the public looks to anybody who can impose duties on them. These tend to be thugs fed on the same materialism as everyone else. 

In conclusion, Weaver paints a picture of a culture undergoing a long, agonising death, yet clinging to the fantasy of its own life. Societies whose false idols are failing cope like a balding man whose hairs retreat ever more. He compensates with a combover until there’s nothing left to comb. Nominalism creates a contradictory culture. Glorifying pleasure, it expects heroism. Fragmenting the sciences, it expects wisdom. Destroying a common ideal, it expects its citizens to form a common front. 

The treatment is polemical, and not a replacement for reading philosophers themselves. As a Platonist, Weaver unnecessarily denigrates Aristotle at times, blaming him for the decline of the medieval worldview. Yet some authors of similar politics to Weaver (like Heinrich Rommen or Edward Feser) would dispute this. He also glosses over Enlightenment projects like those of Rousseau and Kant without much analysis (Charles N. R. McCoy criticises them in much more satisfying detail). But for one wanting an overview of how a single wrong turn can doom a whole culture, Weaver’s clarity is unparalleled. His work is especially good as a locus classicus, with which to compare current trends against. Seldom, in my reading, do I find Weaver has nothing to say on a given topic.

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Culture

Immaturity as Slavery

By Philip Diaz-Lewis — 3 months ago

“… but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a world of secondhand, childish banalities.” – Sir Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance. 

The opening quote comes from a part of Alec Guinness’ 1999 autobiography which greatly amuses me. The actor of Obi Wan Kenobi is confronted by a twelve-year-old boy in San Francisco, who tells him of his obsessive love for Star Wars. Guinness asks if he could do the favour of “promising to never see Star Wars again?”. The lad cries, and his indignant mother drags him away. Guinness ends with the above thought. He hopes the boy is weaned from Star Wars before adulthood, lest he become a pitiful specimen. 

Here enters the figure of the twenty-first century man-child, alias the “kidult”. He’s been on the radar for a while. Social critic Neil Postman prophesies the coming of “adult-children” in The Disappearance of Childhood from 1982. American journalist Joseph Epstein calls this same creature “The Perpetual Adolescent” in a 2004 article of the same name. But the best summary of this character I’ve yet found is by the writer Jacopo Bernardini, from 2014, to which I can add but little.

The kidult is one who lives his life as an eternal present. As the name suggests, his life is a sort of permanent adolescence. He is sceptical of traditional definitions of adulthood, so has deliberately shunned milestones like marriage and childbearing, in favour of an unattached lifestyle which lasts indefinitely. His relations with other people remain short and shallow; based entirely on fun and mutual use (close friendships or passionate love-affairs are not for him).  

Most importantly, the kidult doesn’t change his tastes or buying habits with age. The thresholds of adolescence and maturity have no bearing on the things he likes and purchases, nor how he relates to these things. Not only does he like the same toys and cartoons at thirty as he did at ten, but he continues to obsess over them and impulsively buy them like when he was ten. Enjoying childhood fare isn’t a playful interlude, but a way of life which never ends. He consumes through instant gratification, paying no thought to any long-term pattern or goal.

Although it must not strike the reader as obvious, I think there exists a link between Guinness’ “secondhand, childish banalities” and a kind of latter-day slavery. To see the link needs some prep work, but once laid, I think the reader will see my point. 

First to define servility. I believe the conservative writer Hilaire Belloc gave the best definition, and I shall freely paraphrase him. The great mass of people can be restricted yet not servile. Both monopolistic capitalism and socialism reduce workers to dependency, but neither makes them entirely slaves. Under capitalism, society retains an ideal of freedom, enshrined in law. Even as monopolists manipulate the law with their money, the ideal remains. Under socialism, state ownership is supposed to give all citizens leisure to do what they want (even as the state strangles them). In either case then, freedom is present as an ideal in theory even as it ceases to exist in practice. Monopolistic and socialist states don’t think of themselves as unfree.  

Slavery is different. A slave society has relinquished even the pretence of freedom for a large mass of the working people. Servility exists when a great multitude are forced to work while having no productive property, and no economic independence. That is, a servile person owns nothing (or effectively nothing) and has no choice whatsoever over how much he works or for whom he works. Most ancient civilisations, like Egypt, Greece, and Rome were servile, with servility existing as a defined legal category. That some men were owned by others was as enshrined by law as the ownership of land or cattle. 

