Review : 21 Roman Women

Time for another book review. This time, I veer away from mythology and back into proper history.

Today it's the turn of Emma Southon's A History Of The Roman Empire In 21 Women. The best description I can think of for this is "militant feminism with a human face". Southon is professional comedian-level funny, righteously and rightfully angry at the the historical injustices of the treatment of half the human species by the other, but rarely grumpy or preachy. Unashamedly revisionist and provocative, the hilarious and often NSFW jokes – this is really, really not a book for children – don't obscure the deep thought that's clearly gone into this. I found it very insightful and I enjoyed it enormously. 9/10 for me !

The Importance Of Being A Mornament (it's like an ornament, but... more)

There are two main points from the whole book that stuck with me. First, that Romans viewed women as more important than later historians have traditionally allowed. They didn't view them as useless ornaments who existed solely for making babies or prostitution... at least not always. But the second, related point is that this doesn't mean they treated them very fairly. Southon never tries to depict the Romans as in any way progressive, because they could be a right bunch of misogynistic weirdos. They might not have excluded women, but they believed pretty darn strongly in a highly gendered society. 

The earliest references have some of the clearest examples of this. Rome was founded by freed slaves and escaped convicts, all male, but the idea that they might go and liberate women to sustain the fledgling city seems – in their own description – to have been thought of as ridiculous. Far better, apparently, to just go and ask their neighbours if they had any they'd like to donate (quite literally treating them as a commodity) and when that slick piece of diplomacy astonishingly failed, they decided to just abduct them instead. Lovely.

And yet even in the early centuries, women appear as both villains and heroines. There was Tarpeia, the traitor who opened the gates to the enemy, but also Hersilia, who forced a truce by having the Romans and the Sabines acknowledge each other as family thanks to the, err, forced marriage*. Regardless of whether woman either existed, the Romans themselves thought they did. It wasn't they who left them out of their histories, that was the fault of much later writers. 

* Oddly, Southon doesn't think the Rape of the Sabine women should be interpreted in the modern sense. So... these bunch of desperate freed slaves and escaped convicts go and abduct a bunch of women, and then the women decide of their own free will that these dudes are, like, totally hot or something ? Hmmm.

And it wasn't just grand politics where women appeared as active protagonists. Southon describes one especially bizarre episode :

Ocrisia was doing something with the semi-sacred fire in the royal house in the presence of Tanaquil whereupon, to everyone's great surprise, a giant willy rose up out of the ashes. This floating ash willy proceeded to impregnate poor Ocrisia, because Tanaquil, who was once again able to recognise a come on from the gods, ordered her to sit down on the fire and fuck it, and Ocrisia obeyed.

Sexy. But while Southon clearly has a point in that the divination skills of Tanaquil were unfairly written out of history, I have a hard time seeing that one as due to misogyny as she claims. Rewriting this WTAF moment into one that doesn't involve fucking a giant ash willy feels like Tanaquil's divinatory skill is lost more out of collateral damage than anything else : the version in which Orcrisia got pregnant by Tanauqil's husband may be a cliché, but good grief it's more believable.

Influenced And Influential

Women were also affected by the political changes that they themselves influenced. One of Southon's skills is presenting this as full history of Rome itself as well as its women, albeit with the major political events now reduced (rather pleasingly) to scenery*. As Roman government reformed, she notes that while inequality was a deliberate design feature of the earlier monarchy, it was very much a bug in the new system of the Republic. Not that this helped with female empowerment very much, mind you.

Greater equality was the order of the day, though in this case, it doesn't really seem to have done much for female empowerment at all.

* I have to disagree that Roman military history is boring, even if Southon's descriptions of the protracted civil wars as "extremely slow-burn class warfare in which all the protagonists are grumpy billionaires" is pretty damned apt.

One example of this limited change makes this clear. A disturbing feature of Roman life was that aristocratic women could rarely own their own property or run their own affairs, being required to be under a male guardian : initially their parents, then later their husband. In essence, a husband had the same level of authority over his wife as parents did over their kids. Which is distinctly creepy.

But Republican reforms meant that the woman could keep her original family as her guardian instead. This gave them a degree of choice. Rather than now being wholly (materially) bound to their husband, thus making it pretty essential to obey him in everything, they had options. They could certainly choose to support him against their original family; if he was rich enough, there was little financial risk in doing do. Or they could opt to quite literally say "you're not the boss of me !" and bugger off. It hardly meant that they were free (but then, everything was a hierarchy for men as well), but at least now they had a choice of employer, as it were. 

Even clearer examples of feminine feedback come in the form of the the Vestal Virgins, where politics and religion collide head-on. Southon's description of the Roman idea of divine justice is brilliant :

Romans appear to have viewed their gods as capricious, grasping psychopaths who would crush every mortal in an instant but who could also be bribed with a bit of burnt food and some perfume. Romans gave them a little drop of wine, some banging statues, and the odd glorious temple, and in return, the gods helped them win wars and didn't send massive swarms of bees to chase them around the streets.

This sort of political-religious attitude will be important later on. For now, the Vestal Virgins were given extreme privileges for their virginity, which the Romans viewed both as an immense sacrifice and literally necessary for the city's survival. They were given an escort and essentially free access wherever they needed to go, and could even pardon criminals with a look. Those who tried to cross their paths without waiting for them could even be executed. 

But this was a case of the kind of power which is only given provided it's not abused (with later laws restricting their pardoning powers in a classic case of "but we never meant that you should pardon that guy"), and the punishments for misbehaving Vestals were severe : for having sex or even just wearing trousers, they might face being bricked up alive with a candle and some food so that technically it wasn't counted as an execution.

Other concerns feel much more modern. Worries about excessive luxury still abound, but for some especially strict Republicans, these included "tables with one pedestal" and, perhaps even more inexplicably, rugs. For women specifically, the dilemma over whether sex work counts as empowerment or objectification resonates very strongly. For some it was indeed grim slavery, but for others, it was a choice and they did it freely. Choice, surely, is the whole issue here. Someone who doesn't want to do it is in an awful state, but that doesn't automatically mean that other people aren't genuinely enthusiastic about it. Later on, notes Southon, monks were viewed as always tempted by the pleasures of the flesh, whereas the idea that women might actually enjoy sex was never even considered.

And the major caveat to women requiring guardians was that this doesn't appear to have applied to the lower orders, with a nice case of a woman running a huge spa-villa in Pompey as her own boss. Southon's descriptions of this are honestly lovely, and had it not been for the volcano, it sounds like she would have had a wholly successful career. I somehow always find it rewarding to read descriptions of people who just had a nice time.

