Saved By The Bigots ?

I saw a Guardian article appear on my phone's news feed, "No, America is not on the brink of civil war". Googling this to provide the link for this post, I immediately found another article, also in the Guardian, "The next US civil war is already here". I suppose if we follow the usual guidance that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, we could only say the next American civil war will happen at some point. Which isn't very helpful.

The article saying the war is already here is nothing special, it assumes all the standard narratives of polarisation, a descent into fascism, etc. The article saying it's not going to happen is much more interesting. It has some valuable points, but I think ultimately it's far too optimistic.

Let's start with the good points :

In general, behaviours are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.

This links back to the idea of armchair bigots : people who won't lift a finger to prevent fascist atrocities, who will vote for despots and might even attend the odd rally, but won't actually instigate anything themselves. Some of them might volunteer to join the despot's militia, but very few indeed will actually pro-actively go around setting up said militias. At some deep level, for all that they profess otherwise, the vast majority of people like being told what to do. They like having a framework in which to operate, a step-by-step system to follow. Few indeed want to be involved with setting up that system in the first place. Hardly anyone likes writing instruction manuals.

In a sense, people are a lot like wildebeest - once one jumps into the crocodile-infested river, off they all go, but it's very rare to want to be the first one in.

With this in mind the author's other points can be interpreted with far less rose-tinted glasses. I strongly agree that people do profess different views in polls than they actually hold. But this means they're perfectly comfortable with being perceived as holding those views. And, crucially, the big ugly elephant in the room is the guy they voted for. The classic quote, "I know he lies, but I believe him anyway"* would seem to apply. They were quite happy to vote for someone who endorses all manner of actually incoherent, self-contradictory lunacy. 

* I heard something similar on the radio the other day regarding Boris breaking lockdown rules : "he shouldn't do that, but it won't change my vote." I cannot understand people who want people in charge of them who repeatedly demonstrate themselves to be untrustworthy. I just don't get it.

So while perhaps the following may well be true :

In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.

Indeed, had even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt, with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as “needed” to achieve their goals – things would have gone much, much differently.

...we probably shouldn't read too much into it. Recall Trump's speech afterwards where he gave a speech almost as if he were held at gunpoint asking the coup attempt (for that is what it was) to end. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that if the election had, somehow, been overturned, then vast numbers of Republican voters would have assembled for a counter-coup ? Is there anyone who could envisage Trump himself standing down ?

Of course not. The majority of voters may or may not really believe in a stolen election, but that hardly matters. They are quite clearly willing to go along with the claim to get what they want. They do behave as if the beliefs were true when other people act on them. So I am not in the least persuaded by the author's other claims :

We are not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

A consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and surveys that America is facing an epidemic of “fake news”, which was leading people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavoury political candidates...   

It turned out that, contrary to the initial hysteria, “fake news” stories were viewed by a relatively small number of voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or anti-Clinton “fake news” by social media sites already seemed firmly committed to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is, “fake news” is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump’s support more broadly.

Two words : Fox News. Labelling "fake news" as only the online Alex Jones stuff is a catastrophic mistake. That's even leaving aside the claim that fake news didn't reach many people, which I'm anyway wary of.

Contrary to narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect participants’ genuine views. 

Back across the pond, there are huge numbers of people convinced that Brexit is somehow a good thing despite this being in manifest, glaring contradiction to the facts. Likewise there are still people convinced that Trump was a good president. It doesn't matter which specific claims they believe and which they reject - that's irrelevant. The problem is they believe in some aspect, some sufficient element of the grand narrative. They believe in it enough to vote for a man whose words are literally less intelligent than predictive text messaging. The specific beliefs are nowhere near as important as the overall feeling.

All you need to overturn a democracy is enough people willing to do nothing. It doesn't matter how many card-carrying fascists you have provided everyone else is willing to tolerate the hardcore being in charge. Pushing into the details, really trying to tease out of people that actually yeah, Trump's inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's, is pointless folly. We're in a post-truth world precisely because even when you can get these people to admit they're wrong, it doesn't change anything. They still want things even when shown they're in contradiction to the facts. Strangely, the author does seem to understand this, but reaches entirely the wrong conclusion :

It should not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually no effect on political preferences or voting behaviour; misperceptions are generally not driving political alignments to begin with – nor are they driving political polarization.