Let’s put a little Aristotle into the mix. There are two kinds of obedience: from a free subject to a ruler, and from an unfree slave to his master. These are often confused but distinct. For while the former is reasonable, the latter involves no reason and is truly blind. 

True authority is neither persuasion nor force. If an officer argues to a soldier why he should obey, then the two are equals, and there’s no chain of command. But if the officer must hold a gun to the man’s head and threaten to execute him lest he do his duty, this isn’t authority either. The soldier obeys because he’s terrified, but not because he respects his superior as a superior. True authority lies in the trust which a subordinate has for the wisdom and expertise of a superior. This only comes if he’s rational enough to understand the nature of what he’s a part of, what it does, and that some people with knowhow must organise it to work properly. A sailor understands he’s on a ship. He understands that a ship has so many complex functions that no one man could know or do them all. He understands that his captain is a wiser and more experienced fellow than he. So, he trusts the captain’s authority and obeys his orders. 

I sketch this Aristotelian view of authority because it lets us criticise servility without assuming a liberal social contract idea. What defines slavery isn’t that the slave hasn’t chosen his master. Nor that the slave doesn’t get to argue about his orders. A slave’s duty just is the arbitrary will of his master. He doesn’t have to trust his master’s wisdom, because he doesn’t have to understand anything to be a slave. That is, while a soldier must rationally grasp what the army is, and a citizen must rationally grasp what society is, a slave is mentally passive.

Now, to Belloc’s prophecy concerning the fate of the west. The struggle between ownership and labour, between monopoly capitalism and socialism, which existed in his day, he thought would result in the re-institution of slavery. This would happen through convergence of interests. The state will take an ever-larger role in protecting workers through a safety net, that they don’t starve when unemployed. It will nationalise key industries, it will tax the rich and redistribute the wealth through welfare. But monopolies will still dominate the private sector. 

Effectively, this is slavery. For the worker is protected when unemployed but has entirely lost the ability to choose his employer, or even control his own life. To give an illustration of what this looks like in practice: there are post-industrial towns in Britain where the entire population is either on welfare or employed by a handful of giant corporations (small business having ceased to exist). To borrow from Theodore Dalrymple, the state controls everything about these people, from the house they inhabit to the school they attend. It gives them pocket-money to spend into the private sector dominated by monopolies, and if they want to work, they can only work for monopolists. They fear neither starvation nor a cold night, but they have entirely lost their freedom. 

This long preamble has been to show how freedom is swapped for safety in economic terms. But I think there’s more to it. First, the safety may not be economic but emotional. Second, the person willing to enter this swindle must be of a peculiar mindset. He must not know even a glimmer of true independence, lest he fight for it. A dispossessed farmer, for example, who remembers his crops and livestock will fight to regain them. But a man born into a slum, and knowing only wage labour, will crave mere safety from unemployment. Those who don’t know autonomy don’t long for it.

There now exist a troop of companies that market childish goods for adult consumption. They typically do this in one of two ways. First, offering childish products to adults under the guise of nostalgia. The adult is encouraged to buy things reminding him of his childhood, with the promise that he will relive it. Childish media and products are given an adult spin, and remarketed. Toys are rebranded as collectibles. Children’s films get unnecessary, adult-oriented, sequels or remakes (what Bernardini calls “kidult movies”). Originally child-friendly festivals or theme parks are increasingly marketed to childless adults.   

The second way is by infantilising adult products. Adverts, for example, have gradually replaced stereotypical busy office workers and exhausted housewives with frolicking kidults. No matter how trivial, every product that is not related to Christmas, is now surrounded by giddy, family-free people engaged in play. The message we’re meant to get is that the vacuum cleaner or stapler will free us to act like children. By buying these things, we can create time for the true business of life: bouncing and smiling with one’s mouth open. 

I believe infantilism to be a kind of mental slavery. In both the above examples, three elements combine: ignorance and mass media channel anxiety into childishness. This childishness then binds the victim in servitude to masters who take away his freedom while robbing him in the literal sense.

An artificial ignorance created by modern education is the first parent of the man-child. Absent a proper and classical education, the kidult’s mind is an empty page. Lack of general knowledge separates him from the great achievements of civilisation. He cannot seek refuge in Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or Dante, for he has never heard of these. He cannot draw strength from philosophy and religion for the same reason. Neither can he learn lessons from history, for the world begins only with his own birth. Here is a type of mental dispossession parallel to an economic one. Someone utterly ignorant of the answers great people have given to life’s questions will seek only safety, not wisdom.

