Whose cloud is it anyway ?

I really don't understand the most militant climate activists who are also opposed to geoengineering. Or rather, I think I understand them (or some of them at any rate), but I don't understand what their goal is supposed to be.

To a certain extent of course it makes good sense. The basic thinking that we've messed things up, so the best thing we could do is to step back, isn't unsound. It's completely natural to assume that because we got things so very badly wrong before, any further, deliberate intervention has a serious risk of making things very much worse. It could even be hubris to assume we're capable of getting things right, such is the complexity of the system we're dealing with.

I'm not unsympathetic to this view by any means. Anyone who is not merely advocating but actively gung-ho about the prospect of trying to alter the climate is someone to steer clear of. What I don't get is not the skepticism, but the denialism. And many of the reasons claimed for opposing geoengineering in principle (rather than objections to the specifics, which are often legitimate) are, so far as I can tell, a terribly toxic mixture of naivety and cynicism.

The most common retort is that geoengineering will distract from the more important business of cutting emissions. This, I think, is wrong-headed for a multitude of reasons. First, geoengineering takes many forms, and I'd argue that deliberately rewilding, planting trees, encouraging sea grass and other growth, all fit the bill of actively changing nature to help reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And these solutions clearly aren't opposed to environmentalism in any sense : quite the opposite, they are perfectly aligned with classical environmentalist movements.

Second, how exactly are we supposed to reduce the existing CO2 without inducing the removal of carbon ? We have, so the claim is, already done horrible damage, but apparently we should now just back off and leave well enough alone. This is like going into someone's house, breaking all their furniture, starting a small fire in their dustbin but then slowly tip-toeing away claiming you don't want to make things worse. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me; if you make a mess, you have a responsibility to clean things up (or at least to try). I find it extraordinarily strange to claim that we've done such awful damage but shouldn't try and repair it.

And thirdly, our efforts to reduce emissions have been pretty pathetic so far. Yes yes, you can whine about overthrowing capitalism or some other damn fool idea as much as you want, but it isn't helping : it's schoolyard politics. The point is that geoengineering solutions appear to have little or nothing to do with this, and it doesn't look at all likely that if we took all the money away from geoengineering research we'd really invest it in other energy solutions instead. That idea seems crazy-naïve to me.

Which is why I don't understand what the goal of the opponents is supposed to be. Live in a shitty, overheated planet and make the best of it ? Sit back and watch everyone and everything suffer horribly ? That prospect is surely crazy-cynical, the product of people who've had the hope beaten out of them. It's daft.

No, the right solution seems clear : diversification. More than any other this feels like a situation where the idea of a single magic bullet is never going to work. Instead, we need to try and cut back our energy requirements wherever possible, change our energy production methods, change our farming techniques, change our construction strategies, work to a controlled decline in the population (otherwise Nature will do this for us, except it won't be controlled), and, yes, actively solicit the removal of atmospheric carbon. The idea that we can just, somehow, stop emissions tomorrow and that alone constitutes an acceptable solution is frankly bizarre. We know that simply isn't going to happen and it wouldn't be enough anyway. Pretending we should be singularly focused on this outlandish objective, at the exclusion of all others, is hindering the cause, not helping it. It's an outrageously unrealistic goal which distracts from what we really need to do, which is everything.

Which is not to say that some geoengineering "solutions" aren't a hell of a lot more scary than others. For example, injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to obscure the sunlight just slightly. The NYT piece linked doesn't have much in the way of data but some choice quotes :

“There certainly are risks, and there certainly are uncertainties,” he said. “But there’s really a lot of evidence that the risks are quantitatively small compared to the benefits, and the uncertainties just aren’t that big.” The only thing more dangerous than his solution, he suggested, may be not using it at all.

Once solar geoengineering began to cool the planet, stopping the effort abruptly could result in a sudden rise in temperatures, a phenomenon known as “termination shock.” The planet could experience “potentially massive temperature rise in an unprepared world over a matter of five to 10 years, hitting the Earth’s climate with something that it probably hasn’t seen since the dinosaur-killing impactor,” Dr. Pierrehumbert said.

