Review : The Slavic Myths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singing Slavs

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

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

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

Scary Slavs

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

Vampires

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

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

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

Werewolves

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

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

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

Sexist Slavs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supernatural Shamanic Slavs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review : Unruly (II)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is a sentiment I thoroughly share. 

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

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

Review : Unruly (I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Good To Be the King ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terminology Problems

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

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

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

Religion : Don't Blame God

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

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

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

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

Context is key

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

LLMs Ex Nihilo

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT ? SERIOUSLY ? WHEN YOU GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT ?

– Death, Soul Music (Terry Pratchett)

That's the scale of the problem we're facing when dealing with the issue of whether computers can think. Forget the robot uprising crap, we're talking full-on "meaning of life stuff" here. Allow me to explain.

As I've said previously, I've made peace with the idea that we'll probably never get a "truth engine" that can analyse data and form a truly objective, impartial conclusion. We might well get something that does better than we do at formulating conclusions though, which is not to be sniffed at. So instead I'm comfortable with describing AI (mostly but not entirely meaning LLMs) as "thinking engines" instead. That is, they process data and produce conclusions, and that's all I mean by "think". I'm using the word in a very broad, very liberal sense.

I tend to object rather strongly to the notion that LLMs currently go any way beyond this. I don't think they're conscious because I don't think they have any sort of subjective inner awareness. They're not really deterministic but they are still essentially algorithmic robots. They can be described as having a kind of understanding in a useful, productive sense, but not at all in the human-like way. They don't form mental images. They have no sense of the ineffable about them, no emotions, no desires of their own, they are nothing but data processors – and I think there's a very great deal more in a genuine mind than merely analysing raw input data.

The following article from Vox is remarkably thoughtful for a popular piece with a clickbaity headline. It's worth reading in full, but there are two essential points I want to highlight. The first is that minds are not necessarily all alike :

Radically different materials can execute the same basic operation. Biology may have produced the first flying entities. But the reason that birds can soar above the treetops isn’t that they’re made of organic tissue — it’s that their wings perform a set of aerodynamic tasks, such as generating lift and minimizing drag. As airplanes vividly demonstrate, if you put metal and fuel together in just the right way, you can replicate these functions and take to the skies.

To be sure, biological neural networks and artificial ones aren’t identical in design or behaviour. But neither is a cardinal [presumably meaning the bird, not the bishopy sort] and a Boeing 747. Nonetheless, the airplane replicates the avian functions that are necessary for flight. Likewise, computational functionalists wager that computers can instantiate all the neural operations that are relevant to consciousness. So, as long as they recreate a brain’s elaborate algorithms with sufficient precision, they actually can be conscious.

I will gloss over that "be" for the moment, because I take the point that minds might be qualitatively different from each other. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were not, animals having enormously different biology, senses, appendages, and environments with which they have to interact. So I'm prepared to concede that a conscious LLM may have little enough in common with the mind of a bumblebee or a dog or a professor of geology.

But how fundamental can this difference be before we stop calling it a mind at all ? For sure, it could be so different that we have very great difficulty in recognising an alien or robotic intelligence as being conscious. It seems to me, however, that if it doesn't have subjective, inaccessible, inner awareness, if it can't imagine things and those imaginings have no direct correspondence in the real world (just as we can imagine yellow without yellow being present), then we have no business calling it a mind, really. Thinking ? Understanding ? Yes, but only in the (still useful !) sense of data processing. Not at all in the philosophical sense. I see no reason whatever to presume that a network of probabilistic word generation algorithms, however elaborate, would count as truly having a mind any more than would an abacus. 

The article then explores (quite nicely) the notion of computational functionalism, wherein it's the process that's conscious, not the thing itself. I'm sympathetic to this view. Indeed, this could be interpreted as far more subtle than ordinary materialism or physicalism, in which some physical thing actually is conscious. You could even see it as a hybrid step, as close to dualism as a physicalist interpretation would allow*. And in that sense, I don't think it's crazy.

* That is, an electron is a real physical thing. But the mere movement of an electron isn't a thing. You can't say that movement is a physical object, because that's nonsense. So the process of electrons moving around, in a complex EM field, as being conscious is not really the same claim as saying the electrons themselves are actually little bits of minds.