Correcting any individual belief won't help because this doesn't change the sentiment. But it is absolutely necessary to stem the tide of lies because they are what provoke the all-important feelings in the first place. It is not any individual misconception that drives political beliefs - that's a crazy prospect - it's the overall flow. So I agree that America probably isn't on the verge of a civil war, but I think it's foolhardy in the extreme to say that it's democracy isn't in real peril. 

The author is right to point out that polling data may not reflect real beliefs, but I think he may have fallen into a behaviouristic fallacy that people will act in neat accordance with their perceived truths. The problem is that people are part rational, part irrational, and also part just plain lazy. And I for one wouldn't recommend relying on laziness to save democracy.

Corruption and the social contract

So many parties at Downing Street now one wonders if Boris had misunderstood the entire concept of a political party... 

Some level of corruption in government is, alas, inevitable. There is simply no way to get hundreds of people into a high-pressure, high-stakes situation for protracted periods without some of them doing something underhand. Can't be done. A lot of idealists cling to the idea that with total transparency and accountability, everyone would behave like saints. They won't. Human beings just aren't like that. There is a fundamental need for privacy even in politics; sometimes it's necessary to say things - unpleasant things - privately that could not possibly be said publicly. If you don't have a degree of privacy, you won't have a functional political system, and it's enormously naïve to think otherwise.

To put it another way : politicians are just like everyone you've ever met. How many of them are totally innocent, incorruptible under any and all circumstances ? How many can resist all temptation and follow every rule ?

None of them. Not one.

But...

That's not a justification. It's not even an excuse. When you get found out, you pay the penalty. A real, tangible, direct consequence, not something as ephemeral as a change in the mood of public opinion. You lose your job. You pay a fine. You might even be imprisoned. You may well recover afterwards, but you take a hit. You don't carry on as normal.

Not all corruption is equal. Greasing the wheels when negotiating with foreign dignitaries is wholly different from enriching yourself from the public purse. If in a crisis you negotiate a contract, for, say, PPE, and you speed things up by going directly to your friend, then as long as you get a reasonable deal then most people will probably forgive you. Your penalty might, in such a case, be nothing more than an apology. 

(But even then, you do apologise. You don't avoid the fact that this was not the ideal course of action.)

Of course, if you don't get a good deal - if, say, you have to throw all the PPE away because it doesn't meet the required standards - that's different. In that case the deal has been good for exactly no-one but yourself.

If some corruption might be excusable by necessity, some definitely isn't. Breaking the rules because you lack even the rudimentary self-control to avoid a piece of cake - frickin' cake ! - and then feel the need to cover this up afterwards is inexcusable. The fact that people thought you deserved a surprise birthday party in the midst of your own lockdown speaks volumes about how seriously they don't take you.

In some ways it's the sheer pettiness of the lockdown parties that I find most offensive. Birthday parties, Christmas quizzes, leaving dos... these serve no purpose at all apart from gratification. They've not corrupt for a higher purpose. They're not even corrupt for anything special at all. At least if someone had been found in bed with a cocaine-snorting hooker you could understand why they felt the need to lie about it, even if the act itself was far more morally dubious. But lying and obfuscating because they had cake ?

If you're going to lie about something that petty, if you don't even have the courage to admit that really rather minor misdemeanour, what the hell else are you hiding ? You ask people to do far, far more than avoid birthday parties, but if you as leader can't even avoid that... you are contemptible. It doesn't matter if you were there for only ten minutes - if you can't bear to avoid even something that petty, how can you expect people to avoid the things that really matter ?

The privilege of being the ones who get to set the rules has obvious, tangible benefits besides the power itself. As such a prominent figure, you can reap enormous financial rewards through lectures, books, interviews etc. This is easy enough so long as you have the competency to actually run the high office to which you were elected. And that's absolutely fine, your perspective in that case is valuable.

But if you aren't... if you're only there because of corruption rather than in spite of it, then resorting to underhand practises for your own enrichment becomes all the more probable. That's why the current scandals engulfing Westminster speak so much to what we all knew from the start : that the current administration is rotten to the core. This is not normal. This is a case, I think, in which it's the individuals who are to blame more than the system.

If you have to have corruption, it can't be like this. It can't be egregious. It can't be over petty personal issues like cake. It's can't amount to admitting the rules were broken but then sticking two fingers up to the public and then ignoring them.