The second parent is anxiety. Humans have always been terrified of the inevitable decay of their own bodies, followed by death. The wish for immortality is ancient. Yet the modern world, with its scepticism, creates a heightened anxiousness. When all authority and tradition has been deconstructed, there is no ideal for how people ought to live. Without this ideal, humans have no certainty about the future. Medieval people knew that whatever happened, knights fought, villeins worked, and churchmen prayed. Modern man’s world is literally whatever people make of it. It may be utterly transformed in a very short time. And this is anxiety-inducing to all but the most sheltered of philosophers.

Add to this the rise of a selfish culture. As Christopher Lasch tells us, the nineteenth century still carried (in a bastardised way) the ideal of self-sufficiency and virtue of the ancient man. Working and trading was still tied to one’s flourishing in society. Since 1960, as family and community have disintegrated, the industrialised world has degenerated into a Hobbesian “war of all against all”. A world of loneliness without parents and siblings; lacking true friends and lovers. When adulthood has become toxic and means to swim in a sea of disfunction, vulgarity, substance abuse and pornographic sexuality; it’s no surprise some may snap and long for a regression to childhood. 

Mass media is the third condition. It floods the void where education and community used to be. The space where general knowledge isn’t, now gets stamped by fiction, corporate advertising, and state propaganda. These peddle in a mass of cliches, stereotypes, and recycled tropes. 

My critique of kidults isn’t founded on “good old days” nostalgia, itself a product of media cliches. Fashions, customs, and culture change; and the citizen of today doesn’t have to be a joyless salaryman or housewife to count as an adult. Rather, the man-child phenomenon is a massive transfer of power away from the small and towards the large. The kidult is like an addict, hooked on feelings of cosy fun and nostalgia which are only provided by corporations. These feelings aren’t directed to the good of the kidult but the organisation acting as a dealer. The dealer controls the strength and frequency of the dose to get the wanted behaviour from the addict.     

Now we see how kidults can be slaves. First, they’ve traded freedom for safety (false as it is) like Belloc’s proletarians made servile. Unlike the security of a traditional slave, this is an emotional illusion. The man-child believes that there’s safety in the stream of childish images offered to him. He believes that by consuming these the pain of life will cease. Yet man-children get no material or mental benefit from their infantilism. Indeed, they’re fast parted from their money, while getting no skills or virtues in return. The security is merely psychological: a Freudian age regression, but artificially created. 

Second, while authority in Aristotle’s sense means to swap another’s judgement for your own, for the sake of a common good you understand; here you submit to another’s judgement for the sake of their private good, which you don’t understand. Organisations seeking only profit or power impose their ideas on the kidult, for their benefit. An immature adult pursues only pleasure, lives only for the present, and thinks only in frivolous stereotypes and cliches implanted during childhood. He’s thus in no position to understand the inner workings of companies and governments. He follows his passions like a sentient puppet obeying an invisible thread, leading always to a hand just out of sight. 

In the poem London, William Blake talks about “mind-forg’d manacles”. These are the beliefs people have which constrain their lives in an invisible prison of sorts. For what we think possible or impossible guides our acting. Once mind-forg’d manacles are common to enough people, they form a culture (what’s a culture if not collective ideas on how one should act?). Secondhand childish banalities are such mind-forg’d manacles if we let them determine us wholly. Their “secondhand” nature means the forging has been done for us, and this makes them more insidious than ideas of our own creation. For if what I’ve said above is true, they threaten to make us servile. If enough people become dependent on secondhand childish banalities, as the boy who met Alec Guinness, then the whole culture becomes servile. Growing up may be painful, but it’s a duty to ourselves, that we remain free.

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Culture

The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing?

By Jimbo Flappr — 4 months ago

This is an extract from the transcript of The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing? (1949 – Present). Do. The. Reading. and subscribe to Flappr’s YouTube channel!

“Tradition is like a chain that both constrains us and guides us. Of course, we may, especially in our younger years, strain and struggle against this chain. We may perceive faults or flaws, and believe ourselves or our generation to be uniquely perspicacious enough to radically improve upon what our ancestors have made – perhaps even to break the chain entirely and start afresh.

Yet every link in our chain of tradition was once a radical idea too. Everything that today’s conservatives vigorously defend was once argued passionately by reformers of past ages. What is tradition anyway if not a compilation of the best and most proven radical ideas of the past? The unexpectedly beneficial precipitate or residue retrieved after thousands upon thousands of mostly useless and wasteful progressive experimentation.

