Assassin's Creed: Seek This Symbol

When people ask me what I write, I answer, “the cultural history and philosophy of the Romantic Era from 1776-1929”. Since philosophy covers metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, I write about all these subjects as they pertain to the Romantic. Yet my most popular article by far is a critique of Assassin’s Creed focusing particularly on the ideas expressed in the game Assassin’s Creed 2.2, titled “Brotherhood”. I am currently on my second play-through of the latest release, Assassin’s Creed 3 and I thought that I would take a moment and share some ideas.

When any aesthetic expression is put into the world certain people are drawn to it but for very personal and often unique reasons. This game series has fans all over the world, but I doubt that very many see what I see. Likewise, I may see things beyond whatever was conceived by the creative team behind it.

As with any work of art, it is whatever we want it to be provided our perception can be supported by the work itself. So if I am a fan of the series because of the game play, sure that’s there. Or if I think the characters are cool, yes, that is there too. But if I like it because I think it promotes homosexuality, then I may be going out on a limb, because that’s really not there, at least as far as I can see.

What I want to write about here is a scene in the latest game that gave me chills, but first some background information for the uninitiated. A key aspect of the story running throughout the games is the “Ones Who Came Before” and the artefacts they left behind. Basically, they are an ancient advanced civilization who lived on Earth and bioengineered slaves to serve them, also known as us humans, and were the origin of the divine pantheons of many cultures. Their civilization was destroyed by a massive solar flare and the few survivors were forced to interbreed with the surviving humans. You did not need to have this lineage to be a member of the Assassin Brotherhood, but the top Assassins were. This ancient DNA allowed them to utilize artefacts, such as the Apples of Eden, without being corrupted by them.

I should note, there will be spoilers in this article. You have been warned.

In Assassin’s Creed 3, we learn that at least two of the ancient ones had essentially downloaded their consciousness into a sort of internet linking various artefacts and temples. Through these they acted as “spirits” manipulating the course of human events, primary through the conflicting secret societies of the Assassins and the Templars. These two entities are first discovered in Renaissance Italy and identify themselves as Minerva and Juno.

Minerva is the Roman name for the goddess Athena and is associated with wisdom, tactics, invention, commerce, and freedom. Forms of Athena/Minerva include Britannia and the Statue of Liberty. So we could say that she represents the Assassins.

Juno is the Roman equivalent of Hera, the wife of Jupiter/Zeus. She is the goddess of matrimony and motherhood. In other words, social order and therefore represents the ideology of the Knights Templar.

In the story, one of the temples housing Juno’s consciousness is in a sealed cave in up-state New York and protected by a tribe of Mohawk. The existence of the temple is discovered by members of the Knights Templar who are looking to remove the natives and open the sealed doors, but Juno wants to prevent such a premature activation of the temple. She makes contact with a young Mohawk boy who inherited from his British father the ancient gene of the Assassins. During his communion with Juno via an ancient artefact she shows him the insignia of the Assassins and tells him to “Seek This Symbol”. That is where I got the chills. Here’s why.

There are two kinds of people in the world. There is us and them. Humans are by nature small group animals with about 100-150 people in a group. We can say that what binds them together are familial ties, but that is superficial. Values are those things we act to gain or to keep. These values are determined by beliefs, and the habits required to attain these values are called virtues. When beliefs, values, and virtues are shared by members of a group we say that they have a common purpose. This is the glue that binds humans together as a couple, a family, a gang, a tribe, and a nation. We might even call it love.

All of these things, beliefs, values, virtues, shared purpose, and levels of group identity, are all abstracts. They have no physicality. So we manifest them as symbols. A symbol is not merely the representation of an ideology, but also of the group that adheres to that ideology. This is why the desecration of a symbol invokes such wrath. We love our symbols because they symbolise our love, our love of ourselves as part of the group we identify as us.

Humans may be small group animals by nature, but we no longer live in small groups. The groups we form are within the context of a larger group all filled with numerous other groups divided along a myriad of largely superficial lines, like race, national origin, religion, politics, and even cultural consumption. The result is that symbols lose their exclusivity to us. Anyone can impose any meaning, be it great or trivial, upon a symbol as they utilise it according to their fancy. A person may wear a cross for a number of reasons without any of them signifying identification with the beliefs, values, or virtues of Christians as a group.

Ubisoft, the company behind the Assassin’s Creed series, has made the symbol for the Assassin Brotherhood readily available in numerous forms, from jewellery, to belt buckles, to decals. What this says is, “I like the game Assassins Creed.” But there is more to it.

Within the context of the game’s story the symbol represents a secret society. It is a gang of men and women who have dedicated themselves to a system of beliefs, values, and virtues. Through this there is a common purpose and a brotherhood. Now suppose players of the game once exposed to this ideology find that they share these beliefs, values, and virtues. Does it not stand to reason that they will invest their emotions in the symbol as well? At this point the symbol transcends, “I like the game Assassin’s Creed” and becomes “I believe in the Assassin’s Creed”. The transition is made from art into life.

So let’s look at the symbol itself. First though, I need to give a brief disclaimer. I have no idea how the designers at Ubisoft came to create this symbol. I do not know their intentions, inspirations, or any meanings that they subscribe to it. What I am presenting here is just my opinion and the ideology that I have emotionally invested in it.

You may notice that the symbol looks like the letter “A”.  Sure, we can say A for Assassin.  We could also say A for Atheist.  The creed, “Nothing is True; Everything is permitted” as first expressed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an attack on belief, which historically has been used to control people, and in a general sense it rejects all beliefs derived from social conditioning. not only religious beliefs.  Also, the Assassins in the game are portrayed as atheists.

A can also stand for Athena.  It may seems strange to mention a pagan goddess alongside atheism, but the gods and goddesses are very useful tools as symbolic representations.  Athena, as mentioned earlier as Minerva, is in many ways a vivid characterisation of the Assassins, their beliefs, values, and virtues as the goddess of wisdom, battle tactics, invention, commerce, truth, reason, and freedom. As the patron of heroes, particularly Odysseus, she encouraged the virtues of strength, courage, mastery, and honour.

Also of note in this regard is that in the game the Templar leaders carry the title Master, while among the Assassins the preferred title is Mentor.  This fits with the opposing ideologies.  The Master commands while the Mentor guides.  The word mentor originates from Homer’s Odyssey as the proper name of an old man who lived in Odysseus’ town.  During the story both Odysseus and his son are counselled by him, but it is later discovered that this was actually Athena appearing in his form.  The root of the word mentor, men, is the same from which we get the word mental referring to the mind.  It is also the root for the proper name Minerva, aka Athena.  So whether intentional by the games authors or not, we have another connection between the Assassins and Athena.

The letter A can also stand for Anarchy.  The political view of the Assassins is that power must be redistributed to each individual rather than concentrated in a central authority.  If we see political opposition on a scale between individualists on one side and collectivists on the other, then we have a clearer picture of the Assassins on the individualist side along  with the libertarians and anarchists and the Templars on the authoritarian collectivist end with the progressives, socialists and communists.  Power to the people does not mean power to a central authority claiming to act on behalf of the people. it means challenging the central authority as it presently exists and the potential creation of new authorities.

I have chosen to mark as the beginning of the Romantic Era as 1776 for three reasons.  That is the year that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, James Watt put the first commercial steam engine into operation, and the Declaration of Independence was issued.  Romanticism is about individualism.  The Wealth of Nations brought capitalism that empowered the individual economically, the steam engine heralded the Industrial Revolution created individual opportunity, and the Declaration of Independence brought Classical Liberalism, at the time was called radical republicanism, which brought individual freedom.  Another interesting relationship was that Adam Smith, James Watt, and many of America’s founding fathers were all Freemasons.

The symbol the the fraternal brotherhood known as the Freemasons, or Masons, is a compass and square.  Others have noticed the similarity between this and the symbol for the Assassins, with the compass forming the “A” shape and the square being the portion beneath it.  The “G” is said to stand for God, though not in a purely Judeo-Christian sense, but rather a supreme being as the “great architect of the universe”.  Masons use architectural and stonemason metaphors the illustrate their key principles of brotherly love, relief, and truth.