On top of all this, there are fears about rogue actors using solar geoengineering and concerns that the technology could be weaponized. Not to mention the fact that sulfur dioxide can harm human health.

Dr. Keith is adamant that those fears are overblown. And while there would be some additional air pollution, he claims the risk is negligible compared to the benefits.

To be clear, I'd probably put this way down my list of preferred geoengineering solutions. Injecting chemicals known to be harmful is, pretty obviously, not exactly the ideal solution. But all the same I take great issue with :

Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, said he considered solar geoengineering a grave threat to human civilization. “It’s not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy,” he said. “But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous.”

Now this is extremely foolish. Consider the trajectory of the climate. Now consider what happens if (or rather when) we fail to reduce emissions and things get bad. What exactly do you think people will do then ? It seems to me that when pushed, there is every chance that desperate people will look for desperate solutions. Only, if we don't do the research now, future generations may implement it regardless, heedless of the unknown consequences because that is exactly what desperate people do. Better by far to research this now while we have time. Do as many simulations as possible, run controlled tests where possible, monitoring how the chemistry changes in laboratory-reproductions of the upper atmosphere and eventually in small-scale open tests. Likewise :

Then a professor at Harvard, Dr. Keith wanted to release a few pounds of mineral dust at an altitude of roughly 20 kilometres and track how the dust behaved as it floated across the sky. A test was planned in 2018, possibly over Arizona, but Dr. Keith couldn’t find a partner to launch a high-altitude balloon. When details of that plan became public, a group of Indigenous people objected and issued a manifesto against geoengineering.

Three years later, Harvard hired the Swedish space corporation to launch a balloon that would carry the equipment for the test. But before it took place, local groups once again rose up in protest. Within months, the experiment was called off.

“A lesson I’ve learned from this is that if we do this again, we won’t be open in the same way,” Dr. Keith said.

That last is pretty sinister. Either we can approach this rationally and sensibly and have controlled, transparent research, or we can respond with knee-jerk, absurd levels of ideological purism and reap the whirlwind. We are going to need geoengineering research : in this technique, in all techniques, because we need as many solutions to the climate crisis as we can. Nothing less is adequate.

(Note : I say research. Not necessarily this particular solution, which I'm instinctively against. But not investigating it at all, not even considering the possibility without any actual data to back up the objections, that's mad. Even more so for other solutions which can be much more limited and controlled in their affected area, e.g. algal blooms in reservoirs.)

A second, more academic article explores the prospect of marine cloud brightening. Instead of making the sky darker, it proposes injecting small amounts of salt into clouds to make them more reflective. This would still not be among my top priorities for geoengineering (I think those would probably be rewilding and direct carbon capture) but salt is at least a lot better than sulphur dioxide. That article is also much more measured, setting out a detailed program for how practical tests could proceed and when they should stop. It also makes it clear that it would not be, by any stretch, any sort of "quick fix", with the results possibly not known for decades. Which is exactly why we should start as soon as possible. It might also help us better understand how particulate matter in the atmosphere behaves more generally, something we're been doing anyway... better, surely, to study things in more controlled conditions than making observational inferences where there are numerous confounding variables.

Well that's really all I wanted to say on the matter. It's right to be cautious about geoengineering schemes, but it's silly to treat them as all being equal, and foolish in the extreme to restrict research on any of them. We need to do this now while we can still can. Otherwise we may find ourselves in a situation where we don't have the luxury of investigation at all.

