Politics

The Caste of Our Insecurities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. 

The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. 

She makes the case.

And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously for most people, expressed by body language, word choice, social assumptions, and a kind of cognitive aphasia in which people simply do not see what they’re doing or who they’re doing it to. Difficult to get the why if the what can be so smoothly unrecognized.

It’s hard reading, and yet fills in blanks that other attempts at addressing racism and class bigotry fall short. For instance, we tend to default to the occurrence of racism based on appearance, and to a great degree that is a major aspect. But any look at the history of it in this country reveals certain baffling inconsistencies, as when Irish immigrants were seen as nonwhites in the mid-19th Century, and how Jews have long suffered a conditional status. Italians, East Europeans, and so forth, all passed through periods of being regarded as, functionally,  not White.

At times, the idea that class is at work more than race, but that will not answer the fact that “success” is no guarantee against automatic relegation to inferior status. Over the last century and a half that African Americans have been removed from enslavement, wealth has proved to be insufficient to overcome systemic biases, even as wealth makes certain interactions easier. 

In the afterwash of the Civil Rights era, many white people would like to believe that the issue has been settled, but we are constantly reminded that it is not. Partly, this has been a consequence of not identifying the problem correctly. The frustration of seeing our best intentions regularly thwarted by behaviors which seem to have no manageable foundation dogs us through history. The key factor in this persistent misidentification is the fact that all our public declarations, beginning in 1776, overwhelming stress our commitment to equality. This pledge masks intentions that run directly counter to the stated goals. It is more than special pleading, it is a refusal to adhere to principles that require us to stop being White.

By White I do not mean the surface markers of what we semi-scientifically term Caucasian. Because, as noted, many groups that have met those qualifications in the past were, at one time or another, regarded as Not White. White is a social and political designation. The term did not exist as a group marker until the 18th Century and was intended as a hierarchical label. It quickly established a kind of “natural” pecking order upon which the future designations of racial groups could be slotted into categories. This quickly became both political and economic fuel for purposes of group identity and justification for exploitation. In America it was used to legitimate not only slavery but miscegenation laws and later eugenics programs. But more consistently, it evolved a rigid caste system with which we live today, albeit diluted sufficiently most of do not recognize it.

Not recognizing, it becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

Wilkerson’s book is, as I say, hard reading. The savagery with which we have treated African Americans, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and establishing the principle of participatory equality, is made all the more terrible because of the ideas on which our country has been founded. To be sure, caste may not be the key to undoing the systemic disregard experienced by millions of people, but upon reading this book I have found some purchase on the problem that, while not rendering it sensible, at least suggests the degree to which the problem is rooted. 

It has also given some slightly more discernible explanation for what just happened in our recent election. And if true, it is a sad and pathetic reality. 

The apparent need sewn into the fabric of our being to somehow be Better Than is a double-edged blade. One can use that need for self-improvement without it becoming a toxic excuse to constantly keep someone else down, to perfect one’s gifts, to aspire to personal achievement. Or it becomes a need to just exercise a false sense of self-entitled privilege over others by virtue of the arbitrariness of birth or group affiliation. This can justify anything from cheating on exams to murder, depending on the pathology of the obsession to simply Be Better as opposed to Doing Better. And of course, if the latter is the path chosen, the goal is already lost. All that remains then is to do all one can to hide one’s inabilities, infelicities, and lack of empathy. 

Expunging this apparently integral notion of caste may be the only way to become the better angels of our stated aspirations. But how does one do something without first recognizing it?

The Trajectory of Faith and Historical Reality

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

All histories are potentially divisive. Depending on how one approaches a period, supporters, detractors, identitarians, anyone with a self-appointed mission to either defend or attack certain sacrilized bovines may find agitation to the point of absurdity. The historian must be at least aware of all this before tackling her subject. Not with a view to self-censorship (although that may happen by default) but to know how much referencing and documentation may be required to overcome (somewhat) assaults based on issues having only tangential relation to the history being examined.

Which is one reason a book such as Peter Heather’s new Christendom: the Triumph of a Religion AD 300—1300 is both hefty and well-notated. He is not here interested much in the assertions of Christianity, only in the evolution of the religion over time as a social and political entity. The road from minor cult to the dominant aesthetic and political reality of Europe by the 14th Century is here examined as a system. How did it get to the point where we are still wrestling with questions of cultural legitimacy as they impinge upon the political realities of modern life?

Heather resents his credentials—agnostic, let’s say—as someone interested in what people did and how they did it. This is a history like any history of a country or a people. Dates matter. Major players matter. Shifting demographics matter. This is the story of bureaucracies and armies and successions and, above all, assertions of power. The Christianity that emerged over centuries after Emperor Constantine declared it the state religion of the Roman Empire is, regardless of how individual believers may feel, a political system. After Constantine is certainly became something other than what it started. The road it traveled is fascinating and maps closely to the more usual history with which we are familiar (if we are familiar with it).

This adds a layer as well to the questions of why Rome “fell” and how the Crusades began and failed and the way in which dynastic politics became inextricable from the dissemination of a faith that, in primary ways, was diametrically opposed to everything Europe became.

Two details make this a fascinating take on the topic. One, Heather goes into great detail over the matter of conversion. Of course, we know the famous ones—Augustine, Constantine, the less well-known Pegasios—and by these we understand it to be a dramatic, soul-wrenching experience. But when closely examined, it was never so simple, and for the vast majority of people at the time it was much more mundane. This month we’re worshiping Apollo, next month Sol Invictus, the month after that the Christian God. In order to comply with the law and obtain work, we must change our associations. Constantine’s mandate impacted the Empire through patronage. In order to obtain a position in the government, conversion was required. Heather makes clear with the case of Pegasios (bishop of Ilios, 350s A.D.) that it was a revolving door, as Pegasios had no trouble going back and forth between paganism and Christianity as circumstances dictated. This was not, for him (and presumably many others) a matter of salvation of the soul as it was a matter of livelihood and income.

Moving forward, it then appears obvious that the vast majority of conversions were pro forma. The king has decreed he and his subjects shall be Christians and so the people go to a different church.