To be a conservative, therefore, to stick to tradition, is to be almost always right about everything almost all the time – but not quite all the time, and that is the tricky part. How can we improve society, how can we devise better governments, better customs, better habits, better beliefs without breaking the good we have inherited? How can we identify and replace the weaker links in our chain of tradition without totally severing our connection to the past?

I believe we must begin from a place of gratitude. We must hold in our minds a recognition that life can be, and has been, far worse. We must realize there are hard limits to the world, as revealed by science, and unchangeable aspects of human nature, as revealed by history, religion, philosophy, and literature. And these two facts in combination create permanent unsolvable problems for mankind, which we can only evade or mitigate through those traditions we once found so constraining.

To paraphrase the great G.K. Chesterton: “Before you tear down a fence, understand why it was put up in the first place.” I cannot fault a single person for wishing to make a better world for themselves and their children, but I can admonish some persons for being so ungrateful and ignorant, they mistake tradition itself as the cause of every evil under the sun. Small wonder then that their hairbrained alternatives routinely overlook those aspects of society without which it cannot function or perpetuate itself into the future.

And there are other things tied up in tradition besides moral guidance or the management of collective affairs. Tradition also involves how we delve into the mysteries of the universe; how we elevate the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing into artforms unto themselves; how we represent truth and beauty and locate ourselves within the vast swirling cosmos beyond our all too brief and narrow experience.

It is miraculous that we have come as far as we have. And at any given time, we can throw that all away, through profound ingratitude and foolish innovations. A healthy respect for tradition opens the door to true wisdom. A lack of respect leads only to novelty worship and malign sophistry.

Now, not every tradition is equal, and not everything in a given tradition is worth preserving, but like the Chinese who show such great deference to the wisdom of their ancestors, I wish more in the West would admire or even learn about their own.

Like the Chinese, we are the legatees of a glorious tradition – a tradition that encompasses the poetry of Homer, the curiosity of Eratosthenes, the integrity of Cato, the courage of Saint Boniface, the vision of Michelangelo, the mirth of Mozart, the insights of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, the wit of Voltaire, the ingenuity of Watt, the moral urgency of Lincoln and Douglas.

These and many more are responsible for the unique tradition into which we have been born. And it is this tradition, and no other, which has produced those foundational ideas we all too often take for granted, or assume are the defaults around the world. I am speaking here of the freedom of expression, of inquiry, of conscience. I am speaking of the rule of law, and equality under the law. I am speaking of inalienable rights, of trial by jury, of respect for women, of constitutional order and democratic procedure. I am speaking of evidence based reasoning and religious tolerance.

Now those are all things I wouldn’t give up for all the tea in China. You can have Karl Marx. We’ll give you him. But these are ours. They are the precious gems of our magnificent Western tradition, and if we do nothing else worthwhile in our lives, we can at least safeguard these things from contamination, or annihilation, by those who would thoughtlessly squander their inheritance.”

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Culture

Consorts (Part 3)

By Sarah Stook — 4 months ago

Eleanor of Castile

  • Life: 1241-28th November 1290
  • Reigned: 20th November 1272-28th November 1290
  • Spouse: Edward I (m. 1254) 
  • Children: Sixteen, including Edward II
  • Parents: Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu
  • Origin: Spain

Early Life: Eleanor of Castile was born sometime in 1241 in Burgos, Castile (later Spain). Her parents were Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. Ferdinand was one of Castile’s most successful rulers, as he greatly expanded its territory and joined it with León. Joan was Ferdinand’s second wife- Elisabeth of Swabia had died in 1235. Their eldest son, Alfonso, would succeed to the throne after his father’s death. 

Eleanor was her mother’s successor as Countess of Ponthieu. She had five brothers, seven half-brothers and three half-sisters, though most did not live past early childhood. Eleanor was extremely well-educated, even for the time, and enjoyed the arts and literature. This extended to Alfonso and the Castile court itself. 

Marriage and Children: The only living daughter of Ferdinand III and half-sister of Alfonso X, Eleanor was a desirable candidate in the marriage market. After several betrothals were played with, Eleanor was ultimately engaged to Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England. They wed on the 1st November 1254. Eleanor was about thirteen and Edward only a couple of years older.