Passing paradigms

I now turn away from my mythology binge – which continues in the background unabated – and back to an assortment of articles I've been meaning to read for bloody ages. Let's start with this one, a piece from the London Review of Books on scientific paradigms. Sounds dry ? Well, read this bit and then decide :

As Morris tells the story, ‘the bile just flowed out of him.’ Kuhn ‘started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.”’ At the end of his tether, Kuhn threw an ashtray ‘with malice’, maybe at Morris, maybe just in his general direction: ‘It came hurtling across the room, spewing butts and ashes.’ (Kuhn and ashtrays were constant companions; he smoked upwards of six or seven packs of cigarettes a day, and died of throat cancer.) First Kuhn threw the ashtray, then he threw Morris out of graduate school. 

If I were the editor, I'd pick something from that for the big quote-in-bold designed to grab the readers attention. But what in the world could provoke such fury in the ivory-tower world of philosophy of science ?

That would be Thomas Kuhn's one-hit-wonder of 1962 : The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I've had this in the back of my mind for a while as something I should probably read, but after reading this piece I've decided firmly against it. There's too much in it that would annoy me, but also far too much I'd misunderstand. Kuhn himself wasn't exactly thrilled by the book's reception :

Invited to a seminar by Princeton undergraduates inspired by what they took as the book’s anti-authoritarianism, Kuhn erupted, telling them that they just hadn’t read the thing properly: ‘I kept saying, “But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that! But I didn’t say that!”’

So I'm probably far better off with the article, providing the author, one Steven Shapin, has done their job well enough. I'll pass over the biographic stuff and stick to the ideas. 

Very broadly, Kuhn seems to have been the one who came up with the idea that science advances in revolutions. We tinker away diligently enough, but then some moment of genius happens which throws it all away, and suddenly we're in a whole new world. This idea seems so ingrained in popular culture that I took it for granted that it was just a natural conclusion that everyone reached; to find out that this is not so is interesting by itself (though what the model of progression was before Structure Shapin does not say). 

Regular readers will know I despise this idea. Or more accurately, one particular aspect of it : that singular geniuses are largely responsible and we an essentially ignore everyone else (the "great man" of history theory). And though of course our ideas and world views shift, I'm less sure of whether that feels like the popular notion : a sudden moment of revelation in which the nay-sayers are cast down and the plucky underdogs revealed as unfairly-shamed geniuses. I rather doubt it ever seems like that; popular science reporting has it that something akin to this happens all the time whereas to those of us on the inside it seldom feels much of anything like the popular depictions.

Anyway, the initial definitions of paradigms :

Kuhn plucked the word ‘paradigm’ from linguistics – where it referred to the permutation of forms having a common root, like the conjugation of verbs or the declension of nouns – and repurposed it as the term for a key regulative resource in scientific inquiry, a concrete model of ‘the right way to go on’... A New Yorker cartoon shows tramps leaning against a wall: ‘Good news – I hear the paradigm is shifting.’

Paradigms are one of the few bits of philosophy of science that we were explicitly taught as undergraduates. Our lecture's model was simply that the paradigm is the prevailing wisdom, the conceptual framework by which we default to interpreting data. Paradigms, he said, can of course change. Such a shift might or might not be dramatic and exciting, depending on how it happened. But though it would presumably be beneficial, it wouldn't be inevitably good or bad, it would just be a thing that happens. This is a much more neutral view. Only once does the article come close to this, with Kuhn later describing paradigms "as concrete, non-rule-like regulative structures".

Nothing here seems terribly offensive. So what got people so riled up that "groups of philosophers had "‘gathered and said that the book should be burned’" ?

Not so much, perhaps, of the nature of paradigms themselves. Having a framework within which to interpret data is inevitable. What seems to have really ticked people off is the nature of how Kuhn proposed they changed and who got to decide when such a change had occurred. In standard prevailing wisdom :

Science methodically compared theoretical expectations against observational and experimental evidence; it purged itself of bias and prior expectations; its knowledge was cumulative; the quality of that knowledge was guaranteed by explicit methodological standards shared throughout the scientific community; the various bits of science were part of a fundamental unity, whether of concepts, facts, or methods; it arrived at, or at least approached, truth. 

