Review : Mythology

Unlike many books, I didn't pick this one up because it was cheap but because it wasn't. It was more of a case of "I can afford this and it looks lovely".

And it is. Unbeknownst to me, it's a 75th anniversary edition of Edith Hamilton's 1942 classic "Mythology"*. Physically this is a beautiful book, hardback cover, thick pages, fully illustrated, with lightly silvered paper edges. It's an absolutely first-rate piece for the coffee table. It's also stonkingly well-written, a mixture of Hamilton both retelling the classic stories and providing insight and commentary. She's not in the least bit afraid to pronounce judgement without distracting from what the myths themselves say either. For example early in the introduction :

* Yes, I know, it's got "75th anniversary edition" printed in large letters on the front cover, but I didn't read the blurb.

Of course the Greeks too had their roots in the primeval slime. Of course they too once lived a savage life, ugly and brutal. But what the myths show is how high they had risen above the ancient filth and fierceness by the time we have any knowledge of them. Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories.

Perhaps the only flaw I could possibly find with the book is that the Norse section, though excellent, is tiny and tacked-on, like it should be the start of a whole new volume that was never finished. I have no idea if that's the case, but the great bulk of the book is about the Greek myths, so I'm going to concentrate entirely on that section here. A more minor quibble is that Hamilton doesn't really labour any of the more sordid stuff, yet to her great credit, this doesn't make it any the less compelling. I do think there's rather more of the filth and slime in the stories than she gives credit for though.

There were three major themes I found interesting, so let's start with those.

1) The Greek Miracle

This is how Hamilton describes the anthropomorphic Greek gods : surprisingly, they are in essence rational. That is, they are no longer primal, elemental forces beyond all human ken, but essentially human themselves. If the Greeks of pre-antiquity had little understanding of physics, then they had some knowledge of a theory of mind. They had no way of knowing about static electricity, but an angry man hurling thunderbolts they could readily understand. Rather than seeing this as a primitive attempt at describing the world with crude substitutions, Hamilton views it as a laudable and earnest attempt to make use of the best, most plausible explanations available. The Greek "preoccupation with the visible" led to a "humanised world, free from the paralysing fear of an omnipotent unknown".

In contrast, Celtic and other myths are full of figures beyond comprehension, beyond reason. Hamilton notes that the Roman gods, prior to their transplanting Greek ideas, were simply unpersonified powers of sheer will, useful and practical but inhuman. Celtic fairyland is not located on any map, nor does Aladdin's genie live in any real place. In these wilder myths, both time and space are malleable and causality an optional extra. In stark contrast the Greeks were explicit about naming exactly where everything took place : winged horses were given real stables at locations you could visit as a tourist; the sequence of events in the stories is perfectly logical, even if the characters might not always be sensible. Their internal motivations are loud and clear, whereas in the Celtic stories they are virtually absent.

Mankind in the Greek myths, says Hamilton, is put front and centre. They might not treat us very well, but the gods are more concerned with us than in ordering the structure of the cosmos. They are formidable to be sure, but they are not omnipotent or omniscient. The stories even make them amusing : one could laugh at the gods, though admittedly not to their faces. They were hugely complex figures : beautiful, capricious, dangerous, cruel, yet not terrifying. Their reasons and behaviour, even if those were often worse than that of ordinary mortals, could be understood. And though there were moments of true savagery, they were, she claims, exceedingly rare.

More surprisingly, Hamilton also describes magic as being extremely infrequent in the stories. Here she means human sorcery rather than the supernatural more generally, since gods and monsters are ubiquitous : in Greek myths, unlike the Celtic tales, it's gods all the way down. But indeed, there are basically two famous human witches and a smattering of lesser examples; in Celtic mythology, magic is everywhere and available to essentially everyone*. Celtic magic is bewildering in its unpredictability; Greek magic followed distinct rules. And even the Greek gods were created by the universe rather than the other way around : mind from matter, not matter from mind. Hamilton's view of the Greek myths is as a mixture of science, religion, and literature all blended into one astonishing whole.

*What's especially weird is that, as Philip Matyszak points out, the Greeks and Romans viewed magic as an essentially normal, daily occurrence in their real lives, making its dearth in their stories all the stranger. I have no idea why this should be.

2) Changing Beliefs

All this makes the question, "did they really believe all this ?" barely meaningful. While Buxton noted the versatility of the myths, Hamilton charts the change of the stories over time. By the time the Greek playwrights and poets set forth the tales in their most fully-developed forms, centuries of re-evaluation meant that ideas of the gods had shifted dramatically. Zeus, once a whimsical rapist, shifted into the primary giver of justice (even in Plato this is loudly apparent). Olympus may once have been understood to be physically atop a mountain, but even by Homer's time this literal version had been replaced with a more spiritual interpretation : the gods existed, no doubt about that yet, but they weren't equivalent to giants living in a hall on a very visible nearby hillside.

Even by the end of the Roman Republic, genuine belief in the gods was waning. Philosophy had, perhaps, dealt them a killer blow. "If the gods do evil then they are not gods", said Euripides, decrying the notion that the gods would demand sacrifice. Plato's interpretation was a little more sophisticated, saying that it was the loss to those committing the sacrifice that the gods would respect, rather than the silly idea that they could be bought off with some burnt meat. Or as Hamilton quotes from Pindar on the story of Tantalus, brutally punished for feeding the gods his own children :

A tale decked out with glittering lies against the word of truth. Let a man not speak of cannibal deeds among the gods.

The poor demanded gods behave with some measure of decorum; the need for hope in a just and ordered reality was irresistible. The problem, of course, is that if the gods are comprehensible then they are not gods either. Making the gods conform to human expectations rather than the other way around, as Plato insisted on very forcefully in order to manipulate the masses, was fatal. The morality might be more appealing but a god you can negotiate with is largely missing the point.

Another example that comes to mind to me here is King Alfred as depicted in The Last Kingdom. The on-screen portrayal is magnificent : Alfred is indeed great, but he's hardly nice. One moment in particular took me a good long while to properly understand. When asked to show mercy to the wayward son of one of his most loyal followers, Alfred refuses. It makes him seem cold, aloof, and haughty, but that's the whole point. By setting himself apart from other men, holding himself to higher standards and not succumbing to loyalty, Alfred appears above mere mortals. Here is someone, or so perhaps he intends men will say, who has that spark of the inscrutably divine about him, someone truly kingly, even godlike.

Without this similar haughtiness, when tales could be re-written completely to suit the fancies of the day, belief in the gods was doomed. Of course it took centuries to die out fully, and Roman writers freely incorporated them into their literature without really caring much whether they were real or not. But ultimately, it's hard to believe in a god you can control. 

This puts the rise of Christianity in a new light : yes, it had the social-moral appeal of a god risen from the lowest of the low, but the notion that you could bribe it with sacrifice was done away with completely. Sure, aspects of this crept back in, because people need some aspect of control. But this never reached the same degree as with paganism. You can pray, you can pledge to make yourself better to atone for your sins, but ultimately it's god who judges. You cannot bribe*. This would give Christianity a devastating combination of attributes. The god appealed strongly to the poor and downtrodden, giving the new religion genuine and literal revolutionary appeal against the old order, but restored the aloof superiority and power of the earlier, more primal Greek ideas.

* And when bribery was introduced, such as buying the remission of sin, it split the Church. This is corruption in a human system, not part of the faith itself.

3) Interconnections

What this sizeable collection of tales makes clear that Buxton's analysis didn't was that the Greek mythological world was essentially an Expanded Universe. It was, in a way, a franchise operation. Characters might have their own main central "box set" collection of tales but they also get frequent cameos in other stories. Odysseus is hardly the main character at all in the Iliad but he was given his own successful spin-offs, not just in the Odyssey but in various other stories as well. Hercules has his own main show but crops up everywhere, especially on the early stages of the voyage of the Argo. Medea begins in one story and ends in another; Theseus and other heroes have whole series of escapades in which they may or may not, at any one time, be the central focus of the tales. Likewise with Daedalus, who does much more than make wings (some of it extremely unpleasant). 

Even apparently minor side-characters, like the monster Scylla that threatens Odysseus' ship, have backstories of how they came to be. And it's not just backstories. Polyphemus, the most famous Cyclops, goes on to become a figure of fun who can't get a girlfriend. Oedipus' tale continues long after the famous "oops-I-did-my-mother" moment. 

What strikes me about this is that it's almost as if the world of Greek myth, for all its constant evolution and retellings, was constructed as a vast pseudo-history. Characters rarely exist in isolation but have complex family trees and endless backstories, a sort of mirror-world of endless supernatural adventures. All characters are connected but all of them are characters, larger-than-life figures who lead impossibly interesting, weird and wonderful lives, some of which are more fleshed-out than our surviving records of real people of the time. Together with their complex and detailed motivations, this network of relations between them all helps make the characters in Greek myths feel all the more like real, believable people, even when they do outrageously impossible things.

Which is not to say there was a Hellenistic equivalent of a bible, no single Authorised Book to sign up to, let alone any dogma to follow. But the intricacy of the relations, the need to at least make some effort towards self-consistency, maybe points towards an early tendency in that direction. I wonder if this made the whole thing any the more or less believable to the Greeks themselves. On the one hand, such a complex web of connections might be thought too detailed for anyone to have just "made up". On the other, everything was a story, and you'd have to assume that at least some people would have been suspicious of just how amazing all the character's lives appeared to be and wondered where all the normal people were. 

Especially so given that so many of the stories were well-developed literature. Indeed the explicit motivations of the characters, the logical (but carefully contrived) sequence of events, the general self-consistency at least within individual stories, all give Greek myth much more in common with modern literature than Celtic stories. Even some of Plato's dialogues contain more in the way of emotive description of the scenery than anything from Wales or Ireland. In Celtic stories things are constantly happening for no reason, motivations are hardly mentioned, violence is constant and cruelty rampant. In the Greek stories all of these are heavily toned down. There's less of the primal appeal to the base and the bloody and far more of the refined literary appeal to the head and the heart.

In Persians : The Age of The Great Kings, Llewellyn-Jones mentions that the Persians didn't really have a modern concept of historical truth. While the Greeks of course did have such a notion, it's tempting here to see the emergence of this as evolutionary. Greek playwrights were happy to use their gods as purely literary figures without a sense of blasphemy; Plato's outright declaration that the people must believe in moral gods took this to a whole other level. There is perhaps not a clear distinction but a spectrum between the purely whimsical fictions and the hard-headed historical truths, with the mythical tales always being accepted as lying somewhere in between the two. Truth and literature were not so easily distinguished.