Edward and Eleanor had a famously loving marriage. They were close from the moment they married, no doubt helped by the fact that they were practically the same age. Edward never strayed from his wife or had any illegitimate children, an extreme rarity for the time. He loved the fact that she joined him on the Crusades. Eleanor’s death would devastate him and it was only by need that he chose to remarry. They were rarely apart. 

The pair had sixteen children- eleven daughters and five sons. Only seven of their children lived past infancy- indeed, the future Edward II was their youngest son and child. Eleanor adhered to the parenting styles of the time by sending her children away to be educated and barely seeing them. She did care for their education and arranged her daughters’ marriages. 

Pre-Reign and Queenship: Eleanor and Edward initially lived on the continent, but moved back to England in 1255. During the Second Barons’ War, Eleanor joined her husband as he fought in Wales. She once again was at his side when he traveled to fight during the Crusades. At this point, Eleanor had given birth to six of her children. Three more would be born during the Crusades, though only one would live to adulthood.

In 1272, they received word that Edward’s father had died. They nevertheless stayed on the continent until 1274, whereupon they returned to England. The pair were crowned together on the 19th August of that year. 

Eleanor was uninvolved in politics due to her husband’s views on the matter, but was seemingly alright to it. She instead focused on culture. Her influence included arts, literature, education, decoration and clothing. Eleanor’s superior education helped her in that respect. In that way, she fulfilled the traditional role of Queen- she was not political and focused on the feminine aspects of a reign. 

Whilst she enjoyed a close relationship with her husband, Eleanor was generally very unpopular with the public. Her business dealings, which made her incredibly wealthy in both land and money, were seen as unbecoming for a queen. The large foreign retinue of cousins that came with Eleanor were also disliked, though Eleanor was smart enough not to let the men marry English noblewomen. She also supported her husband’s crusade against the Jewish people. 

By the mid to late 1280s, Eleanor was frequently ill. In 1290, it was clear that she was dying. Eleanor used her remaining time to arrange the marriages of her children. In November of that year she was no longer able to travel and was thus given quarters in Nottinghamshire. 

On the 28th November 1290, Eleanor Castile died at the age of 48-49. Her husband was by her side. Eleanor is buried in three places- her viscera (internal organs) in Lincoln Cathedral, her heart at Blackfriars Monastery and the rest of her body in Westminster Abbey. Edward would later be buried beside her. 

Personality: Eleanor was an intellectual with a passion for the arts and culture, something that is part of her legacy. She was also extremely brave and strong, as evidenced by her joining her husband on the Crusades. Several of her children were born abroad as opposed to the safety of England. Unfortunately, Eleanor had her flaws. Her ruthlessness towards the Jews may not have been the same as her husband’s, but she still seized lands from them. Her general business dealings made her unpopular.

Legacy: Eleanor’s most famous legacy is that of the Eleanor crosses. Her broken-hearted husband built twelve large, intricate crosses to mark the stops taken as her body was taken back to London. Only two remain. Eleanor’s cultural influence was also strong. She is also often remembered for the loving relationship she shared with her husband, a sharp contrast with that of other medieval marriages. 

Margaret of France

  • Life: c.1279-14th February 1318
  • Reigned: 8th September 1299-7th July 1307
  • Spouse: Edward I (m.1299) 
  • Children: Three
  • Parents: Philip III of France and Maria of Brabant 
  • Origin: France

Early Life: Margaret of France was born around 1279 in Paris. Her parents were Philip III of France and Maria of Brabant. She was the youngest child of both parents, with Philip having been married to Isabella of Aragon until her 1271 death. Margaret has a brother, a sister, and five half-brothers, though most did not live past childhood.

Very little is known about her early life, but she was likely well-educated as a princess of France. 

Marriage and Children: Margaret’s older sister Blance was initially engaged to Edward’s son, the future Edward II. Upon hearing of Blanche’s apparent beauty, Edward broke off the relationship in hopes of marrying his son’s betrothed. It turned out that Blanche had already been married off. Her half-brother Philip IV had been king since Margaret was six and offered her as Edward’s bride. An angry Edward refused and declared war on France. Eventually, an agreement was made. Margaret’s half-niece Isabella would later marry Edward II as part of the agreement. 

Despite Edward’s devoted love to his late wife Eleanor, the fact he only had one living son made it essential that he remarry. In the end, Edward and Margaret would enjoy a very happy marriage. Their age gap was at least forty years, but they lived harmoniously. Margaret’s decision to join her husband on the front was reminiscent of Eleanor and thus pleased him greatly. Their relationship was so great that Margaret would refuse to remarry upon his death.