There was true love to be found here as well. By chance, I happened to hear Mary Beard's podcast about the woman usually known as Turia recently, who has a massive gravestone describing much of her life story. Most of this seemed like the act of a dedicated and loving husband, but Mary Beard being a thoroughly odd duck, she described it as partly selfish for reasons that entirely escape me. Southon, however, is pretty clear that this is an act of great romantic feeling, not some weird humblebragging nonsense. Which directly contradicts Philip Matyszak's dubious claim that romance was a medieval invention. Again, sometimes things in the past could just be nice.

Unfortunately, of course they could also be horrible. But even then, women could still take control.

Power and Prudes

Segueing nicely to combine sex and politics, Southon prevents the rather spectacular antics of Julia Caesar, or more accurately Julia Caesari Filia, daughter of Augustus. Augustus was undeniably a political genius, but Southon shows him to be a horrible dick in his personal life. I mean, he divorced her mother on the day she gave birth to Julia, which is more than enough to denote "horrible dick" by itself, but it gets worse. He mainly divorced her so he could shag other women, but then the politics and sex collide head-on and here's where he gets really dickish.

Augustus, as the first emperor proper, had won. The Republic lived in name only and there was no longer any regular route to the top of the tree. You couldn't be promoted to being Emperor as you could consul, and the best you could hope for was to be adopted as heir. So how to deal with all those squabbling aristocratic senators who came from a long line of politicians where the struggle for advancement was all about political promotion ? Augustus' brilliant idea, says Southon, was to try to redirect their competitive streak into solid Roman virtues : family values, domestic harmony, chastity, that sort of thing*. Families would no longer be quite such a private sphere, but the way that the aristocracy competed for status.

* And weirder ones, like encouraging people to have as many babies as possible. Or even stranger, banning people from bribing people not to marry. Quite why people were bribing others to not get married is anyone's guess. "If there is anyone here who knows why these two may not be lawfully joined...." – "YEAH I'VE GOT FIFTY QUID, STOP THE CEREMONY !"

Unfortunately even a genius can misread the room from time to time, and Augustus didn't seem to understand that other people were awfully fond of adultery as well. This included not just a lot of senators, but Julia as well. In Southon's words :

She fucked in the Forum. She fucked on the rosta. She fucked by the statue... she fucked his great rival's son... Julia Augusti Filia loved to fuck.

Gosh.

Some of this was performative. Julia had never been one to hold back, but she always did as she was told and married who her father told her to marry. But after he took her son away to raise as his heir and her husband died, then had her marry someone she hated, and she snapped and went on a complete fuck-fest, making a very public mockery of his extremely prudish laws. Appeals from other aristocrats, who didn't regard Julia's behaviour as anything especially bad, fell on deaf ears. Augustus executed her main boyfriend, banned her from drinking wine or having male visitors or attendants unless they were ugly, and had her exiled. She only found out about the death of her daughters third-hand. The only thing Augustus did for her was to provide an income and comfortable surroundings, but on his death, Julia's son was murdered by Augustus' new heir. 

Fast-forward a couple of centuries and we get someone who absolutely did not love to fuck, Perpetua. Here we see politics and religion having whole new difficulties. For the mostly still-pagan Romans, the need to placate the gods was extremely real. For the Christians this was obviously nonsense. The pagans, in Southon's telling, weren't intolerant towards Christianity because of their religious beliefs per se. They were intolerant because the Christian's beliefs prevented from partaking in the religious rites that they genuinely saw as necessary for survival. Christians, in effect, were the equivalent of those "sovereign citizen" dickbags that plague parts of the modern world.

And Christianity changed the world view of its followers in highly pragmatic ways. For the pagans, having a social network, followers, status, all that really mattered. For Christians it was nowhere near as important as entering heaven. So when Perpetua refused to sacrifice to the deified Emperors, to her father this was a kick in the teeth : refusing her basic social obligations as a citizen, besmirching his good name, and potentially risking divine wrath (presumably via swarms of giant bees) all at once.

Pepetua's tale is not a nice one and I'm going to skip over it. But Southon makes some important corrections to early historian's narratives. Some of them portray Perpetua as a cold unfeeling zealot, a God-botherer who cared for nothing but Christ. No, says Southon. Her choices hurt her. She was distraught at the social injury done to her father, moved by her own crying baby, and suffered the physical torment of prison greatly. Perpetua in her own writings may have a belief it's hard for most of us to relate to, but she comes across as every bit as human as the sex-crazed Julia Filia.

To The Bitter End

Martyrdom and spirituality gave women a new avenue for agency, albeit not a very nice one. Even if you were a theologian, as evidenced by Melania the Elder*. Living in c. 370 AD, life in Rome was not so very different to how it had been in the late Republic : there was a senate, gladiatorial games, chariot racing, and all that familiar stuff. But Christianity had changed the character of social life, and rather than being a power through her husband, Melania sought power through spiritual prominence. 

* Not to be confused with Melania the Plastic, who is a modern blemish.

And it was, ultimately, all about power. Melania chose the now fashionable ascetism for this, suffering financially (but not really, never being in any real financial danger), physically (very definitely really, but stupidly) but not at all socially. She managed her family finances carefully and ensured her family rose to prominence, her virtue signally being amply rewarded. After all, "Ascetism is meaningless if it isn't a choice... it didn't offer power to the powerless, it merely reframed the power of the powerful." Being poor when you can't help it sucks. But being deliberately poor, in the right circumstances, can give you tremendous theological and social clout.

Christianity had by now evolved, allowing marriage and family relations even as ascetism became popular. It certainly didn't seem to have made anyone especially nice though. Poor old Perpetua had suffered from the pagans, but now the Christians threw those abuses back at everyone else. Melania herself was manipulative and power-hungry, but at least she never encouraged people to fast themselves to death to get off on it, unlike "Saint" Jerome, who did. Her granddaughter, on the other hand, may have freed eight thousand slaves, but she forced her own attendants to become ascetics and only let them eat every other day. I guess the bit about feeding the five thousand passed her by.