This contradicts the idea of a major ideological revolution sweeping the continent. This was political.

Once understood, subsequent Church history makes more and more sense as history. Alliances, territory, prestige—all the values of a strong state—contributed to the eventual displacement of older religions as Christianity became the dominant ideology.

It is in the triumph of that ideology—or, rather, its symbols—that the success is traced. What people followed willingly (and, to our dismay, today) is a successful leader who could demonstrate a special bond to fate. The story of Constantine’s victory at Milvian Bridge is not a single unitarian narrative. There are four versions and it seems obvious in context that each served a public relations purpose. The Chi Rho triumphant, symbol of early Christianity, figures prominently in the story, but not in the same way in the various tellings.

Which is also where Christianity veered off its previous path of peace and harmony and, over time, became a militant religion. The leader who was victorious in battle and claimed aegis of the Christian god got to say which god would be worshiped. The contradiction emerged from the beginning. Peace and War joined in a paradoxical arrangement to underwrite the legitimacy of king or emperor.

The other thing Heather’s history dispels is the myth of the barbarian hordes. We tend to visualize them as rude brutes with no learning pouring brutishly into Roman precincts destroying a sophisticated civilization. In reality, these “barbarians” had learned from Rome and were in many way culturally on par with the empire they were displacing. And they brought with them their own variations of what they saw as True Christianity.

Which leads to another aspect that is oft misunderstood, which is the mythology of the Church Triumphant calling all the shots across Europe. That did happen, but it was a long process and fraught with setbacks and disputes. For much of the millennium being discussed, it was the kings who told the church what to do. Charlemagne’s crowning as the first Holy Roman Emperor was his idea, stage managed on his end, with the Pope going along with it lest there be consequences.

In short, this is an agnostic analysis of the growth of a bureaucratic, political system which follows the twisted paths of such things like any other. And by the time Rome became predominant once more, it was at the head of a religion that barely resembled the early pastoral communities from which it sprang. Each stage was a near-run thing and the unity of the Church was never what it appeared to be. 

Which is a curiously pertinent bit of history to become acquainted with now. Keeping the components separate and knowing how such things happen is a useful tonic in an age where the cries of faiths that claim unalloyed divine cause to overturn anything in their path. 

Destroyer of Worlds

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Oppenheimer is powerful film. Perhaps it requires someone versed in science fiction to do something like this. The world changed when Trinity went off and the only art form that doggedly tackled the ramifications of that change was science fiction. Unleashing the power of the atom was transformative in ways most people at the time could not fathom. Since the introduction of that power was as a weapon, it is natural that people would be, at best, ambivalent about its potential. The way the country dealt with that over the next 15 years did little to ease people into this new reality. We were in the midst of the second Red Scare at the same time, so everyone’s nerve endings were constantly assaulted by things triggering panic.

What the film manages to do is convey that arc from the collapsing world order through the triumph of community action and the achievement of dedicated people to create something new down into the cesspool of post-war anxiety that poisoned everything. What begins as a youthful encounter with new physics on the cutting edge of revelation becomes the hardened pragmatism of survival (theory only takes you so far) and then disintegrates in the endemic distrust of men trying to contain something they categorically do not understand. The impossibility of isolating the discoveries of the American program becomes the paranoid insistence that no one can be trusted, turning the youthful dream into the nightmares of the guilty.

At the same time, we are treated to several well-placed mini-presentations of problem-solving and the nature of the subatomic realm as revealed by the drive to build The Bomb.

Cillian Murphy is amazing as Oppenheimer. We are treated to glimpses of many of the players involved, each distinct, and perhaps the fairest portrayal of General Groves in any dramatic presentation to date.

But the core of the film is that turn from one world—one kind of world—to another. The Trinity test is just past halfway in and much of the event occurs in eerie silence. Probably accurate, but as useful as that may be, it is the symbolism that strikes home. No word is spoken, no sound, either of bell or crying prophet, no whisper in the vacuum of transition. Nolan ties this together with an interaction at the beginning, a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a lake that is unheard (though tragically misinterpreted by the uninvolved witness), and revelation of what was said at the end. Just as in particle physics, we observe small interactions that ramify into huge consequences.

The scientists who were trying to caution the politicians that this was something for which they were woefully unequipped all seem to underestimate the venality of those with whom they must deal. Most of them, anyway. A few understood quite well and acted on their knowledge for both good and ill. Multiple tragedies emerge.

The movie leaves us with much to ponder, but it is we who must do so and conclude what we will. To say they should not have done what they did is pointless. Many of these people were condemned later, for a variety of reasons, early victims in the emerging world of cynical power management that characterized the post-war years.

And for all its excesses and over-the-top drama, it seems that science fiction was always the best tool for trying to cope with what happened after the genie emerged. Mutability is at the core of SF, mutation both subject and theme, and as absurd as some of it may have appeared to the general public, especially through the radiation scares of the Fifties, it has turned out to be more or less on the nose with respect to the cultural reactions. Which, finally, may be why the best dramatization of all this has come from someone who is familiar and skillful with the tools of SF.

Clear-Eyed And Informed

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

One of the quickest ways to end conversations in casual social gatherings is to contradict someone expounding on myth, hearsay, and bad history. You’ve been there; we all have. Someone at some point starts holding forth on some chestnut of popular apprehension and repeats a story that has suffered the manifold revisions of a game of telephone that render the story factless, in service to a line of self-aggrandizing chest-beating at the expense of the truth. Stories many of us take for granted in the first place and, because we’ve never heard or bothered to find out the real story, assume to be accurate. We grow accustomed to thinking about these stories this way and then, when it might matter in ways we never anticipated, we don’t know that they have prepared the ground for us to swallow bigger misconstruals and even outright lies.

Into this, occasionally, steps someone who knows better and points out the flaws in the presentation. A curious thing usually happens. Either the conversation turns away from that topic or everyone gets angry. Not at the one disseminating the broken narrative but at the lone voice that contradicts the nonsense. Such reactions lead eventually one of two interpretations—either that people in general don’t care what the facts are or, adjacent, they like the error-laden chestnut more than the reality.

