Thanks. I was very happy to see this review, since Ballad of the White Horse is my all-time favorite poem (I finally finished memorizing it earlier this year!)
I agree with everything this says, and I think it gets the moral right. But at the risk of doubting Chesterton's genius, it really bothers me how he presents it at the end.
My understanding is: Alfred defeats the Danes. His vassals tell him that he could potentially press his victory and drive them from England entirely. But he feels like this would be "showing daisies the door" and against the spirit of eternal revolution. So he makes a peace treaty that lets them stay in England. Then when he gets old and weak, they backstab him and attack his subjects. The king must go back to war, despite his old age. Still, he gives a speech saying that this is the way things have to be.
This bothers me for the same reason it would bother me if the police caught a murderer, then let him go without jail time because "each generation must defeat the murderer anew, that's just how things work". It isn't! If police did that, it would be unfair to the murderer's next victims! In the same way, Alfred's decision seems unfair to all the people who the Vikings killed or uprooted the second time around. It's all nice and well to say that if you can't defeat a problem permanently, you must remain ever vigilant. But the poem suggests Alfred is going beyond that, and refusing to defeat a problem permanently - even though he could - in order to prove a point.
(also, "the Vikings" are a terrible symbol for "problem mankind just has to learn to live with because it can never be fully ended". England has been Viking-free for almost a millennium now!)
I can't tell whether I'm just overinterpreting the lines where people tell Alfred he could have gotten rid of the Danes, or whether this is a contentful disagreement between me and Chesterton. If the latter, I appreciate that his poem doesn't shy away from the inevitable bad consequences of taking his incorrect position on this. But the fact that he's under no illusions here makes it even harder for me to understand what he's thinking, other than giving Alfred another opportunity to make a flowery speech.
(one of my favorite parts about the poem is how it stops just sort of postmodern-style lampshading of how everything Alfred does is an opportunity to give a flowery speech about virtue. In one part, a peasant woman offers him some bread to tend her fire, Alfred gives a flowery speech to himself about how virtuous the poor are, and he gets so distracted that he forgets to actually tend the fire and burns all her food. Then the woman slaps him, he's surprised for just a second, but he quickly regains his bearings and gives a flowery speech about the symbolic meaning of peasants slapping kings, and even though he's still standing in the place he got slapped, the woman is never mentioned again - presumably she gets creeped out by all the soliloquizing and sneaks away)
My other complaint (no, really, I love the poem, I just don't get many opportunities to complain about it) is the last twelve stanzas. Sure, they're incredibly beautiful and form a great emotional arc and the part about the grass is great. But they're almost unrelated to anything that's come before. King Alfred is attacking London . . . why again? Something about defeating the Danes? Who he didn't want to defeat before? But now they're back? And he has to take London to stop them? But we've just gone through ~500 stanzas about the King's first battle, then a discussion of the symbolism of the horse, then a prophecy - and now we get 12 stanzas of "oh and also there was another battle, don't worry, he won". And it ends with "and the King took London town", which sounds like it should be the crowning point of the poem. But there wasn't really any effort to build up London as symbolically important before. Earlier in the poem one of Alfred's generals says "I doubt if you will have the crown / till you have taken London town", but in fact he has had the crown for decades at this point. I don't know, I just never "got" this part emotionally.
Vikings in particular are not a threat, but in the last book Chesterton discusses "the barbarian come again" in terms that evoke modern ... Bureaucrats? Secularists? George Bernard Shaw? He doesn't pin down exactly who he's talking about with these words, but they seem to be modern people:
"They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
"Not with the humour of hunters
Or savage skill in war,
But ordering all things with dead words,
Strings shall they make of beasts and birds,
And wheels of wind and star.
"They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
With many a scroll and pen;
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred's days,
When pagans still were men."
Evil reappears in every age, sometimes with a new form, leading to the need to defeat it once again? I agree with Scott that some particular evils, at least, can be defeated in an ensuring way, though Evil writ large will always be around until Christ returns.
When it's your monkish clerks who neither lust nor fight, it's all "go robed in rain and snow but the heart of flame therein", when it's the other guy's monkish clerks it's "backwards shall ye turn and gaze desiring . . . when pagans were still men"
My guess would be the poem assumes it's being read by people who know enough about Alfred the Great to know that re-taking London was when he declared himself King of the English. Chesterton may not have realised it would be talked about a century after his death by people in other countries.
At the risk of being a non-Catholic spouting nonsense about Catholics, I think that you *are* getting at something contentful- a profound difference between the views of a utilitarian consequentialist and those of (a certain flavor of) a Catholic.
To illustrate my point, let me turn to another great Catholic writer. When Bilbo does not stab Gollum, yes, it is an act of pity and morally upright and so on. But consider what’s at stake. He almost gets caught (and then presumably gets killed). He explicitly almost cracks his skull on the low ceiling. Gollum’s shriek alerts the goblins and Bilbo almost gets caught by them. _Any single of those happening would have doomed the world to darkness_.
When Aragorn decides what to do on Amon Hen after the breaking of the Fellowship, he has a number of perfectly reasonable choices. Go help Frodo (Aragorn previously treaded the deadly flowers of Morgul vale!) or go to Minas Tirith as he intended and Boromir’s dream suggested. One thing that _wasn’t_ reasonable was taking the time to have any kind of ceremony for Boromir (complete with a long poem!), and then chase the Uruk-Hai across Rohan, in the opposite direction from all the action and risking being killed by Uruks or even the Rohirrim. And of course, pertinently to your original point, he pardons the Easterlings after the war and doesn’t even exterminate the Orcs- and then spends much of his life campaigning in the East and South.
Building a huge army, crafting a Ring etc. actually did make more sense than Gandalf’s plan. Saruman was at least partially sincere when he thought he was opposing Sauron his way. At least at first.
Returning to Chesterton himself- Father Brown has a number of situations where he could take a “wrong” action that would bring glory to the Church. He scoffs at those.
I could give many more examples, but the point is- when people tell you that “the Catholic Church is not utilitarian”, this is what they mean. The Bilbo that would stab Gollum would fully succumb to the Ring. The Aragorn that would abandon Merry and Pippin wouldn’t be the kind of future king that would be needed. You do the right thing because it is the right thing. And it also may “pay off” as Aragorn’s choices did but that’s not why you do it.
Perhaps the Alfred that wouldn’t let the Vikings go wouldn’t be Alfred.
(To be clear- I am not defending this view, merely clarifying how Chesterton might have thought).
Yes, yes. This. I think this is almost inconceivable for any consequentialist. In a simple sense this could be trivialised perhaps to the trolley problem, even. But there's also a strong Christian (or renegade Christian?) strand with retelling stories from the "baddie" perspective where the moral choice is essentially tragic, but if you accept the Christian narrative, ultimately right (starting from, I kid you not, the True Cross speaking in a trippy Dream of the Rood ca. 710 AD).
I don't think it's at all inconceivable for a consequentialist, and I personally think of any consequentialist who fails to engage with these sorts of ideas as operating at a very low level of sophistication. It's impossible to judge all the outcomes of every action you take in full, and you should always be cautious of the patterns you create in your own reasoning and judgment through your behavior, and the patterns that any rule will create in the reasoning of people subjected to it, not just the idealized consequences of those measures taken in isolation. And even if you exercise your best judgment, sometimes things won't work out for the better.
But, as a rule, writers trying to lionize some particular moral code pretty much never craft stories where their heroes act according to that code, and the worst case outcome actually comes to pass. It's one thing to say "A Bilbo who would have killed Gollum would have succumbed to the Ring, so even though there was a risk of disaster, it was the right thing to do." It's another thing to write a story where the protagonists show mercy to their enemies, it comes back to bite them, and their enemies win and take over the world and the forces of Good suffer an ultimate and permanent defeat, but the author presents the protagonists as having made the right choices anyway.
If you believe some higher power will prevent these sorts of outcomes from actually occurring in real life, then virtue ethics become essentially identical to consequentialism- behave according to the appropriate virtues, and the consequences will resolve themselves. It's a very different matter to believe that people should behave according to select virtues even when this will in fact lead to worse outcomes than not doing so.
That's an excellent critique, generally speaking, but, well - Morgoth _and_ Sauron were indeed shown more mercy or at least leniency than they deserved, with devastating results. Some smaller-scale disasters caused in part by misplaced kindness involve Eol, the sons of Feanor, Turin and Saruman.
In most of those cases, Tolkien does not dwell much on how the Good Guys should have been much more vindictive (Treebeard's decision to let Saruman go is perhaps the biggest exception).
Dialing up vindictiveness - without implausibly careful calibration - might decisively eliminate the enemies you can see, but it'll also make new ones out of folks who could otherwise have been allies, or at least neutral. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga One particularly memetic way to express the sentiment is "those 'no-nonsense solutions' don't hold water in a world of jet-powered apes and time travel."
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Desertopa suggests that Good Guys doing Good Things, losing Badly to Bad Guys and the narrator still claiming they were acting correctly doesn't happen often or at all. I'm giving a few examples from the Legendarium where this plot played out to a significant extent. Good Guys were too nice to Bad Guys, paid Bad price, Tolkien did not obviously consider the too-niceness a mistake.
"Some smaller-scale disasters caused in part by misplaced kindness involve Eol, the sons of Feanor, Turin and Saruman."
As for the Feanorians, there's not much could have been done about them. If the Valar had intervened and dragged them back by force, or even killed them, this would have proven (at least to Feanor) that the claims made by Morgoth were true, and the Elves were the slaves of the Valar. And the Valar did not feel they had the right to interfere with the fate of the Elves, as the Children of Eru; they saw their original interference (bringing them to Valinor) had resulted in this, and any further meddling would just cause more trouble.
To kill them would have reduced the Valar to the same level of Morgoth. You don't defeat evil by becoming evil.
"writers trying to lionize some particular moral code pretty much never craft stories where their heroes act according to that code, and the worst case outcome actually comes to pass."
Interestingly, Ragnarok, which Chesterton so disparages here, is exactly that. Although he is also a Catholic, I think Tolkein has a better understanding of the pagan sense of virtue. Tolkien [1] (quoting Kerr): " 'The winning side is Chaos and Unreason'—mythologically, the monsters—'but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.' And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this 'absolute resistance, perfect because without hope' "
The "melancholy" felt by the pagans wasn't just because of their eschatology, but because anyone living then could expect many disasters to befall them:incurable disease and injury, famine, war. they held great regard for both those who kept going despite disaster, and those who fell to it valiantly. As an atheist, the view that one should stick to one's principles despite knowing that everything will be swept way in the end seems more virtuous than the idea that doing so earns brownie points in heaven.
I’m reminded of Tietjens’ anger (in Parade’s End) at his father for killing himself, because he made it an option for his sons, basically. He felt it as an attack or a loss of protection/tradition, I think.
> _Any single of those happening would have doomed the world to darkness_.
Certainly would have been bad for Bilbo personally, but I'm not so sure how that scenario plays out for the wider world. Gollum held on to the ring an awfully long time, and could conceivably have done so longer still. Keeping it buried might even have slowed the process of Sauron's recovery.
Without Bilbo, maybe Gandalf has to step in to keep the dwarves from getting eaten by spiders, and negotiate their release from the elves. Maybe they get a replacement elvish burglar as part of the deal, who then discovers Smaug's vulnerability in time to save Laketown. The Battle of Five Armies would presumably go differently due to diplomatic ripple effects despite Bilbo not being directly involved.
Later, Frodo gets involved because he wants to find out what the heck happened to his uncle that would result in a dwarf showing up at his door with plunder shares and a next-of-kin notification, but no body having been recovered. They can't even say for sure he's dead!
Gandalf presumably still sees good cause to get a team together at Rivendell to manage Sauron-related problems, but in Moria, rather than a silent tomb, they find an active siege between the Balrog and some ring-bearing goblin warlord, whose charred finger happens to land in Frodo's pocket as a fateful echo of both Isildur, and Bilbo's misuse of the riddle game. Gandalf recognizes its significance, but falls off a bridge (as previously scheduled) before he can explain fully, and then the plot's mostly back on track from there.
Bilbo getting killed and the Ring not getting out? Obvious and swift win for Sauron. He didn't need the Ring to win - he was already very much winning. This is something people sometimes miss - Gandalf, Saruman, all the elves and all of Gondor together are completely outclassed. Direct confrontations of any kind are never suggested because they are hopeless at this point. Aragorn and Elrond are no Elendil and Gil-Galad.
Gandalf changing pre-set plans to attack Dol-Guldur to accompany the dwarves for no particular reason? I mean, sure, also Manwe deciding to just descend and fix everything. Fact is, Gandalf didn't really know about the Ring and expected the company to get in trouble and still left them. He would have done the same, only earlier. Or even would have insisted on them going back to rescue Bilbo as he was in fact attempting to do when Bilbo showed up.
Elvish burglar? Whose smell would be unfamiliar to Smaug? He wouldn't play riddles with an elf. And Thorin was not overfond of the wood elves either.
The Ring getting to Orcs - again, various scenarios, extremely likely to get to Sauron.
Frodo and next-of-kin notification - nope. Next of kin would have been... Lobelia? Frodo was adopted when he 21, years after he was orphaned. Anyway, one thing he would not do for his distantly familiar obviously-mad uncle who vanished years ago is go to the unprecedented-for-Hobbits-except-Bilbo journey to Rivendell.
ETA: I don't think I've emphasized enough how much this would not be happening. The next-of-kin notification would be taking place a year or two after Bilbo's death at the latest. Frodo was simply not alive then.
Gandalf assembling a team in Rivendell - he didn't do that even in the book. But let's suppose this all somehow happens (why? The Council had no actual point other than the Ring). Why would the team do the whole stealthy creep thing? The only strategy available to them would have been a diminished version of the Last Alliance. And anyway, when does this happen? For most of the time windows, there's no real contest between an Orc even with a Ring and the Balrog. So the Ring either stays in Moria or the Balrog gets it. No good outcomes.
And even somehow ignoring everything above - the plot is _not_ on track. In this world, there's no Gollum to guide Frodo and no Gollum's teeth to actually get the Ring into the fire.
Otho was Bilbo's blood relation (so he expected to inherit Bag End) so if a Dwarf turned up with "sorry about your cousin, here's his share of the treasure" it would have been accepted by all in The Shire as "this is what happens when you go off on adventures". Otho Sackville-Baggins would have had no reason to go haring off on an adventure of his own trying to discover Bilbo's fate. (More likely reaction would have been "good riddance to bad rubbish").
