The User Experience Of Our Digital Life

Today, I want to look at how and why UX seems to be so routinely awful in our daily digital lives, and what this has in common with broken toasters and racism. These ideas have been floating around in my head for quite a while. The need to finally write them down was triggered when I commented on this thread, but here I want to give a more developed version.

What is UX and how is it so bad ?

I couple of years ago I went to an astronomy software conference and I was delighted that there was a big focus on user experience. For those unfamiliar, UX is closely related to, but not the same as nor exclusive with, user interface. It involves much more about how things behave, whether things do what the user expects, how many steps they need to execute a command, how easily they can figure out what to do, that sort of thing.

This pleased me greatly because almost all astronomy codes are, or at least were, written as command-line based and come with minimal documentation. This is fine when it’s just for one’s own use, but releasing such a thing to the world and saying, “here, read my Python script” is surely ridiculous if you ever expect anyone to actually use it. And yet this is absolutely standard practise in the world of astrophysics.

I, for one, don't want to read code. I want to read things I can read, not have to parse.

So for bad UX, astronomers are guilty as charged. What’s particularly annoying is that there persists a (somewhat subconscious) undercurrent of belief that things are somehow better as command line tools and GUIs are actually something to avoid, or even that code itself should be difficult to use and uncommented because you should never use something you don't fully understand and must have suffered in order to do so.

Yes, some of my compatriots are actually mad.

But then the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve noticed this sort of thing everywhere. Not to the same degree, but the same root issue – a fundamentally sub-optimal UX – appears in so many places where it really, really shouldn't.

To be fair to astronomers, this is somewhat justifiable from a group who are focused on the results and think that UX is a “soft” feature... but multi-billion dollar companies whose product is aimed at the general public surely ought to know better. The following list is by no means complete, but it should give a fair indication of the state of things. I've deliberately curated this to be (mostly) things which are quickly obvious when using an app or service, and when a straightforward profit/engagement motive isn't readily apparent. The reasons for those kinds of failings are self-evident; the reasons for the following frustrations are maybe a bit more interesting.

• Amazon recommendations for the thing you’ve just bought, as though it wasn't obvious you wouldn't immediately need another expensive sofa or five dishwashers
• The NatWest banking app repeatedly insisting I can't use biometric information to log in even though I demonstrably can 
• Transport apps (planes, trains etc.) not syncing with local board information or even given conflicting information about delays and statuses
• Streaming services that bury the “continue watching” list, continuously change the category orders, and make it incredibly easy to accidentally skip halfway through an episode instead of pausing it 
• News websites which are so plastered with ads that the content is literally unreadable. Ads for profit make complete sense, but so many that you actually can't access what you came for do not
• The total lack of explanation given on Google Pay as to why I can't verify my card, only to find that one day it's spontaneously verified itself
• The UK passport replacement service continuously jumping the page around when I want to enter anything in the entry fields on my phone
• The relentless, unending stream of cookie acceptance/refusal windows
• Constant demands for notifications and subscriptions (yes, I get the point of these, but did nobody implementing these ever think, hmm, maybe this will annoy me so it will actually be counterproductive ?)
• The utterly awful "summarise this email" feature in Gmail which nobody asked for, to say nothing of Google's ludicrous attempt to replace actual search results with AI hallucinations
• The incredibly irritating micro-delay when trying to switch workspaces on Windows (yes, Linux fans, I'll let you have this one : Linux does this much better)
• The abyss that is infinite scrolling everywhere with no ability to save your place
• GitHub having the same labels for different things in different places that do different things
• Actually, just simply... GitHub, all of it
• Similarly, Linux (workspace switching notwithstanding)
• Expedia's constant notifications of miniscule prices changes while booking (although this is not as bad as it used to be)
• The lack of a CTRL+F search function in the ChatGPT app, no pagination, minimal ability to organise with folders and no ability to export them
• Inconsistency in language settings with some McAfee (among others) pop-ups still being in Czech despite the fact that I've told the app not to do this

The list could go on. And on. This kind of thing is everywhere.

Now this is not a first-world-problems rant, for the above list has also been chosen to only have things which are annoying, but don't render things truly unworkable. Unfortunately, this makes the problems all the more intractable. Serious problems usually get fixed quickly, but less important ones can persist indefinitely even when they're trivial to fix. But why ?

It's all the fault of those frackin' toasters

This is an an example of what I call broken toaster syndrome : you won’t fix your toaster if it’s only slightly broken, like if the handle gets a bit wonky. Most people, most of the time, accept problems when they can work around them. It's only when they hit that threshold of being genuinely unusable, when the handle comes fully off, that they actually do anything about them. The result is an accumulation of issues that never needed to happen, things that make simple tasks maddeningly frustrating for no good reason.

In the digital world, hardly anyone is going to file a complaint because a button wasn’t where they expected it to be or the icon size is bit too large. They’ll just put up with it. And dedicated UX testing can easily overlook things if it’s given to the original developers who already know how to use the tool, or it’s so limited that nobody actually gets the experience of what the thing is like to use routinely and in anger (when users may be stressed and in a hurry), as opposed to a single dedicated session (where they're likely to be a lot more patient).

So, just as with problematic hardware, digital stuff gets asymptotically degraded to the realm of being bloody awful to use whilst being technically functional. Genuinely brilliant underlying code gets an interface which isn't user friendly but is actively user hostile. 

Which brings me back to astronomy. Simplifying slightly, I once asked why the FLASH hydrodynamics code doesn’t come with some built-in tool for setting the initial conditions. The answer being… this was too easy ! They’d rather focus their attention on developing new features than making the existing ones easy to use (which would simplify this for new users by many orders of magnitude), on the grounds that this could be done at any time… the result, of course, is that it never gets done at all. Paradoxically, the easiest changes can be the ones least likely to be implemented.

Being pro or anti-AI is like being a racist

It's been suggested that all this is the result of AI, because blaming everything on AI is a way to win instant popularity on the internet. But I don't think this is much the case, or at least, that the claim needs heavy qualification. Similarly, a couple of recent articles about the declining power of Google search are worth reading in full : the current, apparently terminal decline is indeed dominated by Google's balls-deep obsession with implementing AI as badly as possible, while previous occasions when the quality declined – and it certainly did both wax and wane over the years – were due to other factors.

Make no mistake : AI is definitely a contributing and sometimes a dominating reason behind some UX decay. But I think the underlying cause is a bit like the recent prudish age-gate checks on internet service providers : no-one wants to complain their porn is blocked because they're embarrassed, and likewise, nobody wants to complain about any minor problems they encounter so they just get worse and worse. AI simply isn't necessary as an explanation here.

Likewise, I've come to the conclusion that being pro-AI is a bit like being a nationalistic bigot and being anti-AI is like being a racist : they are both absurd generalisations, both ends of the same horseshoe*. To say AI use will definitely make everything better is like being a Reform voter who constantly chants about how the British flag is amazing and lacks any knowledge of the history of how that flag was regarded worldwide. But equally, to say AI will only make things worse is like another Reform voter (or perhaps the same one) insisting that everyone who isn't British is just an awful person who should be excluded from society at all costs.

* At least, that is, as far as concerns go about how AI is used – I'm not going into energy use or legal concerns about data acquisition here. Those are legitimate issues, but separate.

The point is that you can use it in different ways. If you have the mindset that UX is useless, you'll just use AI to add more and more features in a chaotic UI that eventually makes no sense even to experts. That's not the AI's fault, that's yours for being a moron.

If, on the other hand, you think that UX is valuable and take it seriously, you can use AI to help you tremendously here. The speed of AI-implemented code changes means that you can afford to spend at least a bit of time doing your own testing. You can now run through your UI and check everything works as expected and get a feel for actually using it, rather than coding once and insisting users follow the documentation (if you even write any) : you can adapt to the users rather than forcing them to adapt to your code. AI, in some conditions, will finally allow you to fix that damn toaster.

Hence, racism and bigotry. It's madness to say that all AI is unanimously bad just as it is to say that all British people are cunts, and conversely, it's equally crazy to claim that it's all brilliant and that all British people are magnificent specimens of humanity. "It's bad because it did this one thing I don't like, and all the good stuff doesn't count" is just classic rotten-cherry-picking racism.

Okay, but if AI can fix a broken digital toaster, does that mean it will ?

I'm optimistic that this will help astronomy quite a lot : since almost all code is open source here, it becomes possible to tailor the experience to suit one's own needs. This still requires effort – you have to really think about how you want things to work, you absolutely cannot simply tell the AI to "make things better" – but at least now it crosses the threshold for possibility. Astronomers, at least, can afford to spend a few hours here and there asking AI to make UX improvements; they could not previously afford to spend weeks learning other's people's code in order to move one button to a different panel. After all, you'd likely fix your toaster yourself if a) you knew how and b) it wouldn't take long.

I saw a meme asking if people using AI could actually be persuaded to stop, directly comparing it to meth addiction. In my case the answer is yes, I could and would still do my job without it. But this misses the point that I'd have to work in a world full of broken toasters with no real possibility to fix them. AI at least offers a path out of this in way that nothing else has ever come to close to offering.

Elsewhere, though, the effect is harder to gauge. Giant corporations have always had the resources for UX refinement, they just often choose not to bother. There's no reason to think that making this easier will actually lead to them doing anything differently; quite likely, some of them will prioritise making more toasters over fixing the ones they already have.

How we go about changing such attitudes I don't know. Heck, I may well be unusually irritated by digital defects; maybe everyone else is happy enough with the way things are. Certainly there are more pressing issues... but I can't help wondering if maybe the continuous low-grade defects in digital UX aren't having some cumulative effect. Could it be that having to deal with all this is part of why so many people seem so angry despite ostensibly living in an age of material wealth and technological wonders ? And wouldn't it be nicer if things just worked ?