The reception of the corrective information can have a chilling effect on the one offering the facts. No one likes to be ostracized,

It can be puzzling. What is it about these skewed narratives that people preferred? Well, almost always there is something about them that makes people feel good about themselves—about their patriotism, they beliefs, their affiliations, but mostly about their ignorance. Once we leave school, most of us feel we are done with homework, which no one really liked anyway, and the idea that we may be less knowledgeable than perhaps we need to be just suggests that we need to do more homework. I suspect there’s an unexamined aspect of psychology that says that to be an Adult is to already have all the skills and knowledge we need. More study seems justifiable only if it leads to higher income. Even then, excuses can be made to avoid it.

But the reality is we need always to know more, especially about stories we think we know. The how, why, and wherefore of our history feeds into present issues in ways that, if we are ignorant, can lead to political and social traps.

When reading a first-class historian like Jill Lepore, one becomes aware of how tangled those webs into which we might fall can be. For those of us who may delight in being that one person at the party who will speak fact to ignorance, her books are a delight.

Her latest, The Deadline, is a collection of essays designed to counter the shallow, poorly-understood history that underlies so many of the canards foisted upon us daily as truth. As well, they are a delight to read.

In several books, Lepore has displayed an approach to her subjects that bypasses the various filters with which we view our history, opening side entrances into the underlying realities of which modern myths are formed. She examines the cultural touchstones by which we navigate the pathways of our presumably common identity.

Here, we find a range of essays that cover most of American history, topical subjects, thorny personal issues, memoir, and observations about the nature of knowing—or not knowing—what’s going on. Quite a few pieces are about the business of news itself, covering processes and personalities, and giving us a glimpse of how what we think we know comes to us too often “prepared” so a particular message is put forth, even while it is possible to find out what the other facts are. To that problem, we learn that there is nothing new about “fake news” other than the delivery vectors (and perhaps the speed with which it comes at us) but that even when such distortions seem impossible to counter, somehow we seem not to be fooled for long. That may be changing, though, and Lepore gives us her perspective on that as well.

Essentially, Lepore gives us a clear-eyed view of ourselves and our proclivities, often with the unpleasant but unsurprising conclusion that if we are fooled, it’s because we wish to be. But really there is no excuse for blindly reacting to hormone-spiking jabs at our panic buttons. We just need to know a little better.

As I say, Jill Lepore has become one of my favorite historians. She has a quirky set of interests (she did a marvelous book about the creator of Wonder Woman as well as penning one of the most interesting histories of the United States I’ve read in a long time) and this allows her to approach even the most convoluted subjects in ways that consistently illuminate. Along the way, she lets us know that one of the best ways to not be fooled is to refuse to accept the soundbite, the meme, or the two-minute report as the end of the story. While each may well contain a grain of truth, we have to understand that it’s only a grain and all that went into it is so much more interesting, richer, and liberating.

Dust and Destiny

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I went to the theater—an Omnimax—to see Dune Part Two. The anticipation for this film since the first one has been a constant background hum. Other films so hungered for have more often than not disappointed. What could possibly live up to the self-generated hype?

My reaction? I was satisfied.

Oh, it was a thrill to watch, don’t get me wrong. For such a long picture, it flowed effortlessly by, feeling much shorter than its nearly three hours. Scene by scene built logically and solidly upon what went before and while everyone knew how it would end, the ending landed with an acceptable sense of resolution that nevertheless left the door open for the next one, but not in a frustrating way.

The changes from the novel mattered not at all. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is its own thing. Based as it is on legendary source material, a challenge for any filmmaker and one that often humbles lesser artists, Villeneuve was clearly not intimidated, but even so it would be hard to live up to over half a century of lore and cultish expectation. He succeeded by telling the core story in his own way and with a visual sensibility that supported his SFnal understanding.

The previous two attempts feel more than anything like run-ups to this.

Let me get this out of the way. David Lynch’s 1984 film is an epic miss. Lynch is not a science fiction guy, but a horror film maker, and it shows in what then were and remain odd choices for characterization. That said, he managed to get large chunks of it more or less right and for its day it was quite an achievement, but it did not flow well and Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul is a stiff suit filled with pronouncement. MacLachlan is a fine actor so I do not fault him. There were other choices Lynch made that with a slightly more SFnal attitude might have worked, but he kept giving us monsters. The underbudgeted SyFy Network production is underrated by too many. Whatever its other faults, it told the story much more smoothly and far more comprehensibly than the Lynch and some of the choices in cast and presentation were inspired. Paul was closer to what he ought to be, the Baron was closer to what we find in the novel, and on and on. (It failed mainly with Feyd, but then, who could beat Sting? Well…)

Villeneuve, if nothing else, gets science fiction. He seems to understand that it is not something you do by fixing up a contemporary sensibility with a couple of odd bits to make it strange, but that it is wholly strange. Other. He took the original Blade Runner, which is one of the best dozen SF films ever made, and immersed himself in the Otherness of it and produced a film that was fully science fiction. Arrival, which is the closest to a contemporary tableau as he has done in this vein, is all about the doorway into that Otherness and it does not try to reduce it to a suburban trope.

Now Dune.

Everything about this film is a masterclass in how to approach science fiction. And he treated the characters as real. Not mouthpieces. People caught up in enormities of process and disruption and groping for handholds and in their groping make the world different, whether they intend to or not. That is what makes it accessible. They become something other in the face of an ecology removed from contemporary sensibilities. That is what makes it science fiction.

The question, now that this masterpiece has arrived and we who have lived with the legendary attempts to turn a groundbreaking novel from the 1960s into a film, is: why Dune?

Descriptions of what Frank Herbert created have changed over the years. It was an ecological novel. It was a political novel. It is a novel about human-directed evolution. It is a novel about religious extremism. It is an attempt to produce the War and Peace of science fiction.

It is, of course, all of these things. But I think at its core it is a novel about hubris.