If the Melanias had sought religious power, other late Roman women went for the old-fashioned approach to power through politics. The truly remarkable Julia Maesa, annoyed at having been relegated back into obscurity at the death of her emperor-husband, instigated one coup and survived a reactionary counter-coup unscathed. The first put her monstrous loony of a son (Elagabalus) on the throne, a puny teenager rising from religious obsession to ruler of the world because his mum knew how to persuade Roman legions how to do her bidding. Unfortunately the brat was so awful that his own bodyguard murdered him, but Maesa survived even as many of his favourites were also put to the sword, despite being the most prominent female figure in the reign. And then it just gets better : she now ushered in another coup, persuading these grizzled military assassins to put her grandson on the throne instead. She lived long enough to fully dismantle the remaining infrastructure of Elagabalus's administration and then died. Her daughter, Julia Mamea, went on to be a successful empress-mother.

And then it was over. Southon makes a compelling argument that the title of Last of the Romans could well go to Galla Placidia (died 450 AD), the last normal Roman aristocratic woman, doing normal Roman things behind the scenes like getting married, influencing her husband, summoning St Augustine, advocating for the city of Rome's supremacy in its own empire, that sort of thing :

No emperor or empress after her was as vocally and visibly dedicated to the cause of the city of Rome. None ever voluntarily lived there again, none supported its primacy, none was crowned there and none ever died there peacefully again. In some of her coins, Placidia shows herself crowned with the hand of God reaching from above to bless her with divine sanction. On the reverse, however, stands Victoria, holding a cross but representing, as she always had, the unending triumph of the eternal city of Rome.

Conclusions

What I particularly like is that Southon never tries to make the case that women were automatically better rulers than men. She notes that women were bizarrely and unfairly viewed as susceptible to enacting a peculiar, emotional sort of cruelty when given power, but never pretends that they had innately better judgement than men. They most certainly did not and do not. This book is a plea for recognition and equal treatment, not unfettered approval. 

What comes through clearly is just how much women have been overlooked. Despite the undeniable patriarchical nature of Roman society, they still managed to be kingmakers, heroines, businesswomen, whores (both literal and pejorative), traitors, murderers, theologians, wives, mothers, criminals, leaders... all of human life is here. They were far more in control of their destiny than often shown, even if their treatment by the men could be abominable.

Not that I think Southon is perfect. One particularly weird claim she makes is that focusing on women makes the men less important and derives them of agency. Surely this must be intended as irony ?  But if not, I think the opposite. Focusing on women doesn't change what men did, but it does reframe their actions. It makes them seem less mechanistic and more human, reacting to fellow human beings – doing things because their hateful/abusive/loving/bizarre spouse wanted them to, not just behaving in accordance with Roman social obligations. Both genders benefit from respecting the other; neither is deprived of anything through a more level playing field.

She also has a tendency to replace "slaves" with "enslaved people", which is apparently the done thing in history books lately. I find it distractingly odd : just what do you think "slave" means ? More on that in a forthcoming review. And she definitely has a strong love-hate relationship with her subject, though she does manage to turn that conflict into a glorious display of laugh-out-loud humour. 

Then again, decrying people's "nostalgia" for ancient Rome, and explicitly declaring scare quotes around "Western civilisation", are definitely into stranger territory. Western civilisation is a thing. I think, in many ways, it's a good thing. Rome too could be horrific and brutal, but it contributed art, literature, philosophy, law, engineering, and a scale of political thinking not seen in Europe for centuries afterwards. Being nostalgic for gladiatorial combat or war elephants would indeed be a cause for concern, but I look more sympathetically on those romanticising some aspects of the past – as Southon does for the villa owner in Pompeii – and I certainly don't think Western civilisation deserves any kind of quotation marks. For better or worse, the Romans played their part in shaping it, and the role of women in the process has been unfairly dismissed. More like this, please !

Review : Epic Slavic Myths

Following a now well-established procedure, after that delightful but short offering from Thames & Hudson, I turn to a longer collection of the source material from Flame Tree. MOAR SLAVIC MYTHS, I SAY !

The Review Bit

Except, not really. Flame Tree's Slavic Myths and Tales (introduced by Ema Lakinska) from their "Epic Tales" series doesn't bear much resemblance to Charney and Slapšak's The Slavic Myths at all. While Lakinska here presents a nice introduction to the Slavic pagan gods, claims that any of the tales contained herein actually have much of a direct connection to the earlier theological beliefs are not exactly convincing. Oh, no doubt some of them do. But without expert guidance as to exactly which ones and why, along with counter-arguments, any guesses here would be like throwing darts at a board.

My second disappointment comes from the collected tales here not being nearly as vampire or werewolf-focused as I was hoping for. The horror-story aspect here isn't anywhere near as prevalent as in TSM, so much so that I need to find another book to better explore this.

And... some of the stories here have been sanitised to the point of incoherence. This is weird, because the publisher says they've preserved the original translations in spite of their, ahem, dated terminology. They do indeed contain some horribly racist and misogynist elements : murderous, scheming Jews, Turks who serve no narrative function except to be slaughtered, supernatural temptresses who are cruelly drowned, as well as a good deal of mutilation, ludicrous over-reactions, and even passages which are pretty much straight-up homoerotic. All the stranger, then, to find that some of the tales they include have had all the good bits taken out to absolutely no benefit. It'd at least make sense if they'd all been child-proofed.

What saved this one from being a disaster is that plenty of the stories here do have all the juicy bits left in, and many of the tales are just very good. Also, this time I would query ChatGPT on pretty much every story I read where there were parts that made no sense. And this has helped a lot. ChatGPT provides citations to alternative versions of the texts which are (sometimes) a lot more coherent, as well as suggesting symbolic readings that make the apparent acausal chaos of the narratives far more understandable. I give this one a solid 7/10.

What follows here is my own readings aided by ChatGPT inquiries. The text here is purely my own and I leave out bits where I think the LLM is clearly just wrong.

Themes

I think Lakinska has some interesting but sometimes very questionable points. She says, very reasonably, that ritual leads to myth which leads to folk tales. The role of folklore is to preserve the essence of a myth while giving it changed characters and settings which are more appropriate in a new (i.e. Christian) context. The old gods survive in the stories as legendary, fantastical figures, renamed and left to the reader's interpretation for their symbolic importance. Some stories really are, or at least contain elements of, truly ancient mythology, in that they are about the fundamental nature of the world : cosmology masquerading as morality. They were once believed to contain true explanatory power, but survived long after the belief faded because the story was still emotionally resonant.