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Differing perspectives

Which brings me to my final section : no author has a monopoly on what the Greek myths mean. While there is some overlap with Thames & Hudson's Myths That Shape The Way We Think series, Hamilton provides a much more comprehensive set of stories – and also a sometimes quite different analysis. Whereas Buxton was convinced that, unlike the Celtic and Norse, the Greek myths were largely recorded by those who actively believed in them, Hamilton makes it abundantly clear that this is at best a simplification. Not only the tales themselves but belief in them shifted over time. In fact the whole notion of "truth" dissolves when applied to myth and is probably best avoided.

Sometimes the analysis is more directly at odds. Matyszak made the claim that romantic love didn't exist in the ancient world, and that "love" was essentially an interchangeable term for the act and the emotion : regardless, disturbingly, of whether that was reciprocated or not. Here both authors may have good points. In Hamilton's description of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, when Cupid is sent by Venus to make Psyche ugly (she had the unfortunate distinction of being so beautiful she was distracting Venus' worshippers), he falls he love with her so he does... nothing. He doesn't pursue her himself. He literally takes no action of any kind.

Poor Psyche is therefore admired by all but in the unique situation of being pursued by no-one, since Cupid shoots no arrows. It would be a stretch too far to proclaim this is a clear example of Cupid's own romantic love (and probably too childish to say Cupid is just firing blanks...) but it's also a far cry from the serial rape that characterises most of the Greek gods infatuations. Cupid at least doesn't act from his own base and selfish physical needs, quite unlike Zeus or (especially) Apollo. There is at least a hint that romantic love is possible; personally I still find the claim that this was an invention to be extremely far-fetched.

On this subject in particular I think Hamilton underestimates the savagery of Greek myth. The story of the terrified Daphne, pursed by a lusty Apollo and turned into a laurel tree, is a deeply disturbing tale of attempted rape; similarly the story of Arethusa pursed by the river god Alephus... but this is worse, because she's turned into a spring and their waters mingle. So she doesn't even really escape, unlike Daphne. 

In many stories the rape is successful and not viewed as anything especially heinous. In others, especially perhaps later stories, things turn out quite differently. Apollo rapes Creusa, but is later shamed by the Oracle of Delphi into essentially paying child support. Mind you, Apollo is a particularly nasty piece of work who burns a girl alive for cheating on him. Interestingly he's supposedly the god of truth who can never himself be deceived. Having the god of truth being a serial rapist would seem to rather undermine Frank Herbert's claim that respect for truth is the basis for all morality. You can't be a moral rapist, even if you're honest about it.

As might be obvious by this point, compared to the Celtic stories the focus on love and sexuality is much more predominant. Even bestiality is common, sometimes as a result of madness. Strangely, homosexuality is rare, though asexuality is relatively common. Plenty of huntresses just wish men would bloody well sod off.

But it isn't just love and sex in which the darker aspects of Greek myth are visible. Perhaps I'm just looking for it too hard, but there's plenty of savagery here despite Hamilton's claim to the contrary. Dionysius' followers, the Maenads, run through the forests tearing animals apart, with Dionysius himself being "the god who dies", being ripped apart every year on Hera's orders. Tantalus and others murder their children and eat them, as does Cronos himself, and even Zeus swallowed Athena's pregnant mother. And Hercules is on occasion an actual murderer, sometimes due to madness but sometimes not.

To Hamilton's credit, though, she sees the value in these early authors despite their many obvious faults. Whereas "Homer never wondered about anything", Hamilton notes that Hesiod was determined to address the larger, cosmological questions despite his flagrant misogyny. And Pandora, that "beautiful disaster" (a.k.a. a hot mess) can be interpreted variously as being actually the cause of men's evil, or merely providing a focal point rather than being the actual source. Interpreting the myths in any single way would be to misunderstand and underappreciate just how incredibly versatile they can be.

The very last difference I want to end on is Theseus and Hercules. If Hamilton understates the brutal nature of some of the myths, her claim that this aspect was played down certainly has merit nonetheless.

Hercules, says Hamilton, was by far the most popular hero in classical Greece. He was a bit of a hot mess too : not really stupid exactly, but hardly the brightest penny in the fountain. Big, burly, and willing (possibly even able) to fight the gods themselves, he had the usual complex flaws of most Greek heroes. He would mostly fight for a sense of justice we today would recognise, defending the weak and overthrowing tyrants and so on. But he would make many mistakes, sometimes causing the deaths of innocents. Yet he would also punish himself incredibly harshly for his transgressions. If he sometimes should have known better, he would at least do anything anyone could ever possibly do to atone for his sins. This level of subtlety in the character work is not absent from Celtic stories but it's certainly rare, whereas in the Greek myths it's all too common.

And Athens had an even more sophisticated hero, who they uniquely preferred to the simpler charm of Hercules. Theseus was more compassionate and more intelligent by far than Hercules, able to understand concepts the big guy with the club couldn't make sense of. Theseus' great skill is, in prelude to Christianity, forgiveness. He doesn't inflict petty revenge on those who oppose him. When Oedipus, later in life, was cast out from his city, Theseus alone received him. When Hercules went mad and killed his wife and children, Theseus alone forgave him, saying the deed was not his own, and fearing not that he himself would be morally tainted by association. The heroism of Theseus is not only in fighting men and monsters (though he does plenty of that) but in making moral choices. Here indeed Greek myth appears to have risen well above the primeval muck and slime.

Lest we get carried away, like Hercules, Theseus too was far from perfect. At one point he tries to help his friend abduct Persephone from Hades because his friend wants to – ahem – "marry" her. Yet having any moments of moral sophistication at all is a powerful development all the same. And these imperfections are part of what gives the myths their enduring appeal : their blend of sophisticated moral reasoning together with the base and most primal human instincts, the terror of monsters with the light of reason, the strength of "naked will and courage" embedded in intricate and sophisticated plots, the familiarity of modern values shining through against the dark savagery of the distant past. They can be appalling violent, but also deeply thoughtful. There's usually more to them than meets the eye.

A Year of Private Eye

Last year I was gifted a year's subscription to Private Eye. This has now completed, so it seems like a good moment to offer some thoughts on it. Since they have a regular section "Street of Shame" which criticises other media outlets, I'm sure they won't mind.

It's... a mixed bag, to be honest. The first thing that struck me was the utter lack of dumbing down, to the extent they provide almost no context for any of their stories whatever. Consequently unless you're already familiar with the basics, it can be very hard going (though since they cover many stories regularly, this gets a bit easier after a few issues). They almost never lead with a simple bit of background to highlight the main point or context of a story, but dive straight into whatever they want to discuss. It doesn't help that the style of prose is sometimes rather tortured. Sometimes so much so that I can't understand if the "killer punchline" of a story is just not as clever as they think it is or if I've failed to spot an obvious point they were trying to make.

This makes reading it quite the slog. I'm glad it doesn't come out more than fortnightly because it takes me that long to muster the will to sit down and read the bloody thing. Even then I usually skip some stories.

The overall impression I get is that their journalists are more analytical than others, but not necessarily more critical. They've very good at getting the nitty-gritty details of a story and working out precisely what happened. But they're not anything special in terms of reasoning as to why someone did something the way they did or what the consequences might be. They can be irritatingly judgemental, which does tend to be the only bit of colour in many of the serious stories but doesn't make them feel especially credible. And just like every other newspaper, they hardly ever report any positive developments and do seem quite determined to spin everything in the negative. The most they do is acknowledge that there might be some benefits here and there, which is more than most ever do, but is still nowhere near enough.

Often their being judgemental slips into unbearable smugness. Their arts reviewers in particular strike me as the standard elite literatti types who think that only one sort of novel is ever worth reading, who are happy to laud the merits of Tolkien now but never would have done so when he first published. They essentially never review anything they like but always, always focus on mocking that which they don't. And really, they're just not very good at this. Their reviews can be quite fun, but generally tend towards dullness.

On individual columnists I have to say I'm particularly unimpressed by their farming and energy correspondents. The one insists that all rewilding is bad and Britain must massively ramp up internal food production while the other hates renewable energy yet offers no alternative. Never do they say how exactly we're supposed to help environmentalism without undoing the damage we've already done. In particular, what the alternative to renewable energy sources is supposed to be is never mentioned. This is extremely irritating, because by implication I suppose we're just going to have to make do with fossil fuels, which is clearly a valid but also catastrophically stupid choice. I'd expect better than this.

But of course, it also has many redeeming qualities. To bring in the positives, to their enormous credit they cover many stories that others don't. Sometimes this can be at the expense of other, more worthy stories that everyone is talking about and I feel it's a shame that they don't offer their perspective on the big topic of the day. And most of these alternative articles aren't of the slightest importance, but every once in a while they get something on the scale of the Post Office scandal and, currently, the massive level of corruption and waste at the Teeside Freeport. The latter is something I think deserves national attention; what I don't understand is why some of these stories don't "break" earlier in the wider press. Are they just not paying attention ?

They also, I think it's fair to say, have no political bias whatsoever, or if they do it's incredibly centrist. While as I laid out I think the current situation in government is a non-story, to their credit they were raising the issues of freebies and donations well before Labour took office. They do seem to base their attacks largely on moral lines and genuine points of principle rather than political preference, and that scores them enormous brownie points as far as I'm concerned. They also happily publish criticism from readers, even if they don't always seem to learn anything from it. They certainly don't have any of the dumb opinion columns or idiotic headlines that plague most newspapers.

If the farming and energy columns aren't to my taste, then the medical column is far superior. The recent series examining whether Lucy Letby suffered a horrendous mistrial is in my (utterly unqualified) view incredibly astute, carefully examining the statistics and providing vital context that other examinations have missed. MD's thoughts, even when I don't necessarily agree with them, are carefully thought-through and justified (such as a dose of lockdown skepticism, which appears to be based on a consideration for the overall effects rather than any knee-jerk libertarian nonsense).

Finally the satire is simply outstanding. The Prime Minister's Top Secret WhatsApp Group messages are laugh-out-loud funny, the cartoons are gold, the parodies brilliant, the wit razor-sharp and unafraid of offending as many people as possible. It's honestly almost worth reading for this alone.

When it came to renewing my subscription, I dithered until the last moment. The satire is fantastic, but did I really want to have to commit to this regular slog for another year ? I've often had several issues stack up unread because I can't find the time to face it; my completionist tendencies utterly prevent me from just reading the good bits.

In the end I decided I would. On balance the positives clearly outweigh the negatives, and since I now have the issues covering the last year of an extended Tory government, it's pleasingly symmetrical to have those covering the first year of a Labour government. Whether I'll continue beyond that I don't know. It's rather expensive... but it is, without doubt, an important institution.

Review : Epic Celtic Tales

For my next mythology read, I decided to choose a book from a different publisher. Mark William's Celtic Myths whetted my appetite, but I wanted more of the original stories themselves. And here in the Czech Republic, it seems that every bookshop carries almost the complete series of Flame Tree Publishing's Epic Tales series, which I've been eyeing up for a while. At last the time was right to give them a go with their Celtic Myths & Tales book.