But :

Structure denied all this. Scientists were not notably open-minded. Their training encouraged the embrace of what Kuhn frankly called ‘dogma’: theirs was ‘a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox religion’. If the account in Structure were accepted, Kuhn wrote, the notions of ‘“scientific progress” and even “scientific objectivity” may come to seem in part redundant.’ We may ‘have to relinquish the notion’ that scientific change brings scientists ‘closer and closer to the truth’. Scientific knowledge did not accumulate: it moved from moments of puzzle-solving ‘normal science’ governed by one paradigm, through ‘crisis’ and ‘revolution’, to subsequent moments of ‘normal science’ governed by another paradigm... there was no independent way of adjudicating between them; the embrace of a new paradigm ‘can only be made on faith’.

...either side of a paradigm shift scientists live and work ‘in a different world’. There were no bodies of facts, methods for establishing facts, or theories for interpreting the facts, that were paradigm-independent; there was no ‘neutral algorithm’ for judgment. This was the Kuhn who was taken to be a reality and reason-denying relativist.

Ahh, now this is spicy stuff indeed. A rant here on my part would seem inevitable, were it not that the article reveals that this is far more of how Kuhn was misinterpreted rather than what he actually meant. 

Two thoughts though. "Dogma" is a trigger word, so I have to say I don't believe there is such a thing as scientific dogma* : provisionally. That is, I don't believe we have things we believe with inflexible rigidity. We use the term "Law" only to underscore the robustness of a finding, not to declare from on high that it is forever unchallengeable. The only sense in which I think we have "dogma" is a much weaker one. We have common "maxims, norms or (his preference) values of science"; there are useful heuristics for interpreting data, default frameworks which can safely be assumed to correct for everyday purposes. These are by no means set in stone, we just don't challenge them routinely because we feel that to do so would make no progress, with there being more obvious mysterious avenues that would be better explored instead.

* As for "faith", that is too big a topic to condense here, so see this post instead.

Secondly, the profound revelation of a paradigm shift according to these (mis)interpretations of Kuhn... well, this reminds me of one of my all-time favourite Star Trek quotes :

For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

Scientists are not closed-minded to such revelations. On the contrary, I claim that such things are, in a smaller way, very normal. To illustrate : a useful tactic, I've found, is to think on different scales. Especially while coding. It happens regularly that I find my code doesn't do the thing I want it to do, and my first efforts are always to check for the small stuff : maybe I used the wrong variable, got a positive or negative sign wrong, that kind of thing. Then I move up a level to checking the structure : maybe I haven't indented a loop correctly, maybe I've not iterated correctly, etc. 

But if all that seems secure, I move to the largest scale (or if you prefer, higher level) : the basic premise of what I've written. Maybe the actual line-by-line execution is doing exactly what I wanted it to, but I've got the whole foundation of how to do the task wrong. Figuring out that I've done the wrong thing in the right way is, in some ways, one of the most rewarding parts of debugging code, albeit sometimes the most frustrating as it means not a mere tweak to a section but a full rewrite.

Paradigms, I claim, are just like this. They're on a grander scale to be sure but the principle is the same. And I don't think it's true at all that scientists aren't especially open-minded towards paradigm shifts. Rather we go deliberately looking for them, but we're still skeptical when we find evidence of them. Such a profound change deserves a very high level of confidence, just as you wouldn't want to start believing you could suddenly breathe underwater without some seriously compelling reason.

Even this, though, may not be enough to warrant hurling an ashtray at someone or calling for the book to be burned.

Structure implicitly challenged the notion that there was such a thing as a unified scientific community; rather, there were many communities, each of them organised through its commitment to specific achievements, specific methods and specific standards of fit between expectation and evidence. The much treasured idea of ‘scientific unity’ was also sacrificed: science was a ‘ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts’.

This I think is actually a good description of academia but a lousy one of science itself. Academics and individual disciplines certainly have different standards and methodologies, but the collective scientific world view is stupendously self-consistent. To call it "ramshackle" is nonsensical.