That's all fine as far as it goes. But claims that specific tales can tell us about specific gods seems dubious : a recurring conflict between the young and old might represent a theme of renewal of the year*, but it could also persist purely as literary inheritance; things may endure not so much as a direct vestige of paganism, but because they appeal to more primal instincts. And sometimes, as with the cow whose ears are a literal hemp factory (Papalluga, Serbian), or the key-throwing psychotic bear whose ears are portals to another realm (The Bear In The Forest Hut, Polish), or the tit-sucking Prince Marko and his 600 kg hammer (Prince Marko, Croatian), are memorable precisely because of their sheer surrealist madness, not because of any deeper symbolism.

* One particularly egregious example : the story of Princess Miranda's sleeping kingdom has been interpreted by the same analyst as both representing the seasons, light and darkness, and German oppression of Poland.

And there is a lot of memorable surrealism here. ChatGPT is resolute that none of this is due to substance abuse, but I'm not so sure. Feeding bits of oneself to a giant rainbow bird to rescue twelve suicidal eagles (The Eagles, Polish) is not, in my view, the sort of thing that one just comes up with. Yes, mixing of narratives, forgotten symbolism, and plain bad writing can explain a lot. But the choice of the specific decisions as to which motifs to mix, especially when there's no clear causal connection between them, I think we really can attribute to addled brains. Badly-joined stories, especially when chopping the head off one's horse after only moments before learning the language of animals (Ivan, the Firebird and the Wolf, Russian) simply can't be explained by faulty memories or even regular shitty writing.

But in ascribing this to some mental aberration, I don't necessarily mean literal drugs or mushrooms. It can (also) be malnutrition, poor hygiene, and the stresses of living in a world which didn't recognise personality disorders or mental illness (or neurodivergence) as clinical conditions. I think we have to take these kinds of factors very seriously when we're dealing with stories in which people who readily give all their money to charity are subject to repeated moral lessons about the virtues of poverty and the sin of greed. Never mind the one in which God endorses cannibalism (Bulgarian Hospitality, Bulgarian), or the one where the hero realises his tragic mistake only to immediately and pointlessly die by falling down a well*.

* Actually, into a spring. ChatGPT's suggestion that the Croatian "How Quest Sought The Truth" is about how knowledge isn't good enough, and that a previous mistake can't simply be undone, is not implausible. But this is a children's story, and I would have much preferred a straightforward redemption arc : for the hero to finally understand his error only to snuff it in a pointless accident just doesn't work for me, and the metaphysical symbolism of reconciliation in heaven is going to sail over the heads of most ten year olds.

One other questionable claim from Lakinska is more straightforward. She says that the early Slavs had no concept of destiny, but this is confusingly contradicted by tales in which destiny is front and centre. Sometimes it's inescapable, with the protagonists' very attempt to thwart fate being precisely what leads to their demise. This is a time-honoured plot device that's found well beyond fairy tales, of course.

Sometimes it's more subtle. The Serbian story simply called "Fate" has a complex morality in which a good man is dealt a cruel lot in life simply because he was born on an unlucky day, but he manages to work within it by giving everything he has to his literally born lucky daughter-in-law. One day he accidentally refers to a field as his, whereupon it bursts into flame until he corrects himself. This is not a moral tale of "be good and be rewarded, be bad and be punished" – his lazy but lucky brother gets all the wealth – but rather a way of working within assigned destiny. This rather undermines any claim that there was no Slavic belief in fate : there certainly was, and it was philosophically sophisticated. Sometimes there's a lot of thought underneath the surrealist surface.

Common trends

But there are certain recurring motifs which do seem distinctly Slavic. One simple literary device is to suddenly veer into the first person and sign off with " and I was at that feast and I got pissed", which is apparently the equivalent of "once upon a time*". Another is the ineffectual "I told you so" moment, like when a horse warns its rider that the next action is going to cause it serious pain and then notes "oh look, that actually happened", or an eagle who taunts a man (by repeatedly nearly letting him fall to his death) in mimicry of the time when the man was threatening to kill him (a sort of "look what I had to go through" moment). The odd thing is that these aren't the punchline. They are simply short internal events that don't advance the plot, but keep happening again and again.

* The Belarusian "Little Rolling Pea" has a seriously weird intro sequence which thankfully never caught on, which the author promises the reader two cloaks, a sexy lady, and the equivalent of £1.50 for reading his story. Even "It was a dark and stormy night" makes more sense than this.

One other micro-motif that crops up repeatedly is the supernatural creature who promises their guest a gift as a reward (for example, a giant Daddy Snake to the shepherd who rescued his son – The Language Of Animals, Bulgarian), refuses their specific request, but then acquiesces when the guest decides to leave. It's not stated directly, but it feels like they are honour-bound not to let their guest leave empty-handed. This could be an ancient law of hospitality, but it might also be more of a case of simple fairness : I have to reward you for services rendered.

A larger recurring theme is the reward of charity. Again and again we get brothers rescuing animals and acquiring hordes of bestial helpers, usually three, but sometimes up to six. Often this is initially to their personal impoverishment, with the reward of this personal Animal Attack Squad only becoming apparent later on. This also fits nicely with another theme, where most of the hero-protagonists only succeed thanks to their many helpers. Their virtue, unlike the poor chap who gets repeatedly tortured to stop him being greedy even though he's the nicest guy in the story*, is directly and tangibly rewarded.

* The Polish story of "The Good Ferryman And The Water-Nymphs". It must be said that he does keep abducting sexy mermaids, but remember, I said nicest.

Not every hero follows this path though. Some are essentially superheroes who gain powers through magical objects or animals. Prince Marko literally sucks the tits of a fairy-like creature (and he's not a baby or anything) to give him the super-strength to wield his massive hammer; another becomes a hero by passing through the ears of a storm horse (going in reverse removes his powers – The Whirlwind, Polish). A few are simply innately overpowered, especially the nameless prince in the Serbian tale "The Dragon and the Prince". Here, the protagonist is also notable in another way : he meets a mysterious old lady, but instead of telling him how to defeat the dragon, he tells her everything she needs to do. For no reason at all, he already knows everything and also happens to have super strength. It's a tale which is truly boring in its inexplicable weirdness. There's no reason for anything, no moral growth... like a Michael Bay movie, it may have plenty of spectacle, but it's all wasted.

Uncommon tendencies

And the diversity of the stories goes much further. Some are misogynist, some are hugely liberal. One of the more interesting is the Czech tale of "The Wood Lady", which has a young girl quite unmistakably falling in love with a fairy princess : she reacts with physical pleasure to the sight and touch of the fairy and spends all day dancing with her. Her mother's reaction, interestingly, isn't "wicked child !", it's "damn shame she disappeared". Whether the fairy's vanishing is a metaphysical commentary on how same-sex relations are forbidden at a deeper level (e.g. by society) rather than individuals... who knows. But you could certainly read it like that. No such degree of tolerance is found for the seductive temptresses in the Czech "Grandfather's Eyes" though, in which the women are first bound with brambles before being drowned*. Kinky.