The article's second major point is where I come unstuck :

We can name the physical laws that enable birds to get off the ground. And we have always had reason to believe that inanimate objects could emulate their movement; grains of sand have travelled through the air since time immemorial. By contrast, no one has ever seen a rock experience pain or pleasure, even momentarily (in part, because it’s impossible to directly observe the internal experience of any being or entity other than oneself).

There's the crux. You can't observe consciousness from the outside because it only exists internally, and whether this is because it's a process or an actual substance makes no difference at all. If you see a bunch of neurons firing, do you see yellow ? No, a bunch of neurons firing doesn't look yellow. If you see hormones diffusing throughout the brain, can you honestly say, "yep, I'm witnessing anger ?". No, you cannot. You have no idea what's going on in the conscious mind of the subject. 

The physical and the conscious clearly have some deep, intimate connection, but they are absolutely nothing like each other. There's a world of difference between saying that one gives rise to the other (I'm perfectly comfortable with that) and saying that the two things are literally the same.

A possible escape route is that maybe we can't say a person is angry or horny or introspective from a mere brain scan due to sheer complexity. Maybe we need to know everything in great detail, and we just can't capture the full neurochemical state in enough resolution to make more than a crude guess as to what a person is thinking. Perhaps if we could do so, we would literally be able to read minds.

I claim that this is not the case. I think the Hard Problem is actually the Impossible Problem. I claim that even if we had absolutely all physical information about the system, we would still never know what a person was thinking, not really.

Imagine, if you will, a stupendous spreadsheet listing the configuration of every atom, every subatomic particle in a human body. Could you use this to learn an awful lot about brain states, even a reasonable guess as to what the person was thinking about ? Yes, certainly. But no list of numbers ever actually is yellowness or being horny. The numbers [255, 255, 0] may describe perfectly to a computer how to produce the colour yellow, but it makes no sense to say that that list actually is yellow. They give rise to it, and that is all they do, all they can do.

"What ? That argument is stupid, I'm seeing [255, 0, 0] right now !" said no-one ever. You cannot experience a colour just from a list of numbers : they might give rise to your internal state, but that's not at all the same as saying they actually are the colour itself. That would be insane. Complexity is simply not the issue here at all.

Which brings me to the "meaning of life stuff" I promised earlier. What's been running around in my head is the opposite case : the idea that connections and processes are literally all there is. In that case, you could certainly say that an LLM had a similar consciousness to a human. You wouldn't have to resort to panpsychism, because you could legitimately say that only certainly processes were complex, and not everything in existence undergoes such processes.

But the result would be, I think, extreme nihilism of such a degree as to be actually offensive. I've postulated that meaning arises through knowledge of the connections between different things, that we can be said to understand a thing based on how much we know about how it relates to other things and our ability to predict its behaviour in novel situations. The more moral sense of the word "meaning" may encode something similar : meaningful experiences are those which affect many of our internal links, our own local knowledge of how things relate to each other.

Now suppose that those connections are all there are. That is, knowledge, understanding, and ultimately consciousness itself, arise from connections between items of information and nothing else. That's it. We've hit rock bottom. A mind is a set of relations between physical things and there's nothing else to it. Mystery solved, we can all go home for tea and biscuits.

Or, quite honestly, we may as well all do whatever the fuck we want, or just not bother. I find this idea unspeakably bleak, because if that's all there is, then we're just... electrons and magnetic fields. Atoms bashing about. We have no more claim to moral value than a rock. Without something deeper than the visible connections (some continuing series of connections, possibly going all the way down), we could not rightly say that murder or torture was wrong, and that I simply will not accept.

"But,", you may say, "maybe the moral meaning is something that emerges from the system if it can't be found within it reductively". Ah yes, you might say that. But that concedes the point that there's more to the system than what's visible, doesn't it ?

Fortunately for my own mental health, I think this idea has absolutely no merit in it. The idea that a mind literally is the observable processes, or the physical constituent parts of the nervous system, is to me absolutely and incomprehensibly WRONG. 

Now to be sure many people accept the materialistic world view without falling into moral degeneracy; some at least have probably even fully embraced the "it's all just atoms" perspective without becoming absolute cunts (though I would be a wee bit skeptical as to just how many have really thought this through). And that's fine, I guess, as long as it helps them get through the day. But I cannot escape the feeling that for me personally, this doesn't work. If other people want to live in such a reality, then good for them, I suppose. But for me ? I think I'd rather hit myself in the face with a brick, thanks. After all :

If droids could think, there'd be none of us here.

– Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

We All Screen For i-Screens

I'm still finding it hard to get my head around the fact that there are people who think modern life is too easy. 

I mean, I just don't get it. At all. Sure, navigation is easier because you can outsource that to Google Maps, and you can order takeaways online, yes... and that's what's shutting down your critical thinking skills ? You don't have five hundred thousand other things demanding your attention instead ?

Wow. Must be nice. I only wish I had that problem.

Some have it that technology itself is the issue, and that we should claw back a more manual existence, both mentally and physically. I'm not entirely without sympathy here : as I've said before, I do think single-purpose "devices" like books are inherently better for developing focus and deep thought than devices which are designed to be multi-functional. Of course, in practise we need both sorts, but I think this maximal focus is particularly important for children. Reducing reliance on tech in schools is perfectly sensible, not least because kids will find their own ways to distract themselves regardless.

A good learning trajectory, I think is to first learn the fundamentals, do enough of the really hard basics yourself such that you develop a solid intuition for it, then gradually move up to dealing with the higher-level stuff, outsourcing the low-level aspects to dedicated tools. Do at least some addition and multiplication yourself before handing it over to a calculator; do at least a few Fourier transforms and differential equations the hard way before letting a computer handle it; look through an eyepiece before relying on a telescope's CCD*. Even if you forget the details later – and you will – you'll still be far better equipped to spot when things go wrong and figure out solutions. You'll also learn critical and analytical thinking along the way, and maybe even a little wisdom. Those kinds of skills have much broader applicability.

* Though there is no case whatever to be made for going back to an era in which you needed an acoustic coupler to send emails. Sometimes simplifying things is just good.

Then, so my pedagogical theory goes, you can start to ease off on the low-level stuff. To keep doing everything from first principles, solving every equation by hand, doing every task the hard way, is largely counter-productive, or even self-destructive, and futile. No, the point is that by having earned these core skills, you can free up your cerebral burden to concentrate on the bigger picture : deciding what problems to solve, how you want to solve them, and of course why. Your mind is still fully engaged, it's just doing less of the slog-through stuff (though it should probably also keep doing at least some of this) and more of the philosophy. 

This is likely true in general, it's just much more important when you're young because you have so much more to learn anyway. So yes, reduce tech even to zero for the youngest, then gradually introduce it at later stages of children's development. 

In that sense, I completely agree with Wes Streeting* that we should both reduce screen time for the youngest children and also more carefully monitor and regulate it for older children. That's common sense. Children need more sources of stimulation, and need to learn how to interact with each other far more than they need to learn how to use computers. Plenty of time for that later. 

* I had a lot of respect for the man until he decided he secretly loathed working for Keir Starmer for so many years despite being one of the most prominent faces of the refurbished Labour Party. Nevertheless, he's right about this. 

But for adults, I think "screens" as a being the, or even a, cause of society's ills doesn't have much merit to it. Multi-functionality is probably a bigger contribution, just because it's innately easier to get distracted and lose focus with a device that can do essentially unlimited things : if your main means of working is also your entertainment system, then it would be a rare person indeed who never got distracted by anything. 

Still, I think most people learn to overcome this. Most people are not so lacking in self-control that they find the mere presence of a shiny object irresistible.

No, I think the real problem is exactly as set out in this Aeon piece : it's a deliberate design problem. It's the way apps and social media have been constructed to form addictive, habit-forming, compulsive behaviours. It's not that they're just easy to use in a way which makes you want to continue out of a sense of progression and accomplishment – these kinds of apps aren't the pinnacle of productive user experience. It's more like they feed a constant low-level stream of dopamine, a sense that if I keep going just a bit longer, I'll get to the good stuff... which never arrives. We keep going out of a compulsion that's much harder to override than a genuine desire to continue in a task we actually enjoy.

Or, worse, they continuously enrage rather than engage. The brain seems to relish in arguing and it's addictive. Culture wars and Karens seem to strike at something deep in the subconscious.

To digress slightly, as this other article points out, unchecked complaining wires us to see the world differently, to insist that absolutely everything is awful and sink into a pit of doing nothing but whining. Complaints become a reflex action which overrides real thinking. It's such a common problem, and kudos to the article for noting this as a major symptom of the "these days" fallacy. That one in particular winds me up the wrong way (so I guess this is the wrong time to rant about it).