Frodo would have been left to be 'brought up anyhow' among the Brandybucks, as per Gaffer Gamgee's recital of the family history in the pub before the big birthday party:
"Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders, being brought up anyhow in Brandy Hall. A regular warren, by all accounts. Old Master Gorbadoc never had fewer than a couple of hundred relations in the place. Mr. Bilbo never did a kinder deed than when he brought the lad back to live among decent folk.
‘But I reckon it was a nasty knock for those Sackville-Bagginses. They thought they were going to get Bag End, that time when he went off and was thought to be dead. And then he comes back and orders them off; and he goes on living and living, and never looking a day older, bless him! And suddenly he produces an heir, and has all the papers made out proper. The Sackville-Bagginses won’t never see the inside of Bag End now, or it is to be hoped not.’
Otho was less than gruntled upon Bilbo's disappearance, as he had hoped to inherit:
‘Only one thing is clear to me,’ said Otho, ‘and that is that you are doing exceedingly well out of it. I insist on seeing the will.’
Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo. He read the will carefully and snorted. It was, unfortunately, very clear and correct (according to the legal customs of hobbits, which demand among other things seven signatures of witnesses in red ink).
‘Foiled again!’ he said to his wife. ‘And after waiting sixty years. Spoons? Fiddlesticks!’ He snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off.
You’re correct of course, it was he, not Lobelia, who would have inherited. Poor Otho, one tends to forget about him much like Telep… we sorry Celeborn. Wisest of the Elves.
… now I’m trying to Imagine Lotho as the Ring-Bearer.
Tolkien says he died at the "ripe but disappointed age of 102", so he didn't live to see Frodo leaving and selling Bag End to Lobelia 😁 His dream of being the multiple head of Hobbit families (hence, Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) never came true:
"Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. ...In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
Lotho as Ring-Bearer? He wouldn't have gotten as far as Farmer Maggot's farm, the night he heard Gaffer Gamgee talking with someone about "Baggins", he would have immediately rushed out and surrendered it.
(1) " Gollum held on to the ring an awfully long time, and could conceivably have done so longer still."
No, The Ring was actively trying to get back to its master, which is how Gollum came to 'lose' it in the first place. If it ended up being picked up by a goblin or Orc, it would have made its way to Sauron much sooner.
(2) Aw man, does nobody understand the point being made about *mercy*? This is why I want to kill Tom Bombadil after watching the latest episode of Rings of Power; they have him word-for-word quoting Gandalf's speech about "some that die deserve life" but the boneheads in charge of this show/scriptwriting twist it to force a choice between "abandon your friends to CERTAIN DEATH or go save them and LOSE ALL CHANCE TO FULFIL YOUR DESTINY" (more stupid 'conflict for the sake of conflict').
Total misunderstanding of the entire point of what Tolkien, via Gandalf, has to say.
Whether the Ring is “actively” trying much and how sentient or whatever it is are some of the most unclear yet important points in LoTR.
Certainly it would have many chances to betray Gollum and get itself to be found by some orc. He hunted and ate a young goblin on the very day he lost the Ring.
Even the strongest argument “in favor”, Isildur’s death, is not all that clear. This also depends on which version of events we actually consider.
The Ring is not sentient, but it is filled with Sauron's power and finely attuned to the will of its master. He is constantly, as it were, calling it back and it can respond to that.
Think of it as a type of machine intelligence, that may not be conscious as such, but has a clear set of instructions and goals to follow.
Why didn’t it betray Gollum all those years? Dol-Guldur is closer to Gollum than Mordor. Providence interfering gently every single time? I find it more parsimonious to assume that its “freedom to act” is very limited and it is not in fact attuned to the Will of Sauron all that well, certainly not so far from Mordor and while Sauron is still relatively weak.
There is a really well written fantasy novel called "The Worm Ouroboros" by E. R. Eddison. In it, a viking-inspired kingdom of warrior fight against another kingdom of evil viking-inspired warriors. Battles are fought, people fall into and out of love, betrayals occur, protagonists die, and in the end the good guys win. Then life goes on a while. Getting bored, one of the heroes prays to the Gods to grant him a wish. The wish he wants? To bring his old enemies back.
On a sudden Lord Brandoch Daha stood up, unbuckling from his shoulder his golden baldrick set with apricot-coloured sapphires and diamonds and fire-opals that imaged thunderbolts. He threw it before him on the table, with his sword, clattering among the cups. “O Queen Sophonisba,” said he, “thou hast spoken a fit funeral dirge for our glory as for Witchland’s. This sword Zeldornius gave me. I bare it at Krothering Side against Corinius, when I threw him out of Demonland. I bare it at Melikaphkhaz. I bare it in the last great fight in Witchland. Thou wilt say it brought me good luck and victory in battle. But it brought not to me, as to Zeldornius, this last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.”
[...]
[Lord Juss] answered, “I shall be thirty-three years old tomorrow, and that is young by the reckoning of men. None of us be old, and my brethren and Lord Brandoch Daha younger than I. Yet as old men may we now look forth on our lives, since the goodness thereof is gone by for us.” And he said, “Thou O Queen canst scarcely know our grief; for to thee the blessed Gods gave thy heart’s desire: youth forever, and peace. Would they might give us our good gift, that should be youth forever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms. Would they might but give us our great enemies alive and whole again. For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.”
(Tolkien, famously, thought that this philosophy was disgusting and marred the book.)
That reminds me of a more recent fantasy saga. The Sith believe that the best way to grow stronger is to struggle against powerful enemies. Which is why a Sith Lord is expected to find and train an apprentice: if there are no sufficiently powerful enemies at hand, they will create their own. 😉
I am a Catholic (but not a theologian), and I think you got the closest to explaining it: an act of mercy can make redemption possible. As others noted, the invaders are different Danes, as the previous ones converted, which changes the nature of the conversation. But it is intentional (and always kind of funny) that consequentialists can't account for mercy and redemption, which is a major appeal of Catholicism.
When people say “the Catholic Church is not utilitarian” I think they have in mind something like Newman's quote "The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."
It's not that, exactly. The young courtier is saying "why can't we make an end of the bad guys once and for all?" and Alfred is saying "life is not like that, there will always be weeds".
Even if they had killed off the Danes (instead of making peace) at the end of the last war, some new enemy would come along in their place. There is no one, forever, done and dusted, now we won and everything is fine. Rome had its golden day and fell, and that was the world's end for the people of that time. But new society grew up, with people both good and bad.
If you want things to stay good, you have to keep cleaning house. There is never going to be one final "great, everything is clean and tidy, I'll never have to do anything again".
New enemies and new challenges are part of the nature of the world as we have it. While they're gone off to fight and win another victory, the weeds are growing on the White Horse after it has been scoured. The daisies don't care about Alfred taking London, and when the victors come home, they'll have to have another scouring day next year and get down on their knees and weed the White Horse, and bedamned if they're the Big Damn Heroes who kicked Viking asses all over again.
It may also be a subtle reference to the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares:
Matthew 13:24-30
"The Parable of the Weeds
24 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”
Just like the poor, we'll have the weeds with us always, until the end of the world. That's what being a conservative is about at bottom: understanding that to keep the thing clean, you have to work at it. Unlike the progressive, there is no one final "and now we've fixed it all forever and will never have to do anything again" dream; starting a revolution is easy, staying a revolutionary is hard.
As that English Catholic guy said, in his fiction and in his letters:
“For the Lord of the Galadhrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-Earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted, for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”
"Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."
You get back up, you pick up your sword (or your broom, or your spade) and you do it all over again until the day you die. Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
Sure, but I think Scott's contention is that, in this specific case, Alfred had a chance to finish his job, but decided not to. Sure, "chop wood, carry water", but sometimes, you need to chop a fixed amount of wood to ensure you'll be warm in the winter. Leaving the work half-done today just because there's eventually going to be another winter after the coming one seems... ill-advised.
Scott is mistaken in his reading, I think (though I shudder to suggest any error on the part of the True Caliph).
This is a *different* bunch of Danes landing and making trouble, and Alfred is not king of All England at this point. To "finish the job" means he would have had to go to Europe, seek out and kill *every* Dane there to make sure nobody would survive to launch another raid, and then maybe come back to England and kill all the Danes in the Danelaw, whom he had made a treaty with and who had been living more or less in peace with him for decades.
That would be like if instead of interning the Japanese during the Second World War, Roosevelt had said "No, to hell with it, kill them all so they'll never try this again". Uh, yeah. That may be a very utilitarian decision, but us snivelling bleeding-heart non-utilitarians have the gall to object to such "git er done" acts.
Same with Europe after the First World War - if the Allies had killed every single German (man, woman and child), both in Germany and any Germans or people of German descent living in the US and elsewhere, then there sure wouldn't have been a Second World War on the continent. But even punitive as Versailles was, they didn't go to *that* extreme.
And Alfred *did* finish the job this time as well - he kicked out the new wave of invaders, and he can't be blamed for not foreseeing that one hundred and seventy years later, there would be a succession crisis in England that meant a bunch of Vikings who had settled down in Normandy would arrive to claim the realm.
That's fair -- I have not read the poem, so I was assuming that Scott's reading was accurate, and Alfred stopped short of neutralizing all the hostile Vikings who were already in England. But if Alfred did indeed neutralize them (by making them sign a peace treaty), then his job was indeed done. Going out and genociding a whole other continent would've been excessive indeed.
I don’t think you should be satisfied by this. Alfred couldn’t _know_ Guthrum would be true to his word. And in any case, there would be a deterrence argument for killing them all. Within the consequentialist framework (or a relatively simple version thereof), he still took a needless risk.
As I've described in a longer comment, killing them all wasn't pragmatically possible, and it would have been a very stupid idea as it would *immediately* invite retaliatory, vengeance-seeking, raids by their kinsfolk and countrymen in Scandinavia and on the Continent.
Imagine that after the American Civil War, the North had embarked on a policy of "kill them all" in the South. Whether or not this would have succeeded, I leave up to others to discuss. But Alfred wasn't even in as strong a position as the post-Civil War North. He was *not* king of England, as 'England' didn't exist as a state or nation then. He was king of Wessex, with an allied/subdued kingdom of Mercia. Marching north on a "kill 'em all" expedition, after just about winning a hard-fought victory, would have been monumentally stupid.
We moderns may expect that "oh, nobody really means it when they sign treaties, that's just going to be broken the second either side sees advantage", but that wasn't the case then. Alfred was Guthrum's sponsor in baptism, his god-father: this was a relationship that meant something. If Alfred went around breaking treaties and betraying relationships and being foresworn, he wouldn't remain king long.
Sometimes consequentalism is damn stupid, and this is one of those times.
...to mean that Alfred specifically rejected a "drive the Danes out of England" plan which everyone thought would have succeeded, and that the same Danes he spared were the ones who burnt Brand's farm and attacked London later. If that's not true, and these verses are just rhetorical flourish, then I guess Alfred's/Chesterton's perspective would make more sense.
It seems Alfred rejected the 'drive out the danes' policy, but I don't think it was universally expected to succeed. Alfred was king of Wessex, the southernmost kingdom in England at the time. Northumberland wasn't, and had never been, part of this realm. So in that sense it's less a 'drive out the danes' and more an 'invade the danes' policy that he rejected. It would have been a new war, and it's hard to criticise him for rejecting that.
And as others have said, it wasn't Guthrum's army which was causing trouble, it was other Danes, who had settled up north. Guthrum kept the treaty and was peaceful for the rest of his life. The relevant poetic licence in BOTWH is describing Guthrum as the king of the Danes, when he was really more like one of a number of warlords.
Well, first we have to deep-dive into history to work out why the young earl's policy was rejected (or not so much rejected, as the flaws pointed out) by Alfred.
Okay, so Alfred is a 9th century Anglo-Saxon king. Well, the only reason for that is that after the collapse of Roman Britain in the 5th century (roughly), bands of invaders from the area around the North Sea (roughly) turned up and conquered, settled, and took over: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.
So this is a "beam in your eye" situation - if the Anglo-Saxon Problem had been solved by the Romano-British, there wouldn't *be* any King Alfred. The weeds always return: in the days of the Romano-British, the weeds had been the ancestors of Alfred. Now in Alfred's day, the weeds are the Danes (roughly speaking). And if they do solve The Danish Problem who are the next lot of weeds? That's what Alfred (in Chesterton's version) is trying to get across to the young earl: there is no Final Solution (and I use that term on purpose).
Secondly, on pragmatic grounds, they can't do it. Maybe the young earl wasn't around for the days of Alfred's war, or maybe he had been too young to fight in it, but Alfred's victory only came after a long, gruelling series of defeats.
It all kicked off with the Great Heathen Horde led by Ivar the Boneless (and two of his brothers,; "According to the Tale of Ragnar Lodbrok, he was ...the brother of Björn Ironside, Halvdan Hvitserk, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Ragnvald)", which by the way is a *fantastic* title for the whole thing. The *ostensible* reason claimed was revenge for the killing of Ivar and brothers' father by king Aella of Northumbria, but most likely it was a combination large raiding party and planned invasion, since the Frankish kingdoms where they usually raided had toughened up their defences:
"The Great Heathen Army, also known as the Viking Great Army, was a coalition of Scandinavian warriors who invaded England in 865 AD. Since the late 8th century, the Vikings had been engaging in raids on centres of wealth, such as monasteries. The Great Heathen Army was much larger and aimed to conquer and occupy the four kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex."
Anyway, the above kingdoms weren't able to drive out the raiders, especially as they had been fortified by the Great Summer Army which turned up from Scandinavia. and fourteen years later, Alfred finally defeats the half of the army led by Guthrum and makes peace:
" According to Alfred the Great's biographer Asser, the Vikings then split into two bands. Halfdan led one band north to Northumbria ...Returning south of the border in 876, he shared out Northumbrian land among his men, who "ploughed the land and supported themselves." This land was part of what became known as the Danelaw.
According to Asser, the second band was led by Guthrum, Oscetel, and Anwend. ... Asser reports that Alfred made a treaty with the Vikings to get them to leave Wessex. The Vikings left Wareham, but it was not long before they were raiding other parts of Wessex, and initially they were successful. Alfred fought back, however, and eventually won victory over them at the Battle of Edington in 878. This was followed closely by what was described by Asser as the Treaty of Wedmore, where Guthrum agreed to be baptised and then for him and his army to leave Wessex. Then some time after, the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum was agreed, that set out the boundaries between Alfred and Guthrum's territories as well as agreements on peaceful trade, and the weregild value of their people."
So pragmatically, Alfred *can't* mount an invasion to clear out the Danelaw and "drive the Danes out of England". He doesn't have the strength and if he does anything like this, he's giving the Danes/Vikings the perfect excuse to mount a second invasion. You reviewed the Sage of Burnt Njal, you know the complex web of obligations around kin-slaying. "He's slaughtering our kindred" is the perfect casus belli for the Scandinavian and Continental Danes to come together and invade.