* This story also features a sequence in which the eyes of different animals give different perspectives on the world. It doesn't go down this route, unfortunately, but it comes intriguingly close to asking "what is it like to be a bat  owl ?". A missed opportunity for a pre-Nagel philosophical inquiry on panpsychism and idealism...

Even within the individual stories, things are diverse in the extreme. They can veer from deeply metaphorical one moment to completely mental the next : one features a hero who inexplicably forgets his horse can fly and has to be reminded of this by his horse (Princess Miranda, Polish). Or in another, we get a guy who is repeatedly lectured at great and extremely tedious length on how he needs to be a good boy, only for the story to have him reform not through stories at all but through experience (Silyan The Stork, Macedonian). Irony, thy name is fairy tale.

But we also get more sophisticated storytelling, in particular, a lot of tragedy. As we've seen recently, literary tragedy is arguably the result of conflicting moral goods, with characters having needs that simply can't be reconciled. The Ukrainian tale "The Serpent's Wife" is a nice example. Like the Selkie stories, a snake-woman has to leave her husband because he calls her a serpent when she doesn't attend to her duties. But the tragedy here is much more developed : the man, formerly lonely and introverted, becomes arrogant and prideful and forgets himself for just a moment, and she still loves him : unlike most Selkie tales, she takes the time to kiss him goodbye and give him the parting gift of knowledge. The fact that, by her own instruction, he gets to use this to marry the Tsar's daughter about five minutes later feels distinctly off, but doesn't undermine the intended message. 

Various other tales herein contain similar variations on the theme. As well as being compelled to leave by unstated magical destiny for breaking assorted rules, the wife – and I think it's always a wife – often chooses to wish the husband farewell. In some cases they are later reunited, quite unlike the Selkie versions where the woman leaves even her children without a word.

The fact that we get this deep tragedy mixed with a total lack of common sense only makes the stories all the more intriguing. In the Czech tale "The Three Doves", the man gets a telepathic nosebleed that warns him his wife is leaving; when they reunite in a magical castle, she's delighted... but utterly fails to warn him that the forbidden room contains a three-headed dragon*. Of course, in classic fairy tale fashion, Chekhov's Dragon is released by the particularly imbecilic man who gives him water for no reason, whereby his wife is abducted so they're parted again. Moron.

* Both men and women in fairy tales are capable of being thick as shit, and here they're both the latter. Point out the forbidden room : fine. Sensible, even. Not telling him why it's forbidden is idiotic, but he's at least equally brainless for not asking the question.

Old magic

Sometimes, this lack of reasoning fatally undermines any message the story intends. We need to know what the characters are thinking to understand the chain of causality, and without this, the tales often feel like just a "bunch of stuff that happened". 

But in other cases it may not be bad storytelling at all, but the whole point. ChatGPT tells me that Max Luthi – and I've not looked this up for myself – had the idea that the emotional depthlessness, or weightlessness, of the stories is by design. Instead of giving us a detailed description of a character's inner monologue or emotional turmoil, emotions are cast as external symbols. The emotions are found not in direct descriptions of what the characters are thinking, but what they do and what they encounter.

So to an extent, the apparent shallowness is superficial. The imagery shouldn't be interpreted literally : not only the text but the symbols themselves must be read. Conventional stories have character depth and specific lessons to impart; the wonder tales sacrifice depth for breadth and versatility. This makes it damn hard to interpret their original intent, but also makes them far more widely applicable.

And this helps explain how they can get away with sometimes horrific levels of violence. In the Czech tale of "The Golden Spinning Wheel", the main character has her hands and feet cut off and her eyes gouged out. Instead of being traumatised for life, she just gets on with things. Likewise, talking animals and shapeshifters cause absolutely nobody the slightest bit of surprise because they all occupy the same narrative space : everything is used as a symbol. Nothing is literal. So to say the stories lack depth needs an important qualification that it depends how you read them; in some ways, some of them might be just as deep as any Greek myth.

Quite likely, some of these themes really do extend back to pre-Christian era. Certain motifs like the "obstacle flight", or the "duck horcrux*" are so common that they almost certainly do have pagan origins, even if we can't be sure of the details. I think of them as descended beliefs. They aren't a straightforward record of what early people's believed, but the result of continuous change and development from genuinely early origins.

* A common motif in which a sorcerer hides their power inside a sequence of animals, often ending in an egg inside a duck. 

A really interesting possibility here is that some of the animal beliefs might be shamanic, whereby humans and animals are thought to form a continuum. Essentially, an animal is just a human wearing a skin, or indeed vice-versa : we're all the same underneath. This explains the apparent bestiality in, for example, the Czech story "The Bear, The Eagle and the Fish" in which the daughters of a count are all married to various animals and produce actual animal babies. But again, I doubt the author really had this directly in mind when they wrote it. More likely, they inherited a literary tradition but one which did have genuine archaic origins from a truly ancient belief system.

And so I don't think the author here is really quite correct to say that there are aspects of the god Perun in the bear in "The Bear In The Forest Hut". Or rather, it needs more qualification and development : the psychotic key-throwing bear* (the one with the Tardis ears**) might have ideas inherited and developed from Perun, but I don't think it's at all likely the tale was recorded in a deliberate attempt to record any beliefs that if you go down to the woods today, the gods will give you a big surprise.

* In her summary, the author utterly neglects to mention that the bear tries to kill the girl and instead only notes that he "gives her treats", which is a bit like saying that Darth Vader was a competent administrator and neglecting everything else.

** Hemp factories, portals to kingdoms, and superhero costume changing room..  ears are tremendously useful in Slavic tales, but nobody seems to know why.