The price paid for the responsibility of high office is twofold. First, you have to do the job competently. The rules you set must make sense and serve a clear purpose. Second, at least for the duration of your term, you have to set a higher standard than you might expect of the general public - if you expect the majority to meet your requirements, you yourself must exceed them. This Tory government has played fast and loose with the first, especially lately as it flagrantly lifts restrictions as a distraction, and consistently failed miserably on the second.

We should not expect perfection. Some minor breaches can be forgiven, if they are admitted swiftly and with an apology. We can't expect divine perfection from anyone. But - blimey ! - we can expect better than a government that actively tries to justify breaking its own rules rather than apologising, who continuously lie and deceive and conspire. Who want others to avoid funerals but themselves can't even avoid birthday cake. Quite simply, they have to go.

Don't Look Up At Munich

The other day I happened to watch a seemingly odd pairing of new movies : Munich : The Edge of War followed by Don't Look Up. Both are excellent on their own merits, but I think the combination, strange though it may seem, is even better. I will give some brief description of each but it's the linked theme of forgiveness that I most want to explore, which will necessitate some minor spoilers.

First, a reminder that I don't believe the message intended by an artist is necessarily all that important to the merits of their work. I have become quite convinced that it's the message the audience takes away that's more important and often more interesting. Whether a character's actions can be construed as good or evil is - almost - entirely in the eye of the beholder, regardless of whether the author intended any particular moral lesson or not.

Yet that's no reason to discount what the author was trying to argue either, particularly so in these cases. Munich is a conscious attempt to rehabilitate Chamberlain, often viewed by the modern British as cowardly and ineffectual. Without digging into the accuracies of the movie, as it stands, I think it largely succeeds in its goal. The pressures of movie-Chamberlain to avoid war at all costs come through very clearly, his earnest intent to save millions of lives understandable, and the viewer feels for themselves the tension, the difficulty of the choices he had to make in the face of extreme consequences.

In particular, towards the end of the film movie-Chamberlain is presented with an offer. He can either continue with the peace talks he's been working on carefully for many months, or he can accept a radically different plan, with 12 hours notice, from a complete stranger. The viewer is given the distinct impression that this plan might indeed be the better choice, but he refuses - and the film is skilled enough that you can appreciate why. Thinking it over afterward, there is no guarantee this plan would have worked anyway. The peace talks were all but guaranteed, the intervention of a stranger is a wild stab in the dark. While the viewer could certainly conclude that the movie-Chamberlain is naïve, it would be rather harder to describe him as cowardly.

Was Chamberlain right to negotiate peace with Hitler ? The movie ends by saying it bought the British time to re-arm, but equally, it must have allowed Hitler even more time to prepare. From movie-Chamberlain's perspective, it seems clear that Hitler is contemptible. But it was not at all clear that Hitler was truly monstrous. Horrible, certainly. A dangerous, fanatic absolutely, who shouldn't have been anywhere near political office. But actually evil ? There was not much at all to suggest what was going to happen next; from the movie version, at least, Chamberlain's approach is, arguably, neither cowardly nor stupid. It was a sensible approach, given the ignorance of the nature of the beast across the negotiating table.

In Don't Look Up, the twofold threats are a bit different. The main one comes from a gigantic comet that's going to cause a mass extinction six months from its discovery. This, in movie science land, is a difficult but not quite unsolvable problem. The second problem is vastly more challenging : politics. An inept US administration that's deep in the pocket of big tech, that cares more about polling than reality, a society that obsesses over happiness and washes over all unpleasantness with platitudes, a group of truth-talking scientists coming up against a crowd bent on avoiding "division" and a wider public who barely believe in the asteroid at all... remind you of anything ?

Personally I think the movie's a great piece of satire, hilarious and horrifying all at the same time. It's a very thinly-veiled attack on climate/covid/inset-crisis-here deniers, but you can also read a lot more into it than that. It's enormously pro-science and anti-fake news. You could also view it as anti-woke, determined as it is that facts are facts and that denial of them is just fucking stupid. This is a sentiment that I largely share - despite philosophical misgivings there are cases where observational reality can smack you in the face like, well, a colossal asteroid. At which point any doubt about the nature of truth is rendered pointless. Not every viewpoint has merit.

(This is not to say that how we define knowledge isn't hugely important, difficult, and interesting. It is all of those. Nevertheless, there exists a regime in which trying to avoid, rather than analyse, observational findings is a very clear sign of delusion and insanity.)