Review : The Odyssey

I seem to have a habit of reviewing Christopher Nolan movies so I can hardly not cover The Odyssey. I'll keep this one spoiler-free.

In some ways this is essentially Project Hail Mary but in space. That is, it's definitely excellent – outstanding, even – but I don't think it's going to "change cinema forever" or anything as hyperbolic as many reviews make out. Or perhaps, Dune. It's certainly a cinematic feast and an absolute spectacle, and possibly the best version we'll ever get. Perfect ? No. Thoroughly enjoyable ? Absolutely. An easy 9/10 from me.

The Dune comparison also holds up in its sheer physicality. Things are intense, and thankfully Nolan seems now to be well out of his "let's make everything deliberately inaudible" phase. In fact, the screams of the Cyclops might well be the best audio effect I've ever heard. I'm convinced that some of the scenes, especially the storm(s) at sea, are actually louder in the cinema than they would be in reality, but the intensity is used very deliberately and selectively. I don't think I ever had any difficulties hearing anything.

The visual spectacle is equally compelling. Again, Nolan appears to have gotten over his "CGI is worse than Hitler" pretentious attitude and uses it sensibly and judiciously, where practical effects just wouldn't work. It looks, sounds, and feels stunning from start to finish. The creepy design of the Cyclops and the monstrous nature of Scylla are particularly well done : the Cyclops looks far more like a creature than an overgrown one-eyed man, while Scylla looks almost like an alien animal, something other-worldly. These are not ordinary mortal beings ramped up to 11. Nolan may have minimised the gods, but he doesn't hold back on supernatural : similarly, Circe's transformation of the crew into pigs is downright nasty. This is a scene that's more visceral and earthy than I would have expected from someone I associate with perfect cinematic cleanliness. It works brilliantly.

About the only other thing I would mention visually is the oddly contrasting aesthetics. Odysseus' palace looks interestingly archaic and pagan inside, dim and gloomy and lit by dark flame, but with a staircase that looks like something you'd more associate with something found in the home of an ultra-minimalist serial killer. Weirder yet is the palace's positively ruinous exterior. This isn't unique either : Athena's temple also has an interesting primitive vibe (as does Troy), but with a rather strange look as though nobody could afford to hire a cleaner or do any routine maintenance. Circe's island reminded me more of Tintagel than the Mediterranean, which was a little jarring*. And Agamemnon looks a bit like a scary robot while Odysseus' crew wear simpler but anachronistic armour – even when they're just rowing a boat.

* It was actually filmed in Scotland so I wasn't too far off.

It does work overall though. The palace looks like a palace, the temple looks like a temple, Agamemnon is clearly the leader even without saying a word, and Odysseus' crew are clearly a band of warriors. It's simple, iconic, and immediately clear to the viewer what's going on.

The storytelling is where it shines. Nolan's use of flashbacks to fill in the essential details of the Trojan War is carefully controlled, follows the overall structure of the poem, and fills in relevant similarities and necessary parts of the narrative exactly when needed. The moral aspects come through clearly without being overwhelming*. Nolan's choice of which parts to emphasise and which to discard feels like the most balanced approach possible.

* Though, I would say that its needs to reduce the mentions of both "Zeus' Law" and the "Sea Peoples" by at least a factor of five. Honestly if you make a drinking game out of either of these, you'll be dead by the end of the film.

Nolan does make some deviations from the poem, but I think he does so in a self-consistent way that doesn't undermine the source material. Whereas the original Menelaus and Helen live happily ever after, here they're at odds. Menelaus is a dominant masculine archetype, but Helen isn't afraid to push back. At the same time, Menelaus clearly has massive respect for Odysseus' cleverness that lends him some interesting depth. He's a brute, but not a villain... though he does look disconcertingly like Andrew Tate.

The Penelope/Telemachus dynamic is handled similarly well. Penelope is clearly torn by competing forces : wishing her husband had never left, desperate for his return both for selfless love and a purely pragmatic desire for security, wanting to do the best for her son but not yet ready for him to assume his father's throne Telemachus would have been easy to make into an annoying Wesley Crusher-type git, but to his great credit, Tom Holland manages to avoid this. 

As for Odysseus himself, I think Matt Damon has become a fine actor. He takes a highly understated approach and I would actually have liked a bit more direct emotion from time to time : he could do with getting properly angry and (especially) distraught at least once or twice. There's a particularly poignant scene in the poem where Odysseus breaks down and weeps at memories of the war that I think would definitely have been a useful addition. At the same time, his massive PTSD comes through in other ways, and I think Matt Damon largely succeeds in giving the character latent tension rather than merely not bothering to act in a more thespian fashion.

Practically every other objection I have falls firmly into the "would be nice to have but not necessary" category as well. I like the "Nobody" joke with the Cyclops, the shade of Achilles lamenting his fate in the afterlife, Athena going in disguise as a man... none of these really need to be in the movie though. Excising these, in my opinion, allows Nolan to keep focus on the tale he wants to tell, without omitting or changing any of the key themes of the original.

Finally, I have to mention classicist and translator Emily Wilson's notorious and scathing criticism. It's a worth a read, because it brilliantly highlights exactly those key themes in a way that's better than I could have done. It's also a pile of garbage. Among many, many other things, Wilson is oddly fixated on :

• The colour of the sea not being purple
• The lack of time spent watching Odysseus building a boat
• Christopher Nolan having some sort of drowning fetish (seriously, which Nolan films has she been watching ??)
• Odysseus not being horny enough
• The movie somehow being a veiled criticism of Brexit and the War on Terror
• Odysseus spending too much time worrying about not telling Sinon he was going to die
• Lack of exposition / too much exposition / unclear motivations (even when the characters directly state why they're doing things, which in my view helps provide explanations Homer never did but should have done)
• The supposed lack of internal moral consistency, despite the fact that this is clearly bollocks.

This last particularly irked me because it's even more nonsensical than the rest of the post. Wilson picks up on many moral points that would probably have taken me a lot longer to draw out, but she gets them all catastrophically wrong. Being laced with militant feminism – she seems to hate all the female characters because.... well I don't really know why at all – doesn't help, but the way she seems to get everything completely backwards is damned odd.

The law of hospitality is only the most egregious example. This is a recurring theme in both poem and movie, with respecting hospitality to strangers being literally sacred. Admittedly, in the movie, the reason give is rather blunt and transactional : that guests might be gods in disguise. This is morally uninteresting but understandably simplified for the sake of a movie, but what's handled really well is the use and abuse of the law. This kind of law only works when enacted respectfully, when both sides understand the limits to which it should be used. Its wanton misuse by the suitors leaves Odysseus with no choice but to disregard it, leading to calamity and even the ruin of civilisation. 

Like royal power, sometimes the whole point of giving authority is to deny its use : either entirely, or only to limit how far it's actually applied or restrict who gets its. Holding back, showing restraint, sometimes leads to more power rather than less. And with the law based on the authority of the gods, when it fails – when it's revealed as ineffectual – it can't be mended. The only alternative is an entirely new order.

My final points connect to this in a somewhat convoluted manner. Weirdly, Wilson laments that the movie is soaked in spectacle and there's always some loud exciting thing going on. This is a blatantly false claim, as there's plenty of brooding silences and quieter scenes that lend all the more impact to the noisy bits. Complaining there's too much happening here is surely a case of complaining there are too many notes. But even worse, this deeply flawed criticism misses the point that Odysseus goes through all of this, and so the viewer experiences all this intensity, as part of a journey of self-discovery. He has to overcome the external challenges, to be pushed to the very limits of endurance, before he can confront his own doubts and his own world view.

Yes, obviously that's all a horrible cliché, but this is literally the first such tale in Western literature, so it doesn't count.

The movie is explicit, and I think rightly so, that Odysseus' voyage away from Circe on a tiny raft into the turbulent sea is quite different to his earlier heroics, a leap of faith that tests him as never before. We don't need to hear some internal monologue to get this. We, the audience, can be rightly expected to fill in these kinds of gaps for ourselves; likewise, while I think some egregious violence in the sack of Troy would have helped explain Odysseus' inner torment, it isn't necessary. Wilson, on the other hand, seems to want the exact inverse of what makes the movie a success : she wants more exposition where none is actually needed and less in the (few) places where it's too much.

Anyway, for me it's a massive hit. It has definite re-watching value, as befits one of the world's oldest stories. There will be surely be more Odyssey adaptations in the future, but this one is likely to set the benchmark for decades to come.

The (Greek) Tragedy Of The West

I try to avoid reading polemics because I don't see the point of them. I see the need to write them from time to time, but reading them is the cynical equivalent of mental masturbation. Sure, wallow in self-pity if that's your thing, but I'll stick to actual porn like a normal person, thanks.

Ahem.

Anyway, this is not to say I don't occasionally read things that sound more polemical, if only as a "just in case" situation. Today's IAI piece certainly has a "you should feel like utter shit" vibe about the title... I mean, "The End of the West means even more than you think" sounds to me like barely-coded essay-speak for "Things are awful and you're not feeling depressed enough, here, watch me murder some kittens so you feel properly sad."

Wait ! Don't go ! I promise it actually turns out to be nothing like that at all. It's actually about the similarities between the seemingly-chaotic Greek tragedies and the complex modern world in which we find ourselves, and how we can strive to keep our heads when those around us are losing theirs (and not necessarily just metaphorically). It's also good not just as a self-help, but an insight into what makes the Greek tragedies so appealing.