Conclusions

I want to end with a few more mentions of some of my favourite stories :

• Bulgarian Hospitality : in which god comes damn close to approving cannibalism and the man in question is absolutely happy to murder his own child. Even weirder, the emotional weightlessness doesn't work here, because he does the deed in secret so as not to upset his wife.
• The Serbian tale of The Three Brothers : a case of a ruined text. In the original Serbian (so sayeth the chatbot), the three brothers have a sister. While they go off into the world and each rescue animals, she gets a set of iron teeth, a whetstone, and becomes a cannibal. She kills, roasts, and eats their own mother until one of the brothers spots her and his rescued dogs kills her. The contrast between the brother's selflessness (with the animals having further roles in helping them later on) and the daughter's utmost selfishness could not be greater... and all of that is lost in this version. Oh, and it ends with one of the brothers leaping over a fucking massive ditch for really no reason at all.
• The Czech tale of The Devil's Brother In Law also has the most interesting bits excised. Our hero is driven away by his evil stepmother, but in the original he experiences forced conscription and gets to (unwittingly) boil his stepmother and other tormentors in cauldrons in Hell. Fascinatingly, the Devil here doesn't tempt anyone into sin, but actually plays an active role in saving them from damnation. Rather than the Prince of Evil, he's more like the ultimate backstop : he doesn't actually want to torture anyone, but he absolutely will if people are beyond salvation.
• Another Czech story, The Bird With The Golden Gizzard is a messed-up version of the goose that laid the golden egg. Here, the bird has giblets than give power and wealth : the heart will make you king, the gizzard gives gold. The introductory characters are completely lost, the boy who eats the gizzard is (much later) drugged by a bar wench to vomit it back up whereupon she immediately eats it, then he just happens to find leaves that turn people into goats and back again so he uses that to revenge himself. Then he marries Gizzard Girl because of course he does.
• The Ukrainian tale of The Vampire and Saint Michael is one of few stories here with genuine horror elements. The vampire in this one is more a case of demonic possession in which a princess forgets to cross herself before bathing and gets taken by the devil. Placed in a coffin in a church, nobody can enter to pray for her because she eats them and leaves only the bones. The hero hides in her coffin to save her by demanding marriage, so what we have here is literally a demented sexy vampire that could have been lifted straight out of True Blood.
• The Serbian version of Saint George is a sort of mash-up of The Silmarillion and Aliens. Here the saints order the world among themselves much as the Valar do following the song of the Ainur. Seeing the Trojans turn to sin, Mary – yes, that one, the compassionate nice one – decides that the best solution is to nuke the site from orbit (i.e. with thunderbolts), whereupon the thunder god (a.k.a. Saint Elias) says, "no no Mary, let's give them a terrible winter first. Oh, that didn't work. Okay let's try smallpox. Bugger. Right, bring on the dragon, and if that doesn't work, then we'll get smiting". This all puts things in a very different context from how the tale is usually told.

The acausality of the narratives can be at once maddening, frustrating, and wondrous. In the worst tales, literally anything can happen at any moment; they can be little more than word salad. In the better stories, the spontaneity might be a reflection of real life, how things are genuinely unpredictable and seemingly random. In the Croatian tale of The Wonder-Working Lock, the apparently happily-ever-after moment is ruined by the sudden appearance of the King of the Sea, who has never once been previously mentioned. But he at least serves a clear narrative purpose : our hero has an all-powerful lock, and he must finally prove his worth without his magical aid. It's badly constructed, but at least it has a point to it. Only in the greatest tales does everything serve a clear narrative purpose and simultaneously flows naturally from one sequence to another, with apparent inconsistencies being explained by later revelations.

And we should also not forget that modern surrealism is very much a thing, e.g. Futurama, Monty Python, Rick & Morty. We enjoy silliness, so there's no reason to suppose people of the past didn't as well. They wanted entertainment, after all. Likewise with sexuality : we should be careful about reading in coded symbolism, but The Wood Lady is as close as the genre ever gets to hot lesbian fairy action. Not everything is deep metaphor, and while we shouldn't try to see everything in Freudian terms, we also shouldn't deny the contributions of homosexuality in archaic literature. 

Other sociological tendencies are more obvious. Throughout, we get stories of commoners rising to the heights of social success, but we have very little questioning of the social stratification itself. We might get the odd king being humbled here and there, even having to learn manual labour in the Serbian "A Trade Before Everything". But nobody ever stops to think about whether the underlying social order isn't, maybe, just bollocks.

And there's an overwhelming preference for the conflict between the young and old to favour the young. The elderly aren't always evil by any means, but generational strife massively favours the next generation (a nice exception occurs in the Croatian "Stribor's Forest", in which the mother is treated cruelly, but this is much later). We have, I suppose, a fascinating mixture of progression and conservative forces all at once. Dragons which can turn into rabbits, bestiality, mutilation, a giant three-headed dragon that rides a horse*... yep, all good. Social reform ? Now you're just being silly.

* Three Doves, Czech.

In the end, I think what we've got here are some bloody good stories, but they can rarely lay claim to the status of myth proper. They have the versatility, but often too much so : there are too many ambiguities, too many ways of reading the tale, to give them explanatory power or ready symbolism, and they lack any authority to impose any single interpretation on them. That they can be interpreted to mean anything results in them being meaningless – the Greek or Norse myths often have at least some clear, unavoidable message that fairy tales lack. The descent has proceeded too far, but every so often – and not that unusually – there's enough left to give a story some serious clout. They are worth reading, but this means some serious effort to understand what the bloody hell they're on about; some are simplistic bits of faff, but others are layers of complexity all designed to deliver a silly joke. I think they're wonderful.

The Mouse Dystopia

Here's a rather nice little video on Universe 25, a.k.a. the Mouse Utopia :

This is something I've come across many times over the years. I'm sure I've read at least one long read on it, though I'm not going to trawl through everything to find that again.

Anyway, the basic story is simple. A bunch of mice were given unlimited resources, perfect conditions, and the result was an absolute disaster. Not only was the result a population collapse to total extinction, but the mice demonstrated weird pathological behaviours : some became constantly aggressive, others retreated from mouse society altogether, some became obsessed with personal grooming. Mothers ate their own young and reproduction completely ceased.

The popular reading is that comfort kills. We need something to strive against, the thinking goes, something difficult to prevent us sliding into sloth and indulgence.

A more sophisticated interpretation, as the video presents, came from the original investigator. What went wrong was not excessive comfort, says this alternative interpretation, but a lack of clear social roles. The mouse society collapsed because they had no meaningful activities to structure their little lives around; in effect they failed from sheer ennui.

Both of these are tempting readings from the brief popular description I presented. It's certainly hard to see people taking literally deadly selfies and not see more than a little resemblance to the grooming-obsessed mice who beautified themselves to death. This is part of some deep appeal in the human psyche to a state of decline. Like the myth of Atlantis, there's something perversely romantic about the notion of a society which reaches the heights of glory only to fail and never return.

And yet, it's all bollocks. All of it.