I think this sort of attitude is exactly what the press feed on : the tabloids in particular, but not exclusively. They present everything in the worst possible light. They make us believe, as the ancients did, that progress is impossible. They cultivate the death of hope for the sake of immediate profit. They seek out a deeply (small-c) conservative mindset, so common in the pre-modern era, the same one* which kept social change and improvement at bay for thousands of years. Both progress and conservatism tend to be self-reinforcing : progress by immediately normalising every development such that progressive voices always have something to complain about, and conservatism by insisting that nothing ever really changes so it isn't worth trying. Mix them together and it's all too easy to degenerate into nothing except perpetual whining**.

* I recommend making the time to watch this video as well as the one in the previous link. They're both more nuanced than the somewhat hyperbolic rhetoric I've adopted here, which should not be taken literally.
** PLEASE, for the love of sanity, just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes about Donald Fucking Trump. 

And with digital devices this is ramped up to eleven. Which swings me nicely back to the Aeon piece I want to concentrate on. Because, it's not the devices themselves that are responsible for this. They just make this much, much easier to do. No, the problem lies with the human beings designing the algorithms, deliberately keeping everyone pissed off so they can't think rationally and see through this endless stream of utter garbage.

Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment.

...The fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll. These are choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium.

Though I would interject to point out that this doesn't mean there isn't a real problem with declining attention spans, it's just that the cause is not the digital or screen-based nature of the entertainment. And spending hours on a complex game, where things are constantly changing, isn't really the same as spending hours on a single difficult problem. But I take the point that not all forms of modern approaches are by any means bad, especially the tendency towards multi-hour YouTube videos.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’

The predicted disasters were apocalyptic. J W Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was blamed for triggering copycat suicides across Europe. Johann Peter Frank’s six-volume A System of Complete Medical Police (1779-1819) listed ‘reading of poisonous novels’ among the causes of suicide. Arthur Schopenhauer in 1851 described ‘bad books’ as ‘intellectual poison’. If the manipulative potential of novels were truly that great, as one historian dryly notes, women would have been eloping in hordes.

They didn’t. The disaster never materialised. But the panic served its purpose.

The expansion of literacy from a tiny elite to the general population scared a lot of conservatives. The panic wasn’t really about literacy declining. It was about literacy escaping elite control.

The historical pattern is well described, but I don't think much of the modern panic is really all about "elite control". There might be that aspect to it, a sort of snobbery : "you shouldn't be doing this largely harmless thing you enjoy because I never did that, or I just don't like it", rather than much in the way of "you plebs shouldn't learn anything". And to be fair, the author does go on to note that some of the panic arises from people enjoying themselves in the "wrong way" rather than learning the wrong things. 

But the main concern is that the new ways of learning will be genuinely harmful, both in terms of the effects on attention, memory, cognitive skills, and the actual information conveyed. Nobody is now concerned that women will overheat their brains by learning, but people do worry they will be misinformed : this is not the same moral panic as in earlier eras. Still, while digital media is different on all fronts from printed materials... the article is right that this doesn't make it necessarily better or worse. Merely talking to your friends is no more likely to give you the correct information than reading a book or watching a YouTube video is.

Indeed, for all the problems of echo chambers, the internet still gives you vastly better access to genuine expertise than in previous eras. People only remember the classics of literature and forget the trashy novels, the crappy magazines, the stupid TV series of yesteryear, the misinformation and delusions of past ages. We have a survivorship bias, remembering the geniuses but forgetting the contemptible fuckwits of earlier eras (largely because we have out own to deal with).

I would accept that this is all part of the continuous pattern the author describes, and if anything I might say the similarities are actually stronger. Then as now, the concern wasn't (all) about control, but conservatism : the tendency to see anything different as bad... but stemming from legitimate observations that some things the next generation do really are indeed just bad. The mistake is to think the previous generation never did anything equivalent, just because the mistakes they made were different.

What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.

Absolutely fair. Which is not to say that there are never any disadvantages to new approaches at all – there absolutely are – but in terms of the apocalyptic rhetoric, I think all of it is nonsense.

These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.

This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses... if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

Yes, this ! Far from making life too easy, the modern user experience is far, far too difficult. Every single fucking website requires you to click through a list ten feet long to reject cookies, dismiss the "subscribe" box, actively opt-out of signing up for notifications.... The stream of interruptions is what kills attention and renders impotent any attempt at focus. Having digital access to work and entertainment is not the problem at all : having the experience be equivalent to finding oneself in a rowdy nightclub in order to read a short article about snails is where it's all gone wrong. 