Still, it does begin with a bit of a rant about how things are bad :

Liberal humanism can be defined as a quasi-religious faith in progress, the power of reason, universal human rights, the moral primacy of Western-style democracy, free markets, and the unbounded potential of technology. It also contains a hubristic belief that it is the best single way in which human beings can organize themselves. It is a utopian ideology that looks forward to a time when all societies would be democratic, prosperous and part of a homogenous global system.

The gap between what liberal humanism promised and what it is now delivering is too vast for any illusion to sustain it. While technology has advanced the moral progress of our institutions has not followed. A backlash was inevitable.

Unfortunately, the author doesn't really expound on why things haven't panned out the way they were supposed to, and for my part I would put a pretty big label on "under-regulation". I don't think this has much to do with "liberal humanism" per se. I mean, monarchy is a terrible system, but if you happen to have a decent one, things are probably not too bad for the ordinary folk. Here it's the reverse : the ideas are good, but if you don't do things properly, if you let market forces and inequality spiral out of control, you won't get a good result.

Still, the main point seems sound. Rightly or wrongly, the perceived failings of the prevalent ideology are leading to reactions against it.

This backlash has been exploited by Trump and other right-wing politicians across the West who mask their self-serving politics by positioning themselves as bulwarks against the fragmenting of Western values. The utopias these new preachers evangelize about are now located in some unspecified time in the past, before the fragmentation, rather than the future. 

This is very interesting to me, seen as how medieval rulers were apt to present novelty as regression; elsewhere it has been noted that techbros sometimes try to disguise political regression with a shiny novel aesthetic. Here it seems we're really going for old-school conservatism : not merely avoiding further changes, but the notion that the past was better because it was geared around order and hierarchy, a direct reaction against liberal democratic values. The different ways people appeal for change are interesting in themselves, however the article continues :

Those still looking forward, ignore the fact that our uses of science and knowledge are as fleeting and crooked as we are ourselves, and pin hope of salvation on technology. They put their faith in the God-like abilities of AI or promise redemption in virtual worlds. Science can lift man’s eyes up to the stars, but humans will use what they know to satisfy their most pressing needs and desires — even if the result is ruin. 

While today’s techno-optimists may eventually develop the technology to get us to Mars, the technototalitarian colonies they found are unlikely to give us the belonging and meaning our society on our current planet isn’t providing.

Well that's grim ! But then, I've made my position on techno-optimism clear previously, so I'm not going to go through that again. As far as the Silicon Valley techbro mentality is concerned, I agree with the current article : these sorts of fools don't understand that technological advancement only brings benefits when coupled with social progress, and doesn't happen automatically. I wouldn't agree that this means technological advancement can or should be avoided, although I don't think the author is trying to imply that.

Despite their beliefs in gods and the afterlife, the ancient Greeks were focused on what one does in this world, in the here and now. When Odysseus visits Hades in the Odyssey he is approached by the masses of the dead. Speaking with Achilles he is told those that have crossed over the river Styx are “Numb dead people… the shades of poor exhausted mortals”. The afterlife is no substitute for the vividness of life itself.

And so, perhaps, are the purely-technological solutions of Silicon valley. The techbro solution is only a shade of what must be done to mitigate dystopian angst. An AI is not a true companion and never will be, and a virtual world is no solution to real problems. This doesn't mean they're innately bad, because they're not. But they are definitely used badly by the techbro types.

I would also add a brief note on dystopias more generally. It seems to me that just as utopian thinking commits a fallacy by imagining that an ideal system will lead to true, blissful perfection, so polemics against dystopias do the exact opposite. They paint this picture of a system in which everyone is miserable about everything the whole time, giving the impression that no other state of existence is then possible. All will suffer and all will be suffering. This is simply not how humans work : people will sometimes be happy almost regardless of circumstance, and equally, they can still be depressed in paradise. 

The thing that really gets me about polemics about the actual state of current affairs is the insistence that only one moral-emotional state is permissible : you should either be overjoyed at the ongoing technological progress, say, or utterly distraught and in tears about your constant oppression and the fact that everyone is trying to harvest your organs, or something. Other states are deemed invalid and your contrary opinion doesn't count; moral nuance is heresy. Only suffering or ecstasy are permitted. I hate this.

But I digress. Or do I ? Not quite. It's precisely this flawed, binary, good-versus-evil depiction which, the author suggests, the Greek tragedies are so good at avoiding :

A key set of treasures within this that perhaps best describes the world we now find ourselves in are the first written stories in Western culture – The Iliad and Odyssey – and the Greek tragedies. They describe a world in constant conflict defined by capriciousness, ambiguity, uncertainty and unknowability, where people are often swept along by forces, they interact with but don’t fully comprehend. They also then suggest how best we might approach such a world, pointing us to a form of both political and individual realism.

And that resonates with me very strongly. Yes, parts of the modern world are awful, and parts of the ancient world were orders of magnitude worse. But insisting that we hate everything continuously is just paralysingly nihilistic, not productive. We don't have to go down the full Stoic route to accept that we can still have a largely pleasant life despite circumstances.

One of the reasons the tragedies are still so relevant is that humans, despite advances in technology and material wealth are still driven by the same conflicting needs and illusions. There are many ways open to us to express our needs and organise ourselves, but we are limited by the same Hamartia or basic human vulnerabilities.

We live today in a supposed democratic meritocracy, yet our actions are subject to the invisible gods of market forces and algorithms. We can find ourselves pawns in the petty squabbles of autocratic leaders. But at the same time, within the confines of fate, we are free to make choices – this is how our destiny plays out. In perhaps the finest of the tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus’ fate is not just decided by the choices he makes, but also the interaction of forces outside of his control interacting with his choices. 

Indeed, the developments of the modern world provide material improvement but often moral uncertainty. Whereas the natural forces of the ancient world made for permanent uncertainty, here it's the pace of our own discoveries which result in confusion : the effect is similar despite a very different underlying cause. 

And of course, we're none of us completely bereft of influence and control, but like even the heroes of Greek myth, we can sometimes feel very small and insignificant. The Greek heroes never really go on world-saving missions like modern superheroes do, that's left to the gods. But they do manage to make a difference in their own spheres. Surely that's an important lesson even for the most ardent would-be modern reformers : you may never fully realise your visions, but your contribution may be important even so.

The moral aspects, though, are where things get very interesting indeed :

These ancient stories show us that tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good, but the suffering caused by the triumph of one good over another. Tragedy is about morally defensible but incompatible goals... The chorus divides into two groups. There is no reconciliation.

Which is not to say that the modern world, and ancient tragedy, don't have elements of good and evil about them, things with which there can be no compromise. But an awful lot of conflict does arise in such a way. The similarities to the Dune saga, in which solution after solution is presented and found wanting, seem obvious. And to a lesser degree, perhaps, also that of certain fairy tales with no clear moral lesson (or indeed physical cause for why things happen*). Presumably, uncertainty is a necessary condition for dystopias, but maybe there's a glimmer of hope in that most good dystopian narratives nevertheless have a clear resolution, that form of "political and individual realism" mentioned earlier.

* Possibly, in those cases the chaos is the result of hidden variables : the original versions may have made a lot more sense in a context which is now lost to us. Both Greek mythology and later fairy tales are arguably ways to try and understand a world which simply couldn't be understood by the methods of rational inquiry available at the time.

What can we learn from this ? The author suggests :

The Greeks show us that killing and dying for concepts that defy reason, for often nonsensical ideas, is how many human beings have made sense of their lives. This is something those trying to negotiate peace today must not forget, but the unreasonable nature of our species is something we should all be aware of in our day-to-day relations. Tragedy teaches us that if we do not realise this and we try to disavow the past, then at best, we will be destined to repeat what has come before, and at worst, be destroyed by it. 

In essence, while you might be able to fight off irrationality to some degree, you can't eliminate it completely. You have to accept that people have irrational motivations and work within that framework, not treat them as machines who've simply been fed wrong data. 

The ancient stories place these dilemmas in rich historical and social contexts, where the past weighs down on the present, with everyone aware of the social networks in which they interact and the resulting duties and responsibilities this entails. This contrasts with the ahistorical approach taken by the hubristic planners of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that tried to force an alien political construct on ancient cultures they made little effort to understand or the architects of the homogeneous globalized economy that uproot industries and move them round the world severing social and economic links in place for generations.

And I would add that this may also be a reason why less bloodthirsty culture wars can have such potent effects even on those who aren't directly affected by them. People are very deeply attached to their own beliefs and ways of doing things, especially when they don't ever question them. When someone tells you that something you've taken for granted is actually morally wrong when you didn't even think it was a moral issue at all*... it can feel like a direct attack. 

* Examples : which operating system to use, which food to eat, which bathroom to go to, how to dress, what TV channels to watch... and the left is as absolutely as guilty as the right at indulging in this sort of nonsense. 

Faced with the reality that there are moral and political dilemmas for which there are simply no solutions... recognises that there is a plurality of human values that determines many ways of living, and these values – and those that hold them – will inevitably clash. It is the search for a way of living together despite this, embracing the multiple forms of human life as a good thing in itself.

And for me the answer remains firmly in classical liberalism, a.k.a., you do you. When we interact, we both get a say in how things proceed. When we don't, then my actions are up to me and me alone, and for you as well. I know of no better proposed method of coexistence.

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Provisionally, I remain unconvinced that "liberal humanism" has failed. An insufficiently liberal life, one in which everything we do was under someone else's direct control, would be a true dystopian hell, but I'm unconvinced that anything like that is on the horizon in the western hemisphere. I just don't see it. I often look around me, on a nice sunny day with the green grass and birds chirping and data reduction running happily in the background, see most people being generally pretty cheerful most of the time... and I wonder what the hell is wrong with the people on my social media feed. Important though it is to guard against backsliding, wallowing in self-misery that things don't meet our personal exacting standards, that everything is awful because there are some things we don't like, posting nothing much except what's wrong with the world rather than what's right, is a highly toxic lifestyle choice. 