The similarity between the Mason and Assassin symbols is uncanny and yet may be purely coincidental.  Many theorists put forward the notion that the Mason evolved directly from the historic Knights Templar, however in the game universe, the Assassins are the oppositions to the Templars.  I am by no means an expert on Masonic history, but from my understanding and research I would assert that Masons were generally on the side of liberty and were often persecuted by authoritarian regimes, such as the Italian fascists, the Nazis, and the Soviets.  I suspect that given further study many Masonic ideas may be present in the representation of the Assassins in the game.

Assassin’s Creed is a fantasy.  None of it is real.  There are no ancient ones, divine or otherwise; there is no Assassin Brotherhood, at least not since the Hashashin died out after the Crusades; and there is no Knights Templar, although that is often debated on the internet.  So for all intents and purposes the symbol of the Assassins is equally meaningless, and anyone is free to ascribe any meaning to it, be it trivial or profound.

What is real is that there are people in the world who seek power which they usually justify in the name of righteousness.  Power is the means by which a person works their will in the world.  Some people use their power to exert their will over others and others readily accept this authority.  History shows us that human beings have an incredible capacity for self-subjugation to a point where it is perceived as a social norm and anyone who challenges the authority is seen as being weird or fringe.  Since the authority cloaks itself in morality, these outcasts are usually portrayed as evil or deranged.

This is the underlying truth behind Assassin’s Creed.  It envisions a secret group of people, a gang if you will, who rally behind a symbol and bind themselves together in shared beliefs, values, and virtues to challenge the authority –  “to work in the dark to serve the light”.  We talk about fighting for the right, but we really do not mean it.  We fight metaphorically through political activism or vicariously by playing games like Assassin’s Creed, but the authority does not fear metaphoric or vicarious battle.  Fighting means violence if necessary and the Assassins represent a group that sees the oppression that most are blind to and they are willing to do what must be done no matter how terrible.

At the end of Assassin’s Creed 3, the Earth is threatened by a return of the same massive solar flare that wiped-out “the Ones Who Came Before”.  The main character, Desmond Miles, must make a choice.  By activating an ancient device he can save humanity but also free Juno’s consciousness and she will in turn enslave humanity. Athena/Minerva councils him not to activate the device.  Remnants of humanity will survive and they will be free.  Desmond’s choice is one we must all make.  Do we value security and safety under the authority or do we choose freedom even if it means the world burns?  For me, the symbol of the Assassins marks those who choose freedom, no matter the cost and that is something very real.

Response to a Reader of my Assassin’s Creed Article

I recently received a comment on by far my most popular article on the underlying questions behind the video game Assassin’s Creed, focusing primarily on Assassin’s Creed 2.2, Brotherhood.  You can find it here. My response became quite lengthy and would not fit into the comment section, so I have opted to post my reply here.

Anonymous wrote:

Great post, I've been looking for a while for something like this. Main points of the game condensed in one place. I came to most of the conclusions myself, but had no chance in putting them together as eloquently as you have.

There are still some things that bother me though. The Templars' intentions were in fact just as noble as those of assassins. They wanted the world to prosper in peace. The "wrong" part is, they (just as Machiavelli) believed people are stupid, ignorant, immoral, pleasure-seeking and selfish lot who wont prosper on their own. Thus, someone needs to steer them. Well who better then themselves? They thought themselves better than others and that gave them the right for power. It is obvious to me that the belief someone's life is worth more than another's is false, but you cannot deny some are better than others (again, I don't believe their lives are therefore worth more/less). I don't mean that as a predisposition like race, sex... I mean that some people make more of themselves, they see their own potential and reach for it and eventually get closer to the truth. I don't want to be mean but here's an example: You have a fat greasy-looking guy, slouching in his seat at the computer, staring mindlessly at the screen, eating stale pizza from 2 days ago. .. you get the picture. And then you have someone who is dedicated to a cause, constantly improving himself, training, learning, growing.

How is Templars control of people any worse than Altair killing for peace (see the contradiction)? Ezio's standpoint is a bit better since he's killing for truth or better he's killing the Templars to remove an illusion they've cast. The assassins want people to learn the truth for themselves and then be able to prosper on their own, without someone controlling them (or at least that's how i get it). That here is an ideal. I'd say I'm very idealistic myself, but I can see why people say "Idealism" with a certain you-mean-unrealistic kind of tone. I don't think the fact people would ever learn or even want to learn the truth is an objective truth as you call it. It's Ezio's belief. So he's acting on his belief in the humanity (just as Templars are acting in their belief of their own supremacy). Both are subjective truths.

So I don't see how his small evil (killing) is any smaller than Templar's (deceiving). And I can't even come to terms whether a small evil for greater good is justified. I mean what is ethics? Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences? Ghandi said be the change you wish to see in the world. Well an idealistic world is made of moral people doing moral (directly, not in consequences) things. There would be no need for small evils. I prefer the idea that the only real good is the absolute good. Doing no small evil for whatever purpose. If everyone did the same, ... Instead of fighting the wrong, do right. Be the example.

One more thought on morality: Is it something universal, absolute, or are we taught what is wrong/right? I would very much like to believe it is universal as the other option would very much undermine my beliefs of what is true at all, but I just can't find a proof. Little help?
I saw some posts earlier about how Hitler and Stalin and whoever they've brought up were bad. That kinda bothers me. Most people are just taught they were evil men and than go in the public and start saying all this things you heard in school or god knows where and say how they'd kill them without hesitation if they could go back. What do you really know of this men? What if all you know of them is a "Templar" fabrication to instil fear or serve any other selfish purpose? I'm going for Lenin here, the first guy to actually try out communism in practice. He was an idealist, just as Ezio was. His intentions were great, just as those of Templars or assassins. But then in US, communism is shown as the biggest evil that humanity has ever seen. "Don't think too much about what it is, just know it's really bad for you, look, they are poor and their leaders have a ton of money, damn, we should probably start a war right? I mean they speak of global communism; they want to make us poor too? Yeah, lets build a nuke, what do you think?" They put fear into people to make them see their own government a..... ok I’m loosing track here. You get the idea. Think for yourselves, don’t just be told something and take it as truth. It could just as well be someone else’s subjective or it would serve his purposes to make it yours. Buddha said not to believe a single word someone tells you until you've came to that same conclusion. I just cant stand good old American republicans saying "Obama's a Communist" and when asked what communism is they mock you for not knowing. !!! We did this in 3rd grade!

I know I'm long, one last thing, i thought of an allegory for the main theme of the game. Templars and assassins can be compared to parents and the people are their children. The Templars will tell their children what to do, they won't tell them why and explain. And those kids would live just fine (until some day for whatever reason there would no longer be control). Assassins would let their kids decide on their own, make their own mistakes but also expect them to take responsibility for those actions. These children would learn not to obey, but to decide.

Thanks again for your post and reply. I really liked how well you express yourself. You could probably write this comment in about half the length I did.

Now... Homework

To summarize, I think these are the basic points/questions:

How valuable is a person and are some people more valuable than others?

What is the difference between the political positions represented by the Templars and the Assassins? And how do we judge their tactics?

Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences?

Is there a knowable universal morality?

Were Hitler and Stalin truly evil? What about Communism?

Are the Templars and Assassins just different kinds of parenting?

Whenever I get lost I just break things down to their basics and look to Natural Law for answers. Francis Bacon said, “Nature to be commanded must first be obeyed”. The dark side of idealism is when this fact is ignored and people try to force nature to fit their presupposed notions. This is part of the concept “Nothing is true”. What is true is Nature, Reality, or whatever you want to call it. To put it another way, there is no truth save that which is true.

Thanks to modern technology and a society built on it, Nature is not so great a concern. We exist in a state of luxury. We take this condition for granted and form idealistic notions completely divorced from reality and build moral codes with no concern for Nature. In fact, we find Nature itself morally abhorrent because it goes against the morality that we have been socially conditioned to accept.

This brings me to the first point. How valuable is a person and are some people more valuable than others? Humans possess an individual consciousness, but we are not equipped to survive on our own. We are small group animals. We form families, gangs, tribes, and clans. These are “us”. Those who are not us are “them”. On an individual level, we value our own lives, then our family, and then our tribe.