Every institution depicted in the novel takes on the accoutrements of final arbiter of human destiny. It is an imperial culture. It has divided its cultural anchors into those who deal with genetic lines and those who deal with technology and mathematics. Thinking machines are outlawed. Anything that might take such matters out of human hands has been eliminated or so constrained as to be powerless. Even transportation is the preserve of an elite. It is a classic Hellenistic culture in its defining customs. And it is a mercantilist society based on guaranteed monopolies, because only the elect can manage such power.

As the story opens, all these strains of self-professed competence are colliding with a break point no one can see because no one can see past their own sense of destiny. Hubris bound to a destiny is the most volatile combination in politics and religion and once those two things combine, you have a critical mass that can only explode.

Paul, at least in Villeneuve’s version, sees all this clearly, and yet cannot stop it. Because he discovers that “destiny” is the ultimate crowd-sourced motivator. In the end he makes the choice every leader in his position makes, which is to try to control it by succumbing to it.

It is one of the better examples of Greek tragedy science fiction has produced.

That is the most compelling thread of the films, the way Villeneuve shows us the inevitability of Paul’s choices as one by one his options disappear in the face of—destiny. Destiny that too many others want to see, others work to avoid, and the entire network of people and institutions around him have carefully constructed to reach, no doubt expecting a different outcome.

We can poke holes in Dune as a parlor game—the ecology doesn’t work, the history is missing important links, the choices the emperor makes are absurd, and on and on—but none of its flaws matter against the central idea of the cyclic tragedy of human-made destiny born of hubris. This is the feature that makes this story fascinating over multiple generations. (Lynch didn’t understand this and tried to turn Paul into a hero on a hero’s journey. He’s not and this isn’t. The SyFy version almost got it, but turned it into a “rise of the CEO” story and at the end the CEO has to step down when he can no longer “see.”)

For perhaps too many people, the affection for Dune rests on its novelties—the great sandworms, the desert vistas, the valiant guerilla fights attacking a much larger enemy, the idea of the Navigators who “fold space”—and for them, these films are a feast. Villeneuve sees science fiction, which in its own way has always been a visual art, urging us to see the future (which is why so many movies and television shows over the years have disappointed, with a few notable exceptions, because they always fell short of where the writers were taking us.) But even for them, that theme, those subtexts, act as hooks on the unconscious, which is why we’re obsessed over this story.

But to my reaction. Satisfied? Not thrilled? One can be thrilled at a flawed attempt, but never satisfied. Many not-great films are still fun to watch. But afterward, when contemplation begins…it has to satisfy to succeed. And this one? Yes, it satisfies.

The Tangled Paths Of History

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have made no secret over the years of my personal dislikes. Certain tropes in fiction usually fail to engage my interest and in some instances actively dissuade me from reading. Zombies are the top of my list—automatic non-starter—with vampires a close second. I’m not entirely sure why. Originally I avoided them because they were mainstays of horror and I am not a fan, but there have been many uses of them in science fiction and fantasy and I still find them, at best, a waste of good story potential and, at worst, a kind of pollutant to what might otherwise be a good story.

I’m not, as I say, sure why, but since there is so much in the world that does not deal with zombies and vampires that I do enjoy, the puzzle is not important enough for me to fully explore. Too often I think they are cheats, the primary one being that they attempt to set up a character[s] that I find wholly implausible and, ultimately, uninteresting.

That said, as with anything else, there are exceptions. In such cases, I find the framing and context lend a value to the idea that compels. (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake does this for a whole catalogue of supernatural manifestations, and since the story is centered on Anita finding her way through all this, the various para-humans-what-have-you add rather than detract. I confess, to date, with the single exception of Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall, I remain unmoved by zombies.)

That said, I still require…something special.

John M. Ford was a Minnesota writer of considerable reputation and ability who passed away too soon and who left behind a body of work which is now being given a new chance. Among his novels is an alternate history which won a World Fantasy Award and has become part of the literary mythos. The Dragon Waiting has been reissued by Tor, as an Essential, and is not to be missed,

And, yes, it has vampires. Even, after a fashion, zombies.

And wizards and even—again, after a fashion—a dragon. It is that “after a fashion” proviso that helps elevate this book above the usual run of Middle Ages-to-Renaissance settings often (too often) used (often badly) in fantasy. This is a solid piece of historical speculation.

I did not know enough about it to realize until this most recent release that it was an alternate history. It jumps off with the survival and success of Justinian I of the Byzantine epoch. Instead of dying when he did, Ford posits another decade and the time and ability to make his quite real gains stick. How then might history unfold? With a Byzantium Triumphant in much of the West as well as the East.

As the novel opens, however, we are in Wales and a young orphan working at an inn in the mountains meets a captive wizard who is being taken to London to be tried and put to death. Hywel helps with the wizard’s escape and goes with him, wanting to learn magic. He is himself heir to a wizard’s potential. With a shocking beginning, he is introduced to the Arts of Magick, which, he learns, always has a cost and usually a steep one.

We then shift to Florence and the court of the Medicis and meet a young physician, a woman, Cynthia Ricci, whose father is also a physician, one attendant upon Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo is preparing to face an enemy of the worst kind—Byzantium, backing the Duke of MIlan, Sforza, who is also a vampire. Lorenzo is betrayed, her father is killed, and she must flee.

And then north, into Burgundy, and the household of an exiled Greek family still in service to Byzantium but biding its time for a return, possibly to the throne. Young Dimitrios is brought into the Mithraic Mysteries like his father. And then—more betrayal and he finds himself fleeing, having taken another’s identity. He grows up to become a mercenary.

These three come together at another inn where they meet a German engineer, Gregory, who is also a vampire, and circumstances bring them into alliance to work against the machinations of Byzantium.

Vampirism here is treated as a disease and its victims are not helpless killers in service to a relentless hunger. It is, if you will, rationalized into a chronic disorder that in Ford’s hands has political consequences which play out ultimately in England, where the throne is undergoing a fairly rapid change-of-hands during what we would know as the War of the Roses.