All that said, perhaps it's all worth remembering the earlier lesson : that Blade Runner style grimdark dystopias are simply unrealistic. The important point is not to market everything as unbearably depressing, because it clearly isn't, nor is it that there's a slippery slope towards a truly hellish nightmare where there's no escape from torment, because that isn't going to happen either. I'm sorry, social media, but it just isn't, and this perverse sales pitch is massively ineffective for social reform because it's so blatantly at odds with reality. Rather the lesson here should be that just because there's much in the world that's joyous, that's no reason to excuse the very real failings, the times when things do get dark and depressing, the atrocities and outrages which do happen. We don't need any hyperbole about how we're all going to die horribly. Far more important is to tell us what we need to do to make improvements, not relentless doomongering.

My final point is that the idea of learning to embrace uncertainty, to "live more comfortably with doubt", is nothing new. Life has always been complicated and there have always been forces beyond our control we have to learn to accept; there are, after all, famous clichés about it I need not repeat. But recent decades do seem to have involved a genuine uptick in uncertainty and unpredictability, not just a perception of one. The author's point that this aspect is what makes the tragedies continuously appealing, and now even more relevant, is I think both novel and correct.

And yet the value of the Greek tragedies is, in a satisfyingly meta way, limited. They resonate precisely because they don't contain proposed solutions. The Greek heroes might succeed for a while, but never achieved anything lasting, just as our political efforts can also feel like hollow victories. So while they might teach us how some self-help lessons about how to face uncertainty, we cannot look to them for any deeper answers. Where we do face problems were a compromise is not possible, and this undeniably does happen, we must look elsewhere.

The Enshittification Of The State

We've all seen that services tend to get worse over time. You sign up to a new streaming service and it tends to get more and more expensive and content gets worse, or good content gets rarer. Or you try out a restaurant and it's great at first but becomes more and more mundane.

Some of this is almost certainly due to rising expectations and flawed memory. When you find something wonderful and new, you expect it to continue raising standards in a similar way to your initial experience, and when it doesn't, it feels like it's getting worse. But some of this so-called "enshittification" is definitely real. Amazon adding charges to removes ads from Prime isn't a false memory, and neither is shrinkflation. The rise of reality TV shows isn't, unfortunately, the result of an overactive imagination : some idiotic network executive had to actually choose to make it happen. 

I despise the term "enshittification" because it's fucking lazy, boring, and just a god-awful word. I prefer asymptotic degradation, because this is much more descriptive. Done correctly, from a purely business perspective, it would go like this. First, you set up a service which is really good so you attract new customers. You might even run it at a loss for a while, but no matter, you're getting people interested and enthusiastic. You're building loyalty. Then, you make cost savings by reducing quality or upping prices, or both. But the crucial bit is that you shouldn't do this linearly : if you do, eventually you'll reach a threshold when you start losing customers at such a rate that you become unprofitable and fail. The trick is to do this asymptotically, such that you get ever-closer to (but never actually reach) that failure point. Your service doesn't have to be as good as it was in the good old days, but it has to maintain a minimum standard to remain viable.

Or in other words, you try and cut back as much as you can get away with, but no more than that.

This Mother Jones essay looks at this from the perspective of the failing democratic state. The central claim is that would-be dictators in modern democracies don't go straight to usurping power and replacing themselves as strongmen, but instead undermine things little by little, as much as they can get away with. If that eventually means "everything", then so be it, but this is not likely to be how things start out.

It's a bit more sophisticated than that though. First, there's the concept literally of a dual state, or perhaps more accurately, state machinery applied in very different ways to different citizens. The two halves of this are the prerogative state, which means the ruler acts on a whim without reference to law or due process*, and the normative state in which law and order are – apparently – respected. 

* And nothing to do with Britney Spears, unfortunately.

The normative state might be genuine, or it might be a fig leaf. The dictator (or oligarchy) may simply not care about the majority of people and by and large simply leave them to get on with their lives; indeed, if they try to control too much too soon, people are not likely to tolerate that. But the masses will turn a blind eye to abuses of power – the prerogative state – being deployed against minorities. The existence of the rump normative state gives the leaders a clear advantage of plausible deniability, of having enough apparently intact institutions remaining to be able to pretend that everything is normal.

The problem is that the erosion of power in institutions makes the remaining adherence to law and state machinery ever more of an illusion, a convenience that can be reversed whenever the rulers require it. A true dual state is approaching not just when norms are disregarded – when penalties that should be enacted aren't – but when no explanation is given for the change : when the courts "forego with the business of law entirely".

A difficulty for such a dual state is its instability. 

Fraenkel thought of the prerogative state as something like a black hole: “It’s this void, but it’s a void that exerts a gravitational pull on everything around it. So there’s this constant distortion of what he calls the normative state. And there are these moments where some piece of the normative state just gets collapsed and blown away.”

The Republican appointed justices, to the extent the United States has become a dual state, would rather stave off such a collapse, not least because their legitimacy and power relies on such a mirage. Thus, they prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open. And more than anyone else, the justices are in the position to paper over Trump’s lawlessness or expose it. But this is precisely why the dual state is so dangerous: It allows the would-be autocrat to consolidate power under the cloak of democracy and norms.

An American president with authoritarian ambitions would be more likely to realize them if people thought their lives wouldn’t be affected. The Republican wing of the Supreme Court has a self-interest in a dual state as well; without the illusion of the normative state, the justices’ are revealed to be pawns, not power brokers. Their authority would evaporate because it is based on the perception of the rule of law. But maintaining a stable dual state means that the prerogative state must hold itself back, particularly in when it comes to the economy — the black hole cannot grow too large.

The difficult part is extrapolating how things proceed. Is it inevitable that such a state eventually collapses into full authoritarianism, or can this asymptotic degradation be maintained indefinitely ? 

One thing the article doesn't consider is that actually, it can even be reversed. Decline, even a limited one, is not inevitable. We've seen this in Britain and more dramatically in Hungary, which was as close to an authoritarian state as might be imagined. Sometimes, perhaps, maintaining a fig leaf – even when it's done for many years in the case of Hungary – is enough to allow authoritarianism to be undone. The popular claim that fascism is never removed peacefully is simply not correct, and in the case of authoritarian regimes more generally, this appears even more dubious. The tub-thumping rhetoric of pitchforks and torches is a classic appeal to the uncompromising simplicity of overthrowing the monster, the blood-pumping appeal of violence, whereas in fact it's peaceful protests that usually win the day.

But I would add that history never fully repeats. We can't take any previous patterns for granted because the situation is never quite the same; useful guidelines should be examined closely, but not taken as roadmaps to how things will definitely pan out. In America, as the article concentrates on, it would be democratically suicidal to ignore the abundant warning signs of the dual state; it would also be a self-fulfilling prophecy to pretend that nothing can be done about it. It is that belief, and only that belief, that decline and fall are inevitable that make them so. Hope needs must spring eternal. 

Review : The Slavic Myths

It's time to resume my extensive mythology review series with another outing from Thames & Hudson. This one, simply called The Slavic Myths (authors Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapšak), isn't part of their "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series that first got me hooked on T&H, though it's pretty close. It doesn't quite examine how the myths have influenced our modern-day thinking, but it presents much the same sort of literary analysis : what the myths mean, how they originated, and a description of their variations. The format is to give chapters as pairs, with the first presenting a retelling of the myth using its major elements, and the accompanying second chapter giving the analysis.

As with the other T&H mythology books, this is excellent. The retellings are written in a modern, accessible way, with plenty of description of both the environment and the emotional states of the characters (a tad simplistic, but more than enough to get the job done). We also don't get laden with the endless hyperbolic "twee" that so often plagues so many early fairy tales : that is, we don't get a dozen castle fairer than man ever saw in the same story, nor dozens of chaste maidens* each more beautiful than the last.

* Often not-so-chaste by the end of the story, mind you.

The analyses are extremely clear, interesting, and without pushing any agenda except to convince the reader that Slavic myths are really cool. They also have the touches of humour that are quite frequent in T&H, e.g. "Koschei the Deathless was now Koschei the Dead". 

There are two things I especially like here. First, it points to a possible connection route between the Norse and Greek myths, which otherwise seem so similar yet so far separated from each other. Second, there's much more of a horror aspect than in other mythology books, which makes everything feel both familiar and novel. It's not that the other European folklore and mythology lacks its darker side, but here the intention is much more straightforwardly, and far more frequently, designed to scare the reader*. More on both of these below.

* Exceptions that prove the rule : The Dead of Winter (Europe) and Of Doves And Ravens (Wales) both have collections of horrifying legends, but both but both are deliberately curated as such. The point is that there's relatively little of the fear factor in other mythological collections more generally.

I'm giving this one a solid 8/10; I could easily be persuaded to bump this to 9 if it was just a bit longer.

Right then, here are my personal highlights. I'll try very, very hard to keep this concise.

Singing Slavs

The early Slavs were not your typical bunch of barbarians. They were described by some writers as monotheistic and democratic, preferring wailing to warfare... okay, maybe I'm pushing the alliteration too hard. But while large and muscular, they would rather sing and dance than fight anyone, which isn't your typical description of a heathen people from a late Roman source. Certainly this wasn't a universal, as Slavic kings were definitely a thing and they had a rich pantheon of gods, but maybe some local tribes were exceptional. It's otherwise a very strange thing to just make up.