We've discussed this before, but the great asset for the Vikings is their ships. They can land on the coast, they can sail up navigable rivers, and mount hit-and-run attacks then get away in their ships before local forces can catch up to them. There isn't a comparable English navy to engage them.
Thirdly, again on pragmatic grounds, Alfred is relying on being able to trust Guthrum. He can't fight a war on two fronts, and he needs to be assured that it won't turn out "ha ha, Guthrum came up from behind and stabbed him in the back". For Guthrum's part, he's got what he wanted: his life was spared, he has his own kingdom, and he has an alliance that he would need to be very stupid to trash, and I don't think Guthrum is stupid.
If Alfred tries invading the Danelaw to drive out the Danes, Guthrum will be forced to break that alliance. Alfred's policy turned enemies into allies, the young earl's policy would just create more enemies and this time round, maybe Alfred *wouldn't* win that war. The Danes in time may become "English", just as Alfred's ancestors became "English" after they too had been an invading force that settled down in the land. EDIT: Oops, and I doubt "everyone thought" the #DriveTheDanesOutofEngland would have succeeded; the young earl does, but he's young and inexperienced and full of the stories of the glories of war and overwhelming victories, while Alfred and his veterans remember the slogging in the mud for years and years, and when the kingdom of Wessex was reduced to one island in a marsh.
"In 878, a third Viking army gathered on Fulham by the Thames. It seems they were partly discouraged by the defeat of Guthrum but also Alfred's success against the Vikings coincided with a period of renewed weakness in Francia. The Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, died in 877 and his son shortly after, precipitating a period of political instability of which the Vikings were quick to take advantage. The assembled Viking army on the Thames departed in 879 to begin new campaigns on the continent.
...By 896, the Viking army was all but defeated and no longer saw any reason to continue their attacks and dispersed to East Anglia and Northumbria. Those that were penniless found themselves ships and went south across the sea to the Seine. Anglo-Saxon England had been torn apart by the invading Great Heathen Army and the Vikings had control of northern and eastern England, while Alfred and his successors had defended their kingdom and remained in control of Wessex."
Alfred the Great really is a fascinating character; he was intelligent, genuinely religious, genuinely interested in education and trying to reclaim the best of what had come before from Roman Britain, while improving his own forces against external threat, including reorganising the army, creating fortified towns, and building at least an attempt at a navy to counter the Viking ships.
>That would be like if instead of interning the Japanese during the Second World War, Roosevelt had said "No, to hell with it, kill them all so they'll never try this again". Uh, yeah. That may be a very utilitarian decision, but us snivelling bleeding-heart non-utilitarians have the gall to object to such "git er done" acts.
Well, except that it wouldn't be like that at all. The Japanese people interned by Roosevelt's Executive Order during WWII were largely farmers and fishermen who came to the US, not as an invading force, but as individuals looking to make a living. Killing all of them wouldn't have been utilitarian at all; it just would have been bonkers.
The number of actual Japanese soldiers captured by the US was relatively small, and most of them were actually held prisoner in Australia and New Zealand, and had nothing to do specifically with "Roosevelt" anyway. The analogy simply isn't very analogous, as the Japanese never even got a chance to land an invading force in the United States outside of a few sparsely inhabited islands. Killing the few Japanese who managed to land on US soil *and* subsequently get captured rather than killed in battle might have been utilitarian, but it wouldn't have had much effect (and of course I would join you as a fellow sniveling bleeding-heart non-utilitarian in objecting to such an unchivalrous thing).
Anyhow, the choice isn't between simply letting the invaders hang around or killing every last of them wherever they can be found. Driving them off your island while you have the chance seems like the feasible and responsible "compromise." It doesn't mean they'll never invade again but at least they'll have to cross the water to do it!
> Well, except that it wouldn't be like that at all. The Japanese people interned by Roosevelt's Executive Order during WWII were largely farmers and fishermen who came to the US, not as an invading force, but as individuals looking to make a living.
But it would, indeed, be EXACTLY like that, although for the opposite reason you imply. The vast majority of the Danes in England, were 'farmers and fishermen just trying to make a living'. Turns out it's really easy to rile such people up into a Great Heathen Army.
That reminds me of a proverb from a civil engineer, who was talking about why sidewalks in Disney World get repaired so much more quickly than the average city sidewalk:
"We only maintain that which we love."
Even though it was just a simple concrete observation, I thought it immediately applied to everything in my life. Marriage, kids, career, friendships, yardwork, prayer-life, website code, etc.
Chesterton writes about this very idea in "Orthodoxy", and uses as his example Pimplico, a section of London that in Chesteron's time was known for its slums:
"Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
I was reading something about the “Last Shaker” the other day, and there was something about Shaker doctrine, or nonsense depending on your POV, and how life is for laboring, literally and towards God; so that you may reach heaven and there - labor. Which to someone like me, the Marthas of the world, sounds quite satisfactory. Partly because it implicitly supposes that heaven is much like this place, perhaps indistinguishable.
ETA: I agree though, and am surprised Scott thought enemies could be vanquished finally and forever, or that it particularly mattered who they were, or that the Vikings were somehow “worse” than any other enemies so at the least they should be dispatched forever.
This is a great summary, and eloquently put. Another reason I like it is it is a fair and strong position for me to contrast my fairly strong non-conservatism (in the intelligent, Chesterton sense): I share his appreciation for hope and his distaste for fatalism, but have a more radical sense of hope.
The maintenance of the horse of Uffington is beautiful because of the sense of continuing community, but the maintenance of polio clinics and orphanages for starving children is, to me, a sign of profound failure; we could just not have polio or starving children at all!
My progressivism is one of eradicating smallpox, of ending slavery, of ending profound need; the poor may always be with us in a relative sense, but rich countries have essentially eradicated many particular poverties; those of water, clothing, hunger have been the first to fall, poverty of healthcare is solved in most rich countries, and I hope to see poverties of shelter, communication, and transport eliminated in my lifetime in much of the world.
Chesterton is right that you need to keep painting the fence, but you can also make a better paint.
"poverty of healthcare is solved in most rich countries"
The pertinent part there being *rich* countries. It certainly has not been abolished globally, anymore than poverty in general.
I don't think Chesterton is saying "don't even bother trying to eradicate bad things" but rather "you will have to be careful that you maintain the eradication, once you have achieved it".
Polio and TB may be coming back. Things like measles are on the rise again, and that is because we forgot about maintenance. People thought measles was a solved problem, they didn't get their kids vaccinated, and here we go with the same old story.
"I hope to see poverties of shelter, communication, and transport eliminated in my lifetime in much of the world".
Believe me, I say this not to mock or belittle you. But I remember, back in the days of the economic boom pre-2008 crash, the Episcopal Church (for one) confidently asserting that global poverty could be ended within (a short period of time) because now our societies were all so rich.
And then the crash happened shortly afterwards, and all those riches turned out to be bubbles and built on sand. And, well, 'the poor we have with us always'.
Getting to the age I am, I am now past the youthful confidence of "this time for sure!" about any problems. You have to keep painting the fence post.
I do fundamentally agree with you here; without constant effort, things degrade. But, to mix my metaphors, even if you need to keep repainting, you do get to move the fence posts once in a while (hopefully in a better direction).
This isn't essential to your point, and does not dispute your conclusion so it's just to note, but we *really are* vastly richer as a planet than we were even fifty years ago; vast swathes of the world's population now have access to steady food, water, medicine, etc, as a higher proportion than ever before, and that's despite most population growth happening in poor countries! Global maternal mortality rates have plummeted by something like over 90% over the past century.
Oh, exactly! But the broader point is that all these improvements happened because we *worked* at them, they didn't just happen 'of themselves'. Society got richer and then suddenly everyone was healthy? Yes, but they became healthy because of X, Y and Z going out and doing things like finding out how cholera was transmitted (and taking away pump handles) and so forth.
It's more "if the police caught a murderer, the murderer went to jail for a reasonable period of time, was released having served his time, and then murdered someone again", which to be fair is something that happens pretty frequently. There's also the fact that it's not just that the Vikings had "made a peace treaty" - they became Christians:
"When the pagan people of the sea
Fled to their palisades,
Nailed there with javelins to cling
And wonder smote the pirate king,
And brought him to his christening
And the end of all his raids.
(For not till the night's blue slate is wiped
Of its last star utterly,
And fierce new signs writ there to read,
Shall eyes with such amazement heed,
As when a great man knows indeed
A greater thing than he.)"
So yes, I think you are, to a degree, "overinterpreting the lines where people tell Alfred he could have gotten rid of the Danes" - to do so after they had pacified and converted would, to Alfred, have been criminal. However, I agree that this isn't a point that's made particularly strongly, partly I think because Chesterton is having to make the historical 'facts' (such as they are) fit his narrative and his point.
I also think it's unclear from the poem itself whether the Danes who are attacking at the end are in fact the same as those who had settled and converted before (ie. traitors), or a new wave of invaders. If the latter, I think this entire contention disappears.
It's different Danes. Guthrum and his bunch settled down and kept the peace, but years later Danes driven out from the Continent landed in England and started making mischief again, the scallywags.
> "if the police caught a murderer, the murderer went to jail for a reasonable period of time, was released having served his time, and then murdered someone again", which to be fair is something that happens pretty frequently.
Sounds like you've got a defective jail, then, if it's releasing people without having first properly reformed them.
I recommend that everyone should try memorizing poems. They’re easier than prose to memorize (since they often have rhymes and meters that help you remember what line comes next), and having a poem memorized is great for when you’re bored. Start with a short one, keep adding more poems as you go, and eventually you get good at memorizing them and you can tackle something big.
(1) "His vassals tell him that he could potentially press his victory and drive them from England entirely."
From my understanding? Nope. There isn't an "England" at this point, but a hodge-podge of independent kingdoms. Alfred is king of Wessex, with no claims on any other kingdoms, apart from something like "Hey, Mercia, you guys surrendered to my grandfather back in the day so you owe me fealty".
Which doesn't really do him much good, since the Vikings are occupying London which is located in Mercia and the Mercians have enough problems of their own to deal with. At the time of the events in the poem, he's holed up in the marshes and fighting as a resistance leader, not a king of a settled realm. After his first big victory, as described in the poem, the best he can do is "this half of the country is our territory and that half is yours":
"He won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, dividing England between Anglo-Saxon territory and the Viking-ruled Danelaw, composed of Scandinavian York, the north-east Midlands and East Anglia."
(2) The treaty with Guthrum did make peace. Also, Guthrum is now Christian. This is a big thing! He is now bound by a relationship to Alfred! And in a time when there isn't a nationality as identify (remember, there is no "England"), being fellow-Christians fills that breach. Turning around and massacring your (new) fellow-Christian king and his subjects is not a nice thing to do, and will cause people to regard you as untrustworthy and not believe any treaties you make with them.
"One of the terms of the surrender was that Guthrum convert to Christianity. Three weeks later, the Danish king and 29 of his chief men were baptised at Alfred's court at Aller, near Athelney, with Alfred receiving Guthrum as his spiritual son."
Alfred and Guthrum carve up territory, Guthrum goes to his new lands, and it actually works out pretty well. *This* bunch of Vikings are now settled down and mostly peaceable:
"With the signing of the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, an event most commonly held to have taken place around 880 when Guthrum's people began settling East Anglia, Guthrum was neutralised as a threat. The Viking army, which had stayed at Fulham during the winter of 878–879, sailed for Ghent and was active on the continent from 879 to 892."
It's the *other* bunches of Vikings that are the trouble.
(3) Now I'm not just king of Wessex, guys!
"A year later, in 886, Alfred reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again. Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. Soon afterwards, Alfred restyled himself as "King of the Anglo-Saxons". The restoration of London progressed through the latter half of the 880s and is believed to have revolved around a new street plan; added fortifications in addition to the existing Roman walls; and, some believe, the construction of matching fortifications on the south bank of the River Thames.
This is also the period in which almost all chroniclers agree that the Saxon people of pre-unification England submitted to Alfred. In 888, Æthelred, the archbishop of Canterbury, also died. One year later Guthrum, or Athelstan by his baptismal name, Alfred's former enemy and king of East Anglia, died and was buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk. Guthrum's death changed the political landscape for Alfred. The resulting power vacuum stirred other power-hungry warlords eager to take his place in the following years."
So Alfred goes back to rule in Wessex, leaving his half of Mercia under the governance of his son-in-law. Everything in the garden is rosy, except for those dratted Danes:
"After another lull, in the autumn of 892 or 893, the Danes attacked again. Finding their position in mainland Europe precarious, they crossed to England in 330 ships in two divisions. They entrenched themselves, the larger body at Appledore, Kent, and the lesser under Hastein, at Milton, also in Kent. The invaders brought their wives and children with them, indicating a meaningful attempt at conquest and colonisation."
*This* is the second battle he has to fight, and where the young courtier is complaining about Those Dratted Danish Invasions never seeming to end. And Alfred more or less agrees: after all, what can he do? Go off and invade Denmark and conquer it and make it part of his own realm, so there won't be any more Viking raids? Yeah, that's not going to happen, so all he can do is fight *today's* battle and clean their clocks (and the clocks of any other invasion forces that tootle along):
"Those who escaped retreated to Shoebury. After collecting reinforcements, they made a sudden dash across England and occupied the ruined Roman walls of Chester. The English did not attempt a winter blockade but contented themselves with destroying all the supplies in the district.
Early in 894 or 895 lack of food obliged the Danes to retire once more to Essex. At the end of the year, the Danes drew their ships up the River Thames and the River Lea and fortified themselves twenty miles (32 km) north of London. A frontal attack on the Danish lines failed but later in the year, Alfred saw a means of obstructing the river to prevent the egress of the Danish ships. The Danes realised that they were outmanoeuvred, struck off north-westwards and wintered at Cwatbridge near Bridgnorth. The next year, 896 (or 897), they gave up the struggle. Some retired to Northumbria, some to East Anglia. Those who had no connections in England returned to the continent."
And that's why Chesterton finishes with the weeds creeping over the White Horse once again, with the news of the victory in re-taking London happening off-stage. The weeds don't care about human wins or losses. Nature continues on, whether Alfred is king or not. And this is what Alfred understands that the young courtier doesn't: there is no end. You have to do it all, over and over again. If you want something, you have to work for it and work to keep it.
Alfred was intelligent, capable, ambitious and a good ruler. He encouraged the revival of learning and the arts, as well as taking back territory and expanding his kingdom until he made himself "King of the Anglo-Saxons".