This is a hefty tome, so either I go all-in and write something equivalent to dozens of pages in itself, or I try and keep it brief and miss out a lot. I'm going for the latter. 

The Review Bit

Since this is a collection of tales there's not too much to say about the text itself. There's a good but short introduction giving some essential context, reinforcing Williams' point that it's very hard to determine with any certainty much about what Celtic peoples (here again meaning those of the British isles, with nothing at all from elsewhere) really believed. At least not in any detail. 

Unfortunately the book lacks some rudimentary features that could have made the whole thing a good deal better. Jake Jackson's main introduction and micro-introductions to each section are all worth reading, but short – too short, especially the latter. There are absolutely minimal footnotes, no index, no pronunciation guide, and worst of all the source for each text is unclear. With a few exceptions, none are clearly stated except to say, "we took most of this from a collection by blah in the 19th century". This is quite frustrating as it would help a lot to know which stories likely have at least some archaic origins and which are probably more modern constructions. Many of the stories are, in and of themselves, absolutely fascinating (my personal favourite is the proto-Cinderella who gets repeatedly eaten by a magical whale), but there's so much more value that could have been given with some decent metadata.

Some of the stories, it must be said, are absolute shite, so much so that sometimes the single note I made says, "stupid" and nothing else. By and large it's a good anthology, with plenty of stuff you're not likely to come across elsewhere. But I do wonder why some of them were included. Why have the ones in which absolutely nothing happens (or there's nothing much detectably "Celtic" about them) when you could have more about Taliesin or Merlin, the latter being conspicuously absent ? Some of the chosen stories are little more than word salad as told by a demented elderly grandmother to her half-dead cat.

All in all though, it's perfectly decent, and I'm certainly willing to give others in the series a go.

General Impressions

Bizarre storytelling

Celtic myths are weird. Sometimes, it must be said, it's because they're badly told. There are frequent redundancies and repetition, with many enchanted objects having exactly identical abilities even within the same story. Then there are truly awful metaphors : skin as white as snow is fine, and so is hair as black as a raven, but cheeks which are "redder than whatever is reddest" is comically awful.

Far worse is that often the text is unclear as to which character it's referring to, and in a few cases the basic meaning cannot be guessed until later. For example, in this edition's story of Bran the Blessed, Bran's gigantic size is at first only vaguely alluded to with "no house could contain Bran" and not made explicit until much later in the story. This is something a better edition could remedy with more footnotes or more detailed individual story introductions.

More frequently, in the earlier stories plot structure is often interminably complex, usually nested, and frequently features long "prologues" that are completely forgotten about once the main tale begins. This makes it very hard to keep track of who's important because often initially-central characters disappear without any explanation. Yet in other cases, minor points of detail become tremendously important, even pivotal, later on, sometimes even recurring between different stories. What's especially strange about this is that the literary style is otherwise incredibly and deceptively simplistic. Each individual sentence is the easiest thing in the world to read, but the collective whole... isn't.

For all that though, there's much to reward the reader as well. Characters in the tales are rarely "pure", even if they're warriors of superlative fighting prowess. The great Irish heroes are all of superhuman strength and courage, but while they may start off as men and women of perfect virtue, they usually grow bitter and jealous with age. Even in the courtly romances of the Mabinogion, knights who begin as noble and true almost invariably decline into pettiness. The exceptions are Peredur, who is a permanently insufferable git (imagine Wesley Crusher if he were a medieval knight), and Arthur, who never waivers from the path of true wisdom, righteousness, and courage*. Arthur**, like virtually all the heroes, is a great leader, in charge of but also definitely a member of, a team.  

* This is made easier because there's absolutely no sign of any adultery for him to deal with. Interestingly, his battle with Mordred isn't the climatic moment of his death, but just one of his many adventures.
** Who is very much Welsh, thankyouverymuch, holding court not in Camelot but Caerleon and even goes jousting in Cardiff, no less.

While character development decidedly plays second or third fiddle to plot, it's not absent. It just isn't expounded on very much. Likewise descriptions of the scenery are delivered with the absolute minimum of words necessary, and its emotive impact on the protagonists considerably less than that – which makes understanding character's motivations challenging. Their inner thoughts are almost never revealed. And at times, the endless parade of castles which are "the fairest man ever saw", and likewise for the maidens each more beautiful than the last dozen in the same damn story, becomes downright tiresome.  "What" and "who" take extreme precedence over why, how, where, or when. The latter, especially, barely gets a look in. Descriptions of when things occur becomes conspicuous by its absence; the use of days and seasons becomes a huge flag that a story is of later origin. 

As for plot holes, forget it. The authors show absolutely no regard for addressing the most obvious violations of even their own internal consistency. Magic can be used by almost anyone for almost any purpose entirely at random and then suddenly it can't. Symbolism is everything, coherency is something which happens to other people. Even causality is almost incidental, like a Humean nightmare. Combined with the lack of clear insight into character motivations, and this frequently gives the stories a highly dreamlike quality. What made sense at the time, what may have been obvious to the early audiences, is now lost, but the sequence of events is still interesting all the same. The clearest examples of this are the magical aspects, like the walk-on part of a character whose eye can lay waste entire armies, or the casually-mentioned-in-passing spear that can melt whole cities.

Family matters

What comes across surprisingly strongly are the diverse family relationships. True, there is no sexual diversity whatsoever : every single romantic relationship is between a man and a woman*. But there are single-parent families galore, both of the mothers and fathers, which are described without judgement excepting perhaps a general sense that the situation is unfortunate : there is a strong insistence that everyone must be married regardless of whether they want to or not, but this applies equally to both genders. Men need a woman about the house whereas women need male protection; there's an undertone of extreme patriarchy, but it is at least supposed to be a reciprocal relationship.

* Virtually always one-on-one, with only a single dubious exception that might be polygamy. I don't think there are any transgender characters here, though shapeshifting is common.

For children, adoptions are frequent, with many a hero requiring a slightly unusual and mysterious background. Though their bloodline plays a crucial role, they are rarely born directly into their destiny, but still have to discover it, and must still struggle against adversity. 

As for the parents, there are both happily married couples and those who are at each other's throats. There are some who love their children, some who hate them, some who just want their damn baby to stop crying all the time. Romance flourishes but also dies. Sexual encounters, though never described as such, are all over the place, with rampant promiscuity in both genders; "marriage" and even "love" seems to be used as a very loose term which really means little more than "they hooked up that one time" (well, it's either that, or bigamy is rife). There are few stories which revolve around the characters' romantic-sexual interests, it's always somewhat incidental. Slut shaming doesn't happen, but nor are the conquests of either gender especially celebrated. Things just happen. Which tends to be true more generally as well*.

* At least for the earlier stories. The later ones, the classical "fairy tales", are delivered in a strange, grandmotherly style and are tremendously, outrageously judgemental and are sometimes only bearable because they're so damn weird.

As for women specifically, there's plenty of female agency and empowerment but few women who actually take up arms except in dire need. But though rare, they are present. Most notably, the greatest Irish hero is sent for training by Scathach, the "greatest woman warrior", clearly indicating she's not a unique example, but also of sufficient prowess to easily dominate most of the male warriors. But if combat is rare, so too is the damsel-in-distress. Those are present as well, but they're atypical. Even when women are almost literally the object of a hero's quest, they don't just sit there. Usually, if anything, they hold the essential knowledge the hero himself needs to get out of trouble. And while they are sometimes boring and meek, this is hardly always the case. My favourite bit of sass is from the Welsh Rhiannon, who chides her husband in very modern terms :

Never did man make worse use of his wits than thou has done.

While the predominance of women as either "the fairest maiden man ever saw" is overwhelming, with the main alternative being a villainous hag*, less stereotypical examples are also found. There are plenty of presumably-normal looking women married to ordinary commoners, they're just in the background and seldom play a major role in events – much like in modern TV shows, everyone knows that normal people exist, but people have always desired unrealistic standards from their entertainment even in text format. One very nice exception is a female friend of the virtuous knight Owain, who is just his friend without any romantic interest on either side at any point. Owain marries someone else but this doesn't affect their fraternal bond.

* Villains are by no means always hags, though they don't usually compare to the heroines in beauty.

An unpredictable world

Exceptions to all common trends are frequent. Most giants are little more than brutes, but Bran the Blessed is a noble king. Most fairies are malicious, but a few are helpful. Most heroes are generally wise, but can be prone to stupidity. Many characters are archetypes, but many also are very human and deeply imperfect. Trickery and lies can be used to fool the good but also employed against the bad. Direct moral judgements are few and far between.

Williams mentioned the importance of the themes of being in the wilderness and set apart from society, and this comes across here too in the Welsh myths. Not only in the story of Bran the Blessed do all the main characters essentially retreat from the world after a calamity, but in the direct sequel "Manawyddan" (the Third Branch of the Mabinogion) the survivors, who live in an extended double-family, one day find the whole land is deserted. They eventually wander through a series of inhabited towns, but even there they are repeatedly shunned. If there are larger-than-life heroes, then there are also plenty of the downtrodden and outcast. Sometimes it feels like the author ran out of ideas, but the theme of just "giving up" is so common that it must carry some deeper meaning : there are stories that are resonant with the disaffected as well as having the straightforward appeal of goodies and baddies.

Violence is endemic. It can be absolutely brutal, but like everything else its description is kept to an absolute minimum : the audience needs to know that someone was flayed or crushed, but rarely do they need any of the gory details. It's quite unlike the violence in Homer, who describes the flow of blood and the quivering of spears in hearts with a devastating mixture of titillation and dismay; similarly unlike Homer, violence causes characters to go mad and/or depressed on multiple occasions. Most problems, though, are solved the hard way. There are very few moments indeed of reconciliation between adversaries : one or both of them must die, and often with massive causalities among their followers on both sides. Often the causes of these problems are extraordinarily petty.

What does it all mean ?

I'm not qualified to answer what this tells us about the world view of Celtic peoples. The magical elements are weird and inscrutable : Arthur is the undisputed ruler of Britain despite much of it being a vast, unexplored wilderness home to all manner of weird creatures*. Fairyland in Ireland is somewhere underground, but in Britain it's somewhere you can accidentally wander into almost anywhere and at any time. Getting out might be harder, but it can also be as simple as retracing your steps. There's a strong connection to nature, but it's a dangerous and sometimes savage nature with is nothing like any New Age nonsense.

* Other countries are mentioned as well, especially Greece for some reason. Arthur is even described not as a king but Emperor, having conquered Greece, even while much of Britain is totally unexplored.

My guess is that there might have been some belief in the general ideas floating around here but the specifics are almost impossible to pin down with any confidence. Fairies, giants, and shape-changing are so common that it's hard to see them being purely literary devices but reflecting actual beliefs; violence is so frequent that it can't have been simply added to make the story more exciting (dragons, sadly, are very scarce). That said, there most definitely are literary devices being used here for pure storytelling. While some tales fit the typical description of myth, i.e. explaining why something is the way it is or giving a particular dynasty supernatural credence, many are just stories : they are entertaining, might contain a moral message or two, but are very clearly not meant to be literal truths. 