The Slavs were also never a politically unified people. Being prolific, they spread out over a huge geographical area, merging with the locals as they went.  They were, in fact, sophisticated singing Slavs, highly cosmopolitan and multicultural. So much for some ghastly vision of early European racial purity a la Elon Musk's fascist idiocy.

They also persisted with paganism (aargh ! I can't stop it !) until at least the 9th century, in some cases into at least the 1400s or even very much longer. Not all of this meant harmony with nature and singing nice songs about flowers... some of the descriptions of temples adorned with animal horns and carved gods make them sometimes sound somewhat sinister.

Scary Slavs

The Slavs didn't have a monopoly on frightening folklore, but it does seem to have been more predominant than in other cultures. By far the best known examples are, of course, vampires and werewolves.

Vampires

While belief in both creatures go back to truly ancient times, like the Welsh beliefs in the gwrach ar rhibyn, such ideas persisted into the much more recent past. The craze that would eventually become the fully-formed modern idea of the vampire seems to have begun in 18th century Serbia. The earliest versions concern commoners, not nobles, who would rise from their graves to kill the living, but it took longer for them to develop blood-drinking attributes and the host of other supernatural powers that are the mainstay of modern vampire lore.

What they did already have was a vulnerability to crosses (in the retelling here, the cross even bursts into flame when they confront the vampire), holy water, and of course a stake through the heart. But not because it would make them explode Buffy-style, because they couldn't be truly killed at all. Drowning the corpse in holy water, staking it, and burying it under heavy rocks couldn't kill it... because it was truly already dead : all these measures could do was stop it escaping. And it must be pretty scary if you really believe that the corpse you just faced is still writhing underground at night, hoping for a release to resume its hunt for the living.

Other dramatic elements include a report where the stake couldn't penetrate the corpse, or, conversely, where impaling caused the whole grave to fill with blood. One other key aspect of the early legends was the idea of vampires as contagion : if the first rumours didn't include vampire propagation by bite, they they were certainly associated with plague and illness. It's easy to see how the association could itself become personified, with a supernatural explanation for viruses filling in the gap of germ theory.

Werewolves

These seem to have been much closer to their modern incarnations from the word go. Originally, vampires and werewolves may even have been two words for the same monster, and hence the attributes of one eventually merged with that of the other. Werewolves were from the outset creatures that had to feed on blood to survive, couldn't enter a home unless invited, could control the weather, and were also vulnerable to stakes. They differed from vampires in their shapeshifting abilities, their familiar aversion to silver (less widely-known is that other metals could kill them, but only if left in the body), and that they were very much still alive : they were notionally immortal and extremely hard to kill, but not because they were already dead.

Some werewolves seem to have been the familiar near-demonic monsters, but others were suicidal over what they'd become; the very earliest were just shape-changers with no other connotations. They had associations with the Moon, but also the Sun, with the whole "must transform under the full Moon" business being a much later invention, and most early werewolves were dangerous the whole time. Some particularly grisly tales include cannibalism, incest, infanticide, and mutilation. It's hard to escape the feeling that the Slavic myths could indeed be a lot nastier than some of the other European stories... which makes them all the more fascinating.

Whereas vampires (in this relatively modern era) started in Serbia and spread outwards, werewolves were much more widespread. One of the stranger things, to me, is that while investigators of the same time had no issue with the reality of vampires, witches, ghosts and other supernatural creatures, they usually took great exception to the idea that a man could physically transform into a wolf. The same people that believed in blood-sucking undead demons would suddenly turn positively woke, deeming supposed "werewolves" to be the product of deranged minds in need of mental health assistance. Quite why this should be the point where people finally decide that this is all getting a bit silly is not at all clear.

Sexist Slavs

Well... partially. I don't think you can really spin one single coherent narrative on gender issues here. There are mermaid-like creatures living in freshwater who lure men to their deaths with the promise of sex, but there are also male versions who seduce women; more rarely, the lucky "victim" gets to rule the underwater realm. Perun, the supreme god, is largely associated with thunder and lightning but also fertility – but more in the harvest sense rather than sexual. And female goddesses seem to be just as complex as their male counterparts.

The retelling of the story of Libuše, the fairytale founder of Prague, encapsulates this complexity. In the story she's a wise and revered ruler, but because she makes one mistake that a single man can't tolerate, she's forced out in favour of an "iron king". One the one hand, female rule seems genuinely admired here, but on the other, she's still usurped for no good reason :

"You want a man to rule you. You want someone to drag your children away from you to serve him, to kill and die for him. You want a man who will tax you the way you deserve to be taxed, taking your best cattle and horses. You want to serve a harsh master and to pay for it. None of this I have asked of you, and yet... you want to be dominated rather than shamed by having a woman ruler."

And yet even here, the "iron king" they get is strictly a metaphorical one who uses his iron ploughshare as a table, not because they actually do want a man's man to tell them all what to do. He turns out to be quite a nice chap, in fact.

Then of course there are female monsters, which are far from gender-focused. There are witches that are yet another variant of the undead, rising from their graves to eat children (in Slavic belief they are distinctly creatures, being always old – you can't learn to be a Slavic witch). There are Baba Yagas, sometimes hideous and hostile cannibals – in the story here she lives in her hut on hen's legs inside a fence of human bones – but sometimes helpful. Baba Yaga is not a straightforward monster like an ogre : even when aggressive*, she must obey certain rules rather than skipping straight to dinner time. As with the Norse, then, there are definitely sexist tendencies present, but it's nothing whatever like the modern notion of a simpler past when men were men and women were ornaments.

* And she can be as terrifying figure as any vampire. Huge and horrible, she flies through the forest in a mortar and pestle, the trees opening up to let her pass. 

Supernatural Shamanic Slavs

The pantheon of Slavic gods is easily as complex as those of the Norse or the Greeks. Like them, these were not personified forces like the early Roman gods, but distinctly human, and could have multiple, unrelated associations. Veles, a devil-like figure, was associated with swamps, caves, and dark places, but also the god of music (well, the devil has all the best tunes), wealth, and poetry. A strict good and evil dichotomy appears to be absent. Perun's status as supreme god, and his associations with thunder, give him similarities to both Thor and Zeus, but his lack of sexuality also makes him very much his own entity. 

There's also a character to Slavic beliefs which is distinctly primitive and primal. Like the Norse, they believed in a world tree, though of oak* rather than ash and a simpler structure of three worlds (the underworld, the middle earth, and the heavens) rather than the much more complex version of Yggdrasil. This also seems to have been mirrored through a three-headed god; like the Celtic mythologies, the connection to nature feels more prominent than in Graeco-Roman myths.

* Or sometimes hawthorn, more on which below. It was also gnawed on by a great dog, much as Yggdrasil was attacked from below by dragons, causing it to shake.

Similarly, the shamanic nature of Slavic belief is seen in the idea of a human-animal continuity. Much more on this when I (eventually) cover Neil Price's PhD thesis, but the basic idea was that humans and animals were fundamentally similar, each being thinking entities with non-corporeal souls. But there's also an aspect of something even more mystical, a sort of life-force of the world that could be drawn on for power that's nothing like praying to a god for assistance. This is the old magic.

Shamans could tap into the elemental forces in a variety of ways, some positive, some negative. They could defend their own tribes against other supernatural foes, but they could also amass in groups and war with each other. One of the more bizarre aspects consisted of them using cadaverous crampons : using human veins and arteries and tendons to give them sinewy snowshoes for climbing. Other shamans were believed to have dragon-like wings and superhuman strength, while others could do battle by sending out their souls (in one case even from a barber's shop). Even Saint Nicholas – yes, that one, Santa – may have shamanic tendencies in his battles with wind and thunder.

The landscape itself also formed a key part of belief. While water presents entrances to another realm as it sometimes does in Greek myth, this is considerably more frequent in Slavic and Celtic stories : here the protagonists can, and frequently do, wander into other worlds accidentally, whereas for the Greeks and Romans this required extreme effort. In Slavic tales specifically, water could hold the souls of the dead, with offerings made to appease the souls and mirrors covered after a death to prevent the deceased from watching the living.

Finally, plants also play a major role in Slavic sorcery. Stakes to incapacitate vampires and kill werewolves need to be of hawthorn, not just any old pointy stick. Hawthorn trees would be planted on the graves of such creatures to help hold them down. The hawthorn tree itself, say the authors, was seen as a liminal space, a boundary between the living and the dead (possibly in part due to its blood-red berries). It could be inhabited by demons who needed to be propriated with small offerings, or bound in the tree with metal horseshoes. Walnut and pear trees, on the other hand, were the abode of witches, while linden trees could travel by magic, and others conveyed the wisdom of medical knowledge. Cabbage, oddly, was seen as a phallic symbol. 

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So that's my first brief foray into Slavic lore. Like the mythologies of other cultures I've been reading, it has elements of the bizarre and the fantastical, some striking similarities to other traditions and some aspects which are all its own. It feels like this is a whole European subculture which is far too often overlooked; even Neil Price, who goes to considerable lengths to draw associations between Viking beliefs and shamanic practises, barely even mentions Slavic culture beyond that of northernmost Europe. And this is unfair, because the stories here are easily as sophisticated as anything else in Europe. 

When I describe them as primitive, I mean not that they're stupid, but their base appeal to the blood : the imagery of the dead rising, or of ripping out arteries for climbing gear, is one that resonates viscerally. You can't contemplate a man becoming wolf without a physical sense of fear of the animal within, just as a cannibal witch with a garden of bones is a symbol too potent to be easily dismissed. This does not mean the stories were simple. True, they did not have the vast, pseudo-history like structure of Greek myth, but only because the Slavs were so much more spread out; individual stories, were easily as complex as anything in any other mythology.