I will not go into the plot. The intricacies of invention playing out in this novel yield a satisfying alternate take on how history might have gone given one or two not unbelievable changes, which is one of the principal pleasures of such work. Christianity, for instances, is only one of many religions. The suppressions that dominated Christendom did not happen because of Justinian’s intervention and consolidation of his vision of Rome. Women exercise somewhat more autonomy in this iteration. The cross-currents of empire produce a more interesting mix of cultural expressions.

But it is still an era of cutthroat political maneuvering. Ford’s recastings serve to elucidate the broader streams of change that ran through that entire period.

As to the wizards… there were men who purported to be such then and Ford uses them. We would likely recognize them as charlatans now, glib and deceptive and able to manipulate perceptions just enough to establish reputations and acquire positions. Ford’s attitude toward actual magic is fraught with consequences and high costs and more than once we are told it is better to use trickery than actual magic. There is a sense of magic’s passing from the scene throughout, although it is never explicitly stated, though descriptions of the corruption attendant upon the use of such power offer sobering set pieces of karmic debt collection.

As he points out in an afterward, Richard III of England is used as a handy marker for the end of the Middle Ages and the onset of the Renaissance and so he is used here, but for the end and beginning of ages that were and could be quite different.

Playing with the what-ifs of history is an edifying game, especially when done at this level. Turning the aspects of cultures and conquerors over to see how matters might have been different is another way to appreciate the monstrous and all-to-fragile nature of the past.

Ruin, Blood, Iron, and Context

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It has been some time since I read a comprehensive history of World War II. Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins is subtitled The Last Imperial War and so it is an examination of the war as the last blatant excess of imperialism.

At least, in the traditional sense of the term, as an open and unapologetic expression of the prejudice of the so-called Great Powers to hold, maintain, or create vast colonial empires. One can argue that we still live in an imperial age, but not in the same way and certainly not as a condition sustainable in any meaningful way. What we have now is a state of economic imperialism that on the national level constantly fragments, reorganizes, and coalesces around stated anti-colonial principles. Again, one can argue about the successes or failures of this, but it is a different kind of thing than the Empires of the 18th and 19th Centuries, which, according to Overy, collapsed with WWII.

Overy starts with the Great Depression. He is of the school that sees the second world war as a continuation of the first (are there any who see them as distinct anymore?) and the economic catastrophe as a key element in the period between. The Japanese were already invading China, Mussolini was already trying to kick-start a new Roman Empire, which makes the popular “beginning” of the war in 1939 little more than a pin in the timetable to give shape for those not yet directly involved. He then traces the political and military pathways that took Europe and then the United States into the conflict. (A broader look at the period reveals that fighting on one front or another never really stopped in 1918.)

The book is organized into major reviews of the various aspects of the period—political, economic, military, social—to paint a holistic portrait of, essentially, the entirety of the conflict. Ambitious and not altogether successful, but that really is a quibble. (How complete can one be in a single volume, even one as exhaustive as this one?) With the benefit of several decades remove, the blanket assertions of previous histories seem to settle into more clinical analyses. The relations of Hitler with his advisors and the general staff, the miscalculations of Mussolini, the hubris of the various parties, and even in some instances their shared prejudices. 

Overy claims that three battles all in 1942 established the inevitable outcome: Guadalcanal, El Alamein, and Stalingrad. Laying out the logistical, economic, and global impact of these battles, he makes the case that in their aftermath it was nearly impossible for the Three Powers Pact countries, known popularly as the Axis, to achieve their initial aims, that of establishing and maintaining vast Empires and ending military conflict with their adversaries. The cost to Germany and Japan (and Italy) of these battles drained their ability to strike fatal blows. His numbers re persuasive if not conclusive. Of course, other factors had to remain in play—the commitment of Britain and America to continue as they had begun—but all the weaknesses of the Axis were put to the test and found wanting. The end three years later, according to Overy, was plain at this point.

But not apparent to those involved. He shows that those on the ground, in the circumstances, could not have known. Some guessed, a few had a good idea, but for the most part the cracks in the Axis were not perceived as fatal until much later.

Overy puts the numbers out there. How many divisions, how many tanks, how much artillery, air power, the ability to move men and materiél, and from this Olympian view, yes, it’s fairly obvious that Hitler and Tojo had gambled. Early success obviously convinced them they could achieve all their aims, but eventually the costs ground them down. 

All this to make his larger point, which is that this marked the effective end to the idea of Empire. Britain, he shows, fought to keep an empire it was already finding impossible to manage. Germany fought to gain an empire Hitler believed it deserved. Italy fought to recover one lost centuries before. Japan fought for a place at a table that was by then being cleared of the place settings of empire.

Russia fought for survival. Stalin, like many Russian rulers, had a view of empire somewhat different from the Western or even the Eastern concept. Territorial empire for Russia was basically buffer.

As the war wound down, the United States and Russia were the principle “victors” inasmuch as the postwar landscape emerged from their interests, with almost no one in a position to say no. At least ostensibly, the United States was invested in the end of imperialism, at least as it had been conceived and pursued till then. It costs too much. Even the emerging global economy seemed set to render empire a defunct model. Colonialism was on the way out, though it took decades for it that manifest.

Not that national actors did not continue to assert some form of colonial authority anyway. Wars have long aftermaths, which Overy takes pains to stress.

Overy has his biases, but by and large manages them carefully (he’s too kind to Montgomery, for one thing) and sets out a set of portraits of the people involved that renders them human and places their talents and contributions in context rather effectively. 

There is a great deal of detail here for the avid reader. His conclusions are restrained by the fact that he lets the details reveal what was there to see, but he has a decided point-of-view. Given his aims and the thematic center of what he seeks to argue, this is a fascinating assessment of a time that we are still dealing with, economically, culturally, morally, and certainly politically. 

People, Problems, Politics, and Possibilities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I remember as a child I once asked my dad where all the smoke from the smokestacks went. Into the air, obviously, but after that? I don’t remember exactly what he answered, but it was reassuring, something about how it just got diluted until it sort of wasn’t there anymore. Years later we would have debates about pollution and climate change and it was clear that he simply could not grasp how, the Earth being so big, that we mere mortals could possibly have the kind of impact environmentalists were claiming. It was frustrating and oddly appealing, because reassurance works that way.