I suppose overall I'd have to describe the tales as mangled but sophisticated, the product of both deep craft but also told and retold by artists both skilled and idiotic over many centuries. The result is a mixture of important symbolism and the batshit crazy, the sacred and the stupid. This can make them incredibly frustrating, like a garbled mess of deus ex machina all over the place, but it can also make them compelling. These are stories from a different age with a radically different, fascinating way of viewing the world that extended not just into their actual world view, but into how they chose to tell the stories themselves. So were the stories true or believed to be true ? The original authors, in that there were any at all, may have had such a different notion of truth that the question may not, in the end, make much sense.

Highlights

I've tried to keep this brief and I'm in danger of failing. In fact there's scope for god-knows how many book-length analyses in the style of Williams' and I wouldn't dare to try anything of that nature here. Still, there are too many other things that stuck in my head not to give them at least a cursory mention, both individual stories and general features :

• Bizarre magic. This can mess with our very basic notions of space and time : fall asleep for a day and you might wake a century later; Rhiannon initially appears on a horse moving at normal speed but no-one can catch her; there are plenty of instances of whole castles hidden inside small bags and the like. In the Arthurian tale Culwch and Olwen there are too many weird magical powers (clearly invented in fun) to list in full, but these include : causing everyone in the village to stay awake if the protagonist wants anything; having sparkly feet; standing all day on one foot; growing enormously extended lips when sad (disgustingly, going below the waist and over the head like a hat); having a HUGE ginger beard as big as a hall. And then there's the recurring use of magical and super-knowledgeable fish. One character, having accidentally burned his finger on the roasting salmon, can thereafter learn anything he needs by merely sucking on his thumb.
• Origin of seals. The tale of the selkie has a lot of the elements of the other stories : a strong sense of tragedy, but more complex and bittersweet than a simple tale of woe. The seal-children are cast out by their wicked stepmother, and thereby assume human form once per year. The rest of the time they're still blessed with beautiful eyes and coats. A fisherman steals one of their coats while human, marries her, they have a happy life with many children... but one day she finds the coat and returns without farewell to the sea.
• Contrasting figures. The Mabinogion presents a wonderful sequence of stories. First there's Peredur, the knight par excellence to whom all gifts are given for NO REASON AT ALL. He's unbearable. But next comes Owain, a good but much more human knight. Not only does he have female friends without romance, but he rescues a lion which becomes his inseparable companion – even when he tries to keep the lion away so that he can fight his opponents fairly, the lion insists on coming to his rescue. Then there's Geraint, another very powerful knight but who has a full-blown midlife crisis. He goes off with his wife to prove he's still got it, continuously chiding her to be silent, but she can't help but warn him every time she she sees bandits up ahead. He grows increasingly threatening and then exasperated. "I know not what good it is for me to order thee", he protests in very modern tones, "but this time I charge thee in an especial manner !". She doesn't keep quiet of course, and he never makes good on his threats. Underneath it all is a genuine sense of love between the two. Given the preceding unbearable perfection of Peredur, and the frequent use of repetition which usually culminates in something, this unexpected turn of events and much more complex character interaction is quite the radical departure.
• The Cinderella stories. Much later than the mythological tales but nevertheless fascinating for that. The core seems to be a girl who returns to her future husband because she keeps leaving stuff behind. She often has a sort of alter-ego : grubby ash-girl by day, adventurous beauty by night. Variants are manifold. There's one where she's walking along the seaside and is pushed into the sea by her wicked stepmother, where she's promptly eaten by a whale. The whale vomits her up a few days later, but apparently she's now magically cursed to be eaten by this whale repeatedly until her rescuer-prince slays it by hitting a spot on its vulnerable underbelly. Or there's the version where she rides a talking bull and then hacks its head off – not casually but in a brutal moment of great despair – and flays it. Often in these stories the beheading is a ritualistic part of restoring a creature to its original human form, but in this case... apparently not. 
• Smallhead. My favourite of the feminine heroes, Smallhead is a sort of proto-Cinderella. Rather than fleeing her murderous stepsisters who killed her mother, she pursues them. Forcing them back home, she then outsmarts a pair of witches by sneaking into their house to steal their magical equipment. She eventually magics herself beautiful and marries some prince or other, but this is pleasingly incidental to the main storyline. On that note, sometimes these princes are noble and virtuous, sometimes they're offensively dickish to the point where it makes no sense whatsoever that anyone would want to marry them. 

There are endless recurring motifs. Smallhead at one point hides in a tree in a miller's house, and his wife and daughters, mistaking her reflection in the well for their own, declare themselves too beautiful to live in such a place any more and bugger off. This same unlikely device is used again and again. Or the "Master Maid" stories, in which the escaping heroes (usually a prince and his would-be wife, but sometimes just one person and a magical horse) distract a pursuing giant by throwing out magical items : sticks that become a forest, stones that become mountains, water that becomes a lake. This too is reused over and over.

What's difficult to say is whether the Celtic tales contain the same sort of versatile metaphors found throughout Greek myth. On the surface it appears not, though whether that's by corruption or design is hard to say. It could also be that the Greek stories simply won the literary influence : for example, we say Herculean strength rather than using the Irish or Welsh figures. There are certainly many memorable moments and sayings in the Celtic stories : "He who would be a king, let him be a bridge", says the giant Bran, in a story which presents starkly contrasting examples of good and bad rulers. "I journey for my own pleasure and to seek the adventures of the world", declares the cantankerous Geraint. Even Peredur has a noble moment that could have walked out of Hollywood : "I am Peredur, son of Evrawc from the North, and if ever thou art in trouble or in danger, acquaint me therewith, and if I can, I will protect thee."

My suspicion is that the metaphorical element is indeed there, but cultural evolution has obscured it. For the stories to have real, routine meaning, they must be frequently told and retold. Hence the strength of Hercules is known to all, but that of Bran is not; the wisdom of Nestor is more widely known than that of salmon; Athena's emergence from the head of Zeus is more famous by far than Taliesin's emergence from a chicken; Protean shapeshifting is a common term but that of the countless other Celtic figures of similar abilities just hasn't caught on. The use of seemingly arbitrary instructions which have to be followed precisely but never are is also something that has distinctly obvious appropriateness in the modern world. As does Connal Yellowclaw's magic ring that can always reveal where it is.

It's a shame. Worse by far, as Tolkien noted, is that so many of these tales have been sanitised and reduced to charming children's' bedtime stories. Cinderella hacking the head off a bull hardly seems like a tale originally designed for children, nor does the black horse with iron spikes in his bones that goes through a lake of fire. Hands which reach down chimneys to snatch babies from the crib, never mind flaying Auburn Mary to use her bones as climbing gear to escape a giant...  and the less said about the number of women Peredur beds, the better.

They way to remedy the situation is, fortunately, obvious : get HBO involved. I want to watch a distraught Cinderella spattered with blood as she hacks the head off a bull. I want to watch a giant king act as a bridge for his army only for them all to be burned alive inside a giant house. I want a series in which characters are constantly having extramarital sex and being eaten by whales and shapeshifting chickens and rescued by friendly lions. It'd be better than East Enders, at least.

The Real Manufacturing Crisis

 "We need to get Britain building again" is a routine cry of any British politician wishing to stoke populist sentiment in the least offensive way possible. Perhaps it's even true. Maybe we do need a bigger manufacturing sector, though our days as the world’s industrial superpower are, quite definitely, long dead.

What we remain very good at indeed, however, is manufacturing a political crisis. Because there's all the current political situation is : manufactured. Almost all of the so-called problems are of no significance whatever, and with a single potential exception, the rest are so routine that expecting their removal is hopelessly naïve. I put it to you, dear reader, that if you can't be satisfied with the current government then your standards are so ludicrously high you should give up following politics altogether. With demands like this, you'll always be wallowing in the self-loathing of extreme cynicism.

This may all seem like a very bold claim in itself. It shouldn't be. It should be bloody obvious, and sometimes I despair that the Great British Public are a feckin' gormless bunch of twats. This I will return to at the end.

First I should justify what I'm talking about. I've covered my stance on the current Labour Party, now the party of government, many times before, but particularly here and here. That last one, covering the moment of the major longed-for election, you might wonder if it was now tainted by the realisations – according to the press – that Labour are in fact no better than the rest of the political class. To which my answer is a provisional but nonetheless emphatic NO.

Consider how the current situation started : with the shocking "revelation" that Starmer had declared some donations a bit late. There it could and should have ended, but because there was nothing else on TV, the press decided to run with it and dig deeper. Now the major outlets began running stories Private Eye has covered for months already; that Starmer and some members of Labour have – allegedly – taken donations (!)*. All this was known, public knowledge for months – a sure sign of a manufactured rather than genuine "scandal". These donations have rarely been directly financial but usually in kind; use of accommodations here, concert tickets there, and yes, some fancy clothes as well, along with the hiring of staff.

* I'm presuming that the bracketed exclamation mark is the universal symbol for feigned surprise.

I do not, I should say, think it's right and proper for politicians to receive ALL this stuff, even if they declare it. But I absolutely expect them to, and look with dismayed amazement at those who are apparently surprised by it. You seriously didn't think that politicians don't get a measure of special treatment? REALLY? Come off it. Of course you did.

Those donations which I do see as improper – come on, you can buy your own clothes, and Lammy's claim that "leaders need to look their best" was laughably weak – can easily be redressed by returning them and apologizing. That's it. No further action needed. For the rest, the media have blown things way out of proportion. You can't buy the box Starmer was granted to watch the football any more than you can rent a room in Lord Ali's flat – it's not available for sale, but a private facility made available at the owner's discretion. Monetary values have to be entered in the records, but they're by no means real. Nor is there anything wrong, intrinsically, in private institutions and individuals making these facilities available on their own choice.

(Incidentally, I'd bet heavily that Boris and his cronies would have had a lot more donations like this and simply not declared them at all.)

Claims that this was somehow improper in Private Eye were never very convincing. Often the monetary value estimated was so low that it simply beggars belief that it had any chance of influencing government policy. Right, so gambling regulations are going to change because one minister once had a free coupon for the races, are they ? Yeah, right. As for Lord Ali – he's a Labour peer ! What exactly is supposed to be the problem with Labour peers giving aid to the, err, Labour Party? Are they bribing themselves, somehow? It doesn't make much sense to me at all. And claiming that Starmer just shouldn't go to the football... for goodness sake ! All this time spent denouncing that politicians are out of touch, then we finally get one who genuinely loves the nation's favourite sport... and you want him to stop ? Because he had access to a special area the public can't reach ? What in God's name is wrong with you ?