"Historian Richard Abels sees Alfred's educational and military reforms as complementary. Restoring religion and learning in Wessex, Abels contends, was to Alfred's mind as essential to the defence of his realm as the building of the burhs. As Alfred observed in the preface to his English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, kings who fail to obey their divine duty to promote learning can expect earthly punishments to befall their people. The pursuit of wisdom, he assured his readers of the Boethius, was the surest path to power: "Study wisdom, then, and, when you have learned it, condemn it not, for I tell you that by its means you may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it".
I don't think the idea is the Alfred made a treaty with the Danes *so that* the eternal revolution could be preserved. I think it's that it was the best he could have done at the time. At the end, he's reminding his men that the eternal revolution is in fact inevitable. He's not saying we should deliberately act to preserve the bad forces that make it so; no, those we should fight, understanding all the while that they can never be entirely extirpated.
Not sure if Chesterton thought about it, but one good reason Alfred couldn't just permanently end the Danish problem is that that would have required killing all the Danes living in England, which would have been a very un-christian thing to do.
One hundred years after Alfred king Ethelred the Unready actually tried to do exactly that in the St. Brice's Day Massacre. Historians are not agreed how much that massacre was actually an attempt to really kill all danish settlers, but it is almost certain that its main effect was uniting all Danes and their allies and so to finally cause the total invasion of England by Sweyn Forkbeard. Perhaps the belief that an evil could be finally ended by a thorough cleansing is just a bad idea, that have only ever had bad consequences for the countries that tried it.
Look at this way: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times". But there's one easy solution to this problem: simply never create the good times. Never fully defeat the enemy. The revolution must continue, forever.
I have a slightly different take on that old aphorism. "Sometimes strong men create good times. Just as often, strong men create hard times and bully everyone into saying times are good."
I think you're assuming too much if you assume everyone who uses this aphorism understands it as you do. Sidebar: I know one weight lifter who considers most types of (male) physical weakness to be signs of moral weakness. This is his favorite aphorism. It's very vagueness likely broadens its appeal.
Haha, I didn't mean to claim that everyone does use it my way, maybe just that I would prefer if they did. 😉
But also, the saying doesn't really make sense to me if it means purely physical strength. Physical strength alone just isn't that useful in the modern world.
I would grant that weight lifting could be one way to develop discipline and character. I just don't think it's the only way.
I don’t think of England as Viking-free but I guess it would be too much to suggest that Alfred had the wisdom to recognize there was something in the Vikings worth preserving, bringing into the fold.
The Vikings do not represent an enemy. They represent the fact that there is an enemy!
Consider a different biblical image: the poor you will always have with you. Now why might that be? Eliezer has a tweet thread where he asked a similar question about resource scarcity; in a world which is abundant in all material things except oxygen is there poverty? That bottlenecks we shall face is true, don't know bottleneck lasts forever. The war against scarcity seems eternal. Economists have said that this is because human wants are infinite. But really it is more that dynamic human societies have many white horses that must be cleaned at different great in different ways. Every person conceived is a white horse on the verge of being overgrown, some will not be successful, some will be blackened by the mud of injustice, others overwhelmed by the weeds of misfortunes, others can shine only if others pull their weeds for them, and some refuse help at all. We know of no way to run a society with a zero error rate. Though we will continue to fight it, the poor we will always have with us.
Similarly with the Vikings. Alfred is not betraying his children's children by making compromise with sin, rather the story is meant as a lesson concerning the battle against human travail, but not any individual human travail. It's a platonist vision not an aristotelian one. Alfred narratively is not allowed to have a lasting victory, because lasting victory is not possible in this England.
--
I'm not fully convinced by this reading. And I think Chesterton could have improved the poem, especially the end. But part of the secret to Chesterton is that all of his works were written in a hurry. And besides, I would call his true masterpiece The Man Who Was Thursday.
This point about refusing to solve a solvable problem reminds me of a description of the conflict between modern progressives and conservatives as hinging, in at least many cases, on the question of whether progressive policies have the character of, "We should abolish Mondays." The thing unpleasant about Monday is that you have to start working again, after having some time off. It is fundamentally an un-solvable problem. You could shuffle the schedule around, but so long as you take time off, and then start work again, starting work will be an unpleasant contrast, relative to leisure. In many cases conservatives feel that progressives are trying to spend government money on solving problems, and will end up just moving the problem somewhere else.
The question, of course, is always: Are they right? In some cases they may seem to be. For instance: It is foolish to simply give people big housing vouchers, if it is illegal to build more housing. All that will happen is that housing will become more expensive, and consumers of housing services will be effectively just as poor as ever. But this doesn't mean the problem of housing scarcity is fundamentally insoluble. We do, in fact, have the technology to build a bunch of condos and apartments. Mistaking a solvable problem for an "I hate Mondays" type problem will lead one to behaving in a resigned / despairing manner rather than trying to fix it.
The more I think of it, I wonder if *daisies* might be intentionally ambiguous. Do you want a world without daisies? A world without wildness? Maybe some square footage without …
Huh, I always proofread these for grammar errors etc, and I caught several in this one, but I missed that Alfred was called Albert about five times. Must be one of those things like "the the" which is too obvious to notice. I've corrected it.
I attended a scholarly presentation on historical persons (of one family, so first names were being used) which kept changing the first name of one of the principal characters. First he was Arthur (his real name), then he was John, then he was something else. The presenter never noticed until I inquired in the question session.
If I had a tankard to bang on the table, I'd be banging it right now while shouting YES YES YES 😁
You get it. You get what he was saying in the poem. Yes, I'm biased as all get-out here, but you guys knew that already, so this is one of at least two contenders for overall winner as far as I'm concerned.
I'll just quote another English Catholic 'pale stale male' about what is hope:
Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (Conversation of Finrod and Andreth):
'What is hope?' she said. 'An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none'.
'That is one thing that Men call "hope",' said Finrod. 'Amdir we call it, "looking up". But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is "trust". It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?'
Anyway, I'm happy now. I would say to anyone reading this review, go look the poem up and try reciting it out loud. It's verse, it's meant to be said, and the swing of it will bring you along.
This review has definitely motivated me to go read Chesterton. I've seen many many references here over the years but I haven't actually picked up one of his works myself yet. Any suggestions on the best approach to him?
On the non-fiction side I would start with "Orthodoxy": despite the name it's a lot of fun to read, and it does a great job of explaining the foundations of Chesterton's thinking and philosophy.
On the fiction side, his "Father Brown" mystery books are probably his most popular works (according to legend, whenever he started running out of money he would tell his wife that it was time to write another Father Brown book), and if you like mystery stories they're fabulous. "The Man Who Was Thursday" is probably his best fiction book, but I find "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" just as good, if not better.
Fortunately all these books are easily available in web versions on Project Gutenberg, since they are long out of copyright.
On "faith", I am of the opinion that the modern version of "faith" (which just renders down to belief) is an impoverishment of a very rich concept that is better maintained in how the word is used elsewhere.
To have faith in God is not to believe in God, but rather, something more similar to *trusting* God, and keeping to the faith is not merely continuing to believe, but in continuing to have that trust, and to behave as if that trust is valid.
Just this morning, I learned from a lecture by Alister McGrath that although the first word of the Apostle's Creed in Latin, "Credo" is typically translated as "I believe"... in the Latin at the time, it meant "to trust or confide in a person or thing; to have confidence in; to trust."
Yeah. Faith is a process that starts with belief. But doesn't end there. It doesn't even end in knowledge, because faith is incremental. In a way, the faith process (believe something might be true, act on what it tells you, learn if it is true, repeat) is how we learn anything that is true. Religious or not. Which makes sense--God is the source of all truth, even about His creations.
Well observed. Though the original pagan view of Sisiphus is: he is damned and cursed. - while atheist Albert Camus can not help but see it from a Christian/Catholic tradition. And imagine him "happy".
> “It is good to be a living person in the Underworld,” Tantalus says, “since there is nothing here that can actually kill you.”
> There is a distant cursing. There is a distant rumbling.
> Sisyphus, rolled over by a distant boulder, screams.
> “There are also disadvantages,” Tantalus concedes.
That particular chapter's conclusion features an alternate solution which, fortunately, can be succinctly and elegantly proven to be more or less universally applicable, without the proof itself requiring reference to any sort of benevolent higher power.
There is a big difference though: Sisyphus's eternal labor has no point or purpose. The eternal labor to preserve the White Horse has a point: the point is to keep the White Horse around. Presumably for the people who scour it that's a meaningful purpose, renewing the Horse so that their children and their children's children will live in a world with the Horse in it.
In contrast, the only purpose of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill forever is to punish him. Nobody (including himself) benefits from his labor.
The other thing is: Sisyphus needs to spend all his time on the boulder (presumably). Scrubbing the white horse or fighting the occasional Viking doesn't take up all your time and leaves a lot of your life free for other things. Life is full of dumb tasks that need to be done over and over again for no permanent effect, like brushing your teeth.
> There is a big difference though: Sisyphus's eternal labor has no point or purpose. The eternal labor to preserve the White Horse has a point: the point is to keep the White Horse around.
That just sounds like circular logic to me. Keeping the white horse around isn't the same category as Sisyphus' busywork... why?
At minimum, because the existence of the White Horse is something that matters to some people, and the people who scour it find the continued existence of the White Horse and their participation in it's maintenance meaningful. Because of the scourers actions, generations yet unborn will get the enjoy the sight of the White Horse, just as he has, and his grandfathers did, and their grandfathers. That means something to the scourer at minimum, which is why he chooses to scour.
Sisyphus did not choose his task, and it has no meaning to anyone beyond sending the message "Do bad stuff and you'll get punished forever"; the punishment being, never-ending and work that is meaningless to you.
I think I either made that up for Unsong, or got it from an English teacher who was wrong and had made it up themselves. IIRC I checked and there was no talking boat in eg the Iliad.
Tolkien on The Ballad of the White Horse (letter 180):
“P (Priscilla) has been wading through The Ballad of The White Horse for the last many nights; and my efforts to explain the obscurer parts to her convince me that it is not as good as I thought. The ending is absurd. The brilliant smash and glitter of the words and phrases (when they come off, and are not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the ‘North’, heathen or Christian.”
Elsewhere, he is rather fond of Chesterton, and even this letter suggests that his initial impression had been much more positive. But there is a somewhat overly sentimental feel to some parts of the poem that apparently irked Tolkien, and of course nobody ever was likelier to bristle at historical inaccuracies concerning England!
I do wonder what his objections to the ending were, and how they relate to Scott’s.
I don't know what Tolkien's specific objections were, but in terms of style their writings feel very different.
In everything he writes Chesterton gives the impression of throwing something down in a hurry (he said he wrote his newspaper pieces in the pub minutes before they were due).
BOTWH certainly gives that impression, it's uneven. The best bits are brilliant, and as a whole it's great, but it has many bits that are untidy or slapdash.
This seems a way away from Tolkien's way of doing things, and I can see Tolkien finding it grating.
"I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite.
Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of the Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes. If the reader is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten Times articles than one Tit-Bits joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keep myself on the whole on the level of the Times: it is only occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of Tit-Bits.
I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written; they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start for Highgate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest. In these essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick."
This was a great review. My only objections are the statements at the beginning that the poem is "about conservatism" and "is Chesterton’s love song to conservatism as he understands it." The review goes on to explain Chesterton's understanding, but in Chesterton's own words, and in fact, this isn't "conservatism" at all.
Yes, I thought this! Indeed, in the quote from Chesterton where he explicitly mentions conservatism and progressivism, he seems to be in favour of what he calls progressivism. "[A]ll conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not."
This is only true if you’re inoculated in what passes for modern conservatism in American politics. Chesterton’s idea of conservatism is best espoused by Chesterton’s Fence: not the that the fence should never be reformed, but that it should not be reformed until the would-be reformed understands what purpose it served. The “progressives” that Chesterton targeted in his day were of two stripes; industrialists who wanted to sweep the world of old away in favor of capitalism and material things, and communists and socialists who sought to destroy the entire old order in favor of their new vision for men. Chesterton was so opposed to both of these visions that he developed his own idealized system of economics (distributism) as a third way. Today we don’t think of Bezos/Thiel/etc as “progressives” but I think Chesterton would have put them in them in that category, and I think he was right. They and what we now call “the left” are in a great haste to destroy the old way of being and doing, and have not given any great thought to why the people of old lives that way. A real conservatism is alive and constantly being renewed, but it also gives our ancestors a heavy vote in the process. Orthodoxy expands on this at some length.
It seems more about conservationism ("how to keep what's good") than conservatism ("everything that is, is good") although as a Christian presumably he'd believe the Creation to be essentially good, the devilish meddling notwithstanding.
It certainly does not seem to concern - at least not directly - conservatism as a political ideology or movement.
I can't tell you when it happened, but at some point Chesterton became a distributist. Distributists define themselves as standing in opposition to state socialism AND laissez faire capitalism.
Yep, I came along to say exactly this. The kind of Christianity represented here seems to be beautiful and noble and radical - not what Christian conservatism is today, and not what it has ever been, so far as I understand it.
I'm not quite convinced by the white horse as a conservative argument, either. It suggests that we have to weed and renew the white horse because that's the tradition; and it's the tradition because it's necessary to weed and renew the white horse. But somehow no-one seems to have explained why the white horse is good. I'm guessing Chesterton thinks it's obvious that the horse is beautiful, and that's motivation enough. And as it happens, on the subject of the white horse itself, I think everyone would agree. But sometimes the things that people think are beautiful change, like the hierarchically structured nuclear family. Does he have an answer for what to do when the motivation changes? I dunno.
Another nice example people gave is the fact that the Vikings ultimately win, via France. At this point, 1,000 years later, should we carry on Alfred's perpetual revolution? Should I kill my Anglo-Saxon neighbour?
I do think the quotes are tad excessive, but easily skippable if one is so inclined, and everything else is readable, engaging, interesting and informative.
And surely I can't be the first person requesting the edit of the Alberts to Alfreds?
RE: "But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact...If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution."
I don't know anything about him beyond his Wikipedia page, but is Chesterton really proposing that society is the painted post as it stands? Maybe so, based on these opening lines:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
That seems awfully facile to me, and if I'm understanding it right, would undermine the legitimate moral lesson that we must continually fight to protect what's good in society.
To belabor the analogy, it's equally as clear to me that there are Vikings intent on destroying the Horse, as it is that the Horse is imperfect and crusaders from within might want to improve it. If you blindly treat the latter as the former, you'll get a sclerotic society with frozen mores. Maybe this is too much subtlety to ask for in the genre. But I think if you're going to treat it as a paean to conservatism in the real world, it seems like a fatal flaw.