You can take the most empathetic and compassionate person and ask them to choose between the lives of a thousand African children they do not know and their own child, and I assure you that they would rather see the deaths of these children then their own, even if their offspring is “a fat greasy-looking guy, slouching in his seat at the computer, staring mindlessly at the screen, eating stale pizza”. We are programmed by Nature to value us over them.

Beyond family, we judge people in a community according to their utilitarian value. Let’s say you were picking your team of who to be trapped with on a desert island. Do you pick Billy Joe Bob, redneck extraordinaire with a gun rack in his pick-up truck for when he goes off to kill Bambi or do you choose Noam Chomsky, the smartest man in academia? Sorry Noam, but Billy Joe wins. We need food. For Noam to have any value to the community, he would need to offer something other than linguistics and political opinion.

So according to the grim reality of Nature, we value the lives of us over them, and amongst us it is the people who either create value or carry the power of force who achieve status. It is all well and good to be non-violent when the greater force of law protects the weak, but in the state of Nature the world belongs to the bullies. Might does not make right, but it does win the day. So it is important for us to be stronger than them.

This brings us to the next point. We may say that violence is wrong or that killing is wrong, but violence is the de-facto final resolution to conflict. People who extol Gandhi have no idea of the social context. The British had been in India for centuries and had developed sympathy for the people of India. So the non-violent tactics worked. However, what if Gandhi was against a different culture of the time, like the Nazis for example? He would be dead.

Here’s an interesting point. The Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not kill”. Well, it does, but the translation is off. The actual commandment is, “Thou shalt not murder”. Killing is when you kill “them” and murder is when you kill “us”.

Studies have shown that the old 80/20 per cent rules apply in a crisis situation. Ten per cent will go one way, ten per cent will go the other, and eighty per cent follow one or the other. We almost see this in the American War for Independence. A third of the population supported the patriots, a third supported the Crown, and a third did not care.

In Assassin’s Creed, we have two gangs of opposing views. The Assassins are us and the Templars are them. The people caught in the middle are the innocents not to be harmed, but the Templars have no compunction against killing innocents if they get in the way. So in that regard the tactics differ. The Assassins are justified in killing them because they are not us.

Again, to the modern mind this does not seem right. We are taught not to see us and them. In the West we are encouraged to see them as part of this great human family with us – in the same global village. The enemies of Western Civilization do not share that sentiment and theirs is a view more aligned with Nature.

Now to the third point, “Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences?” In the philosophical branch of Ethics this is a key debate. I subscribe to the latter, which is called Consequentialism. Ethics is concerned with “right action”. An action is judged as “good” if the long-term results are positive and “bad” is the outcome is destructive. Aristotelian ethics holds that to be good is to be consistent with Nature.  Wisdom requires that we look at the world that his and from that arrive at the most positive course of action.

So let’s say someone does a bad thing, but thinks he is doing something good. Then he is a fool, and Aristotle would equate foolishness with evil. Unfortunately, when it comes to questions of ethics we have this Disney view of villains as wringing their hands gleefully at their glorious evil. It does not work that way in real life. As the actor Willem DeFoe noted, all villains think that they are the hero. They think they are in the right. They think they are moral and justified.

I’m going to skip ahead to a related question. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler all thought that they were morally right. Stalin to a lesser degree, but Lenin thought he was freeing the serfs and Hitler was acting for the good of the German people. Germany was pretty sick after World War I, and many believed that National Socialism was the cure. It was us vs. them taken to what many saw as its logical extreme.

One of the consequences of World War II was a rejection in the West of the moral validity of us vs. them, however because it is a natural state the result was hypocrisy. We saw the creation of new parameters that defined a new us and a new them and all the while claiming to be above such things.

Divisions in the West are increasingly along socio-political lines. It is as if without a them we turn our attentions on attacking us. So in America when once there was a universally recognised them, the evil Communists, we now find the country spitting into camps broadly described as collectivist and individualist, or to put it metaphorically, the Templars and Assassins. Since both sides perceive themselves to be good, we might describe this not as good vs. evil but as good vs. good. So which is truly good?

I believe that there is such a thing as a universal morality. Ethics concerns itself with right action. For the Aristotelian, the gage of right action is based on the premise that acting in accordance with Natural Law leads to flourishing, and that is good.

But we have discovered a problem. There is a consequence to over-flourishing. We have reached a point in human development where we have gone beyond Natural Law. If you have seen the film Idiocracy, it concerns itself with the concept called dysgenics. The theory is that without struggle against nature and the competition against other groups of humans, it is not the best suited who are breeding, but rather the least suited, those who would die-off if they had to play by Nature’s rules.

I am an American, but I live in Britain. Here in Scotland roughly a third of the population belongs to the so-called underclass. They are the alleged poor. They are largely illiterate, the beneficiaries of most government programs, and suffer from an obesity epidemic. You can tell their neighbourhoods by the plethora of gambling houses, pubs, pound stores, tanning salons, and chip shops. Birth rates are down in Britain, as they are throughout the Western world, except among this class thanks to government incentives for breeding. A single mother gets more money per child. Does that sound like poverty to you, at least in the Dickensian sense? And yet politicians demand more aid to help these supposed poor, but in truth they are playing off public sympathy to line their own pocket and increase their power-base.

These are the results of social democracy. Unlike the communism of the Soviet Union or the socialism of Hitler where government took a firm hand in social control, this soft touch form of socialism attempts to combine both the collectivist and individualist social approaches. In other words, people want freedom without responsibility, but responsibility to who or what? A responsibly to Nature.

The first rule of Nature is “produce of die”. Every creature engages in production in order to feed itself, be it grazing, hunting, or working 9-5 to buy things from the supermarket. Social democracy promises food without production thus violating this rule of Nature. Someone else will produce for you and this production will be transferred to you via the state and its taxes. This is seen as moral. We do not want people to suffer and go hungry, but the result is what we see in Scotland. So that which may appear good in the short term is negative for “us” in the long-term and vice versa.

So here we have your parenting analogy. Collectivism is maternal. People need to be taken care of and not suffer the consequences of their actions. So the State will provide and care for you from cradle to grave. An argument can be made that American socialism began in the South in the late Nineteenth Century. Former slave masters had no problem with the idea of caring for their slaves from cradle to grave, so why shouldn’t the government do that too. In collectivism, be it communism, socialism, or the way of the Templars, people are to be taken care of in exchange for their production and the wise masters will manage this plantation.

Individualism is paternal. As daddy used to say, “You gotta learn to stand on your own two feet, son”. You have to be strong to produce and take care of yourself and your family. You have to work hard and find your own way. Women and children get taken care of, but you’re a man and you have to do what must be done no matter how hard it gets, and this takes courage.

This connects to the earlier point concerning us and them. Western Civilization was founded by what today we would call gangs, and I have actually been working on an article on this subject. Rome was founded by a gang, as was England, and the British Empire was begun by pirates. A gang is a group of men who take control of an area, and then they bring in women to perpetuate the gang and from this seed a clan, then a tribe, then a nation, and then maybe an empire grows.

Men form gangs and gangs are a threat to the state, therefore men are a threat to the state. So we see men increasingly marginalised in society. Sure, there are men ruling at the top, but more men are subjugated then are ruling. The man’s primary gang, his family, is no longer his. The family now belongs to woman and from an evolutionary stand point; women are accustomed to being taken care of, so the state becomes the new father. The Nanny-State is a largely female-oriented society where the role historically played by a man is now played by the state as the key provider and disciplinarian.

So in the Assassin’s Creed metaphor, the Templars have succeeded in eliminated the male-role as a threat to their power so that they can be the father, caring and providing for a feminised society. The Assassins challenge this through their gang and seek to create a society where the paternal power is removed from the state and returned to the men themselves.

I think I hit all your points. To summarise, Ethics concerns itself with right action, and people have different ideas as to what constitutes right action. The Templars offer order and security in exchange for your obedience to what they “know” is right for you. The Assassins offer chaos and struggle with every person, every us and every them, making their own choices and dealing with the consequences for good or ill of their actions. Ultimately, it is the choice between security and freedom.  It is not always nice, or soft, or comfortable, but it is right because it is aligned with Nature.