The Eye made an obviously erroneous declaration that ministers should make charitable donations in lieu of services rendered. Right, because if you stay at your friend's house and they won't accept payment, you should give it to charity instead, because... what ? And HIGNFY claimed that Labour were no better than the Tories in terms of sleazy corruption, something I think may be one of Ian Hislop's (a fine man and a national treasure to be sure*) silliest claims. Not to mention the melodramatic, exasperating hypocrisy of a media outlet trying to tell politicians that they shouldn’t accept the hospitality they themselves provide !

* I renewed my subscription to the Eye, but more on that in a future post.

In other words : "Here, have a delicious cookie. OH MY GOD THIS MAN IS A MONSTER HE ATE THE COOKIE !"

Sure, whatever dude.

The real story here is, man who makes the rules follows the rules. Okay, some of the donations, even though properly declared, should be returned. But that should be the end of it. At most, some questions need to be asked about how influential donors might be in relation to policy, but this is hardly the bombshell the media think it is. Return goods, apologize, move on. This isn’t anything like the expense scandal or the shifty Russian connections under BoJo.

‘But’, one might object, ‘what about the poor pensioners freezing to death naked and alone while Starmer’s banging Taylor Swift?’. This, too, my friends, is complete bollocks. Fuel payments should ALWAYS have been means tested – given that many even give the money away anyway, this is a good thing to implement ! Rising pensions this year and next more than offset the loss, so no, of course there was no need for the government to do an impact assessment. That itself would have been a complete waste of time. Complainants never give any numbers on this; it’s all emotional rhetoric and nothing else. And, newsflash, politicians make a lot of money, so yes, they’re going to get to do things that most of us don’t. That's just reality.

Everything here has been properly declared and is fully transparent. That the media have just now decided to bother looking doesn’t magically make it worse. Nor do claims that just because not everyone will get exactly what they want, there will be a return to austerity, have any merit to them. Similarly, Rosie Duffield’s claim that Starmer has a problem with women seems ludicrously hollow after a 30-second glance at the Cabinet. Like Dianne Abbot's relentless obsessions with claiming special status as a permanent victim, it all looks rather childish and silly.

I despair of this country, I really do. What really set me off was an especially entitled pensioner moaning that they weren’t getting a 22% pay rise. Come on. Junior doctors are paid an absolute pittance for an incredibly demanding and important job. Don’t you want the guy in charge of your prostate to have the money they deserve ? God knows pensioners need doctors most of all.

I shall pass over the complete non-story that Sue Gray earns more than the PM; God alone knows why anyone would care. As for the wild accusations that climate protestors get harsher sentences than racist actions, that is little better than far-right propaganda. It’s amusingly stupid claim. Unless I missed something monumental, we have an independent judiciary, so this thinly-veiled accusation that Starmer personally decides on sentencing is just dumb. There are and always will be judges who make bad choices. Blaming the government for this is moronic.

I want to end on a more general point. We've been sold Tory fantasies for years that we can have our cake and eat everyone else's too, that a magical unicorn will build us 40 new hospitals and kick out all those pesky immigrants. The result is enormously unrealistic expectations of what can be accomplished. And now at last the cold wet flannel of reality is slapping us full in the face. The government, by taking serious, credible actions to remedy the last 14 years of stupidity, is the wake-up call we so desperately need. True, the one thing they haven't got right, where they've genuinely failed, is messaging, in not fighting back against newspaper nonsense. They've lost control of the narrative, and that, unavoidably, is a serious problem that they'll need to remedy.

In terms of actually running the country though, I say bravo ! We've already had substantial and much-needed pay rises for public sector workers (even if I might not agree train drivers needed this), the end of Tory anti-strike laws and anti-onshore wind power, the beginning of nationalising energy and rail, the end of the deplorable and inhuman Rwanda "policy", the creation of a national wealth fund, a commitment to green energy that, however flawed it may be, is leaps ahead of anything from the Tories, reform of renting that (among other things) stops no-fault evictions... in three months. Three months ! And people are worried because of freebies that cost them the taxpayer nothing. Good grief.

This is stupid. Fantasy politics perhaps played a role in the idea that politicians should, would, or could ever be moral saints; this is an illusion we desperately need to snap out of. The hypocrisy of pretending that Labour are in any way comparable to the last Tory governments is truly exasperating; to hear Starmer labelled as a "liar" for both telling hard truths – we're in a mess – and for properly declaring donations is a reminder of just how gullible the Great British Public can be, as well as how effective the media can be at making mountains from molehills. Enough of this. Time to awaken from our damn-fool Utopian fantasies and make politics serious again.

Aristotle's Art of Rambling

Okay, the title is a bit harsh. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric isn't actually bad, but I wouldn't give it many accolades either.

I've occasionally thumbed through Aristotle in the bookshops and usually thought, "nope". His stuff just seems interminably... dense. But Rhetoric seemed like an easy enough subject, and my random perusal in the shop encouraged me that this would be as good a choice as any for starting out on a philosopher I've too long neglected. And, once again, the deciding factor was that it was very cheap.

First I need to say a few words about the published edition. This one's from Collin's Classics rather than my usual Penguin, and whatever Aristotle himself had to say, I would strongly discourage anyone from reading this particular version. For starters, physically the book isn't great : it's got a very stiff paperback cover, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to read unless you're the sort of thoughtless brute who makes a great big crease in the front cover or the spine. Second, while the introduction is decent enough (actually better than some Penguin ones in being properly concise), there are no footnotes, frequent typos, and worst of all, too many sentences are mangled into incomprehensible nonsense by a bad translation*. A good edition would at least explain that parts of the original text are damaged or the meaning is unclear, but there's none of that with this one.

* Which is this one, though whether this online version also contains the same garblings I've not checked.

Strangest of all is the dictionary at the back. This appears to be generic to the series, containing a list of terms which aren't found anywhere in this book at all. 

On to Aristotle's text itself. It took me quite a while to get into this. I made the mistake of trying to read it, like other philosophical texts, very carefully, poring over every sentence for meaning and consistency. This simply doesn't work : Aristotle makes many sweeping claims in throwaway sentences without any justification whatsoever, which often feel contradictory to the rest of the text*. Trying to read this as a Socratic dialogue, where each statement is so distilled that advancement is incremental to the point of being almost tautologous, is completely the wrong approach. I got on much better when I just read it more like a regular text and stopped worrying about every minor contradiction or undeveloped point, because there are just too many of them.

* In particular he variously describes wealth as something good and desirable, something you should actively flaunt, and then goes on to describe the wealthy as "prosperous fools".

And Aristotle definitely does ramble – a lot. He covers a huge range of topics besides the titular rhetoric, passing over such things as the nature of government, definitions of the various emotions, and what it means to live a good and happy life, all at breakneck speed. Often these are at best tangential to the main topic, and sometimes downright outlandish :

The most important and effective qualification for success in persuading audiences and speaking well on public affairs is to understand all the forms of government and to discriminate their respective customs, institutions, and interests. 

Hands up who thinks the most important thing about persuasion is to understand government ? It may have made more sense in ancient Greece with its multitude of different government types, I suppose. But statements like this abound, often unjustified and yet, paradoxically, still discussed in far too much depth to be of use to the topic ostensibly at hand. He veers wildly between the trivial and obvious, the complex but underdeveloped, and the downright cryptic. As a text, it's a bit of a Jackson Pollock.

Somebody told me that the question-and-answer technique of the Socratic method is no more than a technique for winning arguments. This is categorically untrue. If you actually read beyond the bestselling titles of the Republic or Laws (which are most definitely using the technique as a, uh, rhetorical device), you soon find that many Socratic dialogues are openly inconclusive. In a few, even Plato has Socrates come off the worst. And sure, if you use this method in bad faith you just get leading questions, but the way Plato did it was with a ruthless focus the like of which is utterly lacking in Rhetoric. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, Plato undeniably stayed on topic. Aristotle's approach appears to be more "bull in a china shop".

Perhaps worst of all, though, is that Aristotle's text is often dry and downright boring. A particularly hideous example of the sheer ugliness of the text :

We will now consider the various elementary classes of enthymemes. (By an ‘elementary class’ of enthymeme I mean the same thing as a ‘line of argument’.) We will begin, as we must begin, by observing that there are two kinds of enthymemes. One kind proves some affirmative or negative proposition; the other kind disproves one. The difference between the two kinds is the same as that between syllogistic proof and disproof in dialectic. The demonstrative enthymeme is formed by the conjunction of compatible propositions; the refutative, by the conjunction of incompatible propositions.

It's not all like this or I'd have given up by page two. Still, I could overlook this were the central topic anything other than "how to make things appealing to people"*; the irony here being acute. It does, however, steadily improve throughout. As I say, overall it's not actually bad, but there are certainly some very bad bits in it.

* For a much more rhetorical look at rhetoric, you can do worse than this video.

What exactly does Aristotle have to say ? Given the rambling potpourri structure it seems appropriate to try and divide this into two categories : rhetoric and everything else.

Not Rhetoric

Manual labour : I've long wondered why the ancient Greeks and Romans held the ordinary folk in such low regard. Aristotle sheds no light on this, if anything confusing the situation even further. Indeed his attitude seems positively schizophrenic. He dismisses manual labour as being ignoble because it's a form of servitude that puts the worker at the "beck and call" of other people. Farmers on the other hand are fine because they work to provide for themselves as well as other people. Well, that's self-consistent, I guess, but he also praises the skills of certain actors, and the Greeks in general were proud of their artistic accomplishments more broadly. Yet if art itself was praised the profession itself was frequently demeaned as being little better than prostitution. And what instead Aristotle would have preferred those doing "menial" jobs to do instead, how he thought everyone else would cope if they stopped, I don't know. It's all tremendously strange.

Correlation and causation : Perhaps more interestingly there are a few passages which hint at the crucial understanding that correlation doesn't directly imply causation. Not always though. For instance, he thinks the poor are (somewhat justifiably) greedy because they haven't got enough money, whereas the rich prefer other vices because financially they're solvent. It doesn't occur to him that maybe the rich are rich only because they're greedy anyway and that having more wealth will just lead to a desire for even more. 

Elsewhere he fares better. Not every vicious man is a thief, he says, but every thief is a vicious man (the example may be wrong but the principle is sound). Similarly, he thinks that young men act improperly not from youth itself but because of their "appetites", which just happen to be more voracious when young : but anyone with such appetites will act similarly regardless of age. That is, he identifies a deeper root cause than the superficial "blame it on the youth" approach. He's also very keen to stress that while some things are certain, others are merely probable. A reoccurring theme is that if one thing is demonstrated to happen, then things which are more probable to occur very likely will as well. This makes for rather circumstantial reasoning when dealing with persuasion, but it at least points to grey thinking rather than a simplistic black-and-white approach.