The movie gives us an all-too-accurate satire on how the various media and political organisations respond to the crisis, with a fantastically believable stream of bullshit from various quarters. As well as being frequently hilarious, it's not afraid to give numerous impassioned and deadly serious speeches, especially on the need for a common framework of knowledge. In my opinion it's a marvellous blend of emotions that's executed brilliantly. It's a shame that the people this movie is really aimed at are never going to learn anything from it, because as it quite correctly points out, these people are largely just very very stupid (and/or, more charitably led astray).

At the end of the movie the approaching comet becomes visible to the naked eye. Finally at this point the doubts begin to pass away, but by this point it's already too late.

The unifying theme between these two movies - at least the one that was triggered for me - is how we deal with monsters and idiots. As the old saying goes, the powerful and the stupid have in common that they don't alter their views to fit the facts, but alter the facts to fit their views. Chamberlain tried to appease a monster. Some of the protagonists in Don't Look Up try and avoid stoking division, even when there is only one possible outcome from the impact of a 9 km comet. Chamberlain, it could be argued, couldn't have known that appeasement wouldn't work*, but the fictional protagonists of Don't Look Up don't have that excuse.

* At least not as a long-term strategy. As a temporary, diversionary tactic it might have some success.

This is a dilemma I've raised before. Treating people like idiots is probably the surest way to drive them away, yet trying to placate them runs the risk of legitimising their stupidity. I like very much the emphasis in Don't Look Up that not everything needs to be a platitude, it's okay to disagree and have arguments. We don't all have to agree on everything. We can yell at each other and make peace afterwards.

Perhaps that's a message that hasn't been clear enough in all the discussions of filter bubbles. Perhaps they're more like blankets - when someone says a mean thing, it's all too easy to dive back under the warm snuggly covers. If you're used to everyone always telling you you're right, you won't be able to deal with a proper argument. It's not just that filter bubbles (mainstream media as well as the online kind) cause you to lack or even reject information, it's that they diminish the emotional fortitude needed to deal with disagreement. In short, you become a thin-skinned ninny, resorting to ever more desperate bullshit in attempts to avoid dealing with the real issues.

This seems a bit of a catch 22. If you tell the idiots the honest truth, they'll scurry back under their filter blankets. If you try and be nice to them, they'll think you're endorsing their stupidity. Their exists no solution, so far as I can see, besides tearing up the filter blankets, and that's easier said than done precisely because everything must be deemed to always be acceptable to everyone. 

I say no. As with vaccine mandates, it should be fine to tell people they have to do some things and can't do others. If they're don't like it, that's tough. I agree with H.G. Wells that the law should strive to avoid compulsion, but there are times when the consequences are so obvious that there really shouldn't be any need for a debate. If you refuse to wear a mask, you're saying it's fine for you to risk the health of other people - and that is contrary to the most basic principles of liberalism.

I can already hear the objections about who-gets-to-decide, and to that I say simply : sod off. Not all mandates are the same and you well know it.

I've never much believed in the old maxim that if you want peace you must prepare for war. But if people are already antagonising you, if they're talking shit to your face, sometimes the carry-a-big-stick approach is necessary. Likewise, the west's approach to Russia seems to be to completely ignore the lessons from Afghanistan - or indeed a very much longer swathe of history - and just hope that nothing much happens. Like appeasement in general, this may work for a little while, but sooner or later we're going to run out of salami. I don't know what the practical answer is to dealing with the folly of the west, but Russia is a bully, and the answer here seems an awful lot clearer.

The party of law and order

... does not actually care a damn about law and order. An obligatory rant on the current state of Westminster.

We've seen how rank-and-file Tory members can be stark raving mad before. Like how they were willing to implement some form of Brexit even at the cost of the destruction of their own political party, a bonkers but at least perversely principled stance*.

*Whether they would actually follow through on their professed stance is another matter, but personally I highly doubt it.

Now we're seeing a desperate attempt to cling to power purely for its own sake, with no higher calling or motivation whatsoever. The Prime Minister broke the rules ? Perhaps the rules were too harsh, says Jacob Rees Mogg. He's apologised, so we need to move on, says Liz Truss. Right, so breaking the law is irrelevant then. Taking responsibility now means nothing more than that you have to apologise for your offences and not actually suffer any real consequences at all. That kind of responsibility is for the little people, not, ironically, the people who have to make the rules themselves.