Charney and Slapšak's stated goal is to introduce readers to Slavic folklore and encourage further reading. For me they've succeeded : I'm already reading Flame Tree's much longer Slavic Myths & Tales. I just hope that darker edge isn't just the result of this particularly careful curation... give me a single bloodsucking vampire over any number of ornamental princesses any day of the week. Sod the nondescript castles and wish-fulfilment and give me something scary.

Review : Unruly (II)

Welcome back to my take on David Mitchell's Unruly. Last time I looked at Mitchell's non-kingly words of wisdom (and a few parts which were questionable) on a basically random collection of topics. This time it'll be much more focused on the main subject of what David Mitchell thinks made for a successful medieval monarch. This is going to be very medieval-centric; if you want to draw out what's still useful for modern rulers, go ahead, but that's very much left as an Exercise For The Reader.

All of these are, of course, only guidelines. It's possibly to get away with flagrantly violating almost all of them, depending on the circumstances. But while a skilled ruler might well be able to ignore any rule, and even at least bend all of them from time to time, they almost certainly couldn't completely avoid all of them forever.

Listicle 2/2 : David Mitchell's Top Tips For How To Be A Successful King

Be legitimate. The rules of succession were actually somewhat flexible and varied continuously (I still can't for the life of me figure out why John of Gaunt wasn't king) but they were usually clear. Once everyone can see "the rules say it's clearly Tim's turn next" then it becomes a lot harder to convince anyone it should actually be Fred. Lacking a constitution is actually a strength here, because there's no procedure for changing the rule book. There's no system to game except naked strength, and most people, most of the time, don't really want to go down that route. Rewriting unwritten rules is a whole lot different from rewriting actual... well, writing.

Ideally, you need a very clear reason why you should be next in line, not a terribly convoluted chain of vague connections or lots of individually-unconvincing reasons like Henry VII. He won and all, but that was because of the extenuating circumstances of decades of preceding warfare and Richard III being even worse than Richard II. And poor old Matilda was very clearly the heir apparent, but Stephen managed to oust her because he had a penis and that was apparently quite a high priority for most of the nobles at the time. So "being legitimate" isn't a guarantee of anything, but it does usually count in your favour.

Be openly pre-acknowledged. If people commit to you as heir before you ascend the throne, so much the better. This is by no means a done deal (again, I'm looking at you, Stephen) but it does help. Trying to actually have your heir anointed as king before you yourself die, however, was tried in England but it never caught on : people found it confusing as to who was actually the king – not least of all the heir themselves, who might get ideas ahead of their actual designated time. Still, telling everyone – in public, please, I'm looking at you, Edward the Confessor – who you want to take your place definitely helps.

Don't have a minority. It's best if dad dies when you're a grown-up so you can learn the art of kinging directly from him. He alone doesn't have any competing interests. He alone isn't trying to curry your favour, because he's king and you're not (yet). Everyone else, however, is likely to try and mould you to their own interests. In the particular case of Richard II, everyone telling him he was the epitome of regal magnificence without actually teaching him how to rule was a downright catastrophe.

Convince people you're magical. The power of coronation seems to have grown from something incidental – initially it was far more important to be acknowledged by the Witan – into something literally transformative. It was as though putting on the crown for the first time conveyed some magical change from mere mortal into divinely-appointed ruler. This kind of ritual helped turn the Dark Age thugs with the biggest swords into medieval kings, ultimately just guys with gold hats but now viewed as set apart from other men.

Remember the pretence (I). The tricky bit, the balancing act, is to convince other people you're magical while not falling for it yourself. Richard II fell for it and he was one of the most useless of the lot. You also can't just not bother to pretend though : start convincing people you're not special and there's nothing to stop them form having a go themselves, as happened in the early days of the Tudors, when everyone knew that Henry VII's claim to the throne was as weak as Donald Trump's claim to healthy genes. 

The wise kings, the ones who actually ran things pretty well – Alfred, Athelstan, Henry I, Henry II, Edward III, a few more – knew that their actual hard power was very limited. Their strength came from persuading their subjects, which meant being ruthless when they had to be but also magnanimous when they could. They were disciplined in their use of rewards and punishments alike, never pushing the social norms too far, but also seeking to bend them to their own ends rather than simply going with the flow of the historical currents. They listened, but they also directed. They found a balance.

Certainly you can't adopt John's approach, which, in Mitchell's words, was simply, "I'll do what I fucking like". At that point there was, he says, a widely-understood notion, sincerely believed, that a king's kingdom was literally his own personal property. But previous rulers didn't like living in a shithole so had tended to treat the kingdom in a way that everyone could basically accept. John didn't mind living in a shithole, so broke this convention and ultimately that, in turn, broke him.

Ironically, Mitchell suggests John may actually have been an atheist, co-opting the notion of divine appointment for his own cynical gains without ever really believing in a damn thing beyond himself. When you start doing that, or when you stop questioning yourself, others will start asking the questions for you... awkward questions like, "are we really sure about this one ?".

Like the modern royals who have absolute power provided they promise not to use it, some degree of medieval power wasn't supposed to be actually used, or at least certainly not on a whim. Going down that route was what forced systemic change, not any high-minded ideals about trying to be nicer to anyone. People are naturally averse to questioning the system, but they absolutely will if you push them far enough. Power is seen as legitimate only when it's not abused. 

So promote yourself and believe in yourself, but remember the system is all make-believe. Deep down, everyone knows this, but by default they'll go along with it as far as they can. Don't give them a reason to rock the boat and they won't. And for crying out loud, try and make the system work rather than reforming it, because reform leads to fundamentally dangerous instability.

Remember the pretence (II) : Pay homage to those weaker than yourself. If a ruler you owe fealty to is actually weaker than you, render homage to them even so. This flatters them, humbles you, and doesn't alter the balance of hard power. Doing it the other way around is seldom a good idea as this just rubs it in their noses. 

For example, if Edward I had just treated the Scottish with more respect, rather than instantly assuming his conquest was complete and perfect immediately, he probably would have had an easier time of ruling the place. A lot of kingship does seem to be about the symbolism of power as much as exercising it, as it was with the Roman Emperors : the competent ones would have the dignity to pretend to be humble and not max out on the worldly pleasures that were notionally theirs to command. The attitude of pretending not to be rich and powerful seems to me one of the key ingredients to securing real wealth and power. Flaunting it unnecessarily is a sign of weakness and political incontinence, not the hallmark of the truly powerful.

Remember the pretence (III) : Convince everyone they've won. Or as Mitchell puts it, Henry VIII was like a "big, smelly, terrifying Good Friday agreement". Protestants and Catholics alike thought he was one of them when really he was all about himself. Now Henry VIII was not a successful king, but he did retain power. He was essentially an overpowered screw-up, with almost everything he did going badly wrong, but he did understand how to wield his power to avoid losing it. This strategy, though, is again something that works best from a position of strength, a sort of iron fist in a velvet glove. If you have the strength to enforce your rule, you'll be all the stronger if you pretend you're not doing that. If Henry had openly picked a side there'd have been chaos.

You win or you die. Sometimes, when you get sufficiently powerful, you have no choice but to try for the crown. Harold was too powerful for any other ruler to have ever kept him alive; no medieval British monarch was ever usurped without dying suspiciously quickly afterwards. Theoretically, this could have happened. They could have abandoned their claims and gone off to be a monk somewhere, preferably very far away. But being king was fundamentally an extremely dangerous business, which is why the good ones took it extremely seriously. Once again, understanding where the real power lies, and not believing your own myth of being a chip off the old God, is crucial.

Have a higher purpose : be haughty, not naughty. This one I have to add myself. Most of your dealings should be transactional (more below), but if you can give yourself the air of a moral purpose, that can help set you up as something more than a mere mortal. This can mean denying your own followers from time to time, but the haughtiness of appearing above the petty material concerns can be very important in sustaining the belief that you're a little bit divine. 

For god's sake, though, don't go nuts with this. Do this well and people will respect you, but ignore their base desires completely and they'll despise you. William II generally got away with it by being pragmatic and competent, which was fine in that he didn't really care about the Church... but it was less fine that he didn't care about fathering an heir.

And you absolutely can't be a zealot. You can't let ideological purity get in the way of pragmatism as the hard left does :

While, in principle, all the various kinds of lefties claim that their main aim is to keep the Conservatives out of power, in practice many left-wing groupings reserve their greatest animus for each other... That's what the hard left does – but that's not the problem. The problems is that's all it does... focusing its ire on people it calls Tories but who are in fact fellow Labour supporters – just ones who are a bit more centrist, a bit more capitalist, frankly a bit more realistic.

A medieval king could go on Crusade but that so far as the leaders were concerned, religion was playing a distant second fiddle to ambition and a chance for glory. A good king should give the semblance of devout belief but never try to court the fanatics or put prayer before power.

Secure your heir and legacy. Don't question the succession process. That doesn't mean you can't designate a different heir to the most obvious candidate, but you have to work within the system. One ruler tried the half-baked idea of saying that only heirs conceived while they were king – rather than before they themselves ascended the throne – were legitimate, which didn't catch on. But you could usually still get a way with a fair bit of wiggle-room. Actually I was quite surprised at how flexible things could be : the typical view that it's the eldest male son was a relatively late concept in medieval sovereignty. 

So don't question the process, because otherwise you open a can of worms. It risks people Asking Questions like, "if we don't have to do it this way after all, why can't we do it that way ?", and that leads to chaos. You also need an heir as part of your duties as ruler, to help prevent a power struggle form occurring in your own lifetime. You definitely want to avoid would-be leaders scheming in advance (even if they only ever do so behind the scenes). No, if everyone knows where they stand as soon as possible, so much greater the chance of a stable reign and a smooth transfer to the next one.