An honest cynic : That's cynic with a small c, in the modern sense of the word. Aristotle often takes a dim view of humanity in general and has his fair share of bigotry. Anything men do is naturally better than what a woman does, he says. And while the young are too ill-tempered and uncontrollable, the old are too lethargic and despondent to form proper judgement (he particularly despises the old, quoting a random and bizarre proverb that you should "never show an old man kindness"). Only men of age around 30-50 have proper reasoning faculties. Yeah, right. And even leaving aside his preferred targets for discrimination, he doesn't think much of people as a whole :

Since most men tend to be bad — slaves to greed, and cowards in danger — it is, as a rule, a terrible thing to be at another man’s mercy... life on the whole is a bad business.

On the other hand, he's perhaps more honest than Plato in accepting the existence of malevolence. There are people, he says, who form the right opinion but act in known discordance with morality because they detest their opponents so. For Plato this was an impossibility. No-one knowingly does evil, he says, with everyone doing a sort of moral calculus to weigh up the results of what they want to do. They could be mistaken in their judgment for sure but never deliberately do wrong. Aristotle's view is, I think, much the more realistic, though as for his opinion that nobody desires impossibilities... well, he didn't have Brexiteers to contend with.

Natural law : One of my biggest disappointments in Plato was the lack of discussion about how we behave when the law itself is wrong. Apart from the throwaway line that "bogus laws have no claim to be obeyed" this is something he barely touches. Of course he goes on at enormous length about how we can find the best people to make the best laws, but as to what we do when we find a law is wrong, he  squirms away from answering. Aristotle, on the other hand, accepts from the off that laws will never be perfect, never be able to account for every detail, and can never be absolute. That, he says, is why he need arbitration, to properly determine not only if the law was broken but if breaking the law was justified (Cicero was of like opinion, very much insisting that the context of an action was crucial to whether it was morally right or not). There is a higher sort of natural law, a Platonic form of justice, which must always be obeyed – but to expect to be able to write all this down is just not possible.

Here Aristotle reveals a distinctly Machiavellian streak. He describes how we can argue either way whether we should stick to the letter of an agreement :

We may argue that a contract is a law, though of a special and limited kind... and that the law itself as a whole is a of contract, so that any one who disregards or repudiates any contract is repudiating the law itself. Further, most business relations — those, namely, that are voluntary — are regulated by contracts, and if these lose their binding force, human intercourse ceases to exist. 

If, however, the contract tells against us and for our opponents... we do not regard ourselves as bound to observe a bad law which it was a mistake ever to pass: and it is ridiculous to suppose that we are bound to observe a bad and mistaken contract. Again, we may argue that the duty of the judge as umpire is to decide what is just, and therefore he must ask where justice lies, and not what this or that document means. Moreover, we must see if the contract contravenes either universal law or any written law... whichever way suits us. 

I can only imagine Plato's response if he ever heard he star pupil claiming such. First, his jaw would have dropped in horror. Then, he'd have roused himself to wrath and chased him out of the city with a whip. Nevertheless, this is maybe not too inconsistent : we can argue that contracts are good and binding if they agree with "natural law" (inasmuch as we can ever determine what that is) but useless bits of paper if they don't. But no such defence is possible for Aristotle's following comments on torture, which nakedly argue that we can either say it's "infallible" or that "people under torture tell lies quite as often as truth" depending only on what's to our advantage; he makes similar remarks on the value of taking an oath. This is the sort of adoption of rhetoric for its own sake that Plato would never have tolerated. Ironically, many of Plato's own texts are of infinitely greater literary appeal !

Rhetoric

Which leads on to the main topic. Anyone wanting to read Rhetoric for the titular content is well advised to skip books one and two entirely and go straight to book three. The first two contain some perfectly good advice but it's somewhat indirect. For example, Aristotle says that pleasure is a change of state in relative terms from worse to better, not any absolute state of being : knowing this can help you describe why something felt good to someone, for example. Likewise anger is the mere wish to cause injury while true hatred is the wish for non-existence. And pity is something we feel for those we associate with or feel close to, not, unlike certain people, something we readily feel for total strangers or those far removed in time. He also notes "emulation" as a sort of anti-jealousy : we all desire to be like the people we like.

All this section becomes an interesting and perhaps useful guide to inducing specific emotions, but little is said about how to use these to actually persuade people. Aristotle says that there wasn't any existing treatise on rhetoric, so fair enough I guess, but as any sort of practical guide it tends to spread itself a bit thin. It covers the golden rule of giving a presentation (know your audience) only implicitly, noting that different types of speech are appropriate to different circumstances and venues. For example if you want to flatter someone, praise them for having virtues they themselves openly admire; if you want to interrogate, try to force simple yes-or-no answers that can't be evaded. All well and good, but it's very, very general : all breadth and no depth, covering really all sorts of rhetoric rather than anything specific.

Which is very far to say that it contains nothing of value at all. Far from it ! Below are a selection of choice highlights that seem to be to be broadly appropriate in any sort of persuasive endeavour. Some of these, you may well think, are obvious. But believe me, at this point I've say through literally thousands of presentations and a very good many of them were, frankly, just no good. Sure, some of these may become obvious when they're written down – but they're anything but self-evident. This is definitely a situation where raising to consciousness that what naturally good speakers tend to do anyway, can be of wider benefit to those who aren't so fortunate.

• Be simple. Make your meaning clear and unambiguous. You can (and should !) use simile and metaphor (which is more impactful) and analogy, and it's okay to be lively; use also contrasting opposites where possible But your core message has to come through loud and clear. It should ideally be both immediately understandable but also novel. Be austere and and as brief as possible, but not one word shorter than necessary. On no account at all try and be poetic.
• Likewise, make your talk feel natural, like it's something you've just thought of. Hence the need to use ordinary language as much as possible. Of course, you do have to frame this to suit your audience though, but regardless, illustrate your point with commonly-accepted truths. Everyone likes agreeing with each other.
• Be a master of spin. Aristotle is pretty shameless about how describing the same things in different ways can give very different interpretations. E.g. someone can either be a "pirate" or merely a "purveyor"; thieves can be said to "plunder" or only to "take"; something might be described as a "crime" or just a "mistake". The thing may be the same but the implications radically different. This is another case of apparent contradictions, with Aristotle sometimes as firm as Plato in decrying the need for rhetoric at all, but at other times warmly embracing it. The ideal, of course, is that we use this great talent for the greater good, manipulating people into being better than themselves.
• And yet... facts, facts, facts ! These are his watchword. You must have something to base your argument on, even if it's a character assassination. For example to demonstrate intentionality, prove that your target committed similar actions multiple times, so they cannot claim ignorance. 
• If you use examples at the start, use many : people will be expecting you to draw a wider conclusion, so you'll need to support it with several instances. But if you reach that conclusion by other means (logical deduction and so on), then you only need to use one example at the end, to demonstrate that your conclusion holds water. Giving many at this point could become confusing.
• Oratory matters. The intonations and body language of a talk can embed more meaning than the written word. It might be faster to read the same text but it can contain less information than the spoken word; a skilled orator can make it sound as though they're giving more messages than they actually are.
• More than knowing your audience, Aristotle advises to remember the classic maxim of "know thyself". Different sorts of speech are appropriate for different speakers, especially age-related : the elder statesman approach looks strange in a novice. 
• You can use humour, but it should be sophisticated : the ironical man, he says, jokes for himself, whereas the buffoon jokes for others. That is, make sure the audience is laughing with you, not at you, remain dignified and in control. Make yourself one of the audience; we all want to be like comrades, and shame is only effective when it comes from someone we respect. We also want to emulate and compete only with those who we see as being on an equal footing so as to give us a fair chance. Don't make yourself seem hugely inferior or superior to your audience. Be relatable.
• In a talk, follow a clear structure. In particular, give people a sense of when it's going to end (this is especially relevant to a modern audience !), because this helps people to concentrate : if they have no sense of how long you'll go on for, their minds will wander. Again, I've slept through many a talk because of this very deficiency.
• If you have to describe something that might be intuitively implausible, then you have two options. Either you describe it in plausible terms to make it more readily believable, or openly admit that it's implausible. A related point is that if you have to cover something complicated, your audience may more readily believe you if you concentrate on describing the easier-to-understand consequences instead.
• Pre-emptively debunk probable counterarguments. Try and control the narrative in a debate, forcing your opponents to respond on your terms. If you need to be abusive, use the third person to duck responsibility. If you're questioning someone one-on-one, don't frame the conclusion you want as a question, but simply state it so they have to respond to it rather than refuting it. 

Some of these are certainly questionable, of course. It's probably okay to throw in the odd moment or two of poetical-style flair if you can deliver it well, just don't overdo it. Being "abusive in the third person" is not great : far better to abuse the argument – and you can, sometimes, publicly abuse an argument – than the person. There are even times, of course, when outright invective against evil men is a damn good thing, though this is by far the exception than the norm in most sorts of speech. And of course, insisting on a very particular structure where you can use many examples at the start but should only use one at the end is definitely too rigid, though it's not a bad guideline.

I can generally give a pretty good talk these days. As a chronic introvert who hates talking to strangers, I get an adrenaline buzz out of it. Echoing recommendations from another speaker, my two biggest pieces of advice are : 1) Be emotional; 2) Practise obsessively. The last is fairly obvious. When you can say your entire talk without really thinking about it, when you can ad lib ad nauseum regardless of any slip-ups you make, then you're ready. You should be actually bored of delivering your talk when practising before you do it for real.

On being emotional, this is more aimed specifically at scientists. What I mean by this is to try and actively convey enthusiasm and, even more importantly, interest above all else. Other emotions can be used when necessary; if an experience was frustrating, make the audience experience that too, while if you were amazed or surprised by something, try and make the audience a little shocked as well. I find it helps to give it a theatrical, deliberately exaggerated edge; if you need to disparage something, try and do it in good humour so the audience doesn't believe you hate whoever came up with whatever you're attacking*. God knows I've made that mistake. 

* And you really shouldn't hate them. Even if they've done something impressively stupid, it's likely that you yourself will have done something equally stupid in your own investigations at some point.

A stand-up comedian once explained how he simply pretended to be a different person to overcome stage fright, so by enacting a "presentation persona" which isn't the real you, inauthenticity can have benefits. And chances are, you'll need to exaggerate your own feelings to make the audience react to them : being subtle about it is much harder. Moreover, forcing yourself to exaggerate forces you to stay in control. That way, since you're not really feeling an actual sense of boredom when you recount that time you downloaded a million files and they were all empty, when someone asks you a serious question you can easily dial it back and return to answering perfectly rationally. And exaggeration has the yet further benefit of engendering confidence.

But don't overdo it. It should all be an act. You should express things you felt at the time, but you shouldn't actually be feeling those same emotions in front of a crowd, only pretending. After all, if the audience knows your pretending (and they will), they'll see that you're enthusiastic – why else, after all, would you bother putting on a show ?