I do not believe in the absolute nature of the law. That is not to say that it should be applied arbitrarily, and it especially doesn't mean it should apply differently to someone based on their major demographics : ethnicity, age, gender, religion, wealth etc. should have no bearing on punishment... except wherein any such features are actually pertinent to the law being broken. A rich criminal could, perhaps, expect a judge to deliver them a harsher sentence for the repeated theft of money than a very poor one stealing for the first time out of desperation. But refining and generalising on this is a task for another day.

For now, it is enough to realise that there is no inconsistency or hypocrisy in saying that those who are setting the rules should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. It's not about their wealth or class, but about their unique level of power. Proportionately, those with the most power of all should be held the highest standards possible. This is not to say that all mitigating circumstances should be ignored completely, just that they count for less. If you make the rules, you should make a special effort to adhere to them and lead by example.

What beggars belief to me is not so much that the Tories broke the lockdown rules - lots of people did that, and were rightly fined for it. Even for this they should suffer harsher penalties than the man in the street, but what really gets me is the storm of lies and gaslighting by which they seek to escape the fate of the little people. It's a bad thing to break laws designed to protect public health, but in some ways I find it far, far worse that those holding high office would choose to lie about their behaviour afterwards. How can you be said to be "taking responsibility" if you first put forth a series of lies, evasions and denials before being compelled to offer a paltry non-apology and declare that that's the end of it ?

What I do not understand is how anyone could actively want a known serial liar to be at the heart of government. To me this just makes no sense at all, but plenty of Tories - even if Boris is indeed eventually forced out - are willing to declare this openly. I don't get it. If someone has proven themselves untrustworthy, how can you possibly trust them ? And if you can't trust them, how can you possibly think them worthy to decide rules which affect your own life ? Do the rules just not matter at all to you ? What in the hell is it about Boris that you like so much ? Is his piss-poor tendency to deceive (because he is not at all good at it) actually somehow an asset ? Do you admire his strength of character in putting himself before the truth ?

This is bordering on a fascist level of elitism. The Tory party has always been a lot more morally flexible and more concerned about winning than ethical principles, but Boris is taking this to new levels. At least previously when they were found out, most of them had the decency to resign. Most of them realised that you can't be seen as a party of law and order if you yourselves do not obey the law. That's not to say that things were any better behind closed doors than they are now, but at least they had the modicum of decency not to openly flout the law in full view of the public and brazenly try to excuse the inexcusable. And least they didn't rub their elitism in people's faces. At least they tried to pretend that there was a line that was not to be crossed. There was a social contract of sorts, even if it was very one-sided.

If the Tory party suffers from a total lack of moral backbone, Labour if anything is beset by too much. It is straightforwardly absurd to compare Keir Starmer's drink with his evening meal in a protracted meeting with the multitude of pre-planned Tory socials. It was never about the fact that Tory MPs had alcohol, but the explicitly and exclusively social nature of the gatherings - be they after work or entirely separate from it. Nobody ever said, "no alcohol in private meetings". Nobody ever said, "no food during work meetings". Nobody said, "you must split up for every moment you're not discussing work."

Tory attempts to deflect here are gaslighting and whataboutism, which are somewhat bizarrely trying to paint their opponent as being far more interesting than even his most ardent supporters would ever suspect. They know their own behaviour did not merely bend the rules but abjectly and repeatedly broke them, so they're trying to distract. This is ridiculous. Labour didn't even come close to breaking the rules, and anyway it's the government who are in charge, not the opposition - so the importance of establishing what the Tories were up to is much, much more important. And yes, if it did come to light that Labour had behaved similarly, I would want similar consequences. As it is, this looks a bit like saying, "Yes, I'm a murderer, but that man said a rude word, so we're basically just as bad as each other". Even if we lived in a bizarre word where that was true, it wouldn't excuse the murder.

What's worrying is where this goes next. Will the Tory party clean itself off and at least try and get back its veneer of respectability, or will it go into Trumpian levels of populism ?

Right now, it's screaming towards the latter. And yes, actually there are respectable Tory MPs, but that the self-proclaimed party of law and order doesn't immediately eject its lying, gaslighting, evasive, cowardly, scumbag of a leader is damning. For all that the law can't be absolute, there are clear examples of black and white in amongst all the shades of grey. A party that does not realise that breaches of the law this egregious, this frequent, and this callous, are unacceptable in a functioning democracy is not a political party at all. It's a mob.