I believe that the Assassin’s Creed series is popular for many as just a cool video game franchise, but there is a core of people who recognise in the game the real world struggle between these two versions of “good”. They find in the game their vicarious battle for freedom in a world controlled by Templars. Case in point, look at the recent presidential election. Obama has continued George Bush’s policies, and both Obama and Romney were funded by Goldman Sachs, so it is unlikely that a Romney presidency would have differed from Obama’s. So to put this in the language of Assassin’s Creed, what do you do in an election when both candidates are Templars? I’m sorry to say that I actually forgot about the election because I was busy playing Assassin’s Creed 3, pretending to fight for liberty. Probably because the only hope I see would require a level of real world violence that I have been socially conditioned not to possess.

Mad Knights, Gentleman Cowboys, Socialist Martians…and Me

The story of Don Quixote is that of an old man who indulged himself in tales of Medieval Romances until his brain shrivelled and he came to believe himself to be a person like the characters in one of those stories and this was the lens through which he perceived reality. It is through the character of Don Quixote that Cervantes writing in 1605 effectively destroyed ideas concerning the values and virtues commonly associated with the Middle-Ages – at least for a while.

Mark Twain made this observation in his book, Life on the Mississippi:

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.

In a preceding passage, Twain had noted, “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the [American Civil] war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” This is true. The stereotypes of the Southern gentleman or the dashing cavalry officer owe much to the influence of Scott’s works as Southerners sought to emulate his character’s examples. This may be deemed pretentious, but it is not if you were raised with these values and virtues as norms from childhood.

With the luxury of historical perspective, I can see something that may have eluded Mr Clemens. Cervantes may have made a mockery of the chivalrous ideal, but it made a come-back that defined an entire era of history much larger than simply the American South in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Twain could not truly comprehend that within historical context his era would be just as romanticized, if not more so, than the medieval.

The Middle-Ages were not always in the middle. History is pretty big so historians have divided it into manageable chunks. Today, we see the Middle-Ages as set in-between the Ancient and the Modern. Before the Middle-Ages were the middle, it was called the Gothic Period. But things are not always that straightforward. We also have intermediary transitional periods.

In school texts books we read of one period in one chapter and then turn the page into the next, often to the exclusion of these transitional periods. For example, after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have the Dark Ages, which are counted among the Middle-Ages. Then we have the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as part of the Modern, but they are really transitional periods between the Middle-Ages and the Modern.

Likewise, we are currently in another transitional period called the Post-modern. I argue that this period started in 1929. It is called the Post-modern because it is distinct from the Modern, but we don’t really know what it is yet. Personally, I call it the Socialist Era because of the culture’s emphasis on collectivism as opposed to the Romantic individualism that distinguishes the Modern.

Setting this sweeping stage is important for the point I wish to make, and it is a point very dear to my heart, in fact, I might call it the core of my being.

During the Middle-Ages, travelling troubadours entertained the people with tales of noble and chivalrous knights, beautiful landscapes, and mystical happening. When these were eventually written down they became known as Romances. These were the books that shrivelled Alonso Quijano's brain turning him in Don Quixote.

Then, at the end of the period known as the Enlightenment, with its passion for the Classical world, a group of artist and thinkers went against the mainstream and found inspiration in these same Romances and were labelled Gothic. In the late Nineteenth Century, they came to be known the Romantics who had ushered in the Romantic Era (1776-1929). For all intents and purposes, the Romantic Era is the Modern Era, and the post-Romantic is the Post-modern.

The influence of Sir Walter Scott on the culture had more to do with the existing culture of his time than anything he imposed upon it. In essence he gave the public what it wanted. A glorified version of the Medieval Period derived from the Romances rather than actual history and this in turn affected the culture thus making the Victorian a sort of pastiche of some idealised medieval counterpart. This was just as true in London as in the American South or North. But where it had its greatest impact for us today was in the American West.

Sir Walter Scott had two noteworthy successors. Nathaniel Hawthorn’s collection of novels known as The Leatherstocking Tales and Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian are both conscious imitations of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, but set in the American wilderness rather than the English countryside. Ivanhoe traded in his lance for a six-shooter and the Western was born. 

If Cervantes were to write Don Quixote today, I suspect that rather than becoming a knight our hero would become a Western gunslinger.  The Western is to our culture what the original romances were to Cervantes’ audience in 1605.  Director Mel Brooks is credited for killing the Western Cervantes-style with his 1974 film Blazing Saddles.  It is true that the Western is no longer as popular as it was previous to 1974, but nonetheless the genre still retains power.

Throughout this great span of history an interesting picture begins to develop. The Medieval Romances are killed by Cervantes, reinvigorated by Sir Walter Scott and his fellow Romantics, thus creating Victorian culture and the Modern world, from which we have the Western Romances that inspire the behaviour of many people today, much to the chagrin of the modern day scions of Cervantes seeking to kill it.

What’s more, Cervantes’ anti-Romantic work, Don Quixote, has been transformed into one of the most pro-Romantic works of the Twentieth Century, the musical The Man of La Mancha, in which the character of Cervantes says:

I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning "Why?" I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams - -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all - -to see life as it is and not as it should be.

The critics of the Romantic, as well as some of its misguided followers, believe the Romantic to be a rejection of reality. This is not true. At the core of the Romantic is the quest to make the individual, and by extension the world, better by using the tools reality has provided without denying reality itself. This is accomplished by placing real and imagined heroes upon pedestals to serve as examples for our behaviour and focal points for our values and virtues in a process that I call herotyping.

The counter to this comes from the anti-Romantics who seek to destroy heroes.  Cervantes mocks the knightly virtues through Don Quixote, Mel Brooks mocks the Westerners, and biographers like Lytton Strachey reduce the Victorians to the prudish stereotype familiar throughout the Twentieth Century.  When we look at the depictions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in film, they are typical of Stracheyan Victorian stereotypes.  It was not until director Guy Richie’s popular Sherlock Holmes films (2009 and 2011) that we see Holmes as the expert boxer described by Arthur Conan Doyle or Watson as the Afghan War veteran, thus restoring the characters to their Romantic origin.

I have recently concluded that, like Alonso Quijano, my brain has shrivelled into Romanticism because of my consumption of Romantic literature, films, and television programs since childhood. For me, it was not the adventures of knights, but of Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, American cowboys, and superheroes and their virtues and values that inspired my thinking about the world.

What has brought this to mind is that I have been inspired by the 2011 film, John Carter to finally read the book upon which it is based, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I had read two of his Tarzan books (which are unlike any film versions) as a teenager, but had never read John Carter.

On a personal note, Burroughs died in his home in Tarzana, California in 1950 of heart failure. I know Tarzana well; it is a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley named for his creation Tarzan, and lies directly to the west of the adjoining town of Encino, where I was born seventeen years after Burroughs died.

Thus far three scenes in the book have stuck in my mind that have made me realise that not only was I reading a science-fiction book depicting another world, but I was reading the cultural values of another time that are just as alien to us today as Mars was to the book’s first readers when it was published in 1912.

In one passage, Captain John Carter, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War mysteriously transported to Mars, is soon after his arrival captured by the so-called green type of Martians and treated roughly. “As he banged me down upon my feet his face was bent close to mine and I did the only thing a gentleman might do under the circumstances of brutality, boorishness, and lack of consideration for a stranger's rights; I swung my fist squarely to his jaw and he went down like a felled ox.”

The common misconception of men during the Romantic Era was that they were like characters from modern costume dramas and that to be a gentleman was to just be polite and effeminate. By reading the literature of the period, especially the so-called “boy’s books” like this one, we find that the lesson is that a gentleman must be prepared to fight those who cross the line, so to speak, in defence of his rights.   Of course the heroes always win, but in real life the bad guys may end up punching you in face. I know this from experience, nonetheless, I could leave the conflict with my honour intact because I did not leave the abuse unchallenged and I did not retreat. To my mind, that is what makes a gentleman, though I am aware that the current social norm values self-preservation over asserting one’s liberties.

This same principle is repeated later in the book where John Carter states his position.

"As you know I am not of Barsoom [Mars]; your ways are not my ways, and I can only act in the future as I have in the past, in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and guided by the standards of mine own people. If you will leave me alone I will go in peace, but if not, let the individual Barsoomians with whom I must deal either respect my rights as a stranger among you, or take whatever consequences may befall.”