I digress now too far from Aristotle so it's time to end this. As my first foray into his work, overall I quite enjoyed it. Maybe one day I'll try another text, but I definitely wouldn't choose a Collins edition.

Review : Auri Makes Soap

Well, here's that rarest of things in which I review a fictional book !

I very much enjoyed the two Kingkiller Chronicle books, so let me get the obvious elephant out of the way first.

Like every other fan, I don't understand what's taking so long for the third. They're wonderful books, to be sure. They're good hearty reads, complicated, engaging and accessible. Rothfuss manages to make a tale of potentially bewildering complexity easy and enjoyable to follow. But while they have some moments of beautifully-crafted writing...  still there's nothing that deep or profound about them. For goodness' sake, Rothfuss, nobody's expecting you to solve the mystery that is mankind here ! Get on with it man !

I shall return briefly to this at the very end.

Anyway, The Slow Regard of Silent Things was another "may as well give it a go because it's cheap" pickup on a book-buying binge. Maybe it would placate my Kingkiller nostalgia gap at least a little bit. Tide me over, as it were.

It didn't.

I'm not going to give this book a rating because the author gave fair (in fact commendably ample) warning that I might not enjoy it. As he says at the beginning : 

If you haven't read my other books, you don't want to start here. Without the context of those books, you're going to feel pretty lost. Even if you have read my other books, it's only fair to warn you that this is a bit of a strange story.

In the afterword he goes even further, actually apologising to the readers after a fashion :

It doesn't do the things a story is supposed to do. A story should have action, dialogue, conflict. A story should have more than one character. I've written a thirty thousand word vignette ! The closest thing I have to an action scene is someone making soap. I spend eight pages describing someone making soap. Eight pages of a sixty page* story making soap. That's someone a crazy person does. People are going to read this and be pissed.

* He's recounting a discussion of an earlier draft. The final page count is actually about 150. 

To which his discussion partner responds :

Fuck those people. I felt more of an emotional connection to the inanimate objects in this story than I usually feel toward entire characters in other books. It's a good story. Let those other people have their normal stories. This story isn't for them. This is my story. This story is for people like me.

After that extensive disclaimer I can't possibly bear the author any ill will, at least as far as this particular book goes. So, fine. And if you enjoy the book, if it resonates with you and gives you something meaningful, if you get something out of it... that is absolutely all well and good with me. I certainly won’t stop you. 

But all the same... I personally didn’t enjoy the book, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t explain why. 

So to give similar due warning, if you enjoyed it, then chances are that this post isn’t for you.

In fact you should probably stop reading right away. You almost certainly won't appreciate my views on the matter. And that's okay. 

Enough preamble. The problem I have with the book is... Commander Uhura. 

Eh ?

Slow Regard isn't a bizarre crossover, hilarious though that might be. No, Uhura is famous for being the black woman on TV in the 1960s who “wasn’t a maid.” In fact she was very much more than not-a-maid but a skilled communications officer, capable of many other duties, aboard a pseudo-military ship. She just so happened to be black. The point was that skin colour should be no imposition of any kind. She was defined by what she DID, how she behaved, her skin colour quite properly incidental, humanity having long since moved on from its earlier, pointless bigotry. She had character and capabilities revealed by actions and behaviour.

By contrast I'm also reminded of some of the outreach efforts I saw at last year's National Astronomy Meeting. One fictional depiction of scientists was aimed quite rightly at a young BAME audience. But the young, black, female scientist it featured as its protagonist was worlds away from Uhura. She was defined by the colour of her skin. She existed only to fulfil that role, to tick that box. In her stories, nothing much happens at all and she doesn't actually do anything except represent minorities. That's it.

As you may imagine, I have a problem with this. To appeal to diverse audiences, to be inclusive for its own sake, is right and proper. But you can’t do it like this. You have to show that the under-represented person can actually DO things. Otherwise you not only create a boring character and a boring story, but worse, you reduce your characters to the very thing you’re trying to get people not to focus on. To say, "don't worry, you won't have to actually do anything, you can just show up and be black" is not inclusivity, it's insulting.

Likewise in this novella there is no plot of any kind, no events of any insight. Literally the most exciting thing really is that Auri makes soap. That’s it. There is not a word of dialogue nor a single other character. It is entirely constructed from Auri’s thoughts and (mainly) feelings and nothing else. What "happens" in the "story" is that Auri projects her own feelings onto the gloomy world she lives in, anthropomorphising everything around her, imbuing it with personality. She has unpredictable mood swings in response to how she perceives how the stones are feeling today, conducting all kinds of little rituals to keep everything in its proper place.

To be fair, that’s actually a nice trick for 30 pages or so. But it wears very thin indeed after 50... let alone 150.

I completely get the need for an author to write this to explore their creation, a work they need to create in order to get to the main stuff. But I’ve no idea at all why they'd share it with anyone. Auri is broken, neurodivergent maybe. Yes, okay, good. Well done. That's an important issue to examine. But if that's all, what am I supposed to get from this ? All I end up focusing on is not Auri's worth but her apparent total pointlessness, or possibly the deplorable lack of a proper social care system in Temerant. 

I mean, it's fine to write about feelings purely for their own sake (really, it is), but why in the world you'd do this to the utter exclusion of anything else whatsoever, in a fantasy novel, this I cannot fathom. 

On the other hand, thank goodness it's not a backstory – that would only have ruined Auri's mystery. Answering the questions of why Auri lives in the underthing, how she came to be estranged from the world, how she maintains her sanity, all this would have been a mistake. But failing to even acknowledge these as the most obvious questions – not giving so much as a hint of curiosity about them – feels even worse. Hints would have been deliciously tantalising, but we don't even get even the most ambiguous or indirect reference of any kind.

And again, absolutely nothing happens. Auri has nothing really to be afraid of, nothing to really inspire joy or hurt or anything else, so her feelings become totally random and uninteresting. It's nice to see our own little daily rituals brought to full flower but this doesn't need an entire novella. "A day in the life" is just of no benefit for a character like Auri... would anyone want a story about a day in the life of Gollum ? Probably not, and he at least does stuff. Auri doesn't. This book not only avoids the obvious questions, but it raises no new ones and gives no new insight into Auri's character that couldn't have been done in a conventional story with a plot.

All in all, it's utterly pointless. I don't hate it, can't hate it, because there's absolutely nothing of substance here to hate. It's as bland as plain pastry – hardly something to get excited about but hardly something to spit out in disgust either.

It does make me wonder though if Patrick Rothfuss isn't just hugely pretentious. It feels like he's being an anal perfectionist about a world that doesn't require this level of perfectionism. I know, I know, I daresay his magnum opus means a very great deal to him. The problem is that nothing he's presented so far conveys any sense of what that meaning actually is. There are some great characters in his novels, incredibly clever plots and first-rate storytelling... but, at the end of both the Kingkiller novels I came away feeling somewhat empty. Plenty of stuff happens in them, but what does it all mean ?

Blowed if I know. It's interesting that Rothfuss knows full well how the work will be largely received and has made peace with this. I just wonder if there's really some much deeper symbolism beneath the surface that's escaped my attention (entirely possible) or if Rothfuss only thinks there is (also entirely possible). I just don't know. But to me, it feels like Rothfuss thinks he's creating something as monumental as the Sistine Chapel, something which must be a flawless masterpiece that will inspire generations to come, when in fact he's just writing a good story. And they are very, very good books. I just don't think they're of the scale of achievement that the author thinks they are.

Review : Nietzsche The Narwhal

Justin Gregg is cursed with having two first names. This is the only explanation I can come up with for why his book is so damn awful.

If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal sounded like a fun read in the bookshop. Ostensibly trying to contrast the minds of animals and humans, with a mixture of humour and philosophical commentary, it certainly seemed like this would be potentially very much A Book For Me. Flicking through it I was a bit concerned by the apparent lack of description of anything animal-related, but I decided to give it a go on the basis of the cover recommendations, the blurb, and most importantly the cheerfully low price.

"You can read this in one sitting", says one of the review quotes. This much at least is true : it's extremely readable and often genuinely (and deliberately) very amusing. However the review quote continues to say that you'll want to invite Justin over to discuss his "brilliant mind".

Err, no. Like hell. This man needs help, not praise. I'm quite serious : he is so openly hypocritical, so aware that he's taking actions that he knows are morally wrong, so full of self-loathing for the entire human species, that by the end I felt real pity for the poor chap. He needs to see a therapist, pronto. 

I went through quite the little roller-coaster when reading the book, beginning with bemusement at this charming but strange book, moving onto annoyance that it was a rambling and highly unintelligent mess, and ending with actually being genuinely quite worried for the mental health of the author. Oh, I've read many a book I've hated (and this is one of them) but most of the time I'm happy to attribute that to the author being stupid or malevolent, or both. I don't think I can do that in this case, though I'd like to. I really do think he needs help first, chastisement second (though he does also need this, and I'm not going to hold back from calling out the stupid here). Perhaps if he were in a better emotional state he'd be able to formulate more sensible conclusions.

Nothing about this book makes me take it seriously enough to write it up in anything like the level of detail I'd normally aim for. To an extent, I'm not the proper audience for this at all. There's very little here that I hadn't heard a dozen times already : it's all pop psychology and animal behaviour studies that are very interesting when you first hear them, but anything beyond the major headlines was sparse indeed. And I'm trying hard not to judge it on that basis. After all, there's absolutely nothing wrong with learning things for the first time.

(Incidentally, there's very little about animals in this book and next to nothing about Nietzsche. A very large fraction is given over to incidental anecdotes which are described in really excessive narrative detail before he finally draws out the main point he wants to make.)

Far worse, though, is that Gregg's conclusions are superficial in the extreme and rampantly agenda-driven. What that agenda is takes a good long while to become apparent. Much of the book is rambling commentary without apparent direction. But by the end, it's clear. His claim is that humans have an exceptional kind of intelligence among the animal world, but not in a good way : it's exceptional in bestowing us a unique kind of stupidity, one which will doubtless see us wipe ourselves out before too long. We have a special sort of reasoning but we're an absolutely shitty species. Animals are happier than us, have better morality, intelligence is of no value, and we should either just all kill ourselves and be done with it or go back to living in the trees.

It feels like what you'd get if you scraped together the worst bits of Rutger Bregman and Stephen Pinker and melded them into an unholy abomination. It's rife with rotten-cherry-picking. Conclusions are superficial and stated with absolute and unarguable conviction, presenting the most trite and obvious implications as thought they were some sort of revelation. Of alternate hypotheses appear there none. The words, "WANKER !" and "self-righteous arse" feature prominently in my notes, along with "seriously weird man" (that one crops up twice), "polemic", "evo-psych silliness*", "convoluted in the extreme" and "total B.S.".

* For a very good, very through examination of why evolutionary psychology is nothing but pseudoscience, see this video.