At best, technology is a proxy for the real problems : taking ourselves offline will help only because those same problems don't exist in most other media. But there is absolutely no reason whatever why those problems have to exist in our digital worlds.

These aren’t concessions to declining attention spans. They’re recognitions that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re discovering what literacy meant all along: not just the ability to decode symbols on a page, but the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning.

Exactly. If the goal is to be able to think deeply, to be able to process, analyse, and evaluate complex information, then insisting that there is only one correct way to do this simply wrong.

The pattern I observe repeatedly: people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes. They struggle with philosophy textbooks but thrive when they can listen to lectures while taking visual notes, discuss ideas in study groups, and write while pacing. 

We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesise understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources.

But expansion without architecture is chaos, and that’s where we’ve stumbled. The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. We hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.

Once again, exactly this. It's the content that matters, not the way it's presented. Those who prefer thinking by discussion should do so (for me, trying this for the low-level stuff is like trying to pee while someone's looking right at me). Those who prefer to read their information alone should be able to, and those who want pre-recorded audio-visual should have it. And deep focus on a complex problem can indeed require multi-modal processing as much as it can solitude and simplicity.

What we need is to prioritise and customise the user experience, facilitating access to the information that's required, when it's required, and in what format. Simply hurling everything at everyone, and making them click away a dozen different unnecessary dialogue boxes to get what they need but then having to organise it themselves, and ejaculating pop-up windows at them at random... this isn't helping anyone. Not in science, not in social media, and not in society.

Not all deep thinking needs to be multimodal though. Clearly, the geniuses of the past were able to manage just fine without any of our modern devices and made the breakthroughs that made our modern world possible. My suspicion is that the process of synthesis, the all-important moment when multiple factors come together to create a new, meaningful statement about the world, is something that happens primarily in the mental domain. The external cognition we use is a necessary precursor to that crucial moment, that threshold when all the collective information we've considered crystallises into a hard, transmissible fact. That moment is a purely mental one.

A genius, then, I might define as someone who can do as much of this process purely in their head as possible. Good for them. But most of us mere mortals need our external supports, and fortunately for us, the impact of any breakthrough depends only on what our discovery is, not how it was made. At least in the terms of knowledge work, rather than insisting that we all refrain from reaching for our digital aids and deliberately make out lives more difficult, what we should be doing is streamlining the experience as much as possible, letting us organise things efficiently, collating and comparing what's relevant while discarding what we find superfluous as we choose. 

Often, this means beginning with a wealth of multi-modal data, sifting and examining in vibrant and unpredictable ways until we eventually reach the key moment of discovery. That the final step usually requires intense focus does not mean the preceding labyrinth should follow the same "everybody fuck off and leave me alone" part of the process. Nor does the fact that the route to discovery is often convoluted and fraught with wrong turns and dead ends mean that we should never try and reduce this as much as possible. 

In both science and society, sometimes we need to struggle and sometimes we need to simplify, and to say it's all just one or the other is just wrong-headed : you want people to think critically about their social media posts, but you don't want them to spend hours selecting the appropriate font; solving a scientific problem should involve some amount of difficulty thought but it shouldn't be debilitating. And simplification is all too often compensated for as we just do more and more of the original activity, or something else comes along that consumes all the time we've saved.

No, I think the road to improving things lies almost entirely in terms of reducing our struggles, not in cultivating them – at least for adults. Maybe one day we'll have to deal with people genuinely getting lazy and stupid because everything is too easy, but that day is probably somewhere – as H. G. Wells predicted – around the year 800,000 AD, not next Tuesday. 

Until then, we should actively work towards more digitisation and more simplification... what we need less of is not technology, but interruptions not of our choosing. We need to minimise unwanted distractions and addiction-forming interfaces. We need designs that respect how people genuinely work, and think in longer timescales : maybe giving everyone dopamine hits is good for quarterly profits, but it's absolutely shit for the economy when, years later, they all forget how to turn their devices on because their brains have been turned to mush by a relentless barrage of doom-scrolling websites that insist they fill in another 300-question survey every twenty minutes.

The Better Angels Of Our Scientific Nature

I've pointed out many times that what seems rational is constantly evolving as evidence changes. If you don't notice things disappearing over the horizon gradually, or the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, then a flat Earth is an entirely sensible thing to believe in.