This book was written during the period that I call The Romantic Twilight from 1900-1929. It is a transitional period when the culture of the Romantic Era was transitioning away from the individualistic and towards the collectivism that would characterise the Socialist Era that followed. Bearing that in mind, I find this next passage interesting where Burroughs makes an attack on collectivism in the form of a speech given by the red Martian princess to her green Martian captors, whose society is based on communal use and communal relationships.

"Why, oh, why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows, must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victim of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves."

The concept Burrough’s is echoing here is known as The Tragedy of the Commons. The idea is that when property is held in common, no one takes personal responsibility for it. The result is that it devalues until it is deemed worthless. There is also an eerie hint at what cultural historian Jacques Barzun calls “the modern ego” of the Twentieth Century as being hateful of everything that isn’t the self or does not serve the perceived immediate self-interest. As with much of the writings coming from the dwindling number of genuine Romantic authors during the Romantic Twilight, there seems to a sense of what was on the horizon.

In the musical, The Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote chose to live life by a higher standard. It was a standard that had gone out of fashion. When people saw him he looked like a bad cosplayer dressed in antique rusted armour, carrying a broken lance, and eventually wearing a shaving basin on his head thinking it to be a magical golden helmet. Nonetheless, he held true to the world as he saw it and the noble values and virtues that came with it. This inspired others to be more than they thought they could be. Far from the mockery intended by Cervantes, Don Quixote has become a figure of inspiration to those individuals willing to take on hopeless causes.

Hear me now oh thou bleak and unbearable world
Thou art base and debauched as can be
And a knight with his banners all bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee!

I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha
Destroyer of evil am I
I will march to the sound of the trumpets of glory.
Forever to conquer or die.

Hear me heathens and wizards and serpents of sin
All your dastardly doings are past
For a holy endeavor is now to begin
And virtue shall triumph at last!

I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha
A name all the world soon will know
And the wild winds of fortune will carry me onward
Oh whither so ever they blow

Just as Don Quixote was inspired by the Medieval Romances, and just as the Victorians were inspired by the Romantic histories, today, people like myself, are inspired by the Victorians and their American counterparts. In our Romantic visions of these people we see virtues and values absent from a modern world that we find as “based and debauched as can be”. So, like Alonso Quijano, we read their tales in old books until they infect our brains with the madness of Romanticism, and then we rise up, adorned in their garb, and declare defiant, “I am I”.

Body and Soul

You know Bob, right? Isn’t that him over there? He’s not been himself lately. Maybe he’s been taken over by some alien pod creature or something.  It is kind of bizarre how we identify people. That looks like Bob. And yet we also recognise knowing someone by their personality and character. So, if Bob had been body-snatched then that may be Bob’s body, but it’s not Bob. We make a distinction between Bob the body and Bob the soul within that body, with Bob the soul taking precedent in regards to Bobness.

In our dealings with others we recognise a certain unique spark that we call the soul. In death the lights go out there is nothing there but a vacant shell. So it is easy to imagine how our primitive ancestors, seeing that spark one moment and then gone, contrived a separation of body and soul as two distinct parts with one being the shell and the other being the life essence within the shell.

From this simple starting point, human beings of every culture throughout history have added to the collective lore concerning this thing called the soul, but one thing is generally agreed upon. The soul is this unique thing that makes us who we are. It is what makes Bob Bob.

From a scientific perspective, there is a study devoted entirely to the study of the soul. Its name come from the Greek word psyche, meaning soul, and the familiar suffix –ology, meaning the study of something – though most people would hardly consider psychology to be the study of the soul. Nonetheless, when we speak of the soul we are indeed referring to the psycho-emotional make-up unique to each individual rather than some mystical energy force.

The study of neuroscience gives further insight into the functions of the brain and therefore the functions of the soul. For the soul is not independent from the body. All that comprises it are the product of a complex electro-chemical computer called the human brain. We know this because some victims of severe brain trauma undergo radical changes in personality; in old age, we often see a personality deteriorate; and under the influence of certain drugs a person changes into someone else – very Jekyll and Hyde. In light of this understanding, we should start thinking of the soul in physical terms, but old habits die hard and we still grant it a supernatural position transcending the affects of the flesh.

I predict that in the distant future it will be possible to input a DNA sample from a newborn baby into a computer and from that create a slideshow of how that body will develop through the decades and into old age. You will be able to see how this infant will look at forty. Within our DNA is the blueprint of what our bodies will become.

Of course this future DNA imaging will not be entirely accurate. The infant may develop eating habits that will lead to obesity or become a slim and muscular health fanatic. An accident may twist his form or acne may scar his face. The child’s personality may imprint a dour expression or one filled with hope and joy. There are so many variables that can alter the base-line form established from our DNA slideshow, but that essential form will still be fixed despite these divergences.

The same holds true of the soul. There is a fixed and immutable baseline of who we are as individuals that cannot be changed any more than we can make ourselves taller or shorter in body. However, as with the flesh, variations on this basic theme occur.

There is a saying that no good deed goes unpunished. A person who is naturally kind and generous may find themselves constantly taken advantage of by others and unappreciated. This may lead to a bitter and miserly soul, not unlike the body of a beautiful person twisted by hard living. Just as a naturally scrawny man may use bodybuilding to bulk-up, so too might a naturally lazy soul develop positive habits to be more industrious.

Also, some templates are naturally different from others. Looking at two year old children it is not difficult to distinguish the future athlete and from the future philosopher with his “old soul”. Just as one child has the physical form inherited from his parents that will make him a future athlete, another child has the hardwired soul, also from his parents, that will make him a future philosopher.

Some athletes die from heart failure in their thirties while fifty year chain smokers live into their eighties. It’s all in the genes. This has led many to consider predestination. To what degree do our genes predetermine the direction and limitations of the development of our bodies and souls? To what degree can we truly affect the positive changes we desire?

A 2011 film called The Adjustment Bureau addresses this topic. A man discovers the existence of an agency, which is implied to be divine, that keeps people moving along a life path determined by “the chairman”, aka God, but our hero is determined to make his own choices in spite of their meddling. He succeeds in the end and is told by an angel figure:

Most people live life on the path we set for them, too afraid to explore any other. But once in a while people like you come along who knock down all the obstacles we put in your way. People who realize freewill is a gift that you'll never know how to use until you fight for it. I think that's the chairman's real plan. That maybe one day, we won't write the plan, you will.

The point being made here is that most people will naturally follow the course predetermined by their genes and only wilful action can change that, however I believe that even then there are limitations. Just as a short body cannot be made tall, certain aspects of personality are also fixed. Or as the prayer says, we must “accept the things we cannot change, have the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference”.

In the field of human development and personality, the long running debate is Nature vs Nurture. The question is, “Are we predominantly the product of our inherited genes (Nature) or the product of our environment (Nurture).” The answer tends to swing back and forth over the decades as to which is predominant and these days we find that Nature seems to be winning by several percentage points.

We have inherited the physical aspects of both of our parent’s genetic soup to become a genetic amalgam, so too is your soul a mix. Hence the mother’s cry, “You’re just like your father” or the adage that all women eventually become their mother, or that “the apple does not fall far from the tree”, so you can judge someone by their family.

In contrast, the Victorians accepted the Tabula Rasa theory, known as the colloquially as the “clean slate”, dating back to Aristotle. This view holds that we are born a clean slate and our identity is manufactured during our development. They were wrong of course, but they were right.

Today, we encourage children to “be themselves”, let them develop naturally, and we only interfere when their “natural” behaviour becomes annoying, threatening, or politically incorrect. Looking at the body, we encourage children to eat right and get exercise. We do not just let them be natural, yet we as a society do not impose the same regiment on their souls as our Victorian forebears had done. The genetically preordained nature of body and soul is not inherently right, necessarily desirable, or automatically advantageous. So we fight against it.

The reason I chose to write on this topic is because of a conversation that I recently had with a friend of mine concerning a past relationship of mine that did not work-out. I mentioned my failures and she pointed out that being incompatible does not denote failure.

When we think of the soul of a mystical force that transcends the flesh, we are setting ourselves up for failure. There is a human tendency to imagine the subjective as whatever we wish it to be. We see this phenomenon in religion. I do not like homosexuals; therefore “God hates fags”. The same holds true of the soul. We can imagine ourselves to be whatever we want to see ourselves as regardless of objectivity. This leads to inflated egos, solipsism, arrogance, and a sense of failure when we do not live-up to expectations of ourselves or others.