But there were even more controversial parts of Structure :

One philosopher targeted what he called Kuhn’s ‘purple passages’ – for example, where he said that there was no standard for scientific judgment higher than ‘the assent of the relevant community’ ... Campus radicals seized on Kuhn’s book as a brilliantly subversive exposé. Just as they had suspected, science wasn’t the open-minded objective pursuit of truth, but merely one more mode of authoritarianism. Scientists were just as dogmatic as anyone else, and one way of seeing the world was as good as another. If there were no better criteria for judgment than communal assent, why should anyone bow down to scientists’ pronouncements? Oh thank you, Mr Kuhn, for telling us about paradigms,’ he remembered the students saying. ‘Now that we know about them, we can get rid of them.’

Kuhn stood accused of being yet another philosophical ‘corrupter of youth’. Philosophy of science here bled seamlessly into Cold War politics.

That would seem to explain the vitriolic responses. When you both treat science as yet another religion, another mythological framework to be debunked, when you see scientists as another type of authoritarian High Priest, you essentially demolish the whole edifice. It denounces the entire practise as not worth doing. And that is deeply, deeply insulting. And just plain wrong.

But this doesn't seem to have been Kuhn's intent at all. I will attest myself, again on an altogether different scale, to having been misinterpreted on many occasions. This is deeply frustrating, because instead of writing what I want to write in a way that expresses things in a (to me) lively but clear way, I have to add caveats and provisos and clarifications that can rob the text of all its force. So I'm gonna give Kuhn the benefit of the doubt on this one.

What he actually seems to have been driving at is much more modest :

You should not, Kuhn had written, think that scientific change brought practitioners ‘closer and closer to the truth’. The outcome of change, in Kuhnian terms, was ‘the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practise future science’. 

This I think it would be harder to have much of a problem with. What seems the most promising line of inquiry ? Well, first we assume the code is basically okay, so we check for typos... but then we realise that's all fine, so we move to considering the whole premise of the operation instead. And lo, we get a code we can use for a good while longer, until we need it to do something else (I'll leave aside the notion that we don't ever reach some "objective truth", which is too big a topic for today).

In his Last Writings, Shapin says that Kuhn was intent on "showing how progress might occur across paradigms and why the involvement of subjectivity in science could be considered innocuous." That too is nothing problematic. Subjectivity in science is nothing to be squeamish about, simply because it's a) inevitable, it being folly to think you can mitigate all effects of bias completely and b) limited since you can objectively test your findings : you can get a binary yes/no answer. It is a step much too far, but by no means inevitable, to presume that because science isn't perfectly objective and rational that it's also totally corrupt, totally at the whims of the researcher's moods. It isn't anything of the sort.

Finally :

A theory should be accurate and consistent; it should have broad scope; it should simplify accounts of phenomena; and it should be fruitful in disclosing new phenomena or revealing new connections between them. There were, Kuhn acknowledged, substantial problems in applying these values... These were what Kuhn called the maxims, norms or (his preference) values of science, though he felt no need to offer systematic evidence that these values were generally agreed and invoked.

And there's nothing wrong with that either. We just don't need exact, specific instructions as to how fruitful a theory must be, how much more accurate the predictions of one model should be in order to consider it as overturning another. General guidelines are helpful and good. Overly-strict rules, in this case, would be the opposite. I believe it's helpful for scientists to actively think philosophically about what they're doing and why. But there's no need to do this constantly, let alone resort to hurling ashtrays because of methodological differences. That would make for an entertaining conference, though...

Review : Mythology

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) The Greek Miracle

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

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

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

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

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

2) Changing Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Interconnections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Differing perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Year of Private Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review : Epic Celtic Tales

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

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

The Review Bit

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

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

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

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

General Impressions

Bizarre storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unpredictable world

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

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

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

What does it all mean ?

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

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

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

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

Highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Manufacturing Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, whatever dude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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