Margaret had two sons within two years of marriage, fulfilling Edward’s hopes of further sons. She would later have a daughter that she named Eleanor after her predecessor. 

Queenship: Like Eleanor, Margaret was not involved in politics but was surely a close confidant of her husband. She also bravely joined her husband at the front, something that endeared her greatly to him.

Margaret fulfilled her role as Queen in more ways than just providing sons. A medieval Queen was expected to be a mediator and a calm, feminine influence on her husband. The kind Margaret would intercede on behalf of those who had displeased the king. This most notably extended to her stepson Edward, who often quarreled with his father. Edward was only two years Margaret’s junior and the pair got on extremely well. 

After nearly eight years of marriage, Edward I died on the 7th July 1307 aged 68. 

Post-Queenship: Margaret remained in England following Edward’s death. Despite her youth (she was 26 when she was widowed), Margaret refused to remarry, saying that ‘when Edward died, all men died for me.’

She remained on good terms with her half-niece Isabella upon the girl’s marriage to Edward II in 1308. Unfortunately, Edward’s association with Piers Gaveston soured their previously excellent relationship. Margaret’s rightful lands were confiscated but she later got them back. 

Personality: Margaret was a singularly kind, warm woman who was an excellent queen. She fulfilled her duties through her interceding on behalf of others and mediating between her husband and stepson. Margaret’s kindness went beyond what was expected of the time and thus won her affection. She showed bravery by joining her husband on the front. Despite their large age gap, Margaret was a devoted spouse and remained loyal after her husband’s death. She was kind to her successor Isabella. 

Legacy: Margaret is not as remembered as her predecessor Eleanor, probably helped by the fact that she was not the mother of a king. Her granddaughter Joan, however, would marry Edward II’s son and become mother of Richard II, the boy king. Her loyalty to Edward is something some will remember. 

Isabella of France

  • Life: c.1295-22nd August 1358
  • Reigned: 25th February 1308-25th January 1327
  • Spouse: Edward II (m.1308)
  • Children: Four, including Edward III
  • Parents: Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre 
  • Origin: France

Early Life: Isabella of France was born around 1295 in Paris. Her parents were Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre. Philip’s half-sister Margaret was Isabella’s predecessor as Queen, and they were both engaged to their respective husbands through the same agreement. Philip himself was a handsome man known to be a very strong and hard king. Joan was a beloved Queen who enjoyed a close relationship with her husband. She died when Isabella was about ten. 

As befitting a princess of France, Isabella received a thorough education, probably similar to the one her aunt Margaret received. 

Marriage and Children: The agreement that had Edward I and Margaret of France married saw Isabella engaged to Edward’s son. The king attempted to stop the marriage several times, but the issue became moot when he died. 

Edward II married Isabella on the 25th January 1308 in a very elaborate ceremony. Unfortunately, it was not a good marriage. The roughly twelve year-old Isabella was immediately sidelined at her own wedding reception when Edward sat with his favourite Piers Gaveston. He went so far as to gift all of Isabella’s jewellery and presents to Gaveston, angering her and the nobles. Their poor relationship will be explored further in the Queenship section, as the repercussions were great.

As Isabella was only around twelve at the wedding, it was a while before the wedding was probably consumated. The pair’s first child, the future Edward III, was born nearly five years after the wedding. Isabella and Edward would have two sons and two daughters. 

She was the typical medieval mother in her parenting style. Her machinations alienated her son Edward to the point of him imprisoning her upon reaching his majority. Isabella was close to her daughter Joan in later life. 

Queenship: Isabella was immediately ignored by her new husband. This was not helped by her youth and the fact that she was too young to consummate the marriage, but Edward II was not a good husband. Her jewels and gifts had been given to Piers Gaveston. She was denied money and maintenance, forcing her to complain to her father.

Eventually, Isabella found herself allying with Gaveston. Despite her relative youth, Isabella was an intelligent young woman who was attempting to forge her own political path. Unfortunately for her, Gaveston had earned the ire of the powerful nobles and would be executed in 1308. Isabella was pregnant at the time.

Things would only get worse, despite Isabella successfully giving birth to a son. Edward became close to the Despensers, a father and son duo who would soon become his closest allies. Hugh Despenser the Younger was a great favourite of Edward and it’s believed that they had a sexual relationship. Isabella found herself still cast out of Edward’s inner circle. Despite her problems with a lot of the nobility, Isabella supported their efforts to get rid of the Despensers. 