I've already set out my own idea about human nature at some length here. In extreme brevity : individuals are driven by some innate tendencies, but societies are shaped largely by culture; thus, some societies are shitty and some are good, with neither reflecting anything much fundamental about us as a species. So I need not spend much time refuting Gregg's central point. The whole thing is very much like Erasmus' Praise of Folly but without any of the irony.

Look, I really hate this book. In fact I despise it; its blend of self-righteous self-loathing is contemptible ("I am more holy than thou because I hate myself more !"). I'm giving it 1/10 for content as its morality is at least well-intentioned; Gregg isn't actually evil, just very, very stupid. But even that isn't his fault. I think he's been broken by doomscrolling, of hearing nothing but warnings of doom day after day after day, to the point where he literally can't function rationally any more. Somewhere inside, I suspect, is a commendably warm-hearted and respectably intelligent individual, but one who's likely been broken – broken good and hard – by an excess of compassion fatigue and the toxicity of perpetual ideological activism. So my final rating is actually going to be 4/10. It's nonsense, but it's readable nonsense, and the poor guy desperately needs a hug.

The Good

Does Gregg have any good points ? Yeah, a few. He gives a couple of good proposed definitions which I think are useful in a largely unqualified sense, with any caveats just being tinkering around the edges. First off, language :

Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all. There is something limitless about the human mind that allows for a capacity for limitless subject-discussion.

I don't know if animals have language using something equivalent to grammar and syntax. I certainly don't know the range of subjects about which they communicate with each other. But this does feel like a good definition of language as opposed to mere communication, at least.

The second is lying :

A method for intentionally transmitting false information to another creature with the express purpose of making that creature believe something that is not true to manipulate its behaviour. 

Two key points. First is that with lying we want people to actually alter their beliefs, which has long-term consequences that can extend far beyond our short-term goals. Someone who genuinely believes something will, as a rule, continue to act in accordance with that belief so long as they hold it, mitigating factors notwithstanding (as I'll get back to). This is different to deception more broadly. For example, camouflage doesn't change your belief about the world, it instead hides information rather than altering it*. Secondly, as Gregg elaborates, lying involves a knowledge of theory of mind, that we understand how we each reason and alter the information we convey to exploit this.

* Well, sort of. Camouflage seeks to maintain your default false belief that there's nothing there. It doesn't alter your existing state of mind.

As with many of his points, Gregg goes on to shoot himself in the foot. Each time he tries to (quite earnestly) define some potentially unique attribute of human intelligence, he finds at least a few very credible counter-examples, e.g. some animals having excellent evidence for a theory of mind. He tries his best to mitigate them, but there's a much simpler solution to all this : humans are simply not exceptional in any qualitative sense. Granted, not all animals might possess all of the kinds of faculties of reason that we do ("animal" intelligence is anyway just too broad a category for a meaningful comparison; we are animals, after all, so this is not a sensible distinction). But of faculties which are truly uniquely human, there are few if any convincing examples. 

It all seems far easier to me to say that the differences are only quantitative, not qualitative. I think that we can easily describe the differences between human and animal reasoning by quantity alone : we can perhaps think more abstractly, count to greater numbers, anticipate behaviours in more complex situations and with greater speed. After all, quantitative differences can have qualitative effects. Performance capabilities can depend on critical thresholds, as anyone trying to run a computer program which runs extremely fast until it runs out of memory will attest to. There's just no need to posit that human and animal intelligence must be different at some more fundamental level.

This is much like his idea that you can't be more or less conscious : you either are or you aren't. Rubbish ! Someone in a dream is thinking, to be sure, but consciousness here becomes extremely murky. From direct personal experience I can state unequivocally that it absolutely is possible for self-awareness in dreams to lie on a spectrum. That Gregg is aphantasic and objects to being called "less conscious" is a silly argument because this is such a minor difference as to be meaningless : if, on the other hand, you were only ever conscious of, say, tables, we could hardly say that your awareness was the same of everyone else's. The point is that aphantasia has surprisingly limited effects, and that in lacking this part of inner awareness, Gregg is less conscious than everyone else, but not to any degree which anyone should worry about. You don't lose any rights just because you've got no visual imagination, that'd be silly.

The Less Good

He makes two other valuable points but heavily overstates their importance. He tends to do this at lot, as a rule; when something catches his attention, he forgets absolutely everything else (this is a sort of Utopian fallacy in which solving one problem is often claimed to make magical improvements in all aspects of life). He says that we often tend to predict but not feel the future, and it's feelings rather than facts which drive us to act. This is a reasonable point, and may go some way to explaining why we don't always make sensible long-term decisions. But it can hardly be the whole story : sometimes we just don't know the long-term outcomes, sometimes money and corruption are involved, sometimes we do make good decisions. 

Gregg somewhat reminds me of the Pakleds of Star Trek, often heavily overreaching himself. He earnestly wants to be more intelligent than he actually is and wants to be more moral than he's capable of being. It's like he's trapped in an existential moral hell of his own making. For example, I've long been baffled by fans of Greta Thunderbird* but Gregg has me positively worried. Praising this notable weirdo as having some kind of moral superpower because she's scared shitless the whole time ? Fuck off ! This is stupid. It's not healthy to feel things which aren't actually happening to you, at least not constantly – this is incredibly damaging. It's toxicity cloaked as moral righteousness, not real virtue. Yes of course you should worry about the future, and what's happening right now in various parts of the world... but to actually feel it ? To vicariously experience the suffering of the imagined unborn and unknown billions ? That's a good thing, is it ?

* Go on, tell me that isn't a better name.

Ahh, mate, honestly, I feel sorry for you – that's not healthy. Not healthy at all. I just couldn't live like that, I'd go mad. As I rather suspect Gregg already has. Gregg mate, listen up : you don't have to feel the moral pain of the whole world. Not everything is your personal fault. It's okay to enjoy a trip the zoo with your kids in a nice car every once in a while. Nobody expects you to personally and single-handedly solve all the systemic ills of the world, it's okay to slip up from time to time. Not for the first time do I find myself wondering if this kind of attitude is an after-effect of America's Puritan hangover.

The second good-but-overstated point is that we could have made a better world than the one we have. In context, he's talking about how we make truly weird moral choices in which all kinds of incredibly arbitrary situations are deemed immoral despite lack of any direct consequences. This is fair, but honestly, some places are better places than others in which to live. Given the staggering complexity of human reasoning, the miracle is that we've managed to do as well as we have.

The Bad

I'm going to rattle through some of his stupider points very quickly as this post is already longer than I'd like. In brief :

• He dismisses animals as having the same emotional range as humans, saying they can't possibly experience things like nostalgia or ennui without any justification. Exactly how would you judge if a tiger or a buffalo was feeling nostalgic, pray tell ?
• In other moments of Utopian-like myopia, he insists that bed bugs are becoming some kind of indestructible plague that will surely kill us all (or make us all unpleasantly itchy, I guess). This simply isn't a thing. 
• Elsewhere he insists that there must have been a first moment of true death awareness, which would have been so debilitating that the first poor child to truly realise their own mortality would likely have become a useless gibbering wreck. Exactly how this was avoided isn't clearly stated; it seems obvious enough to me that while everyone has preoccupations with death from time to time, hardly anyone suffers from this constantly, and there's no reason to think the first person to experience "death wisdom" would've done so either (if there even was such a singular moment, which I seriously doubt). Other things happen which demand our immediate attention, and our brains simply refuse to stay on any one topic, or experience any one emotion, for any great length of time.
• He insists animals have a simpler and better morality than humans. In the very next chapter, without so much of a hint of self-awareness, he describes how bees commit annual genocide to eliminate their surplus population. This is dangerously close to Bond supervillain territory. SNAP OUT OF IT, GREG ! (This is a great shame too, because a discussion on how animals reinforce / chastise each other's behaviour in the context of morality would have been really interesting ! And much, much worse than I think Gregg's heavily rose-tinted view would ever permit)
• He quotes a study claiming a 9.5% chance of human extinction within a century as not only credible, but treats that 9.5% as though it were closer to 99.5.%. We're doomed. We've created a host of problems we have no idea how to solve, technology always makes things worse... in spite of the fact that we clearly do and it doesn't. Dumbass.
• Radio signals from aliens won't be a sign that they're intelligent, for some reason. FFS. 
• You aren't winning the game of life against Gregg's chickens. They're much happier than you and you should be extremely jealous. Nietzsche, by like token, would have been better off as a narwhal.

The Ugly 

Finally, the hypocrisy. This is where I felt most sorry for Gregg.  He goes off on one about how lawns are destroying the world (they're not) but doesn't bother to, say, buy an electric lawnmower, introduce more wild flowers, or reduce the frequency of mowing. He knows he should be a vegetarian, buy an electric car, and all that stuff, but isn't and doesn't, despite being conscious of the consequences. And this is... weird, where I can only think to advise him to seek help. If you know what you're doing is wrong, but you keep doing it, if you have a daughter and don't want to see her grow up in a world you believe will be so nightmarish but do nothing at all to stop it... what exactly is wrong with you ? Do you not really believe what you profess to believe ? Are you suffering from severe, debilitating compassion fatigue such that you feel incapable of taking any action ?

Before I read the original essay on the Tragedy of the Commons, which is abjectly and shockingly racist, I thought it meant something quite simple. I thought it meant that individuals would tend to act in their own interest without too much concern for the group. Since each single action would have negligible consequence, and since we consider the effects first and foremost as they relate to ourselves immediately, we tend to neglect that collective effects can be huge. We panic-buy toilet paper because we need it, ignoring the fact that if we all acted together we'd all have an ample supply. Or as here, we don't take actions because the difference they make individually is negligible, which ignores the fact that if everyone switched to renewable energy and sustainable farming techniques the overall effect would be huge.

Perhaps Gregg is suffering from this kind of thinking. It feels to me that he's trapped in a paradoxical hell. And I think the only way forward is incremental. You can take action, you don't have to take all possible actions all at once. Start with something simple and build from there : do one thing, make it habit, and then do another thing, and repeat. Remember that there are environmental success stories as well as failures. Otherwise, this perpetual self-loathing is never going to achieve a damn thing except becoming a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I know, I know : many people (indeed most) who are putting our dire apocalyptic warnings do so with the best of intentions of encouraging action. But we're way past that point, and into the territory where people like Gregg are so angst-ridden that they just don't bother. Fear is now so rife that it's cowing people into inaction through sheer nihilistic dread, while simultaneously others are steeped in impervious denial. Surely, it's time to dial back the fear (perfectly well-founded though it is) and put our more positive messages instead. We can and must change our ways, but putting us in constant fear for our lives isn't helping. Fear is a powerful short-term motivator, but what climate science tells us is that we have to act on the long-term. And for that, we need not a message of fear, but of hope – even if we have to tell some porkie-pies to get people to act, surely getting them to act, not changing what they believe, is what really matters.