After some prolonged discussion with ChatGPT, I've come to the conclusion that what's really going on is likely far, far simpler, and any resemblance to modern Western society is entirely coincidental. What U25 tells us about excessive comfort and the need for meaningful social roles is, I think, exactly nothing. This doesn't mean that these things don't matter. Quite likely, they do. But it does seem that U25 can't tell us a bloody thing about their effects either on humans or, importantly mice. The experiment appears to be yet another case of a popular finding having serious flaws and being massively over-interpreted.

Major caveat : ChatGPT provided many links to support its assertions, but I haven't checked them. I would expect a small percentage of these claims to be wrong, so by all means, do go through the full linked discussion and check them for yourself. However, unless it's made a really serious mistake, it seems very unlikely that the overall claims here are anywhere near as flawed as what really went on in the hell-hole that was Universe 25.

With that in mind, it looks like this a utopia only in an incredibly narrow and extremely stupid sense. Yes, it provided the mice with unlimited resources, and yes, in principle it could have supported a larger population than the maximum value it reached before the collapse. But two absolutely crucial factors are missing from the popular narrative that fatally undermines any meaningful attempt to map the mice to men.

First, there were no good controls for density. Earlier and later experiments did hold the population at lower levels by removing mice, but only when the density had reached a level which was already known to be above comfort levels : these too saw similar behaviours in the mice to U25. At no point does there appear to have been any attempt to either hold the population stable at a very low level, or even at a moderate level but during the phase while the numbers were still increasing (i.e. before the self-destructive behaviours began to happen).

This blows the idea of "excessive comfort" right out of the water. The mice were given little stimuli beside other mice and food. No attempt was made to provide enough space for the mice to live without having to constantly deal with other mice : sure, they always had enough to eat and drink, but they had little way to meaningfully escape from other mice when conflict arose. The idea that this is "excessive comfort" is absurd : it would be more like being locked in a restaurant with thousands of other people and expecting a flourishing society because you could have as much to eat as you wanted. Hate your neighbour ? Who cares, another steak will make you feel better !

This is not quite to say that sheer, simple, mouse density was the dystopian driver. It might well be that with a suitable rearrangement of the furniture, more compartments and better division of the space, U25 could have indeed sustained its nominal maximum mouse population. But it does look highly credible that density is the root cause : for any given configuration, if you have so many mice that they can't escape each other, eventually you'll get continuous unbearable interactions. Maybe a better configuration could, somehow, have allowed a sort of stable mouse version of Biosphere 2*, where they'd naturally regulate their own breeding, but that's a very different and more sophisticated social engineering proposition.

* I'm aware that no breeding occurred in Biosphere 2. Bisophere 2 meets Love Island meets Big Brother, then.

The more obvious difficulty is that here the mice were imprisoned with no way to leave of their own accord. They had no choice but to endure a hell of their own breeding they simply couldn't foresee. The limitless food becomes irrelevant if psychologically there were just too many mice.

Interestingly, there were experiments done in which problematic mice were removed, but unfortunately, only limited data is available on what happened both to them and their parent colonies. It does seem that there were changes in the transplanted mice, but how much and over what timescales is unclear. On the colonies, less data is available : they didn't recover, but by this point the mice had been living in hell for a prolonged period. It seems entirely plausible that they were now permanently psychologically damaged.

And possibly, physiologically damaged as well. This is the second crucial factor that goes unreported, one that's hiding in plain sight. For the Wikipedia article contains something so obvious that overlooking it renders the whole experiment null and void: the cages were only cleaned every six to eight weeks.

Two months ! Two months of two thousand stinking mice. That's not a utopia at all. That's a cess pit. 

And this was already known in 1973. I can see how things like control experiments for density might get overlooked, but this is surely such an egregious failure of reporting that journalists deserve a good chunk of the blame here. Even accounting for a possible belief that mice are essentially just little furry mechanical machines with no psychological needs (such mistaken ideas being more common the past), not recognising the need for basic sanitation is a crazy thing to leave out of the story. 

"Ah yes, this experiment shall be absolutely perfect for these mice. They're going to have a fine time of it, breeding their little hearts out, having all the food they could want, no predators, no way to escape their neighbours after a fight and only having to worry about cleaning every two months."

This is palpably a silly experiment, but the way it's been reported is demonstrably awful. It means nothing for the mice and even less for humans.

And these two factors work in tandem. Had the mouse density been kept lower for a sustained period, the effect of the cleaning frequency could have been examined more carefully. Perhaps at a lower density, mice would naturally avoid dirty areas, which means the situation could be extremely non-linear. It's possible that the population of a lower density could be sustained for a longer time or even indefinitely at the same cleaning frequency, but at a higher density, disease might become prevalent all the more rapidly. Without that density control, we don't know if there wasn't some innate flaw in the rest of the experimental setup, something else – another unknown unknown – that was causing madness in the mice. Given that mice, usually, are hardly the most difficult animal to maintain in captivity, that possibility doesn't look all that unlikely. Something had clearly gone very, very wrong in Universe 25.

Unless something ever repeats the original setup exactly, and does the appropriate control experiments, we'll never know for sure what the problem was. Fortunately for mouse-kind, this seems very unlikely to ever occur because the thing looks strikingly unethical and the possibility of mapping the result to humans is essentially impossible, making it incredibly hard to justify to any reasonable ethics committee. "Yes, I'd like to trap two thousand mice in unsanitary conditions for two months in order to check whether people get miserable if they spend too long in decadent luxury"... this would probably be grounds for ending tenure with the reasonable justification that the investigator has gone insane.

I've suggested that the driving factor behind this dystopia is density, but I don't mean that there's a simple linear relation between density and mouse comfort levels. Nor can we eliminate other possibilities : maybe the mice would still have exhibited pathological behaviours even at low levels due to something else. Clearly, though, pet mice don't usually go insane like this, so I rather doubt it – unless there was something truly strange here, like a chemical leak or something.

All we can really conclude from the Mouse Asylum is that if you give mice unlimited resources, take little account of their psychology, only clean them every couple of months, and make no attempts to control their population, you get a catastrophic hell-hole leading to extinction. ChatGPT tried to call this a "valid observation", but to my mind this has all the same validity as observing that a rock is grey or that a table is made of wood. Nothing unexpected occurred here. It offers no profound psychological insight besides "miserable mice all died". The additional tragedy is the mythmaking that grew up around this complete and total non-result.