But isn't that the heart of conservatism? It's in the name, for goodness' sake. The world has changed, of course, and that's because the conservatives failed. That's what's driving the current wave of reactionaries: to defeat the progressives, so they can paint the post white again.
Sure, but I guess I'm reacting to the characterization that this piece represents some nobler form of conservatism. Cards on the table (as is probably obvious), I don't start from a place that is sympathetic to the ideology. But based on the tone of the reception here (e.g. Scott calling it his favorite poem), I was expecting a more robust or nuanced defense.
Whether or not you think it's noble, it's certainly more effective. Modern "conservatives" took the status quo for granted, and it fell apart before they could even properly react. Change and entropy is inevitable unless it is actively resisted.
It's flattering rhetorically, and strategically an effective proposal. I just don't think it's a sophisticated or convincing one. Among other things, it's ahistorical--not in the literal sense that the post discusses, but in that it doesn't consider how a conservative consensus is formed (the Horse has existed for all time). The modern conservatives were presumably a product of change themselves...
I take your point that I may be incorrectly reading the poem (and the post) as more of an apologia than a call to action. But I do think it's worthwhile to evaluate the material on its merits, if we're going to go around praising it.
I think what it actually represents is the nobility of conservatism. It would be surprising for an ideology to be so popular, if there was nothing noble about it at all.
Incidentally, I think you are perhaps underestimating the degree to which you approach things from a conservative perspective, when circumstances call for it. Just like I might approach things from a progressive perspective at times, without consciously thinking about it in those terms. I don't think it would be wise to view absolutely everything through the same ideological lens.
I'm going to challenge your categorical dismissal of frozen mores. Just because our mores needed to evolve in the past, that is no guarantee they need to evolve today. And just because our mores need to evolve today, that is no guarantee they need to evolve forever.
While our mores can never be perfect, I can imagine a time when then potential cost of further experimentation might vastly outweigh the potential cost of freezing mores today.
So you feel as Chesterton says is the modern division into Conservatives and Progressives?
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
Or, to emphasise the importance of definitions, from the detective story "The Flying Stars":
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
A conservative is someone who wants to conserve. A conservator in a museum does the same thing, and I don't think anyone objects to "if we wish the items to remain whole, action must be taken to take care of them and repair any damage, and even simply to maintain them as they are". You don't just leave things alone without acting on them, and you don't blindly refuse to touch anything because it's fine as it is. It's fine right now, but if you leave it alone, the weeds grow over it.
From the chapter "The Eternal Revolution" in "Orthodoxy":
"The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative. But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in Radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil’s suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy — the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury."
And to return to the poem, from the chapter "The Age of Legends" in "The Sbort History of England":
"There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope — which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped — but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic."
>Apropos of frozen mores, here's Chesterton on female suffrage
I guess these are supposed to make Chesterton look bad, but that really only works if you read them as uncharitably as possible.
Ch. 47, your first link, seems to be basically a standard objection to small-l liberal democracy, which is the tendency to "liberate" even those who do not perceive themselves to be in need of any liberation. The entire argument is contigent on the idea that a majority of women are themselves are opposed to women's suffrage, and Chesterton is clear about that. Even today small-l liberals have the tendency to try and liberate people who want nothing of the sort - how many bazillions were spent trying to liberate Afghani women at the point of a gun, even though they (apparently) wanted none of it?
Ch. 18, your second link, is in fact remarkably prescient. Chesterton does not deny that women have been treated badly and even as servants in domestic life. He just argues out that sending women into the workforce isn't going to solve that problem:
>"I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time."
Quite a few studies show that on average, modern working women continue to do most of the housework and "care" work even if they also have a full time job. Chesterton appears to have correctly foreseen that problem.
The second half of this is generally an observation that women are not the same as men, and have psychic traits that would likely reshape the workforce:
> "Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm.
"Human resources" did not exist in 1910, but Chesterton appears to have described a certain kind of HR lady perfectly. Helen Andrews made a similar point here:
I think it was Theodore Roosevelt that said something like this about women being able to vote: "I am for it, but I do not think it will make much of a difference, because they'll still be choosing between the same candidates that the men are." (Which was basically accurate - people who expected women to vote in large numbers for, say, pacifist candidates ended up disappointed.)
Wouldn’t it be cool if the name of the author of the book being reviewed was in the post’s title or subtitle? The way it is now, we have to delve into the review to discover this basic piece of information.
I've never heard of a "Ballad of a White Horse" before this, as far as I know, but I have heard of GK Chesterton. Standard book reviews usually list the title, author, and even additional bibliographic information about a book, at the beginning of the review, because that puts a bunch of standardized, often useful information, in one place, where potential readers can see it before starting in on the review, and people who were so moved by the review might see it after and go out and get the book.
For that argument you'll be wanting Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy". In the introduction he writes "These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics."
I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re saying. Chesterton obviously thought so, and provided what he would consider arguments in his writings.
If the claim is that this specific poem compares Christianity to these religions, then maybe it’s me being dumb and missing it?
If you’re saying that this conclusion is implied by the logic of the poem, then I don’t think so. Guthrum converting to Christianity is clearly considered an improvement, but this doesn’t mean that him converting to e.g. Islam wouldn’t be.
I should think that it goes without saying that actual Islam, nor Hinduism, nor Buddhism nor all the rest, do not function the way Chesterton says they do. Christianity is not the only source of the kind of hope he is celebrating.
I hope it also goes without saying that Christianity has frequently acted as other people's "weeds"--an inimical force that pulls down all that some culture wants to preserve.
Please note that I am not saying that Christianity is any worse than other world religions, just that's in terms of the effects it has had on non-believers it isn't any better.
Chesterton is not really the author to read if you want “the logical case for Christianity.” Someone else suggested Orthodoxy, and it is indeed a great book, but it’s not going to be what you want if you want, like, a point by point rebuttal of Dawkins and Harris. For that you’ll want to look at someone like Edward Feser or Trent Horn.
Sigh. I rather wish there were epic poems about the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. People have split the nucleus and men have stood upon the Moon. And the footprints on the Moon will last ten million years https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6BjNNddehiI . Not all accomplishments require ceaseless maintenance.
We got distracted from going to the moon for a few decades, lost the ability to do so, and now are trying to spend billions of dollars getting it back (and failing!) Sounds like a thing that requires ceaseless maintenance to me!
>We got distracted from going to the moon for a few decades, lost the ability to do so, and now are trying to spend billions of dollars getting it back
True! Many Thanks!
>(and failing!)
That remains to be seen. The current plan is for Artemis III to land people on the moon in 2026. I suspect that it will be delayed, perhaps 50:50 odds on whether it happens say by the next election cycle in 2028.
>Sounds like a thing that requires ceaseless maintenance to me!
And yet the Apollo 11 LEM descent stage still sits there, a monument that men did indeed walk the lunar surface. True, we cannot do the same this year, but it _was_ accomplished. The astronauts' footprints on the moon _do_ remain there. And large parts of the knowledge of how to do it were not lost.
edit: To clarify: I view the endurance of the Apollo 11 landing site as a side issue. My original "Sigh" is about the poem being about
Yet another war. Again. A conflict between armed groups. Again. "Willie McBride, it all happened again. And again, and again, and again, and again."
I don't really _care_ that King Alfred picked himself off the ground and fought another battle. Frankly, from the vantage point of over a thousand years after his battles, I haven't got the foggiest idea of whether the world would have been on balance better or worse if the Danes had won, and I doubt that anyone else can tell either. I would rather celebrate that men walked on the moon and that people split the nucleus.
To pick another example of something I would rather celebrate: Smallpox no longer spreads around the globe. It had no animal reservoir. Once we got everyone vaccinated, the wild virus went extinct. Barring some bastard actively releasing it into the human population again, it is _gone_. That was a permanent achievement.
Scouring the carvings on an airless moon every few million years (plus the occasional preventative asteroid deflection) might seem like near-constant maintenance work, to the kind of people who can throw around 10km/s delta-v as casually as Alfred the Great getting up in the middle of the night to visit the latrine. https://qntm.org/free
Cute! Many Thanks! In our own system Pluto and Charon are doubly tidally locked - but not with so small a separation.
>Scouring the carvings on an airless moon every few million years (plus the occasional preventative asteroid deflection) might seem like near-constant maintenance work
Hmm???
>Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years.
For _human_ purposes, if something needs maintenance every ten million years, that's just about indistinguishable from not needing it at all.
"And yet the Apollo 11 LEM descent stage still sits there, a monument that men did indeed walk the lunar surface."
Like the Roman ruins in Alfred's times? Works so impossible to be done by the hands of man, to the thought of the people of that day, that they must have been made by giants?
'From the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, 87: 'eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate.''
We walked there once, will we ever do so again? That's the point of the 'ceaseless maintenance', you can't just rely on "well we know how to do it and we've done it, of course everyone will remember how" because as examples throughout history have shown, no, everyone forgets.
Many Thanks! I was originally looking at a different point, that I prefer to celebrate that the moon landings _happened_, even though we currently don't have the ability to replicate them. Perhaps Artemis III will actually land on the moon again.
I'm with Scott on this one. It doesn't count if no one can see it to be inspired, and we've thoughtlessly left that capability to rot. If we manage to get it back, someone is going to have to write the Ballad of Elon Musk, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.
To the extent that the LEM doesn't require constant maintenance by people who love and preserve it, then the LEM isn't what the poem is about. It's about all those institutions that make civilized life possible--without constant upkeep, they degrade. The horse is just a metaphor, after all.
>To the extent that the LEM doesn't require constant maintenance by people who love and preserve it, then the LEM isn't what the poem is about.
And I'm not enthusiastic about the poem, in at least two different senses.
a) I don't really _care_ that King Alfred picked himself up and fought yet another battle. From the distance of a thousand years, I have no idea whether the world would be a better or worse place if the Danes had won, and I don't think anyone else knows either. I just view their war as "yet another battle between two armed groups"
b) Maintenance is a _cost_ . The more maintenance an institution, machine, or structure needs, the worse it is. A pipe that constantly needs leaks plugged is less valuable than one that holds water _without_ further effort. There _are_ a few triumphs such as the eradication of smallpox which look like they will require no further effort. There are _many_ cases where an invention or discovery was difficult to make, but the effort to teach it, while nonzero, is far smaller than the original effort. I prefer to celebrate such advances more than those that require constant maintenance.
>From the distance of a thousand years, I have no idea whether the world would be a better or worse place if the Danes had won, and I don't think anyone else knows either.
I'm fairly sure that Chesterton cares as little as you do. It's just a metaphor. Haven't you ever had the experience of having lost everything you were striving for, and having to find the wherewithall to pick yourself back up and keep trying? Chesterton wants you to see those banners waving.
>I prefer to celebrate such advances more than those that require constant maintenance.
Really? I'm skeptical-as in, I don't believe you really mean this. How about a relationship? A garden? A lifestyle? There are many, many challenges in life that cannot ever be "one and done." I am guessing that you actually have experienced this and found the determination to carry on somehow. That's the hope Chesterton is describing.
Many Thanks! I am not missing the point of the poem, but rather am _disagreeing_ with the point of the poem.
>Really? I'm skeptical-as in, I don't believe you really mean this. How about a relationship? A garden? A lifestyle? There are many, many challenges in life that cannot ever be "one and done."
My point is that constant maintenance is _crappy_. It is not something to be celebrated, but something one grits one's teeth over. Yeah, I _do_ really mean this.
There are many, many situations where the right response to discovering that something requires a great deal of maintenance is to yeet it. To reiterate:
We don't have to eradicate smallpox again. But we do have to have a medical institution that can treat and eradicate disease effectively, and that does require maintenance; we've seen it backslide before. (For instance, in the 19th century medicine stopped believing that fresh produce would prevent scurvy.) Surely "it was cool how we had that accomplishment one time" would be pretty hollow if it was *just* about the particular accomplishment itself, with no cause for reflection on how we might achieve similar things in the future.
>But we do have to have a medical institution that can treat and eradicate disease effectively, and that does require maintenance; we've seen it backslide before.
And the more maintenance it requires, the less of an advantage it provides. Ideally, we want to move as many illnesses into the "solved problem" category as possible. It is better to have a robust institutional structure which was can be reasonably sure won't unlearn how to solve deficiency diseases than one that requires constant oversight because it always has a substantial rate of screwing up.
>Surely "it was cool how we had that accomplishment one time" would be pretty hollow if it was _just_ about the particular accomplishment itself, with no cause for reflection on how we might achieve similar things in the future.
I disagree, but I'm going to take an example from another field, because medicine deals with such a complex system that there are a nearly endless series of problems to solve.
Consider the role of timekeeping in finding a ship's longitude. To make a very long story ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude ) short, John Harrison developed chronometers from 1731 through 1762 which were sufficiently accurate for this purpose. Since then, of course, time measurement has been continuously improved _but the original problem was solved and stayed solved_. If NIST never made another refinement to timekeeping, all of the applications which run on the clocks with today's accuracy will continue to work. Not everything requires "how we might achieve similar things in the future"
Yeah, Jeffrey, it's a pain that every day you have to eat food and breathe air. How much worse humans are than rocks - a rock doesn't need three meals a day and sleep and water! Humans constantly require maintenance, it's such a drag 😁
Good review. I can't resist a bit of a hobby-horse gripe of mine though: free will is by no means a requirement for hope, virtue, moral responsibility, or any other thing that makes life worth living. I think Chesterton wants to assume otherwise because it is convenient for his theological arguments. But asserting that determinism is the death of hope is ironically an anti-hope position when the balance of evidence is against the existence of any meaningful sense of free will.
Chesterton expanded on his thoughts regarding free will, and why he believed it was so important, a bit in "Orthodoxy":
"Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say 'thank you' for the mustard."
He also wrote more on this in an essay he wrote for the magazine "Clarion" titled "Why I am a Christian":
"You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life. That means that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he goes on treating them as if they had.
"The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.
"The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic."
Chesterton's point seems to be that the primary "evidence" against free will is theoretical and philosophical in nature, while the evidence in favor of free will is empirical (making choices and willing one thing over another is all something we experience directly, making it as empirical as something can get) and practical in nature: you cannot really behave as if you have no free will, even if you believe it.
I agree that we have to act *as if* people are culpable even if there is no free will, but it is beyond me to imagine how that acting could possibly be *true*.