This thing we call the soul is just as objective as the rest of our bodies. By continuing to think of the soul in subjective terms we put it into the realm of ideas, imagination, and wishful thinking. This denial of reality can only lead to frustration and disappointment as we try to change ourselves, or others, into someone we are physically incapable of becoming.

If we hold the soul to the same criteria as the rest of the body, then we realise that positive change takes work that does not happen simply because someone wishes it to be so. Building the soul, like building the body, takes wilful effort and years of constant habit to yield consistent results, even then the best we can hope for is doing the best with the body or soul that we inherited.

So when we look at past relationships, or any past actions, with regret because of the outcome, we can take some comfort in the fact that we could not have acted any differently. Our behaviour was dictated by our soul and our soul is as fixed as our body. Acting differently would be the physical equivalent of suddenly running a marathon that you are not prepared for and then berating yourself afterwards for not even coming close to finishing.

I appreciate that what I am suggesting here may endorse complacency. I am who I am and cannot help my actions, so be it. However, we also see this is the realm of the flesh. Some people accept their physical forms regardless of how unhealthy or fat they are. While others are conscientious and constantly seek improvements while at the same time recognising that they are not at their desired state. The same hold true of the soul. We can just accept the neural pathways that have developed and say “so be it”, or we can strive to open new ones and be ready when that unexpected marathon comes along.

Just as some people are naturally athletic and others fat, so too are some born with certain neural functions that make them naturally industrious, for example, and others lazy. This has been a source of frustration for me personally when I realised that many of the Romantic virtues I espouse are gifted to some by nature, whereas I have to work at them.  But just as the natural athlete can squander his gifts to become fat or the naturally fat work to become more athletic, so too can the gifts of the soul be wasted or improved upon. The only difference is that one is visible and the other the product of the invisible workings of the human brain.

It has been said that this is the next frontier – achieving an understanding of the human mind that will allows us to mould our souls in the same way that we mould our bodies. For now we must stick to the tried and true old ways when it comes to the workout for the soul found in religion, meditation, hypnosis, and self-discipline to create new patterns of behaviour – new self-made souls.

What’s Your Story?

I once heard a story about a teacher instructing her young students on the period of Scottish history covering William of Orange, who was no friend to Scotland, when one of the boys shouted, “Our King Billy wouldn’t do that to us” and stormed from the classroom. Obviously, the boy was from one of those families that march every July.

There are two kinds of history. There is the history of the head, dealing with facts, key figures, dates, and legislation, and then there is the history of the heart which has more to do with our sense of identity.

In the film, Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard realises that the latest model of manufactured humans, called replicants, comes equipped with memory implants. Dr. Tyrell, the owner of the company manufacturing the replicants, tells him:

We began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or a pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better.

What memories are to the individual, history is for the group of individuals that we call society or culture. There exists a grand narrative in which we see ourselves to be a part. Within this story we are not simply a part of the existing group but also among those members long dead. It is self-identification.

Just as Dr. Tyrell observed in Blade Runner, controlling how people perceive that history is a key part of controlling them. This is why determining the history curriculum in any school system is critical for those wanting their view of the society to be the dominant one. It is much easier to teach children the history you want believed than to convince adults that the history that they were taught was wrong.

In 1985 a television mockumentary appeared called, “The History of White People in America” presented by comedian Martin Mull. In one scene there is a class where the teacher asks the students to tell their heritage. The black student tells the typical African-American narrative of slavery and emancipation. The Jewish-American student gives the typical Ellis Island story. The white boy she asks is at a loss and described how his family first lived on Elm Street and then moved to Maple Street. The non-white children have a grand narrative of the heart, but the white kids have nothing.

This scene illustrates what historian Professor Niall Ferguson wrote concluding his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest: “…the biggest threat to Western Civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity – and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

Pusillanimity is the vice of being timid and cowardly and thus not living up to one’s full potential. So if we go back a hundred years in America we find the grand white narrative of pilgrim forefathers, invention and industrialisation, and Western expansion. In Britain, we see the glorification of an empire upon which the sun never set. Today, those heroes of the past are seen as the villainous murderers of natives and the enslavers of Negros. No wonder the “white race” seems to recoil from its history. The ignorant bury themselves in modern consumption and the learned give only apologies for fear of offending someone. To speak openly and proudly of this narrative is to risk accusations of racism or white supremacy – so best not to mention it.

Imagine if we were visited by an alien race that was a thousand years ahead of us technologically. There are some who welcome such a prospect and look to the stars for salvation. Others fear the threat of hostile invasion from an advanced alien force.

How would these alien visitors perceive humanity? Would they see us as an inferior species and benevolently seek to help bring us enlightenment? Would they teach us their philosophy, introduce their wondrous machines into society, establish advanced government institutions, and extend our ability to produce food, end diseases, and prolong life spans.

Or would they see us as an inferior species fit only for the most menial of tasks? Would they enslave us as a cheap labour force, take our lands from us, defile our great monuments or take them away to their planet. We would fight, but the harder we fought the more ruthlessly they would fight back, especially if we posed a constant danger to their civilians.

The first depiction of such an event came in 1898 with the publication of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. The author speculated what if Britain was invaded by a superior technology just as it had invaded other less advanced countries. But Wells had the over-simplified view that comes with the history of the heart.

British and American imperialism cannot be so easily reduced to fit either the benevolent bringers of enlightenment or the ruthless genocidal conquerors, although both narratives have been spun and propagated. To focus exclusively on the good creates an appearance of racism whereas highlighting only the bad is to become the victim of racism as the white devil.

Like the alien visitors with technology and social systems a millennium in advance of our own, so too were the European visitors a millennium ahead of the peoples that they encountered. In such a situation the outcome does not bode well for the primitives. If the visitors are predominantly benevolent, then they destroy the native culture. If they are predominantly hostile, then they destroy the native people. There is no version of the story in which the natives are not victims and the visitors not victimizers. It’s just the way the deck is stacked.

Part of the white man’s narrative is our much over-looked “Never Again”. The phrase is the motto for the Jewish Defence League and refers to “never again will we allow another Holocaust”. The same concept emerges among Feminists who will “never again” be relegated to the kitchen or the African-American “never again” returning to slavery and discrimination.

The white man’s “never again” is boldly expressed in the song “Rule Britannia” which declares that Britons shall never be slaves. The song first appeared in 1740 during a critical period in Anglo-American history. Here’s the story…

During the decline of the Roman Empire, people sought refuge from the barbarian raiders on the great estates of the wealthy in exchange for work. This evolved into the feudal system of the Middle-Ages when most people lived short, ignorant, and miserable lives on the feudal estate. However in Britain things were slightly different. The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tribes of Britain were largely free until the Norman invasion when feudalism was imposed upon the people as part of the conquest, but the spirit of freedom remained.

In time, this kernel of freedom grew and became empowered through the forces of the free market, the rise of mass communication through the printing press, and republican government in the Seventeenth Century. By the time Rule Britannia was penned we are seeing the rise of the common man from slavery moving closer to full expression in the ever growing middle-class challenging the noble order.

From the ideas of the Enlightenment to their manifestation as action during the Romantic Era emerges the central idea of Classical Liberal thought and modern Libertarianism. I am an individual, I am free to make my own choices, and I shall never be enslaved.

This is our “never again”. We shall never again be serfs on a plantation. We shall never again be slaves to the state. This spirit of defiant individuals is what is fuelling the modern global libertarian movement. Those of us who know our history possess an extended memory that transcends the limited boundaries of our lives. We “remember” the slavery that was and how it was fought against and freedom secured. We say “never again” as the signs along the road to serfdom present themselves with ever more frequency.

Yes, some of the people who first made that statement owned Negro slaves and some even made their fortunes trading in them. What is forgotten is that as soon as the realisation dawned that these comparatively childlike primitives, a thousand years behind us technologically, were in fact human, the abolitionist movement began in full force almost over-night. Britain and America turned its back on one of the most profitable industries of the day and fought through the marketplace of ideas and with gunboats to stop the global slave trade. Although the causes behind the American Civil War are debatable, many individuals signed-up to fight and die not just to preserve the Union, but also to free the slaves. White Britons and Americans died so that black men could be free.