Don't have favourites. Or at least, don't let personal feelings get in the way of political business. Edward II, says Mitchell, could have had as much sex with men as he wanted if he'd only kept Piers Gaviscon in the closet and not given him political power he neither deserved nor was suited to. Favouritism like this was what led to political strife : a good king had to be transactional, giving nobles who supported him positions of influence regardless of whether he personally liked them. Worse still was the case of favouritism with a regency period, which would lead to chaotic power struggles to control the heir. The result was the heir would grow up to be a little shit like Richard II or a moron like Henry VI.

Respect the social norms. Try not to innovate, because innovation leads to thinking, and thinking will lead to everyone thinking that the whole "kings" idea was just made up. If you have to do something new, and you will from time to time, present it as restoration, not novelty. People like things which already work, and trying to hearken back to an imagined golden age seems to tap at something deep in the psyche. 

This is not to say that you can't make use of innovations which do occur. Edward I, being somewhat despotic, was oddly fond of parliaments because he was able to use them to extract money. He made the system work to his own advantage, rather than trying to change it. When change happens, it's far better if you can guide the process and pretend it was like this all along : nothing's really changing, so no reason to doubt the divine right of kings or anything silly like that. 

Suppress doubt. Mitchell's number one point is that you have to stop people from wondering what might happen next. When they do that, they get ideas that maybe they can change what happens, and that leads to rebellion and ruin. In fact the paramount task of any good medieval monarch is to stop this happening. I'd say that if you only do two things as ruler, make it these : understand the source and limits of your power, and make sure everyone knows what's going to happen next.

That's where the importance of those transactional relationships comes in. You have to both bestow favours and riches on your supporters and deal harshly with traitors. This is a weak society you're dealing with, and the moment it loses confidence in the process is the moment all hell breaks loose. But this is not to say you should be cruel, exactly. In fact, harming innocents (like Richard III and the Princes in the Tower) is liable to make you massively unpopular. Not only are certain things simply morally unacceptable even in an age of widespread violence, but they also make you unpredictable. If you go around murdering innocents, why should anyone trust you ? Similarly, if you reward your favourites rather than your actual supporters, what's the point of anyone following you ? Being capricious won't help you at all.

Generally what you want is to be essentially fair and reciprocal, albeit by the standards of the time. That can mean chopping off heads or gouging out eyes when people rebel, and if you don't do this then all that will happen is more rebellion. Start being truly psychopathic about it and you're probably in real trouble, but if you don't follow the convention then people will lose all trust for you. Likewise, you want to avoid being bribable and controllable. You want to be broadly politically (not militarily) predictable, but not perfectly or precisely : if people know exactly what reward or punishment they'll get, they can start to manipulate you. You need to be your own person.

Conclusions

So that's how to rule medieval Britain. Know where your power comes from, be basically predictable, at least occasionally principled but generally transactional, treat the job seriously, and don't innovate more than you have to. Do all of these and you're likely to come out on top. Producing and designating an heir, and at least having some role in their education, are optional but useful extras.

David Mitchell's ideal medieval monarch, then, isn't exactly a nice bloke, but he's not a cunt either. Unlike George R. R. Martin's depiction, short-term cynicism represented a catastrophic failure of the system, not a fault in human nature. When the system was run well, it functioned coherently. It made sense.

Was it a nice system ? Oh hell no, of course not ! It was dreadful. It kept the peasants in insane working conditions, prevented reform, and allowed international warfare as more of an aspiration than a failure. "Come on guys, if we all chip in, I reckon we might just have enough money to invade France this year". But then, anyone expecting to find anything Utopian in the medieval system clearly hasn't read the brief :

I reckon that, as soon as anyone starts seriously believing a system of government is at bottom rooted in justice and loveliness, they've let their skeptical guard down and are inviting the unavoidably imperfect to descend into the downright hellish. The world has never been fair, and cannot be made fair, and claims that it can are foolish or dishonest. It can be made fairer and attempts to make it less fair can be resisted. Optimistic realists seek improvement, not perfection.

Which is exactly right. As he also points out, everyone hates centrists; people seem to want to believe in literal heroes and villains, right and wrong, and don't make much allowances for anything in the middle. Because you aren't clearly picking a side, the thinking goes, you must be one of them. 

And yet... from the deeply flawed medieval system, eventually something better emerged. It wasn't a clear, linear arc towards justice. It was deeply embedded in the process of a radical change in the entire world view, "the underlying truth of existence". Exactly how and why this happened is not something I would care to guess, but the fact is, social progress did occur. We weren't stuck in the medieval pit forever. Improvement is possible even without sudden revolutions. Not subscribing to the most extreme viewpoints in one's political tribe doesn't make one any the less determined for reform, and it certainly doesn't make anyone somehow a member of the opposite faction.

These compromises of principle in order not to upset people set the Church of England on its path. It is despised by many for this. It is deemed to be soft, lacking in intellectual and theological rigour, trying to please everyone. Proper convinced Christians, and indeed ethical people of any belief system, should, it is often proclaimed, be fearless about upsetting people in order to uphold their values. Maybe. But I reckon most of the people who genuinely have no fear of upsetting others don't just have no fear of it, they actively enjoy it.

I strongly agree with that one too. The moral purity brigade mainly act from a sense of entitled self-righteousness, a protest move rather than a struggle for real change. The perfect really is the enemy of the good, and sometimes, then as now, it could truly be a fatal one.

Finally, what did we get as the system improved ? Mitchell's answer is clear : Shakespeare. On people questioning his existence, he has this to say :

Who would want that to be true ? Rather than the actual truth ? Here's the actual truth : a man with a normal background and education, an impecunious member of the provincial bourgeoisie in a backward kingdom on a war-wracked island at the edge of civilisation, turned out to be the greatest writer, and possibly the greatest artist of any kind, who ever lived. So far. That might be the most life-affirming fact in the entire history of humanity. Sometimes it makes me want to cry with joy. It's such a celebration of what humans can be. To want the truth to be otherwise is an act of spite against the very sanctity of our species.

Which is a sentiment I thoroughly share. 

I don't agree, in the end, that the medieval rulers contributed nothing comparable to later leaders, even if things like Magna Carta were actually failures of the system rather than its end goals. I think that some of the above lessons in leadership are plenty relevant to the modern world. But more than that, to understand the medieval world view is fascinating not just in itself, but in understanding who we are as a species. Who we are when we have to deal with very different surroundings to our modern world. How we cope without mass communications, how we reason without huge swathes of statistics, what our intuition is without detailed data. What makes sense, on a base level, to the human brain, and why we still cling to some damn fool ideas today.

As for Shakespeare, I think geniuses of his calibre are something that happens almost regardless of the system we have in place. The challenge we should set ourselves is not "can we make more Shakespeares ?", because we can't : they happen or don't happen uncontrollably and regardless of circumstances. But we can ask whether our system is the best one to allow more normal people to make their best contributions. The medieval system was absolutely shit at doing that. The modern system is a staggering improvement – it isn't a different kind of bad, it's demonstrably, unimaginably better – but with its consumerism, bullshit jobs, pointless discrimination and myriad of other flaws, it's clear that we still have a long way to go. We, at least, actually value innovation. Maybe that gives us more hope than even the most skilful medieval king, who was, at core, just a thug in a shiny hat.

Review : Unruly (I)

David Mitchell's Unruly : A History of England's Kings and Queens has been on my "I'd quite like to read that" list for some time. Finally, mission accomplished. As the popular comedian I most strongly identify with, this one was an obvious choice.

Incidentally, should you prefer to hear from the man himself without reading the whole book, he gave a nice interview about in on History Hit, which is now available on the rest of YouTube. You can skip this post entirely and just watch that if you want, I don't mind.

Anyway, the book is very good. It's clear that Mitchell has read most of the same books that I have, so I can't say I learned too much about history from this. As an overview of the thousand years c.500 – 1500 AD though, it's excellent. It's extremely readable, obviously very funny, and surprisingly analytical. There was a lot more big-picture thinking going on than I expected, rather than just being a potted hilarious historical romp going king by king. I mean, it does have that as well. But Mitchell tries to identify what medieval rulers needed to do more generally to make a success of things, and he goes well beyond merely regurgitating the popular histories. You get genuinely new analysis here, not just Dan Jones doing stand-up.

By and large, the balance of jokes/anecdotes/history is darn good. Only in the case of Cnut, where Mitchell can't help but making cunt jokes instead of describing anything terribly serious, does this become a bit irritating. I get the temptation, and I don't mind the cunt jokes, it's just that the balance is off. He also doesn't really give much of a sense of how much time has passed per monarch, but this is really quibbling. As a book, I'm giving it 8/10.

Quite honestly... and this may be a crime to say... I thought it was a lot better than professional comic historian Terry Deary's latest effort. Sorry Terry !

I'd certainly like a sequel, but this isn't likely to happen. He ends with Liz I, after which the monarch's power was significantly diminished and their history becomes more soap opera and less high politics. Mitchell doesn't really want to go any further because this would be a different challenge, and as we'll see, he views medieval monarchs as something entertaining but not the figures of history he's actually most keen on. Maybe we can look forward to a different history book from him at some point though.

I don't think I feel the need to go into a detailed review of this. I'd rather just get on with – unusually for me – a listicle of David Mitchell's Top Tips For How To Be A Successful King. But there are a few things that don't fit into this sort of categorisation that I really think I should get out of the way first. If I don't, I might explode or something. 