One of his arguments rested on the production of CO2 and methane by the Earth itself, among other particulates such as my be spewed out by volcanoes, and how meager our own output was by comparison. Like other such arguments, its legitimacy rested on those factors left out, like accumulation over time. Some of the first work done on what we now call Anthropogenic Climate Change was down in the first half of the 19th Century. The problem was already apparent to some, but of course the question then was, so what? We have to stay warm, we need energy to build things, how are we supposed to do this thing called civilization if we don’t burn things? While this begs many questions (what is it you want to do? how do think “civilization” should manifest? just how much “progress” do we actually need in certain directions?) the fact is no one could construct solar panels in 1850.

And all the other localized signs that spoke to the hindbrain and the skin that told us nothing was changing. Winters were still cold (depending on where you were) summers still tolerable, water seemed plentiful, and so on. Everything is fine in my neighborhood, why the alarmist talk?

Now more of us are aware that self-deception has played a seriously negative role. Yes, politicians and industrialists have reasons to deceive us about these things, but the fact is many of us have been for decades inclined to believe everything would be fine.

With more frequent hurricanes, droughts, floods, and receding glaciers and our collective eyes on all of it almost obsessively (via media, documentaries, book after book) it has become impossible to calmly ignore the reality. And now we are here, a couple of degrees of global temperature away from the stuff of apocalyptic science fiction. Even the big corporations, while still often trying to underplay the crisis, are investing more and more in renewables and alternatives.  (I’m convinced we’re not farther along that road because the corporations took too long to figure out how to bill consumers profitably.)

Now that the ice sheets are receding and the oceans rising and the number of devastating storms is rising, before panic and collapse set in, what is there to be done?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry For The Future, offers a set of possibilities.

Robinson has been writing ecologically-concerned science fiction all his career. The Mars Trilogy is nothing if not a study in potential human impact on an environment. It is clear from even a cursory perusal of his work that he knows from whence he speaks. What humans are doing, what we will do, what we will have in the wake of our collective doing inform the basis of almost all his work. And in a field that has often offered but seldom achieved viable glimpses of the future, his work carries an efficacy difficult to discredit.

The Ministry of the Future follows the work of a department established by the United Nations sometime in the near future (there’s overlap with the present) whose task becomes to speak for the citizens yet to be. Which eventually includes wildlife in an attempt to include all life in a concept of Citizen in order for them to be granted legal standing. The director of the ministry, Mary Murphy, is Irish, and reminds one a bit of Samantha Powers. She has talented people, many of them visionaries, some of them capable of surprising solutions not always legal.

In the wake of one of the worst ecological disasters in history—a heat wave that descends on India and ends up killing twenty million people—the mission of the Ministry acquires an urgency and a momentum that carries through the rest of the novel. Along the way we see solid analyses and examples of the consequences of climate change and glimpses of the costs of doing nothing.

But as well we see on offer solutions. Robinson pairs gloom and doom with possibilities and potentials in a series of elegant portrayals of what can be done. In this, he covers a wide range of the various aspects of the situation with skill and authority, from geo-engineering to economic revisions to migration policy and the kind of international coalition-building that will be essential. His projections of where we may be politically in thirty or forty years are compelling, suggesting the power of SF to predict the future has some legitimacy.

Though these are just possibilities. Grounded in real science and technology and in a pragmatic “read” of human political tendencies. Some of the factors he examines are less tractable and in some instances brutal. But given the Givens, as it were, he gives us a plausible picture of the next few decades and what it is possible to do. Whatever may actually happen will be different, but within the 560 pages of this novel are a suite of approaches that rise to the inspirational.

Regardless of what may happen, one thing emerges from the novel that is inarguable—any solution will necessarily be a collective endeavor.

As well, Robinson skillfully gives a personal story. Mary encounters the lone survivor of the India heatwave and over the course of the novel a relationship evolves that is one of the most heartfelt and poignant to be found. Through this, the personal challenges of the world as it will change emerges. He keeps the larger story firmly grounded in the personal throughout.

One comes away with the conviction that not only can we solve this problem, but that we will become better for having met the challenge, and afterward we might actually have world worthy of the best in us.

Out of the Mists

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 2 Comments

The common assumption put forward by several decades of anthropology and associated fields concerning that vast fog known as Prehistory runs as follows: humans, after emerging from the crapshoot of evolution, roved the savannah in small bands, gathering and hunting and painfully inching their way toward a point where they began to make tools (other than spear points and such). Then came a long period of migration, scattered attempts at settlement, until, a critical population mass achieved, agriculture was developed, and very quickly came the abandonment of hunter-gatherer society, leading to regular towns, art, and gradually more impressive engineering feats to serve the expanding agro-economy. At some further point, all this became the foundation of nascent states, after which the whole thing rolled into the “historic” era (marked by the advent of record-keeping) and kings and empires and slavery, and so forth.

This is more or less the way it was presented to me back in school, and, I suspect, still pretty much the popular conception of prehistory.

The problem with this is that we are talking about roughly 200,000 years of that undifferentiated, featureless, unchanging landscape. Taken at face value, it says that human beings conducted themselves as essentially immutably “innocent” creatures, either incapable or uninterested in doing anything more with themselves or their environment until they learned to plow a field and write things down. If, as the evidence suggests, modern homo sapiens had been roaming around the planet for two hundred millennia, with all that “modern” implies, this begs the question of what “we” were doing all that time and why, all of a sudden, about 10,000 years ago, we started living entirely differently.

Put that way, there is no reasonable answer. It is on its face an absurd assumption.

One that is not supported by any of the evidence we actually have.

So why cling to the narrative?

In The Dawn Of Everything: A New History Of Humanity, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow explore exactly that question and in so doing turn over multiple apple carts, debunk many myths, and shake up the common assumptions about that vast and murky period. They begin with a look at Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the question of equality.

When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way—which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong—made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were were genuinely interesting.