With Despenser at his side, Edward became a despot over the next few years. Isabella set up her own household far away but would be punished by having her children taken away and her lands confiscated. 

Luckily, Isabella was able to get herself sent to France as a peace envoy. Whilst there, she rallied anti-Edward forces with the help of Roger Mortimer, a leading nobleman. The forces arrived in England and quickly took over. Edward was captured two months later and forced to abdicate. Both Despensers were brutally executed. 

Isabella had her son Edward installed and crowned in early 1327. Meanwhile, the former Edward II was shuttled around before being placed in Berkeley Castle. He died on the 21st September of that year. The circumstances of his death are murky. Historians remain divided as to whether he was murdered or died of natural causes, though murder is more likely. 

Post-Queenship: With Edward III barely a teenager, he required a regent. Isabella, along with Mortimer, fulfilled that role. She ensured her son listened to her and the boy had limited power. Mortimer was a careless man and was stupid enough to treat Edward badly. Eventually, Edward had enough, especially after his father’s death. The trigger was Mortimer ordering the execution of Edward’s uncle, the Earl of Kent. 

Edward took his mother and Mortimer by surprise when he captured them in late 1330. Whilst he placed Isabella in a luxurious house arrest, he had Mortimer executed without trial.

Isabella spent years living very comfortably and was often visited by family and friends. Despite her cold reputation, she was a loving mother to her daughter Joan and doting grandmother. 

The ‘She-Wolf’ of France died on the 22nd August 1358 around the age of 62. She is buried at Grey Friars’ Church. 

Personality: Isabella was a complicated woman. She showed great intelligence and political acumen, but was also very ruthless and sharp. Whilst many queens were forced to live through their husband’s affairs, none would be quite humiliated as Isabella was. She was called a ‘She-Wolf,’ but we must remember she was a humiliated child bride. Such actions in men would not be treated so poorly. Whilst Isabella was controlling of her son, she did prove to be a loving grandmother. 

Legacy: Isabella is remembered as a cold, calculating woman as opposed to the pure and virtuous ladies of her era. She succeeded in giving birth to heirs but did not follow the tradition of ‘feminine’ queenship. The truth is more complicated- Isabella was ruthless and cold, but no more than other historical figures. 

Philippa of Hainault

  • Life: 24th June 1310/1315-15th August 1369
  • Reigned: 24th January 1328-15th August 1369
  • Spouse: Edward III (m.1328)
  • Children: Thirteen, including Edward the Black Prince 
  • Parents: William I, Count of Hainaut and Joan of Valois 
  • Origin: France 

Early Life: Philippa of Hainault was born on the 24th June 1310 or 1315 in Valenciennes, modern day France. Her parents were William I, Count of Hainaut and Joan of Valois. She was the third of their eight children. Whilst Philippa did not have the title of princess, Joan of Valois was the granddaughter of a French king and sister of the other. 

She was likely well-educated. 

Marriage and Children: A betrothal between the future Edward III and Philippa was tentatively discussed as early as 1322. Four years later, Edward’s mother Isabella had them officially engaged in return for William’s help in invading England. 

The marriage was a success even before the wedding, as it is said that Philippa cried when Edward left to return home. Their proxy wedding occurred in October 1327 before their official marriage three months later.

Edward and Philippa had a strong, loving relationship that lasted throughout their marriage. This did not stop Edward from straying in his wife’s later years, as he had a young mistress named Alice Perrers, with whom he had three children. It is argued that this only occurred when Philippa’s health was poor and that it was kept from her. This was oddly progressive for the time, as kings didn’t usually hide mistresses. Whilst he did have the affair with one other woman, Edward’s true love was clearly Philippa. 

The pair managed to have thirteen children- eight sons and five daughters, eight of whom would live to adulthood. Interestingly, most of their children would marry rich English nobles as opposed to foreign royals. This was most unusual for their eldest son and heir Edward, who married his widowed cousin Joan. Perhaps the happiness between Edward and Philippa allowed them to have their own children be married for love. 

Queenship: Philippa may have been Queen in name, but her mother-in-law Isabella was Queen in every other way. Isabella did not like relinquishing her title and thus prevented Philippa’s coronation. It was not until Philippa was pregnant that she was crowned. Luckily for Philippa, she bore a healthy son and unrelated events saw Mortimer executed and Isabella imprisoned.