A contrary view from comes from the New Atheist crowd, who are apt to insist that all of humanity's history would have been better if people had just never believed in anything religious. This is a garbage and meritless claim, for many reasons/ For one thing, as Pratchett pointed out :

“The amount of belief in the world must be subject to an upper limit... It follows that if a major focus of belief is removed, there will be spare belief.”

You can't just stop believing in things by choice. Can't be done. And this follows in part from the above, that at one point, the evidence for the now-discarded ideas seemed very good indeed. Supernatural explanations made a lot of sense, because we understand minds and agency at a much more instinctual level than we do the conservation of momentum or the hysteresis curve. 

It follows, then, that at one point we really had very little option but to believe in supernatural agency for a good many things : we literally have to believe in something, and without a rational explanation available, the gap is filled with angels and demons.

Which leads me in to this thoroughly interesting Aeon essay which examines this in a lot more detail. More than that, it shows how philosophical musings on the nature of angels was anything but the proverbially-empty question : how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, it turns out, is a tremendously useful vehicle for exploring the nature of space and matter. Inquiries may have begun from a world view that now seems preposterous, but the full examination of these early ideas, when done with careful rigour and logic, led directly to some of the scientific notions we now find most fundamental of all.

This view of angels as immaterial ‘intelligences’ became pretty standard in medieval philosophy and theology. But the scholastic period saw an increasing desire to systematise, systematise, systematise. The precise nature or essence of angels became a serious cause for debate, and these debates were not mere thought experiments. Rather, because of the real belief in the existence of angels, theologians and philosophers could think through angels as a way of understanding the nature of the physical world and things like place, bodies and motion. 

This was motivated by significant theological concerns. One concern was that, if angels are immaterial intelligences, then what makes them different to God? For us, our bodies are what make us limited, able to exercise force only directly, such as when I throw a ball. Does this mean angels, having no body, could exist everywhere or act at a distance? This was dangerous territory for theologians, potentially challenging God’s omnipresence and omnipotence.

And again, I've gone on enough times about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic, because if you allow other supernatural powers which aren't under god's direct agency, then you've all but conceded paganism. However, the author here has a much more interesting point : that to make sense of angels conceptually, you have to grapple with basic physics. And no, the "it's just magic" explanation was not enough for medieval theologians.

The view was that angels had to be located (i.e., limited) but without a body. The key to understanding the angelic debates of the scholastic period is to understand what conceptual tools the physics of the day provided. For all intents and purposes, this physics was Aristotle. For Aristotle, physics was simply about things that move and, on his account, bodies don’t move because of gravity or kinetic energy or the warping of spacetime but because of their natures. 

Similarly, there was no concept of absolute space, but rather a concept of ‘place’, which, unlike Newtonian absolute space or Albert Einstein’s spacetime, does not exist entirely independent of the bodies that inhabit it. As the philosopher Tiziana Suárez-Nani points out in Angels, Space and Place (2008), ‘space … as an undifferentiated and homogenous receptacle, was alien to the medieval mind.’ For Aristotle, bodies could not exist without place, which served as a kind of container. Likewise, there had to be bodies for there to be place. In other words, a vacuum is not possible in Aristotle’s view.

I think it's worth pausing for a moment to consider just how profoundly different this is from the modern concept of space. For us, space is a container : it consists of nothing in itself, but it's where everything goes. It's the "fabric" of the Universe which can itself expand, warp, contract etc., but it's not really a physical thing. It's more the reference system we have for other objects. It isn't defined by them, though it is intimately connected*. It can, in principle, be absolutely empty (vacuum energy notwithstanding), and indeed that's exactly what we mean by space itself. The kind of vacuum-abhorring "place" that Aristotle espoused was something altogether different from our modern notion.

* And people say dualism is some sort of mysticism ! Don't worry, I'm not going there today.

So, what has that got to do with angels? If you recall, theological concerns at the time required angels to have a specific location – to be limited and bodiless – in order to avoid angels with limitless power, rendering them omnipotent as well as omnipresent. Normally, the material body of something locates it, so how can immaterial angels be located? Aquinas and others solved this problem creatively, locating angels not by their physical dimensionality but by their operations. Aquinas proposed that an angel has a different type of location than a bodily being. An angel is in a place by virtue of applying its power to the physical objects in a given place. This limited both an angel’s operations and their location, locating them by their operations, rather than by a body.