They proceed then to reexamine as many assumptions as possible with the space of reasonably-sized book to show that Rousseau’s apparent point in his Discourse On The Origins Of Inequality is a bit of a cheat—unless Rousseau was being absurd to a purpose. For instance, Graeber and Wengrow remind us (assuming we ever knew) that the so-called “indigenous critique” of European civilization that informed much of Enlightenment thinking was not an invention of the philosophes but a genuine critique delivered by Native Americans after they had witnessed firsthand European civilization (often as captives/slaves, sometimes a diplomats). The sources were credited by the philosophes themselves as being from Native Americans, but later historians chose to ignore this to the point where it was forgotten and the natives were relegated to that pool of prehistoric humanity too “simple” to understand complex culture and socio-political structures.

From that point on, Graeber and Wengrow take nothing at face value and conduct a thorough reevaluation. If human beings have been phsyiologically “modern” for 200,000 years, it is ridiculous to assume they did not conduct themselves with as much sophistication and complexity as we do. Often, as it turns out, with strikingly different results.

The scope of the book is global. Between them, they cover archaeological finds from Central America to Turkey to Japan and points in between and carefully examine what is thee to be seen and what it means in relation to our understanding of how communities function. It is an eye-opening tour.

Much here is speculative. What makes prehistory difficult is the lack of, well, history. Written history. All we have are the remnants. But with a clear eye, those remnants are quite expressive. One thing that emerges consistently is that our previous assumptions are wrong.

From the end of the last ice age till now, we have enough to trace humanity’s presence and draw conclusions about its progress. But for the most part we still cling to the simplistic story of “primitive” societies living subsistence existences until the point where it become possible to form what subsequently became great states—Egypt, Babylon, Rome, the Indus Cultures. The implication being that once we reached that level we never looked back and marched forward into the present building roughly the same kinds of civilizations. And that at some point we collectively began to realize that we had become in thrall to despotisms and began what we know as the battle for equality. We seldom question the progression.

But, Graeber and Wengrow ask, why don’t we question it? Because even within historic times, it just isn’t the case, at least not universally.

If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

What is revealed by their analysis is that the smooth trajectory of assumed historical progress is an oversimplified, biased gloss from too few perspectives. The reality—that which can be demonstrated with evidence and that which can then be surmised by constructive deduction—is far more complicated, complex, and frankly compelling. Part of the telos of those simplistic constructions is that all that has gone before inevitably led to now—to us. We are as we must be by decree of historic processes which are inevitable.

The truth is, what we are now is only one possibility of what we might have become.

And this is the meat and bone of Graeber and Wengrow’s argument—that to justify ourselves as we are it is better to paint the ancient past as a homogenous, almost featureless whole. Had people twenty, thirty, or fifty thousand years ago not been the pastoral simpletons we’ve presented them to be, then where are the great kingdoms and empires, the technologies, the earthworks, the cities that would mark them as complex thinkers? While to a certain extent that is a not unimportant question, it overlooks examples that have left traces, even up to the present period, that fail to fit the expectations engendered by such a view. The decay of time certainly has something to do with the paucity of physical evidence, but what we do have is not so insignificant that the standard narrative has any claim to remain unchallenged.

While a good portion of The Dawn Of Everything is speculative, enough evidence and solid analysis is presented to more than justify such speculations, at the very least insofar as a challenge to our assumptions and a reconsideration of modern expectations. Quite a bit of non-Western critique was suppressed or ignored to help in building a picture of the past that supported the hegemony of the West’s self-importance. (Quite a lot of what became the political revolution of United States came from indigenous sources, accepted wholesale by the philosophes and then subsequently forgotten. The thinking was sophisticated, philosophically trenchant, and necessary to challenge what had become a standard view of the West’s view of itself.)

David Graeber passed away in 2020, at the age of 59. More volumes were to follow this one, according to his collaborator David Wengrow. One assumes many of the critiques that will inevitably emerge regarding this first book would be addressed in those books that follow—for instance, this—because clearly there was insufficient room in one volume to cover all the material avbailable. We may see more, but what they produced here is one of those books designed to upset apple carts. There is no inevitability in history, tempting though such narratives are. In order to free ourselves of the chains of a presumed inevitable present, we must go back and reexamine the past and find those “missing” parts that demonstrate the possibilities and the promises of other roads. This is what we have in this book.

Seeking Meaning In Sand

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have not yet seen the new film version of Dune. I may write about it after I do, although it is not the entire story. What I am interested in here is the ongoing obsession with the novel. This will be the third cinematic iteration. Famously, there are two uncompleted versions, one by Jodowrosky and another by Ridley Scott. We know how far the former came because there is a fascinating documentary about it, but as for Scott’s version there are mainly rumors and statements that he wanted to do one. Personally, I would have been interested to see that one—I very much like Ridley Scott’s palette: even those of his films that don’t quite work for other reasons I find wonderful to look at—and in some ways he has perhaps played around the edges of it through his Alien franchise. (The first film starts on a world that might have been Arakkis, the second is evocative of Gede Prime, the others keep returning to desert worlds, in theme if not setting. And Ripley becomes a kind of ghola as she is resurrected again and again.)

What is it about the original novel that compels the ongoing obsession, not only of filmmakers, but of fans? (There would be no funding for the films if the audience were not so large and committed. That speaks to the book.)

The history of the novel is something of a publishing legend, like other groundbreaking books. Multiple rejections, ultimate publication, often in a limited way, and a growing audience over years. Dune was famously rejected something like 27 times before finally being taken up by a publisher better known for automobile manuals.

It was, however, serialized in one of the top science fiction magazines, Analog, so dedicated SF readers were the first to encounter it, and doubtless formed the primary audience. I remember reading the ACE paperback from the late Sixties. Its impact on me was almost too large to detail.

I was used to science fiction novels being under 200 pages—average then was 160. From the Golden Age forward you rarely found one more than 250 pages. Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein was an outlier at 408 in its first hardcover incarnation. So here I find this massive book more like the so called classics I’d been reading—Dickens, Dumas, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy—crammed into the cover of a mass market paperback which included a glossary and indexes, explanatory material (every bit as fictional as the main narrative). It felt important. I was 14, it was dense, I struggled through it. (It led to a profound teaching moment in how to read which I’ve written about elsewhere.) I could feel my horizons expand, even though at the basic level of story it was no more or less fascinating than most other good science fiction novels I had read. But it opened possibilities for narrative depth.