The Bothersome Bias Of The BBC

Accusing the BBC of bias is a classic knee-jerk response that generally indicates the commenter is either a) a moron or b) politically extreme. At least, those saying that the BBC is hugely right-wing because it does or doesn't cover story X, Y, Z, are basically equalled by those saying that the BBC is hugely left-wing because it does or doesn't cover story X, Y, Z. It's not at all unusual to see people both claiming that the BBC is a horde of raging anti-Semites and that it's enabling Palestinian genocide. 

Spoiler alert : it isn't. 

I don't believe that the BBC has this sort of straightforward bias on any political position. I don't think it's even, as is sometimes more credibly claimed, especially pro-establishment, given the amount of airtime it's given to Nigel Fuckface over the years.

And I hope don't need to spell out that any attempt to be politically neutral will never be 100% perfect because that's literally impossible; detecting any slightly lean one way or another on any individual position demonstrates exactly nothing and is just a waste of energy. I'm not going on a more general rant here. If you're fervently convinced the BBC does have some massive political preference, then this isn't the post for you.

Instead, I want to point out three other specific areas where I think the BBC is genuinely biased. The first is one I've not seen much discussed elsewhere, the other two are mentioned more frequently but I hope to give an angle on these that's at least presented less often.

This post is strictly anecdotal and I make no claim to empirical verification whatever. I'm only posting this because the effects seem so strong that while the magnitude is certainly open to debate, I think there's very little chance indeed that the effects themselves aren't real.

The first is a victim bias. That is, on BBC Breakfast at least, it seems to me that victims of crimes are put front and centre. Their responses are overwhelmingly the ones which are aired first and given far longer coverage than any other involved parties (except politicians) or any discussion of wider context. Little is said about the cause of crime, and the morning session, deliberately touchy-feely though it is, becomes barely more than a victim campaign group that tends to want to punish the criminals and nothing else – even without ever saying so explicitly.

Two examples : with the murders committed by Valdo Calocane (and similarly for the Southport murders), the prospect that the criminal is mentally ill is mentioned, but the coverage given to the victims and their desired response not to treat him as such is far, far greater. The result is that the idea that the man needs medical intervention more than punishment is never seriously considered. Second, the current obsession is with the possible release of two men who murdered a police officer. Again, discussions of the context of the early release scheme aren't zero, but they're very much on the back foot compared to hearing from what the victims think.

Of course, I'm not saying that the victims don't deserve a voice. But it seem ludicrous to me to essentially only give the victims a voice and not that of independent experts. For the criminally insane, we deserve to hear from mental health professionals. For the prospect of early release, we need to hear from prison officers. And yes, technically we do, but only a very little bit. Any sort of complexity is drowned out by emotion of the people who are understandably distraught.

It isn't the job of journalists to stand for victims. Campaign groups are certainly entitled to do this, but independent journalism should present the different sides more equally. There are other factors involved besides the victim's emotions and the viewer needs to know what these are. They can't make an informed judgement if the only thing they hear clearly is how upset people are.

I'm not claiming that this is by any means unique to the BBC or even that the BBC does this more strongly than other media outlets; it's also entirely possible that BBC Breakfast is worse than other BBC programs for this by its very nature. It may well be that if you watch the news later in the day, or specialist programs, you get a much more multi-faceted view of an issue. But for serious and violent crimes, BBC Breakfast is little better than a tub-thumping call to "lock 'em all up and throw away the key". The problem is that if this is your main news-watching time, as it is for me, then it doesn't matter if other programs have more sophisticated commentary : you'll come away having heard from those who are most closely involved with the case at the huge expense of more objective professional evaluators.

The second issue is the more well-known "both sidesism", expressed brilliantly in this classic webcomic. I won't go into this at any length, but I just want to mention one especially frustrating aspect of this : absolutely everything is presented as awful. By interrogating all people as though they were equally (in)competent, treating all positions as though they were equally respectable – or more to the point, disrespecting everything equally – nothing is ever allowed to be seen as good. Everything must have some downsides. Everything must cause problems for someone. Everyone must be cynical. It feeds this "grumpy old man" habit compulsive addiction to expect everything to be awful and therefore to interpret everything as awful. The result is perpetual misery.

Look, there's enough which is self-evidently horrible in the world as it is. "Manufactured misery" is simply not a thing that needs to exist. All news outlets do this, but my point is that even if you're relentlessly centrist/neutral, the result is the same. At least if you're avowedly pro-some position or other, you're allowed to enjoy it when your side gets a win. The centrist BBC just appears to hate everything.

The third, final issue, is topic fixation. Topic priorities are a more obvious and related issue, but refusing to let go of a story long after what as initially breaking news has well and truly broken, seems to me to be less discussed. This tendency comes and goes and at the moment it's on a bit of a low, though they are absolutely obsessed with this whole "early release" thing as though there was nothing else worth talking about. Even when nothing new of any substance has occurred, still they must repeat the same story day after day.

The reason I say this is currently on a low is because this was much, much worse when they were obsessed with medial problems and charities. They mentioned Rob Burrow and his motor neurone disease to the point where it started getting downright creepy and weird, and the same for Deborah James and bowel cancer : these are both important topics, but the focus on these individuals began to feel like the behaviour of a stalker, not someone genuinely concerned. All other conditions and individuals were excluded because these were apparently Special People, and nobody else experiencing any suffering seemed to count.

There comes a point where raising awareness is just no longer possible because awareness levels are now saturated : BBC Breakfast did this to the nth degree, continuing to report as though their deaths were a recent event months and even years later. This is the Matthew Effect of cumulative advantage of the most perverse sort. Shall we seek out other causes and activists and give them a boost by giving them TV time ? Nah, let's stick with the ones we already know about. Nobody else is important enough.

Look, I love the BBC, and I get dismayed when people call it biased in the usual ways; it is, hands down, one of the best news sources in the world and one of Britain's greatest institutions. It isn't perfect, but that's not a realistic standard for criticism. But not expecting perfection does not eliminate the need for constructive suggestions. These three areas, at least, are surely areas where things can be improved without needing massive systemic overhaul. The underlying structure is sound, but like everything else, it needs a good sweep and a lick of paint from time to time.

The User Experience Of Our Digital Life

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

What is UX and how is it so bad ?

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

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

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

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

Yes, some of my compatriots are actually mad.

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

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

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

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

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

It's all the fault of those frackin' toasters

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

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

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

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

Being pro or anti-AI is like being a racist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review : The Odyssey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The (Greek) Tragedy Of The West

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we learn from this ? The author suggests :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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