So when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologised for Britain’s role in the global slave trade what he should have said was, “You’re welcome”. But that does not fit in with the popular narrative required of the penitent descendants of the white devils.

The French philosopher Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, recognising a human psychological need for the divine, likewise he said that history is a fable agreed upon. This too is a psychological necessity. Each of us carries within ourselves our unique sense of the history of the people we instinctive claim to be our own. It is our own unique history of the heart. Some stories may be vaguer than others and some truer to the history of the head than others. Like the boy and his “King Billy” in my opening story, the history may be propagandistic nonsense, but it serves a purpose. It’s the fable that binds his community together and the same holds true for national cultures.

As for my country, the United States, it likes the fable of being a nation of immigrants. Of course it’s not true. My ancestors were not immigrants to the United States. My story does not fit-in with the nationally accepted narrative. My ancestors were colonist landing on a rocky shore surrounded by a mysterious dense forest from which they built the Plymouth Plantation. It’s more than a question of semantics to recognise that a colonist arriving in a wilderness is not an immigrant arriving in a city. Likewise, the migrants from one part of Britain arriving in another part of Britain are not immigrants. Those people who called themselves the “True Americans” in the 1860’s and their descendants are being white-washed from history in favour of the more popular “nation of immigrants” identity.

I agree with Niall Ferguson that our culture’s pusillanimity will be our downfall. In the name of timidity and cowardice we no longer teach our national story to our children except in the negative. Some participants seek to distance themselves from the perceived sins of our fathers, such as the Scottish National Party trying to teach a history of Scotland that excludes the disproportionately large role the Scots played in the Empire. Another example comes from the city of Portland, Oregon where a statue of a pioneer family intended for the entrance to the history museum was relegated to a residential neighbourhood for fear of offending the Indians. The message to the people of the Anglosphere is clear. Reject your history, denounce the Empire, and condemn the Western Expansion. or be damned as right-wing racists. My answer to that is no.

I am descended from the Scottish Royal House of Dunkeld, the English Royal House of Plantagenet, and the English noble House of Percy. My ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock, one of whom was the first governor of Massachusetts, another ancestor took the first British prisoner of war in the American War of Independence, at least three great-grandfathers fought for the Union during the Civil War, one of whom was the cousin of one of the fathers of American literature, and my grand-father fought in the Great War. I am a proud British-American and “my people” in Britain and America literally created the modern world through their imagination, invention, industry, enterprise, and perseverance. That’s my story. What’s yours?

The RMS Titanic and the Romantic Twilight

Today is the 15^th of April 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I’m sure memorials will be held in Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. 1,517 people died in the tragedy. Not meaning to sound crass, but by the standards of deaths in the century that followed this number is quite low. So why does this event stand-out? I do not believe that it is just about the body count. It’s about what the Titanic has come to represent. At the risk of appearing melodramatic, the sinking of the Titanic represents the sinking of Western Civilization itself.

This is the story of two centuries, the long Nineteenth Century (1776-1929) and the Twentieth (1929-present) or what I like to call the Romantic Era and the Socialist Era, though some people prefer the terms Modern and the Post-Modern.

The dominant political ideology of the Nineteenth Century is now called Classical Liberalism and the primary economic policy is now called free market capitalism. Both emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment. These ideologies were base on the premise of individualism and upholding the Natural Rights of life, liberty, and property. It could just as easily be called the age of heroes for it was a time when self-sufficient individuals were free to carve their own place in the world and in history and did so.

By contrast the 20^th Century displays a distinct lack of confidence that at times festered into outright panic. This is understandable considering the unprecedented levels of emerging crisis. There was World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the Cold War, and now we have the fear of global terrorism. I call this the Socialist Era because now more than in the previous century people look to the government to save them from their fears in the form of social and economic central planning. To fund this salvation, governments tax, borrow, and spend more than ever before and in many countries the public sector is larger than the private sector. The public sector in Britain is now larger than the public sector in Communist China.

I call the transition period between these two eras the Romantic Twilight which dates from 1900-1929. It was during this period when the confidence that characterised the Anglosphere during the Romantic Period began to waiver and the enemies of the Romantic began their ascendency.

The symbolism surrounding the Titanic characterises the split between these two eras. For the Romantic it was a tragedy because it symbolised the failure of our aspirations. For the anti-Romantic post-moderns it symbolised the fall that comes with arrogance. This is a view that has been expressed in many of the countless songs, films, and television programs that have been produced. As recently as James Cameron’s film Titanic this same view emerges and is used to create of false picture of the upper-class passengers.

I found this article from the National Review dated 19 April 1999 called Paying for Beauty - motion picture 'Titanic' misrepresents the social codes of the wealthy.

Yet Cameron-who, as I say, did his homework-knows that there were many true gentlemen in first and second class who indeed, according to their code of behavior, "did the right thing." For example, we see in a cameo shot Isidor Strauss and his wife. They are lying together on a bed in their stateroom, waiting for death. Cameron knows that their real story is more complicated and much more poignant.

Isidor Strauss created the great department store Macy's. In his late 60s, rich and retired, he toured Europe with his wife. They were now heading home on the Titanic. As the ship sank, Mrs. Strauss was allowed to board a lifeboat. She pleaded that her elderly husband be allowed to board too. This was allowed. But Mr. Strauss refused to board. He said, "I will not go before the other men." That was that. She said that she had spent her life with him and would not leave him now. She stepped out of the boat, and they sat on deck chairs to watch others load.

The point here is that the upper-class gentleman's code of that era was deeply felt and sternly enforced. It involved "setting an example" for the rest of society. When things went wrong, one bore it with stoicism, or irony, or humor. Perhaps above all, one was deferential to women.

Col. John Jacob Astor, whose ancestors first earned their money in fur trading, also makes a cameo appearance in Titanic. He was traveling with his second wife, young and pregnant. She pleaded that he be let into a lifeboat with her. Second Officer Lightoller refused: "Women only." Without complaint, Astor withdrew. Apparently while swimming in the ocean he was crushed by tons of steel as one of the funnels tilted and crashed. Benjamin Guggenheim, of the great steel fortune, met a similar fate and asked a departing passenger to tell his wife he had died "like a gentleman."

It is possible that Cameron intuited that a modern audience would scarcely believe that any such code of honor existed. Yet I think he never considered for a moment trying for genuine complexity here, because he had a very different, more up-to-date ideal in mind: that of Jack Dawson.

For us, the denizens of the Socialist Era, it probably is difficult for us to conceive the orientation to reality that characterised the Romantic Era. It is much easier to stick to the stereotypes that we are familiar with and portray the events aboard the Titanic as the sort of class warfare that Cameron depicts.

This is called creating a frame, or context, for the narrative. We may frame the story of the Titanic in the Romantic mode and glorify the courage and the morn the tragedy of the person’s involved, or we can frame it according to the socialist narrative in which the wealthy industrialists arrogantly thought that they has created an unsinkable ship and they paid for their arrogance with their lives and the lives of the lower class passengers as innocent victims of this arrogance. If this was a modern tragedy, they would no doubt be calling for greater government regulation to ensure people are no longer the victims of rich industrialists more concerned with profit than with saving lives.

Recently another interesting narrative has emerged from the conspiracy theory crowd. Socialism needs money to work, but as an economic system it does not create wealth, it consumes it. One means to generate revenue apart from taxation is by manipulating interest rates and thus control the money supply. Over time this creates inflation and devalues the currency, but if you can be among the first to get this newly created money before it devalues, then there is a profit to be made – quite literally. Governments accomplish this through a privately owned central bank.

The wealthy men behind the formation of America’s central bank, The Federal Reserve, supposedly faced opposition to their plans from three men who had the wealth, power, and influence to challenge them: John Jacob Astor, Isidor Strauss, and Benjamin Guggenheim. Coincidentally, all three men died on the Titanic. The conspiracy theorists posit that this was no coincidence.

My personal narrative for the disaster is that the Romantic Era was one of boldness, confidence, and faith in both humanity and in truth. The Titanic disaster was one of a series events beginning with the public outcry against the events of the Boer War in 1900 and culminating in World War I that undermined that public confidence and essentially bloodied the waters for the sharks.