A handful of other novels came out around that time that exploded the confines of the thriller-format SF had been kept to—John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up; Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness; and the coming rage for trilogies (many of which were single narratives published economically in three volumes). By the mid-Seventies publishing had changed to accommodate a new idea of what an SF novel could be, including expanded length to include what has become known as World Building (a technique which in some instances supplanted more important aspects of fiction). Not all by itself, but certainly as a point of history, Dune helped make this possible by creating a market for fuller expositions and more detailed construction. This alone might make it significant.

But that alone would not have made it a perennial seller, almost constantly in print ever since. If Frank Herbert had written nothing else, Dune would have made his career.

It was followed up by two more—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune—completing a cycle. That first trilogy stands as a unified work. The second two books are plot-driven indulgences, but not superfluous. The second trilogy…publishing had discovered by then that science fiction could be best-selling fiction and a frenzy of large advances and high-profile publications mark the late Seventies and early Eighties. Herbert’s publisher enabled him to indulge himself with a second trilogy that often leaves people puzzled. But it kept the spotlight on the primary work.

David Lynch’s movie enlarged the audience again. That film, by a director with a certain reputation for examining the macabre oddnesses of humanity, is a spectacular curiosity. It is a mixed bag of brilliance and weird choices.

Then came a modestly-budgeted miniseries on the SyFy Channel, which went on to include the second two novels. It did a much better job of telling Herbert’s story. The chief complaints seem to be the results of that budget (and that Sting did not reprise the role of Feyd Rautha). It gets dismissed too readily, as if the world were waiting for the “real” cinema treatment.

Which we now, by all accounts, have.

As I say, I have not seen it yet. I want to address the book and its seeming tenacity.

One of the things Herbert did was lace his tale with wise-sounding profundities in the form of aphorisms and epigrams. Each chapter starts with a quote from some serious work by the presumed chronicler of the hero’s life. They sound like quotes from works like the I Ching or SunTzu’s Art of War. This was not a new trick when Herbert did it, but he was particularly adept at it in this book. It is a far future in which, presumably, philosophy has transformed along with everything else. The quasi-feudal politics and economics are given a veneer of newness this way, as if to signal that while it looks like something one would find in the 12th Century, it is not quite the same thing, but you have to take the author’s word for it, because it is the future. The quotes set an aesthetic tone that, among other things, allows us to assume something else is going on instead of just the same old historical thing. In science fiction, veneers matter—they work like orchestrations in a symphony, selecting the right instrument for the right phrase, coloring it. (Veneers should never be mistaken for the story or the theme, which is something unobservant critics do all the time.)

Seriousness established, every significant decision becomes inhabited by purpose, meaning, resonance, and a justification that raises the level of what we read almost to that of destiny, certainly of mythmaking. With this, the writing itself need not be spectacular, just functional.

There are passages in Dune that are breathtaking in what they describe. The ecological aspects of the novel, while in some ways absurd in terms of actual science, take on the same immanence as anything the actors possess. In a way, Dune is one of the first terraforming novels, embracing the idea that human action can transform an entire world. (A couple of years later, we see much more of this, often more pointedly, as in works like Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest—again, the novel opens up a field of possibilities, or at least prepares an audience for more of the same.)

But the characters are hard to relate to—this is a story about archetypes and aristocrats in conflict with emperors and churches. The ordinary people get lost amid the giant legs of the SF manifestations of Greek Heroes. We read this novel for the plot and world and the political revelations. We become engaged because this is in important ways a Lawrence of Arabia story—one toxically mixed with Faust. We read it because we are aware that gods and deserts change the world.

We read it because, as well, we are enamored of the idea of Enlightenment in a Pill.

Herbert was always working in the fields of mind-altering drugs—possibly his best and most relatable novel in this vein is The Santarroga Barrier—and with Melange, the Spice, he created the ultimate in mind-expanding temptations. Its use gives humanity (and others) the universe. Time and space can be brought to heel with it. Visions, prophecies, and clarity are on offer. But it is the ultimate Faustian bargain, for its loss will destroy everything.

It is aptly named. Melange, a mixture of often incongruous elements. A mess, if you will, but messes can evoke wonder, even seem beautiful.

At the heart of this Faustian conundrum are the Fremen, patterned after the Bedu of the Middle East. They are trapped on a world with profoundly limited resources and must be kept that way for the benefit of the rest of the universe. Not quite slaves, but certainly not masters of their own world. Freeing them courts disaster—because part of that freedom entails remaking their world, making it wet. Water, though, is poison to the giant worms that produce the Spice.

Trap after trap after trap populates the novel. Disaster looms. The plot compels.

And of course the relevance to our reality could not be plainer. The teetering sets of balances, all of them with ethical pitfalls, allow Dune to remain trenchant, relevant, challenging. Added to this is the clear connection to the Greek tragedians (especially in the second trilogy—I suggest boning up on Aeschylus and Euripedes before trying them) which gives the book its ongoing frustration of clear, ethical resolution. (And cleverly he took the possibility of building machines that might aid people in their problem-solving off the table, by outlawing thinking machines. It’s all on us and what we bring to the game.)

A final thread woven through the book that seems to make it constantly popular is that it is a coming-of-age story that contains a biting critique of privilege. Whatever Paul might want to be for himself, he is born into a web of expectations that impose their demands from all sides, making any choice he might make impossible outside of a constructed destiny. The adolescent struggling to make sense of the world and find a way to live in it, thinking if only he were god and could command everything to be rational or at least amenable. Paul’s tragedy is that he in fact can become god—and then discovering that this is no solution, either.

How well this new movie deals with all this, I look forward to seeing. For the moment I simply wanted to examine some of the reasons this novel continues to find audiences and why so many filmmakers are drawn to it. The elements it contains transcend the limitations from which it suffers. But whatever the case, this is a novel that allows readers to find meaning—whether that meaning is in the novel or not.