In what sense is anything true, then? We act as if there are such things as protons and gluons and electron holes https://www.xkcd.com/2817/ and space-like or time-like or light-like curves, and that gives us the power to turn ordinary rocks into various magic boxes that answer riddles, or annihilate cities.
We act as if there is such a thing as free will, or civil rights, or aggregate demand and inflation, and that gives us the power to turn starving bandits into happy, healthy citizens.
We invented the word "culpable" to refer to certain people's relationship to certain of their actions. We came up with a theory behind it that involved non-determinism and spirituality. Just because that theory turns out to be false doesn't mean that "culpable" doesn't refer to that relationship between people and their actions, just that this relationship works differently from how we thought.
There are a number of physicists who are not so sure that we live in a fully determined universe. If you buy Godel-like arguments, then even if it is, we can never comprehend the universe on that level, and events must continue to seem unpredictable, even in principle.
But of course that isn't what Chesterton was saying (he wasn't a physicist or a mathematician). He was saying that too much emphasis on empiricism and logic will deprive a person of the poetry of life. That dismissing paradoxical mysteries that cannot be solved as not being real shows a diminishing return. I find that STEM style thinkers tend to disagree, but every artist I ever met agreed with Chesterton whole-heartedly.
Physical determinism and Incompleteness have nothing to do with one another. You should be very skeptical about pop-science explanations of Godel. It's a very precise mathematical statement that cannot be applied to all of metaphysics as you're doing in your first paragraph.
Also, to that extent that actually physicists stray from "shut up and calculate" to consider the metaphysics of the measurement problem, I'd bet money that a wide majority would say the universe is inherently random, not deterministic.
I VASTLY prefer non-rhyming poetry. When I read rhyming poetry silently, I always read it as if it is non-rhyming poetry. I mentally ignore the rhymes.
"What's the point of even reading it then? Clever rhymes are the whole point of rhyming poetry." Well, that all depends on poet. Some rhyming poets lean more heavily on rhymes, while for others, it almost more of an afterthought. it's definitely true that a lot of rhymed poetry is wasted on me, especially the short poems. All the more reason for me to stick to non-rhyming poetry most of the time.
Anyone else noticing how the Book of Ecclesiastes, for the most part, sounds just as cynical as a Viking song? Of course, it famously ends on a positive note, but I don't think that positive ending ENTIRELY contradicts the main body of the piece, though it's been a while since I've read this.
And in contrast, the Anglo-Saxon culture was generally very much like that of the Danes; the contrast in actual history has little of that seen in the poem.
The poem Deor cites legends we mostly know about from Norse sources (when at all), while being *all about* keeping up the hope you need to go on in the face of adversity, as does the Battle of Maldon. I'm not very familiar with the literature from the far side of the North Sea, but I bet Jackson Crawford could name a dozen examples without much thought.
Note that Chesterton himself warned against reading too much history into his poem. The Danes, and even King Alfred himself, are really just metaphors.
Thanks. I was very happy to see this review, since Ballad of the White Horse is my all-time favorite poem (I finally finished memorizing it earlier this year!)
I agree with everything this says, and I think it gets the moral right. But at the risk of doubting Chesterton's genius, it really bothers me how he presents it at the end.
My understanding is: Alfred defeats the Danes. His vassals tell him that he could potentially press his victory and drive them from England entirely. But he feels like this would be "showing daisies the door" and against the spirit of eternal revolution. So he makes a peace treaty that lets them stay in England. Then when he gets old and weak, they backstab him and attack his subjects. The king must go back to war, despite his old age. Still, he gives a speech saying that this is the way things have to be.
This bothers me for the same reason it would bother me if the police caught a murderer, then let him go without jail time because "each generation must defeat the murderer anew, that's just how things work". It isn't! If police did that, it would be unfair to the murderer's next victims! In the same way, Alfred's decision seems unfair to all the people who the Vikings killed or uprooted the second time around. It's all nice and well to say that if you can't defeat a problem permanently, you must remain ever vigilant. But the poem suggests Alfred is going beyond that, and refusing to defeat a problem permanently - even though he could - in order to prove a point.
(also, "the Vikings" are a terrible symbol for "problem mankind just has to learn to live with because it can never be fully ended". England has been Viking-free for almost a millennium now!)
I can't tell whether I'm just overinterpreting the lines where people tell Alfred he could have gotten rid of the Danes, or whether this is a contentful disagreement between me and Chesterton. If the latter, I appreciate that his poem doesn't shy away from the inevitable bad consequences of taking his incorrect position on this. But the fact that he's under no illusions here makes it even harder for me to understand what he's thinking, other than giving Alfred another opportunity to make a flowery speech.
(one of my favorite parts about the poem is how it stops just sort of postmodern-style lampshading of how everything Alfred does is an opportunity to give a flowery speech about virtue. In one part, a peasant woman offers him some bread to tend her fire, Alfred gives a flowery speech to himself about how virtuous the poor are, and he gets so distracted that he forgets to actually tend the fire and burns all her food. Then the woman slaps him, he's surprised for just a second, but he quickly regains his bearings and gives a flowery speech about the symbolic meaning of peasants slapping kings, and even though he's still standing in the place he got slapped, the woman is never mentioned again - presumably she gets creeped out by all the soliloquizing and sneaks away)
My other complaint (no, really, I love the poem, I just don't get many opportunities to complain about it) is the last twelve stanzas. Sure, they're incredibly beautiful and form a great emotional arc and the part about the grass is great. But they're almost unrelated to anything that's come before. King Alfred is attacking London . . . why again? Something about defeating the Danes? Who he didn't want to defeat before? But now they're back? And he has to take London to stop them? But we've just gone through ~500 stanzas about the King's first battle, then a discussion of the symbolism of the horse, then a prophecy - and now we get 12 stanzas of "oh and also there was another battle, don't worry, he won". And it ends with "and the King took London town", which sounds like it should be the crowning point of the poem. But there wasn't really any effort to build up London as symbolically important before. Earlier in the poem one of Alfred's generals says "I doubt if you will have the crown / till you have taken London town", but in fact he has had the crown for decades at this point. I don't know, I just never "got" this part emotionally.
Vikings in particular are not a threat, but in the last book Chesterton discusses "the barbarian come again" in terms that evoke modern ... Bureaucrats? Secularists? George Bernard Shaw? He doesn't pin down exactly who he's talking about with these words, but they seem to be modern people:
"They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
"Not with the humour of hunters
Or savage skill in war,
But ordering all things with dead words,
Strings shall they make of beasts and birds,
And wheels of wind and star.
"They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
With many a scroll and pen;
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred's days,
When pagans still were men."
Evil reappears in every age, sometimes with a new form, leading to the need to defeat it once again? I agree with Scott that some particular evils, at least, can be defeated in an ensuring way, though Evil writ large will always be around until Christ returns.
When it's your monkish clerks who neither lust nor fight, it's all "go robed in rain and snow but the heart of flame therein", when it's the other guy's monkish clerks it's "backwards shall ye turn and gaze desiring . . . when pagans were still men"
"Mild as" monkish clerks, not that they *are* monkish clerks. There are false prophets as well as true ones.
To quote a C.S. Lewis poem on the two kinds of pagans:
Cliche Came Out of its Cage
1
You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ...
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.
2
Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).
Thanks for posting this! I hadn't read it before.
That one made me cry. Thank you.
My guess would be the poem assumes it's being read by people who know enough about Alfred the Great to know that re-taking London was when he declared himself King of the English. Chesterton may not have realised it would be talked about a century after his death by people in other countries.
Is there an annotated version or version with commentary you would recommend?
At the risk of being a non-Catholic spouting nonsense about Catholics, I think that you *are* getting at something contentful- a profound difference between the views of a utilitarian consequentialist and those of (a certain flavor of) a Catholic.
To illustrate my point, let me turn to another great Catholic writer. When Bilbo does not stab Gollum, yes, it is an act of pity and morally upright and so on. But consider what’s at stake. He almost gets caught (and then presumably gets killed). He explicitly almost cracks his skull on the low ceiling. Gollum’s shriek alerts the goblins and Bilbo almost gets caught by them. _Any single of those happening would have doomed the world to darkness_.
When Aragorn decides what to do on Amon Hen after the breaking of the Fellowship, he has a number of perfectly reasonable choices. Go help Frodo (Aragorn previously treaded the deadly flowers of Morgul vale!) or go to Minas Tirith as he intended and Boromir’s dream suggested. One thing that _wasn’t_ reasonable was taking the time to have any kind of ceremony for Boromir (complete with a long poem!), and then chase the Uruk-Hai across Rohan, in the opposite direction from all the action and risking being killed by Uruks or even the Rohirrim. And of course, pertinently to your original point, he pardons the Easterlings after the war and doesn’t even exterminate the Orcs- and then spends much of his life campaigning in the East and South.
Building a huge army, crafting a Ring etc. actually did make more sense than Gandalf’s plan. Saruman was at least partially sincere when he thought he was opposing Sauron his way. At least at first.
Returning to Chesterton himself- Father Brown has a number of situations where he could take a “wrong” action that would bring glory to the Church. He scoffs at those.
I could give many more examples, but the point is- when people tell you that “the Catholic Church is not utilitarian”, this is what they mean. The Bilbo that would stab Gollum would fully succumb to the Ring. The Aragorn that would abandon Merry and Pippin wouldn’t be the kind of future king that would be needed. You do the right thing because it is the right thing. And it also may “pay off” as Aragorn’s choices did but that’s not why you do it.
Perhaps the Alfred that wouldn’t let the Vikings go wouldn’t be Alfred.
(To be clear- I am not defending this view, merely clarifying how Chesterton might have thought).
Yes, yes. This. I think this is almost inconceivable for any consequentialist. In a simple sense this could be trivialised perhaps to the trolley problem, even. But there's also a strong Christian (or renegade Christian?) strand with retelling stories from the "baddie" perspective where the moral choice is essentially tragic, but if you accept the Christian narrative, ultimately right (starting from, I kid you not, the True Cross speaking in a trippy Dream of the Rood ca. 710 AD).
I don't think it's at all inconceivable for a consequentialist, and I personally think of any consequentialist who fails to engage with these sorts of ideas as operating at a very low level of sophistication. It's impossible to judge all the outcomes of every action you take in full, and you should always be cautious of the patterns you create in your own reasoning and judgment through your behavior, and the patterns that any rule will create in the reasoning of people subjected to it, not just the idealized consequences of those measures taken in isolation. And even if you exercise your best judgment, sometimes things won't work out for the better.
But, as a rule, writers trying to lionize some particular moral code pretty much never craft stories where their heroes act according to that code, and the worst case outcome actually comes to pass. It's one thing to say "A Bilbo who would have killed Gollum would have succumbed to the Ring, so even though there was a risk of disaster, it was the right thing to do." It's another thing to write a story where the protagonists show mercy to their enemies, it comes back to bite them, and their enemies win and take over the world and the forces of Good suffer an ultimate and permanent defeat, but the author presents the protagonists as having made the right choices anyway.
If you believe some higher power will prevent these sorts of outcomes from actually occurring in real life, then virtue ethics become essentially identical to consequentialism- behave according to the appropriate virtues, and the consequences will resolve themselves. It's a very different matter to believe that people should behave according to select virtues even when this will in fact lead to worse outcomes than not doing so.
That's an excellent critique, generally speaking, but, well - Morgoth _and_ Sauron were indeed shown more mercy or at least leniency than they deserved, with devastating results. Some smaller-scale disasters caused in part by misplaced kindness involve Eol, the sons of Feanor, Turin and Saruman.
In most of those cases, Tolkien does not dwell much on how the Good Guys should have been much more vindictive (Treebeard's decision to let Saruman go is perhaps the biggest exception).
Dialing up vindictiveness - without implausibly careful calibration - might decisively eliminate the enemies you can see, but it'll also make new ones out of folks who could otherwise have been allies, or at least neutral. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga One particularly memetic way to express the sentiment is "those 'no-nonsense solutions' don't hold water in a world of jet-powered apes and time travel."
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Desertopa suggests that Good Guys doing Good Things, losing Badly to Bad Guys and the narrator still claiming they were acting correctly doesn't happen often or at all. I'm giving a few examples from the Legendarium where this plot played out to a significant extent. Good Guys were too nice to Bad Guys, paid Bad price, Tolkien did not obviously consider the too-niceness a mistake.
"Some smaller-scale disasters caused in part by misplaced kindness involve Eol, the sons of Feanor, Turin and Saruman."
As for the Feanorians, there's not much could have been done about them. If the Valar had intervened and dragged them back by force, or even killed them, this would have proven (at least to Feanor) that the claims made by Morgoth were true, and the Elves were the slaves of the Valar. And the Valar did not feel they had the right to interfere with the fate of the Elves, as the Children of Eru; they saw their original interference (bringing them to Valinor) had resulted in this, and any further meddling would just cause more trouble.
To kill them would have reduced the Valar to the same level of Morgoth. You don't defeat evil by becoming evil.
I was thinking about kindly granting them shelter in Nargothrond, and then not kicking them out when they were obviously being… them.
"writers trying to lionize some particular moral code pretty much never craft stories where their heroes act according to that code, and the worst case outcome actually comes to pass."
Interestingly, Ragnarok, which Chesterton so disparages here, is exactly that. Although he is also a Catholic, I think Tolkein has a better understanding of the pagan sense of virtue. Tolkien [1] (quoting Kerr): " 'The winning side is Chaos and Unreason'—mythologically, the monsters—'but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.' And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this 'absolute resistance, perfect because without hope' "
The "melancholy" felt by the pagans wasn't just because of their eschatology, but because anyone living then could expect many disasters to befall them:incurable disease and injury, famine, war. they held great regard for both those who kept going despite disaster, and those who fell to it valiantly. As an atheist, the view that one should stick to one's principles despite knowing that everything will be swept way in the end seems more virtuous than the idea that doing so earns brownie points in heaven.
[1] "The monster and the critics"
Re patterns, what you make possible, etc. —
I’m reminded of Tietjens’ anger (in Parade’s End) at his father for killing himself, because he made it an option for his sons, basically. He felt it as an attack or a loss of protection/tradition, I think.
> _Any single of those happening would have doomed the world to darkness_.
Certainly would have been bad for Bilbo personally, but I'm not so sure how that scenario plays out for the wider world. Gollum held on to the ring an awfully long time, and could conceivably have done so longer still. Keeping it buried might even have slowed the process of Sauron's recovery.
Without Bilbo, maybe Gandalf has to step in to keep the dwarves from getting eaten by spiders, and negotiate their release from the elves. Maybe they get a replacement elvish burglar as part of the deal, who then discovers Smaug's vulnerability in time to save Laketown. The Battle of Five Armies would presumably go differently due to diplomatic ripple effects despite Bilbo not being directly involved.