Throughout her time as Queen, Philippa proved to be enormously popular and beloved. She was not necessarily political in the way Isabella was, but she used her influence when necessary. Edward trusted her to act as regent when he was away and she proved herself more than capable.

It was Philippa’s kindness and charity that made her loved. The most famous of these cases was that of the Burghers of Calais. Angered by the holdout of the city, Edward swore he’d spare the citizens if six of the leaders (burghers) made themselves known and surrendered to him. Before he could presumably have them executed, a barefoot and pregnant Philippa fell to her knees before him. She begged him to spare them, saying that their unborn child would be punished if they did not. Edward was supposedly so moved by this that he agreed to let them live. 

Her charity extended to those at home. Philippa also bravely encouraged troops fighting the Scottish invaders, something sorely needed as Edward was out of the country.

In her later years, Philippa fell ill. Those years saw Edward turn to Alice Perrers and father three children with her. Philippa finally passed on the 15th August 1369, somewhere in her mid-fifties. Edward was with her at her deathbed. She asked Edward to ensure that all of her debts and obligations were fairly paid.

Edward spent £3K on her tomb. Her death also saw a massive decline in his popularity. He was vilified for cheating on his loving wife with a younger woman- something extraordinary in a time where it was expected that kings would stray. Alice Perrers would become a huge villain in England. Perrers was accused of taking advantage of an old, grieving king by accepting extravagant gifts. Her interference in politics was not welcomed.

Upon his death, Edward was buried with his beloved Philippa. 

Personality: Philippa is one of the most revered consorts in English history. Her kindness, warmth and generous nature made her beloved throughout her country. She was a very successful Queen- she completed the role of feminine mediator and provided her husband with many children. Even without that, her good heart kept her through. The fact that Edward was castigated for taking a mistress shows how loved she was. 

Legacy: Philippa is not often remembered. She did not leave a lasting legacy through arts or culture, despite leaving a mark on the textile industry. Her eldest son did not become king, but her grandson would be. Philippa’s sons Edmund and John of Gaunt would become a direct monarchical ancestor.  

Anne of Bohemia

  • Life: 11th May 1366-7th June 1394
  • Reigned: 20th June 1382-7th June 1394
  • Spouse: Richard II (m.1382)
  • Children: None
  • Parents: Richard IV, Holy Roman Emperor and Elizabeth of Pomerania
  • Origin: Czech Republic/Czechia 

Early Life: Anne of Bohemian was born on the 11th May 1366 in Prague, modern day Czechia. Her parents were Richard IV, Holy Roman Empire and Elizabeth of Pomerania. Elizabeth was Richard’s fourth and final wife. Anne had three brothers, one sister, three half-brothers and three half-sisters. Richard was the most powerful king of the age and was also extremely popular. 

She was likely well-educated. 

Marriage and Children: The marriage between Anne and Richard II was an odd one. Despite Anne being the daughter of an extremely powerful monarch, she did not have a large dowry or other assets. The main reason was due to a problem with the Church and two rival popes. Richard and the Holy Roman Emperor both opposed France’s choice.

Richard and Anne were both fifteen when they married on the 20th January 1382. Despite Anne’s unpopularity and lack of wealth (Richard having to pay Anne’s brother for marriage), the two became devoted to one another. Richard never strayed and always defended Anne.

No children were born of the union. Anne was blamed by society, as women were at the time, but Richard never cast doubt towards her. 

Queenship: Anne was known as ‘Good Queen Anne,’ which shows that she overcame early unpopularity. She would often intercede on behalf of others, as Philippa of Hainault had. This constant kindness made her beloved by the English people, and eventually the court. It was her sweetness that won the nobles over.

After a happy twelve years of marriage, Anne died aged 28 on the 7th June 1394. Edward was bereft. He ordered the palace that she died in to be torn down. Edward also refused to enter any building besides a church where he’d been with Anne. After his own 1400 death, Edward was buried with a tomb he’d already prepared beside Anne’s. 

Personality: Anne was reportedly a sweet and kind woman. She cared greatly for her subjects and was merciful to a fault. It was her good nature that pushed away early criticisms directed towards her.

Legacy: Anne is not often remembered. She, and indeed Richard himself, has no children together, so she did not see any direct descendants claim the throne. Anne did bring new fashions over, such as new shoes. 

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