Listicle 1 / 2 : The Things Which Aren't About Being King Which I Found Quite Interesting

It's Good To Be the King ?

Michell has an understandable love–hate relationship with his subjects (can kings be subjects ?), who were indeed a bunch of thugs. Still, it feels a bit harsh to say that Henry II and Edward III never really achieved anything comparable to Nelson Mandela or whatnot... I mean, they didn't, but they were also living in a totally different age, so they also simply couldn't. It's also a bit mean to call Matilda a twat for waging a pointless war but not William I for doing exactly the same thing, or for that matter Harold. May as well say that Harold should have just given up and handed William the keys to the kingdom.

The odd thing is that Mitchell by and large totally gets this, refusing to judge the past by the standards of the present. Quite right, too ! But it then seems a tad unfair to say that they weren't as important as, say, Shakespeare, and somewhat nihilistic to say that "it's all pointless in the end" because the achievements of one were often undone by the next. Mitchell is caught between genuinely admiring them by their own standards and hating them from his own. Which does at least lead to some hilarious outbursts*, but seems to miss the quite valuable points he makes about how leadership works. As we'll see next time, I think plenty of these remain more relevant today than they we might want them to.

* Norman propoganda against Harold being unsuccessful, Mitchells suggests that "they should have just said he was a paedo". The conquest ? "A moderately major thing but it would have been nicer if it hadn't happened". "Allowing good men to do nothing is the purpose of civilisation", and on controversial views more generally, "I am passionately committed to whatever it is you already think". Sensible bloke, David Mitchell.

He also notes that the actual desire to be in charge was weird, and I'm fully on board with this. As he says, if you're in charge, you get the blame. Far better to take the approach of modern political leaders : be the person who appoints people to make the decisions and then blame them when they get it wrong. Absolutely ! In fact I'd go further. I cannot for the life of me understand people who want to be in charge at all; I, for one, would like to avoid having other people telling me what to do, but this is totally orthogonal to any impetus to instead be the one bossing people about myself.

And while Mitchell is dead right that sometimes raw humanity speaks to us across the centuries, it's hard to see anything of basic human warmth in the "love" between Edward II and Piers Gaviscon... sorry, Gaveston, that's Mitchell's fault. No, they were both abusive cunts and it's hard to see anything remotely heartwarming or romantic about it. But then this is classic Mitchell, saying stuff that makes a lot of sense only to suddenly throw out something where my only response is "Say what now ?".

Lastly, an interesting parallel for British contemporary politics. Everyone was sick to the back teeth of the unbearable Richard II. The problem was that the usurper Henry IV over-promised on how he'd do a better job, but far worse was that the populace now demanded not just improvement but perfection. The result was pointless rebellions at the drop of a hat which only made the job all the more difficult; had they just accepted the change, things would probably have been alright. They went from a total loser to someone half-decent, but they ended up buggering any improvements they might have gotten.

In short, it's good to be the king, but only when circumstances align really quite precisely. The rest of the time it's a pretty thankless and shitty job. Better than being a peasant, to be sure, but that's a very low bar.

Terminology Problems

Refreshingly, Mitchell doesn't give a shit about historians silly quibbles over the Dark Ages or the Anarchy or the Plantagenets, saying that they were dark and it was anarchy (but they weren't actually flowers, so that one doesn't work as well). It doesn't matter that they didn't call them this at the time :  that's what we call them now, so let's get on with it. Admittedly, this is somewhat weakened when he points out that some of the earliest Dark Age poetry is sophisticated and melancholy, hardly the writing of a barbarian. But even so, a label's a label, like how quibbling over "slaves" versus "enslaved" seems to me to be really a waste of breath fighting a truly pointless culture war*.

* Also the word "moron" has some rather unsavoury origins in eugenics, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop using it.

A tangentially-related issue is that he's unafraid to pick a side, saying, "I reckon I've got the right to enjoy history in whatever way I like". Indeed ! And as he says, historians pretending not to have picked a side "are more misleading in an insidious way, because they definitely will have done, even if they don't know it". That's been my view for ages : better to just declare where you stand than pretend you're not standing anywhere. Or if you really are sitting on the fence, you can tell us that too, but that's not the same as being truly objective. That's just knowing that you can't decide who your favourite is, not that you're completely dispassionate. 

Religion : Don't Blame God

Mitchell doesn't think religion was the cause of much or any of the Dark Age violence, because this was happening anyway. At the same time, while there were a lot of devout believers as well as cynics and hypocrites, religion totally failed to stop the violence. Wacky ideas that kings were divinely-appointed bullies wasn't what made them become bullies, but it had exactly no impact in their bullying. Even when they started to really believe it, the Christian stuff about being nice to each other rarely actually overruled human nature. If a king wanted to chop someone's head off, then "thou shalt not kill" was hardly going to stop them from some impromptu anatomy lessons.

He also describes early religious belief, rather nicely, as about not merely words on a page or going to Church every Sunday, but "the underlying truth of existence". And this, I think, does encapsulate something important. There are a lot of caveats to this, not least because the variations are extreme (this is definitely not a complete definition of religion !), but it has a tantalising explanatory power. It helps tremendously in explaining why people got so very cross about seemingly trivial details of procedural theology.

That is, as someone who isn't a complete moron, it's hard not to get angry at anti-vaxxers or Flat Earth conspiracy nutcases. The latter shouldn't really matter, as it doesn't actually impact my own life in any way. But when you study for years and years and someone simply says, based on absolutely nothing, "you're literally wrong about everything", it's hard not to get pretty pissed off about that. That's what a Flat Earther does just by professing their idiotic beliefs, even if they're not trying to convince anyone, even if they don't literally say "you're wrong" so directly.

So it was with early theological debates. It wasn't about calculating the date of Easter correctly : it was about their entire world view. It may seem silly now, but then, that's the hindsight of 1500 years of advancements for you. At the time, the world's finest minds were as invested in this stuff as we are in Maxwell's equations or the theory of evolution.

Context is key

I've frequently mentioned the somewhat confusing network-versus-hierarchy analysis as to how the Vikings were so initially successful but then became vulnerable once they settled down. On the surface, it all seems a bit incoherent : a centralised hierarchy (like the Saxon kingdoms) is supposedly easier to conquer than a decentralised network, which itself should have a hard time coordinating the resources for an invasion. But the Vikings did assemble such forces and were fabulously successful at first, but then, when they moved into colonisation, they were eventually picked off by a resurgent, unified Wessex.

Part of this can be explained by the fragmented nature of the Vikings once they stopped conquering. They were, in effect, a false network, lacking a unifying purpose. But also, adds Mitchell, as purely raiders there was simply nothing for the Saxons to attack in response. As settlers, they had territory which could be occupied. Sure, you couldn't just kill one king and claim the whole Danelaw. But you could assemble enough forces to take a town and then just keep doing that over and over. Just because it was more difficult than having to kill a single leader doesn't mean it wasn't possible. In a sort of reverse Occam's Razor, sometimes the easiest solution isn't the right one.

And the Saxon defences, once Alfred got them all sorted out, were essentially decentralised. Each burg could act as an independent fortification that had to be taken and couldn't be ignored. The fact that Wessex was politically centralised doesn't mean its military had anything like the same structure.

To my mind that quite satisfyingly explains how centralised Wessex survived and was able to overthrow the decentralised Vikings. How did the Viking network manage to assemble and coordinate an invasion ? In Mitchell's words, sometimes things in history just happen, and like the Star Wars prequels, there's no point in trying to explain them.

Couple of other points on this though. Context matters in that fragmented Viking settlements were not the same as massed Viking raiders. Similarly, castles were tremendously good for the state when the state was well-managed, but they made warfare endemic when it faltered : now any lordling could raise a formidable obstacle and cause chaos. But if strength could become weakness, so too could weakness occasionally become strength. Whereas trying to buy off the Vikings had been disastrous for early Anglo-Saxon kings, for the much stronger William I, this had actually worked quite well. Any sort of rules about what's a good idea and what's best avoided, then, had jolly well better take account of the circumstances and not stand as absolutes.

Finally, Mitchell clearly believes in a meritocracy. Appointing the best people is self-evidently a good idea. But he also concedes that in the wrong circumstance, it can fail spectacularly. For a weak society, trying to appoint the best ruler would almost always end in chaos and disaster. It was far better to have a strict system for appointing the ruler even if this was manifestly unfair, because you could usually learn to cope with a bad leader but it's bloody difficult to cope with continuous warfare in a protracted power struggle. Regardless of whether you get a strongman or a hapless imbecile, a simple procedure to decide who's in charge has the appeal of clarity. When the alternative is unrestrained violence, that can be not just a feature that's nice to have, but actually sensible and even necessary. And a strongman, ironically by being militarily powerful, can be better for this, ensuring peace through superior firepower.

I like this a lot. It's long seemed to me that some of the more irrational features of functioning democracies aren't just weird holdovers from a stupider age, although some of them are, they're actually necessary to account for just how irrational people can really be. A totally logical system would likely fail almost instantly because people just don't always respond sensibly to perfectly sensible things.

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That's my assortment of "other interesting things David Mitchell has to say". Don't judge the past by the standards of today and don't get all bent out of shape for things that happened a long time ago. There's no point taking it too seriously : it's already happened, everyone involved is dead now, and getting morally invested in it won't help.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't interesting lessons to be learned though. The influence (or lack thereof) or religion is important, as is understanding how the same actions can have very different consequences in different circumstances. That means that anyone hoping for a sort of how-to leadership guide in the next post had better be aware that harrying the North is no longer such a surefire way to shore up your political capital.

With that in mind, how, then, should a medieval ruler aspire to lead his subjects ? Tune in for part two !