Later, Frodo gets involved because he wants to find out what the heck happened to his uncle that would result in a dwarf showing up at his door with plunder shares and a next-of-kin notification, but no body having been recovered. They can't even say for sure he's dead!
Gandalf presumably still sees good cause to get a team together at Rivendell to manage Sauron-related problems, but in Moria, rather than a silent tomb, they find an active siege between the Balrog and some ring-bearing goblin warlord, whose charred finger happens to land in Frodo's pocket as a fateful echo of both Isildur, and Bilbo's misuse of the riddle game. Gandalf recognizes its significance, but falls off a bridge (as previously scheduled) before he can explain fully, and then the plot's mostly back on track from there.
What's the exact scenario?
Bilbo getting killed and the Ring not getting out? Obvious and swift win for Sauron. He didn't need the Ring to win - he was already very much winning. This is something people sometimes miss - Gandalf, Saruman, all the elves and all of Gondor together are completely outclassed. Direct confrontations of any kind are never suggested because they are hopeless at this point. Aragorn and Elrond are no Elendil and Gil-Galad.
Gandalf changing pre-set plans to attack Dol-Guldur to accompany the dwarves for no particular reason? I mean, sure, also Manwe deciding to just descend and fix everything. Fact is, Gandalf didn't really know about the Ring and expected the company to get in trouble and still left them. He would have done the same, only earlier. Or even would have insisted on them going back to rescue Bilbo as he was in fact attempting to do when Bilbo showed up.
Elvish burglar? Whose smell would be unfamiliar to Smaug? He wouldn't play riddles with an elf. And Thorin was not overfond of the wood elves either.
The Ring getting to Orcs - again, various scenarios, extremely likely to get to Sauron.
Frodo and next-of-kin notification - nope. Next of kin would have been... Lobelia? Frodo was adopted when he 21, years after he was orphaned. Anyway, one thing he would not do for his distantly familiar obviously-mad uncle who vanished years ago is go to the unprecedented-for-Hobbits-except-Bilbo journey to Rivendell.
ETA: I don't think I've emphasized enough how much this would not be happening. The next-of-kin notification would be taking place a year or two after Bilbo's death at the latest. Frodo was simply not alive then.
Gandalf assembling a team in Rivendell - he didn't do that even in the book. But let's suppose this all somehow happens (why? The Council had no actual point other than the Ring). Why would the team do the whole stealthy creep thing? The only strategy available to them would have been a diminished version of the Last Alliance. And anyway, when does this happen? For most of the time windows, there's no real contest between an Orc even with a Ring and the Balrog. So the Ring either stays in Moria or the Balrog gets it. No good outcomes.
And even somehow ignoring everything above - the plot is _not_ on track. In this world, there's no Gollum to guide Frodo and no Gollum's teeth to actually get the Ring into the fire.
Fair enough, I yield to your greater knowledge of the relevant canon.
Otho was Bilbo's blood relation (so he expected to inherit Bag End) so if a Dwarf turned up with "sorry about your cousin, here's his share of the treasure" it would have been accepted by all in The Shire as "this is what happens when you go off on adventures". Otho Sackville-Baggins would have had no reason to go haring off on an adventure of his own trying to discover Bilbo's fate. (More likely reaction would have been "good riddance to bad rubbish").
Frodo would have been left to be 'brought up anyhow' among the Brandybucks, as per Gaffer Gamgee's recital of the family history in the pub before the big birthday party:
"Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders, being brought up anyhow in Brandy Hall. A regular warren, by all accounts. Old Master Gorbadoc never had fewer than a couple of hundred relations in the place. Mr. Bilbo never did a kinder deed than when he brought the lad back to live among decent folk.
‘But I reckon it was a nasty knock for those Sackville-Bagginses. They thought they were going to get Bag End, that time when he went off and was thought to be dead. And then he comes back and orders them off; and he goes on living and living, and never looking a day older, bless him! And suddenly he produces an heir, and has all the papers made out proper. The Sackville-Bagginses won’t never see the inside of Bag End now, or it is to be hoped not.’
Otho was less than gruntled upon Bilbo's disappearance, as he had hoped to inherit:
‘Only one thing is clear to me,’ said Otho, ‘and that is that you are doing exceedingly well out of it. I insist on seeing the will.’
Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo. He read the will carefully and snorted. It was, unfortunately, very clear and correct (according to the legal customs of hobbits, which demand among other things seven signatures of witnesses in red ink).
‘Foiled again!’ he said to his wife. ‘And after waiting sixty years. Spoons? Fiddlesticks!’ He snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off.
You’re correct of course, it was he, not Lobelia, who would have inherited. Poor Otho, one tends to forget about him much like Telep… we sorry Celeborn. Wisest of the Elves.
… now I’m trying to Imagine Lotho as the Ring-Bearer.
Tolkien says he died at the "ripe but disappointed age of 102", so he didn't live to see Frodo leaving and selling Bag End to Lobelia 😁 His dream of being the multiple head of Hobbit families (hence, Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) never came true:
"Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. ...In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
Lotho as Ring-Bearer? He wouldn't have gotten as far as Farmer Maggot's farm, the night he heard Gaffer Gamgee talking with someone about "Baggins", he would have immediately rushed out and surrendered it.
(1) " Gollum held on to the ring an awfully long time, and could conceivably have done so longer still."
No, The Ring was actively trying to get back to its master, which is how Gollum came to 'lose' it in the first place. If it ended up being picked up by a goblin or Orc, it would have made its way to Sauron much sooner.
(2) Aw man, does nobody understand the point being made about *mercy*? This is why I want to kill Tom Bombadil after watching the latest episode of Rings of Power; they have him word-for-word quoting Gandalf's speech about "some that die deserve life" but the boneheads in charge of this show/scriptwriting twist it to force a choice between "abandon your friends to CERTAIN DEATH or go save them and LOSE ALL CHANCE TO FULFIL YOUR DESTINY" (more stupid 'conflict for the sake of conflict').
Total misunderstanding of the entire point of what Tolkien, via Gandalf, has to say.
Whether the Ring is “actively” trying much and how sentient or whatever it is are some of the most unclear yet important points in LoTR.
Certainly it would have many chances to betray Gollum and get itself to be found by some orc. He hunted and ate a young goblin on the very day he lost the Ring.
Even the strongest argument “in favor”, Isildur’s death, is not all that clear. This also depends on which version of events we actually consider.
The Ring is not sentient, but it is filled with Sauron's power and finely attuned to the will of its master. He is constantly, as it were, calling it back and it can respond to that.
Think of it as a type of machine intelligence, that may not be conscious as such, but has a clear set of instructions and goals to follow.
Why didn’t it betray Gollum all those years? Dol-Guldur is closer to Gollum than Mordor. Providence interfering gently every single time? I find it more parsimonious to assume that its “freedom to act” is very limited and it is not in fact attuned to the Will of Sauron all that well, certainly not so far from Mordor and while Sauron is still relatively weak.
There is a really well written fantasy novel called "The Worm Ouroboros" by E. R. Eddison. In it, a viking-inspired kingdom of warrior fight against another kingdom of evil viking-inspired warriors. Battles are fought, people fall into and out of love, betrayals occur, protagonists die, and in the end the good guys win. Then life goes on a while. Getting bored, one of the heroes prays to the Gods to grant him a wish. The wish he wants? To bring his old enemies back.
Life without the good fight wasn't worth living.
On a sudden Lord Brandoch Daha stood up, unbuckling from his shoulder his golden baldrick set with apricot-coloured sapphires and diamonds and fire-opals that imaged thunderbolts. He threw it before him on the table, with his sword, clattering among the cups. “O Queen Sophonisba,” said he, “thou hast spoken a fit funeral dirge for our glory as for Witchland’s. This sword Zeldornius gave me. I bare it at Krothering Side against Corinius, when I threw him out of Demonland. I bare it at Melikaphkhaz. I bare it in the last great fight in Witchland. Thou wilt say it brought me good luck and victory in battle. But it brought not to me, as to Zeldornius, this last best luck of all: that earth should gape for me when my great deeds were ended.”
[...]
[Lord Juss] answered, “I shall be thirty-three years old tomorrow, and that is young by the reckoning of men. None of us be old, and my brethren and Lord Brandoch Daha younger than I. Yet as old men may we now look forth on our lives, since the goodness thereof is gone by for us.” And he said, “Thou O Queen canst scarcely know our grief; for to thee the blessed Gods gave thy heart’s desire: youth forever, and peace. Would they might give us our good gift, that should be youth forever, and war; and unwaning strength and skill in arms. Would they might but give us our great enemies alive and whole again. For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.”
(Tolkien, famously, thought that this philosophy was disgusting and marred the book.)
Yes, that's it exactly. It's certainly a different take on heroism.
That reminds me of a more recent fantasy saga. The Sith believe that the best way to grow stronger is to struggle against powerful enemies. Which is why a Sith Lord is expected to find and train an apprentice: if there are no sufficiently powerful enemies at hand, they will create their own. 😉
I am a Catholic (but not a theologian), and I think you got the closest to explaining it: an act of mercy can make redemption possible. As others noted, the invaders are different Danes, as the previous ones converted, which changes the nature of the conversation. But it is intentional (and always kind of funny) that consequentialists can't account for mercy and redemption, which is a major appeal of Catholicism.
This sounds right to me.
When people say “the Catholic Church is not utilitarian” I think they have in mind something like Newman's quote "The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."
It's not that, exactly. The young courtier is saying "why can't we make an end of the bad guys once and for all?" and Alfred is saying "life is not like that, there will always be weeds".
Even if they had killed off the Danes (instead of making peace) at the end of the last war, some new enemy would come along in their place. There is no one, forever, done and dusted, now we won and everything is fine. Rome had its golden day and fell, and that was the world's end for the people of that time. But new society grew up, with people both good and bad.
If you want things to stay good, you have to keep cleaning house. There is never going to be one final "great, everything is clean and tidy, I'll never have to do anything again".
New enemies and new challenges are part of the nature of the world as we have it. While they're gone off to fight and win another victory, the weeds are growing on the White Horse after it has been scoured. The daisies don't care about Alfred taking London, and when the victors come home, they'll have to have another scouring day next year and get down on their knees and weed the White Horse, and bedamned if they're the Big Damn Heroes who kicked Viking asses all over again.
It may also be a subtle reference to the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares:
Matthew 13:24-30
"The Parable of the Weeds
24 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”
Just like the poor, we'll have the weeds with us always, until the end of the world. That's what being a conservative is about at bottom: understanding that to keep the thing clean, you have to work at it. Unlike the progressive, there is no one final "and now we've fixed it all forever and will never have to do anything again" dream; starting a revolution is easy, staying a revolutionary is hard.
As that English Catholic guy said, in his fiction and in his letters:
“For the Lord of the Galadhrim is accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-Earth, and a giver of gifts beyond the power of kings. He has dwelt in the West since the days of dawn, and I have dwelt with him years uncounted, for ere the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin I passed over the mountains, and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”
"Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."
You get back up, you pick up your sword (or your broom, or your spade) and you do it all over again until the day you die. Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
Sure, but I think Scott's contention is that, in this specific case, Alfred had a chance to finish his job, but decided not to. Sure, "chop wood, carry water", but sometimes, you need to chop a fixed amount of wood to ensure you'll be warm in the winter. Leaving the work half-done today just because there's eventually going to be another winter after the coming one seems... ill-advised.
No, he did not have a chance to invade continental Europe and exterminate the source of Viking invasions.
Scott is mistaken in his reading, I think (though I shudder to suggest any error on the part of the True Caliph).
This is a *different* bunch of Danes landing and making trouble, and Alfred is not king of All England at this point. To "finish the job" means he would have had to go to Europe, seek out and kill *every* Dane there to make sure nobody would survive to launch another raid, and then maybe come back to England and kill all the Danes in the Danelaw, whom he had made a treaty with and who had been living more or less in peace with him for decades.
That would be like if instead of interning the Japanese during the Second World War, Roosevelt had said "No, to hell with it, kill them all so they'll never try this again". Uh, yeah. That may be a very utilitarian decision, but us snivelling bleeding-heart non-utilitarians have the gall to object to such "git er done" acts.
Same with Europe after the First World War - if the Allies had killed every single German (man, woman and child), both in Germany and any Germans or people of German descent living in the US and elsewhere, then there sure wouldn't have been a Second World War on the continent. But even punitive as Versailles was, they didn't go to *that* extreme.
And Alfred *did* finish the job this time as well - he kicked out the new wave of invaders, and he can't be blamed for not foreseeing that one hundred and seventy years later, there would be a succession crisis in England that meant a bunch of Vikings who had settled down in Normandy would arrive to claim the realm.
That's fair -- I have not read the poem, so I was assuming that Scott's reading was accurate, and Alfred stopped short of neutralizing all the hostile Vikings who were already in England. But if Alfred did indeed neutralize them (by making them sign a peace treaty), then his job was indeed done. Going out and genociding a whole other continent would've been excessive indeed.
I don’t think you should be satisfied by this. Alfred couldn’t _know_ Guthrum would be true to his word. And in any case, there would be a deterrence argument for killing them all. Within the consequentialist framework (or a relatively simple version thereof), he still took a needless risk.
As I've described in a longer comment, killing them all wasn't pragmatically possible, and it would have been a very stupid idea as it would *immediately* invite retaliatory, vengeance-seeking, raids by their kinsfolk and countrymen in Scandinavia and on the Continent.
Imagine that after the American Civil War, the North had embarked on a policy of "kill them all" in the South. Whether or not this would have succeeded, I leave up to others to discuss. But Alfred wasn't even in as strong a position as the post-Civil War North. He was *not* king of England, as 'England' didn't exist as a state or nation then. He was king of Wessex, with an allied/subdued kingdom of Mercia. Marching north on a "kill 'em all" expedition, after just about winning a hard-fought victory, would have been monumentally stupid.
We moderns may expect that "oh, nobody really means it when they sign treaties, that's just going to be broken the second either side sees advantage", but that wasn't the case then. Alfred was Guthrum's sponsor in baptism, his god-father: this was a relationship that meant something. If Alfred went around breaking treaties and betraying relationships and being foresworn, he wouldn't remain king long.
Sometimes consequentalism is damn stupid, and this is one of those times.
I'd interpreted the courtiers' complaint:
"The steel that sang so sweet at tune
At Ashdown and at Ethandune
Why lies it scabbarded so soon
And heavily like lead
...
Why dwell the Danes in North England?
And up to the river ride?
Three more such marches like thy own
Would end them..."