Right, so you can have angels which aren't omnipotent or omnipresent and are still immaterial and supernatural. Hooray ! But :

Importantly, the Condemnations of 1277 forbade believing that angels are located by their operations rather than by their substance, so Aquinas’ solution for angelic location was now off the table. If an angel exists in a place solely by its operations, as Aquinas claimed, then what happens when it’s not operating? Angels had to be rethought.

Here’s what Scotus did: he made ‘place’ more mathematical, less tied to location and more similar to our notion of dimension. When thought about in terms of dimension, the ‘place’ occupied by an object stays the same as the object moves through locations. In this sense, its ‘place’, redefined as dimension, is the same, even though it changes location. In other words, Scotus, as aptly stated by Lang, ‘neutralises’ place radically. On the Aristotelian account, direction or location were part of the definition of ‘place’. When redefined more mathematically as a kind of dimension, direction is no longer a necessary feature of this new kind of ‘place’. You can have an idea much more like that of ‘space’, something that doesn’t inherently contain ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ in its definition.

Technically, this meant that God could create a rock in no ‘place’, if place referred to Aristotle’s definition of place, which was a location within the outermost rim of the heavenly spheres. Whereas Aristotle had defined place as a necessary defining feature of physical bodies, Scotus did not. Instead, he created a hybrid account in which something can exist inside the outermost rim of the celestial sphere (occupying place in the Aristotelian sense), but it doesn’t have to; it could equally just occupy space by having dimension outside of that sphere.

And to use another Pratchett quote : all places are indeed one place, but that place is very large. 

Ahem. We even get something akin to the Uncertainty Principle cropping up :

The image Lang uses, citing Scotus, is of a surface that must have colour, but whose colour can be anything. Angels can occupy a place however small or large, just not infinitely so, and they must operate in a place, though they themselves exist in the place indeterminately... To posit angels as immaterial external forces was indeed oddly closer to a classical physics that sees an invisible force like gravity working on bodies externally. In fact, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz accused Newton of having introduced occult forces with his theory of gravity, because gravity seemed to be a supernatural force acting on bodies at a distance.

I mean, it just tells you a lot about human psychology when you find scientists accusing each other of being occult because their rigorous, predictable, mathematical theorems are somehow similar to angels... I'm not sure what exactly it's telling us, but it's certainly a lot, whatever it is. It's interesting to consider "angels" as a proxy for "force", though it would seem very strange to suggest that God ordered the world using ultra-obedient angels rather than just making things go round and round. Why didn't planets move directly according to his will ? Perhaps this again points to a seriously profound mismatch between our modern concepts and the medieval mindset. 

The role angels played in such thought experiments was unique: angels transcended the purely physical world but were still ‘creatures’ that abided by the rules and the logic governing the Universe.. .angels, precisely because of their intermediary status, allowed human beings to think about dimensions of created reality that yet transcended our direct human perceptions.

While it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under ourselves... We equate ‘up’ with ‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very hard time imagining a nonphysical thing. What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.

I would say slightly the opposite on this last point. We have no problems at all imagining ghosts in an abstract sense. Ghost ? Sure, it's a person who can walk through walls, wails around a lot waving chains and making woo-woo noises. Easy peasy. But try and explain how this works on the physical level and we come quickly unstuck. How can it be perceived if it doesn't interact with light ? How can we hear its woo-woo noises if it can walk through solid walls : why would its lungs interact with the molecules of the air, and why doesn't it fall through the floor ? Nevertheless, the imaginary concept of a ghost is simplicity itself.

Although occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical, down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified. Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through, and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.

And I find myself in strong agreement. I presume that the author doesn't mean that we really should think about things as all being imbued with intentionality or anything like that, only that we naturally do. Such a beginning is our jumping-off point, something we can easily understand in order to progress to the next level. Saying that electrons, in suspiciously Aristotleian-fashion, want to reach the lowest energy state, is a very handy lie-to-children. Pretty soon (sometimes immediately) we realise that the electron doesn't necessarily want anything at all, in the literal sense, but the metaphor helps us understand. Only with that basic concept in hand can we get to the hard mathematics, to try and consider – insofar as our observational data permits us – what's really going on.

Right then, time to write to Dan Brown and tell him to write a blockbuster sequel. I'm sure philosophical musings on the nature of immaterial angels and their implications for cosmology is a guaranteed cinema hit.