Throughout the 1920’s confidence continued to ebb away until the final crushing blow came with the stock market crash in 1929. After this point, supporters of the Romantic values and virtues became a joke to be misrepresented and parodied at best and non-politically correct enemies of the people at worst.

Since then we have seen a gradual decline in standards. A standard presumes that there is a right way and a wrong way. To put it in more philosophical terms, there is virtue and vice, good and evil, true and false. The Romantic Era believed in standards. There were standards of behaviour, dress, education, conduct, and belief. The Socialist Era sees the imposition of standards as being judgemental, unfair, small-minded, and bigoted. As a result we have seen a decline in standards, particularly when it comes to matters of character.

I began this essay with the melodramatic assertion that the sinking of the Titanic symbolises the fall of Western Civilization. I think people are drawn to the imagery associated with that period of history and the standards that made it possible, but at the same time it is alien to them. The sinking ship is the sinking of those people and their rules.

The oikophobics of the Twentieth Century seem to glibly celebrate its demise beneath a sombre veneer. The post-modern Romantics on the other hand mourn the loss of a world that was where men were gentlemen and women were ladies. To them, the corridors of the Titanic seem a far cry from the vulgarity depicted in modern reality television. We wonder what life would be like in a world where people had that kind of self-confidence in themselves, in each other, and their society and culture again. And we know that without that kind of self-confidence we as a civilization are most assuredly doomed.

Twilight Zone Episode: Number 12 Looks Just Like You

This is one of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes and I thought for a change of pace I would share it with my readers.

The Plot (from Wikipedia)

In a future society, all young adults go through a process known as "the Transformation," in which each person's body and face are changed to mimic a physically attractive design chosen from a small selection of numbered models. The process gives everyone a beautiful appearance, slows deterioration due to age and extends a person's lifespan, and makes the recipient immune to any kind of disease.

The motive of the Transformation is social harmony. According to Professor Sig, a psychologist with the Transformation service, "Years before, wiser men than I…saw that physical unattractiveness was one of the factors that made men hate, so they charged the finest scientific minds with the task of eliminating ugliness in mankind."

18-year-old Marilyn Cuberle decides not to undergo the Transformation, seeing nothing wrong with her unaltered appearance. Nobody else can understand Marilyn's decision, and those around her are confused by her displeasure with the conformity and shallowness of contemporary life. Her "radical" beliefs were fostered by her now-deceased father, who gave Marilyn banned books and came to regret his own Transformation years earlier and committed suicide upon the loss of his identity.

Despite continued urging from family, doctors, and her best friend, Marilyn is still adamant about refusing the operation. She insists that the leaders of society don't care whether people are beautiful or not, they just want everyone to be the same. Her pleas about the "dignity of the individual human spirit" and how "when everyone is beautiful, no one will be" have no impact. After being driven to tears by the inability of anyone to understand how she feels, she is put through the procedure and (like all the others) is enchanted with the beautiful result.

Dr. Rex, who operated on Marilyn, comments about how some people have problems with the idea of the Transformation but that "improvements" to the procedure now guarantee a positive result, thus indicating that there may be modifications made to the mind as well. Marilyn reappears, looking and thinking exactly like her best friend Valerie. "And the nicest part of all, Val," she gushes, "I look just like you!" The last shots are of her, admiring herself in the mirror and smiling.

A clip

 

Thoughts

The whole point of science fiction in general and the Twilight Zone in particular is to get you to see the world from a different perspective with all sorts of possibilities either wonderful or terrible.   From when the episode first aired in 1964 to the present we can see how our society is moving ever closer to the society depicted in the story.  It is a question of degrees and with each passing year our world increasingly resembles Marilyn’s. 

The author of the Wikipedia article noted, “It is believed that dating, looking sexy, sex, and marrying or mating is done often, (Val comments on how everyone marries 10 or 12 times). The society is probably sex-centered, since Lana, Val and Marilyn (after being made sexy) are only wearing some leggings and tank swimsuits.”  Since the dawn of humankind women have always used sex and beauty to their advantage.  Here we have a sort of hyper-feminised culture where this natural tendency is elevated to an extreme at the expense of everything else.  Likewise, many of the men portrayed are also feminized.

Notice in the clip the authors that Marilyn had been reading and Dr. Friend denounced as illegal smut.  Most were Romantic poets.  Now what if, just what if, there really are secret masters.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw reading great writers, or certain philosophies, or understanding history and politics.  What if they discovered that if you give people enough bread and circuses that such knowledge becomes deemed unnecessary in fulfilling their desires --  to be beautiful, sexy, popular, and to have fun.  What if they discovered that they did not have to outlaw or burn such ideas, but just make them irrelevant so that people chose not to read them.  Sure, you could have the intellectuals, but they would be weirdoes tolerated by society. 

The thing is, during the Nineteenth Century, Charles Dickens went on a sold-out international lecturing tour and Lord Byron was a rock star.  Sure, Charles Dickens did not sell as well as the authors of the penny-dreadfuls, but he was popular nonetheless.  He was not quarantined as an “intellectual” as if he was different from everyone else.  Going to a Dickens lecture was mainstream entertainment.

In Celtic faerie tales, the sidh or faeries would cast a spell, usually over themselves, so that they appeared radiantly beautiful to humans.  This deception was called a glamour.  This Scots Gaelic word has moved into common modern usage to mean beautiful, alluring, or having sex appeal, but the word still retains its meaning of illusion and deception.

What motivates a teenager?  All humans need food, shelter, clothing, and property and humans often judge each other according to how well they can acquire these necessities of life.  It is not just about having these things but also having the knowledge and character traits that facilitate such success.  In the real world knowledge is power and a benefit.  But teenagers do not live in the real world.  Their needs are provided for them.  They are judged by the adults by their grades and by their peers by their popularity.  These involve two entirely different skill sets.  Among the teenagers, the geek is the outcast and the beauty gets the crown, but as adults traditionally the geek gets the high paying job and the beauty usually has to marry well to survive.  The value of glamour is a glamour, a passing illusion.

But what if adult life was more like high school?  What if the State took care of you in your adult life as your parents had when you were a teenager.  Wouldn’t the adult world become more like high school where the air-headed bimbo had a high social value because she was hot and the intellectual was an outcast?  I’m not suggesting that society has reached that point, however there is a very large segment of the population conditioned to that way of thinking and it is portrayed often in the mass media as desirable. 

I have read arguments among the feminists regarding a split in their ranks.  One group sees sexuality as female empowerment and another as female denigration, but lets face it, women get more status in society, even among other women, by being sexy than by being a stodgy feminist intellectual.  In his book, Letters From the Earth, Mark Twain supposes that if by magic the old men denouncing sexuality were made young for the day that they would spend that day trying to get some.  I suspect the same could be said of stodgy feminists.

In this episode we discover that Marilyn’s father had committed suicide after the having the procedure.  This was before changes were made to the mind as well as the body.  You can imagine why this might be necessary as the mind is essentially rejecting the new body, just as the body might reject a transplanted organ.  The mind has to accept the notion that being beautiful and sexy is the highest of values in order to fully appreciate the new flesh, but in the end it is only an illusion.

I can see how the benefits offered by the transformation can free mankind from the tyranny of the flesh.  I’ve discovered as I have grown older that my mind has not changed.  As a single man with no offspring my lifestyle has not really changed since my youth.  What has changed is my body.  Like gender dysphoria  where a person believes themselves to be inhabiting the body of the wrong gender, we find our minds trapped in a body of the wrong age.  The mind is young and nimble but the body is old and with that outward appearance comes the social reactions and judgements.  The actions of a young man that society my deem cool and sexy are viewed as creepy when done by an older man.  So age forces you to grow-up and to adopt other values more in keeping with reality.  Would eternal youth produce a society of teenagers where sexuality, status, and fun become the most important things in life?  Perhaps.

Rod Serling closes the episode with these words:

Portrait of a young lady in love - with herself. Improbable? Perhaps. But in an age of plastic surgery, body building and an infinity of cosmetics, let us hesitate to say impossible. These and other strange blessings may be waiting in the future, which after all, is the Twilight Zone.