Review : Power and Thrones

Dan Jones seems best known as a TV historian, but he's a damn fine writer : far more purposeful and analytical than his TV shows might suggest. Of what I've read, his The Plantagenets is a clear winner, describing in gripping detail the life and times of and English dynasty that's shedloads more interesting that the poxy old Tudors (sorry Lucy Worsely, but it's true). There he covers how medieval kings won loyalty by divulging political power in exchange for military and/or financial support, and why King John's efforts to retake France were doomed by much more than battlefield prowess or lack thereof. He balances carefully between letting the text speak for itself and outlining the broad conclusions. And he's not afraid to pronounce judgement, without coming across as hopelessly biased either.

Power and Thrones is his latest offering, a weighty tome covering the whole of medieval Europe - from the fall of Rome to the birth of Protestantism. Jones' approach is to select a variety of specific events that are representative of the general trends, so rather than getting a breakneck speed account of a thousand years of history (which would average out to about two years per page), we actually get some considerable detail. It's an excellent, very well-balanced approach that never lacks for readability. Never before have I encountered the revenge of sacred chickens, or heard how St Martin exorcised demons from cows and set fire to the Emperor Valentinian's buttocks.

My favourite aspect is the analogies. If Jones has a goal here, it's to show that both the circumstances of the past and the very people living through them were remarkably similar to those of today - not in detail, of course, but nevertheless in general. We might think that the myriad of social institutions in which we participate have an instrumental role in shaping our behaviour, and they do... but the parallel responses to ostensibly very different situations are interesting.

For example, offsetting. In the modern era this is synonymous with climate change : it's pretty unavoidable for all of us to have to burn at least some carbon, but we try and atone for our sins by paying other people to plant trees on our behalf. In the medieval era, the unavoidable activity was sin itself, especially of the hack-thy-neighbour-and-steal-his-land variety. Instead of a fearsome planetary response, they feared divine wrath. Hence the evolution of monasteries to offset the sin of the wider world, quite literally by praying it all away. Monasteries, in some ways, are not so very different from the aviation industry. Or perhaps, as Jones suggests, to multi-national tech corporations, having power and influence far beyond their physical locations.

Political parallels are of course ten-a-penny : from the "build back better" approach of the Emperor Justinian, to concerns over mass migration or the fragmentation of Europe into a plethora of petty kingdoms; censorship in universities*; or crusades against heretics as foolish as any "war against abstractions... see, in our times, the War on Terror, War on Drugs, etc." But in popular culture too, with Arthur and Roland being the superheroes of their day, and sports : with jousting described as a cross between polo, gambling, rugby and cage fighting. Jones does a commendable job, perhaps better than anyone else, of making the people of the past feel just like us were it not for their different conditions. Despite concentrating heavily on the great and the good, it's a marvellously de-romanticised tale of basically normal people. The ineptitude of modern politicians begins to seem a lot more understandable when set against the idiots of the past, who have plagued us since time immemorial.

* Jones is quite clearly not one of the libertarian "free speech" ilk, and the comparison is interesting. The importance of actually having good-faith discussions and speaking truth to power, and not just saying things because you want to offend people, is sometimes overlooked. 

Possibly the most interesting comparison is the invention of the printing press. Suddenly information could be distributed at massively larger rates at low cost. As with social media today, the effects were complex and unpredictable. While initially the sale of indulgences were a boon for the Church, when Luther's theses went viral, the result was just the opposite. And it was this, Jones argues, that brought about the end of medieval Europe and instigated the transition to the modern world.

Jones is careful not to push his analogies too far. If I have a critique, it's that if anything he's too cautious about this. A bit more development on this underlying themes would have been most welcome : I would have liked for him to venture a thesis on what defines the similarities and differences to our ancestors. It feels a bit like there's something deeper under the surface that Jones never quite reaches for, which is a shame. But should he ever decide to do something a bit more explicitly about drawing parallels and lessons from the past, I would be all over it.

Not that this really spoils anything. As an introductory overview to medieval European history - and it's pretty well exclusively European - this feels as good as anything you'll find anywhere. I'm going to give this one a solid 8, maybe 9/10 - excellent stuff, does exactly what it says on the tin, but just a bit too limited in intent.