Combined with the young earl's complaint:
"He cannot say to those he smote
And spared, with a hand hard at the throat
Go, and return no more"
...to mean that Alfred specifically rejected a "drive the Danes out of England" plan which everyone thought would have succeeded, and that the same Danes he spared were the ones who burnt Brand's farm and attacked London later. If that's not true, and these verses are just rhetorical flourish, then I guess Alfred's/Chesterton's perspective would make more sense.
It seems Alfred rejected the 'drive out the danes' policy, but I don't think it was universally expected to succeed. Alfred was king of Wessex, the southernmost kingdom in England at the time. Northumberland wasn't, and had never been, part of this realm. So in that sense it's less a 'drive out the danes' and more an 'invade the danes' policy that he rejected. It would have been a new war, and it's hard to criticise him for rejecting that.
And as others have said, it wasn't Guthrum's army which was causing trouble, it was other Danes, who had settled up north. Guthrum kept the treaty and was peaceful for the rest of his life. The relevant poetic licence in BOTWH is describing Guthrum as the king of the Danes, when he was really more like one of a number of warlords.
Well, first we have to deep-dive into history to work out why the young earl's policy was rejected (or not so much rejected, as the flaws pointed out) by Alfred.
Okay, so Alfred is a 9th century Anglo-Saxon king. Well, the only reason for that is that after the collapse of Roman Britain in the 5th century (roughly), bands of invaders from the area around the North Sea (roughly) turned up and conquered, settled, and took over: the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.
So this is a "beam in your eye" situation - if the Anglo-Saxon Problem had been solved by the Romano-British, there wouldn't *be* any King Alfred. The weeds always return: in the days of the Romano-British, the weeds had been the ancestors of Alfred. Now in Alfred's day, the weeds are the Danes (roughly speaking). And if they do solve The Danish Problem who are the next lot of weeds? That's what Alfred (in Chesterton's version) is trying to get across to the young earl: there is no Final Solution (and I use that term on purpose).
Secondly, on pragmatic grounds, they can't do it. Maybe the young earl wasn't around for the days of Alfred's war, or maybe he had been too young to fight in it, but Alfred's victory only came after a long, gruelling series of defeats.
It all kicked off with the Great Heathen Horde led by Ivar the Boneless (and two of his brothers,; "According to the Tale of Ragnar Lodbrok, he was ...the brother of Björn Ironside, Halvdan Hvitserk, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Ragnvald)", which by the way is a *fantastic* title for the whole thing. The *ostensible* reason claimed was revenge for the killing of Ivar and brothers' father by king Aella of Northumbria, but most likely it was a combination large raiding party and planned invasion, since the Frankish kingdoms where they usually raided had toughened up their defences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Heathen_Army
"The Great Heathen Army, also known as the Viking Great Army, was a coalition of Scandinavian warriors who invaded England in 865 AD. Since the late 8th century, the Vikings had been engaging in raids on centres of wealth, such as monasteries. The Great Heathen Army was much larger and aimed to conquer and occupy the four kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex."
Anyway, the above kingdoms weren't able to drive out the raiders, especially as they had been fortified by the Great Summer Army which turned up from Scandinavia. and fourteen years later, Alfred finally defeats the half of the army led by Guthrum and makes peace:
" According to Alfred the Great's biographer Asser, the Vikings then split into two bands. Halfdan led one band north to Northumbria ...Returning south of the border in 876, he shared out Northumbrian land among his men, who "ploughed the land and supported themselves." This land was part of what became known as the Danelaw.
According to Asser, the second band was led by Guthrum, Oscetel, and Anwend. ... Asser reports that Alfred made a treaty with the Vikings to get them to leave Wessex. The Vikings left Wareham, but it was not long before they were raiding other parts of Wessex, and initially they were successful. Alfred fought back, however, and eventually won victory over them at the Battle of Edington in 878. This was followed closely by what was described by Asser as the Treaty of Wedmore, where Guthrum agreed to be baptised and then for him and his army to leave Wessex. Then some time after, the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum was agreed, that set out the boundaries between Alfred and Guthrum's territories as well as agreements on peaceful trade, and the weregild value of their people."
So pragmatically, Alfred *can't* mount an invasion to clear out the Danelaw and "drive the Danes out of England". He doesn't have the strength and if he does anything like this, he's giving the Danes/Vikings the perfect excuse to mount a second invasion. You reviewed the Sage of Burnt Njal, you know the complex web of obligations around kin-slaying. "He's slaughtering our kindred" is the perfect casus belli for the Scandinavian and Continental Danes to come together and invade.
We've discussed this before, but the great asset for the Vikings is their ships. They can land on the coast, they can sail up navigable rivers, and mount hit-and-run attacks then get away in their ships before local forces can catch up to them. There isn't a comparable English navy to engage them.
Thirdly, again on pragmatic grounds, Alfred is relying on being able to trust Guthrum. He can't fight a war on two fronts, and he needs to be assured that it won't turn out "ha ha, Guthrum came up from behind and stabbed him in the back". For Guthrum's part, he's got what he wanted: his life was spared, he has his own kingdom, and he has an alliance that he would need to be very stupid to trash, and I don't think Guthrum is stupid.
If Alfred tries invading the Danelaw to drive out the Danes, Guthrum will be forced to break that alliance. Alfred's policy turned enemies into allies, the young earl's policy would just create more enemies and this time round, maybe Alfred *wouldn't* win that war. The Danes in time may become "English", just as Alfred's ancestors became "English" after they too had been an invading force that settled down in the land. EDIT: Oops, and I doubt "everyone thought" the #DriveTheDanesOutofEngland would have succeeded; the young earl does, but he's young and inexperienced and full of the stories of the glories of war and overwhelming victories, while Alfred and his veterans remember the slogging in the mud for years and years, and when the kingdom of Wessex was reduced to one island in a marsh.
"In 878, a third Viking army gathered on Fulham by the Thames. It seems they were partly discouraged by the defeat of Guthrum but also Alfred's success against the Vikings coincided with a period of renewed weakness in Francia. The Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, died in 877 and his son shortly after, precipitating a period of political instability of which the Vikings were quick to take advantage. The assembled Viking army on the Thames departed in 879 to begin new campaigns on the continent.
...By 896, the Viking army was all but defeated and no longer saw any reason to continue their attacks and dispersed to East Anglia and Northumbria. Those that were penniless found themselves ships and went south across the sea to the Seine. Anglo-Saxon England had been torn apart by the invading Great Heathen Army and the Vikings had control of northern and eastern England, while Alfred and his successors had defended their kingdom and remained in control of Wessex."
Alfred the Great really is a fascinating character; he was intelligent, genuinely religious, genuinely interested in education and trying to reclaim the best of what had come before from Roman Britain, while improving his own forces against external threat, including reorganising the army, creating fortified towns, and building at least an attempt at a navy to counter the Viking ships.
>That would be like if instead of interning the Japanese during the Second World War, Roosevelt had said "No, to hell with it, kill them all so they'll never try this again". Uh, yeah. That may be a very utilitarian decision, but us snivelling bleeding-heart non-utilitarians have the gall to object to such "git er done" acts.
Well, except that it wouldn't be like that at all. The Japanese people interned by Roosevelt's Executive Order during WWII were largely farmers and fishermen who came to the US, not as an invading force, but as individuals looking to make a living. Killing all of them wouldn't have been utilitarian at all; it just would have been bonkers.
The number of actual Japanese soldiers captured by the US was relatively small, and most of them were actually held prisoner in Australia and New Zealand, and had nothing to do specifically with "Roosevelt" anyway. The analogy simply isn't very analogous, as the Japanese never even got a chance to land an invading force in the United States outside of a few sparsely inhabited islands. Killing the few Japanese who managed to land on US soil *and* subsequently get captured rather than killed in battle might have been utilitarian, but it wouldn't have had much effect (and of course I would join you as a fellow sniveling bleeding-heart non-utilitarian in objecting to such an unchivalrous thing).
Anyhow, the choice isn't between simply letting the invaders hang around or killing every last of them wherever they can be found. Driving them off your island while you have the chance seems like the feasible and responsible "compromise." It doesn't mean they'll never invade again but at least they'll have to cross the water to do it!
> Well, except that it wouldn't be like that at all. The Japanese people interned by Roosevelt's Executive Order during WWII were largely farmers and fishermen who came to the US, not as an invading force, but as individuals looking to make a living.
But it would, indeed, be EXACTLY like that, although for the opposite reason you imply. The vast majority of the Danes in England, were 'farmers and fishermen just trying to make a living'. Turns out it's really easy to rile such people up into a Great Heathen Army.
Hi Deiseach!
That reminds me of a proverb from a civil engineer, who was talking about why sidewalks in Disney World get repaired so much more quickly than the average city sidewalk:
"We only maintain that which we love."
Even though it was just a simple concrete observation, I thought it immediately applied to everything in my life. Marriage, kids, career, friendships, yardwork, prayer-life, website code, etc.
Kind regards,
David
Chesterton writes about this very idea in "Orthodoxy", and uses as his example Pimplico, a section of London that in Chesteron's time was known for its slums:
"Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
Thanks FLWAB! That's a great quote!
I was reading something about the “Last Shaker” the other day, and there was something about Shaker doctrine, or nonsense depending on your POV, and how life is for laboring, literally and towards God; so that you may reach heaven and there - labor. Which to someone like me, the Marthas of the world, sounds quite satisfactory. Partly because it implicitly supposes that heaven is much like this place, perhaps indistinguishable.
ETA: I agree though, and am surprised Scott thought enemies could be vanquished finally and forever, or that it particularly mattered who they were, or that the Vikings were somehow “worse” than any other enemies so at the least they should be dispatched forever.
This is a great summary, and eloquently put. Another reason I like it is it is a fair and strong position for me to contrast my fairly strong non-conservatism (in the intelligent, Chesterton sense): I share his appreciation for hope and his distaste for fatalism, but have a more radical sense of hope.
The maintenance of the horse of Uffington is beautiful because of the sense of continuing community, but the maintenance of polio clinics and orphanages for starving children is, to me, a sign of profound failure; we could just not have polio or starving children at all!
My progressivism is one of eradicating smallpox, of ending slavery, of ending profound need; the poor may always be with us in a relative sense, but rich countries have essentially eradicated many particular poverties; those of water, clothing, hunger have been the first to fall, poverty of healthcare is solved in most rich countries, and I hope to see poverties of shelter, communication, and transport eliminated in my lifetime in much of the world.
Chesterton is right that you need to keep painting the fence, but you can also make a better paint.
"poverty of healthcare is solved in most rich countries"
The pertinent part there being *rich* countries. It certainly has not been abolished globally, anymore than poverty in general.
I don't think Chesterton is saying "don't even bother trying to eradicate bad things" but rather "you will have to be careful that you maintain the eradication, once you have achieved it".
Polio and TB may be coming back. Things like measles are on the rise again, and that is because we forgot about maintenance. People thought measles was a solved problem, they didn't get their kids vaccinated, and here we go with the same old story.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/polio-is-back-in-the-united-states-how-did-that-happen/
"I hope to see poverties of shelter, communication, and transport eliminated in my lifetime in much of the world".
Believe me, I say this not to mock or belittle you. But I remember, back in the days of the economic boom pre-2008 crash, the Episcopal Church (for one) confidently asserting that global poverty could be ended within (a short period of time) because now our societies were all so rich.
And then the crash happened shortly afterwards, and all those riches turned out to be bubbles and built on sand. And, well, 'the poor we have with us always'.
Getting to the age I am, I am now past the youthful confidence of "this time for sure!" about any problems. You have to keep painting the fence post.
I do fundamentally agree with you here; without constant effort, things degrade. But, to mix my metaphors, even if you need to keep repainting, you do get to move the fence posts once in a while (hopefully in a better direction).
This isn't essential to your point, and does not dispute your conclusion so it's just to note, but we *really are* vastly richer as a planet than we were even fifty years ago; vast swathes of the world's population now have access to steady food, water, medicine, etc, as a higher proportion than ever before, and that's despite most population growth happening in poor countries! Global maternal mortality rates have plummeted by something like over 90% over the past century.
Oh, exactly! But the broader point is that all these improvements happened because we *worked* at them, they didn't just happen 'of themselves'. Society got richer and then suddenly everyone was healthy? Yes, but they became healthy because of X, Y and Z going out and doing things like finding out how cholera was transmitted (and taking away pump handles) and so forth.
It's more "if the police caught a murderer, the murderer went to jail for a reasonable period of time, was released having served his time, and then murdered someone again", which to be fair is something that happens pretty frequently. There's also the fact that it's not just that the Vikings had "made a peace treaty" - they became Christians:
"When the pagan people of the sea
Fled to their palisades,
Nailed there with javelins to cling
And wonder smote the pirate king,
And brought him to his christening
And the end of all his raids.
(For not till the night's blue slate is wiped
Of its last star utterly,
And fierce new signs writ there to read,
Shall eyes with such amazement heed,
As when a great man knows indeed
A greater thing than he.)"
So yes, I think you are, to a degree, "overinterpreting the lines where people tell Alfred he could have gotten rid of the Danes" - to do so after they had pacified and converted would, to Alfred, have been criminal. However, I agree that this isn't a point that's made particularly strongly, partly I think because Chesterton is having to make the historical 'facts' (such as they are) fit his narrative and his point.
I also think it's unclear from the poem itself whether the Danes who are attacking at the end are in fact the same as those who had settled and converted before (ie. traitors), or a new wave of invaders. If the latter, I think this entire contention disappears.
It's different Danes. Guthrum and his bunch settled down and kept the peace, but years later Danes driven out from the Continent landed in England and started making mischief again, the scallywags.
> "if the police caught a murderer, the murderer went to jail for a reasonable period of time, was released having served his time, and then murdered someone again", which to be fair is something that happens pretty frequently.
Sounds like you've got a defective jail, then, if it's releasing people without having first properly reformed them.
As far as I can tell, Guthrum didn't break his word to Alfred. Presumably these were different vikings that attacked again.
Yes, it seems there was a naval invasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great#Viking_attacks_(890s) so Alfred couldn't have exterminated them absent an invasion of the continent beyond his powers.
chesterton lives in britain after it was conquered by viking-adjacent normans, so maybe it's a progress but slower modern conservative vision
you memorized all of it.?! That's very impressive. What other poems have you memorized?
I recommend that everyone should try memorizing poems. They’re easier than prose to memorize (since they often have rhymes and meters that help you remember what line comes next), and having a poem memorized is great for when you’re bored. Start with a short one, keep adding more poems as you go, and eventually you get good at memorizing them and you can tackle something big.
"Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Jane.
She wants a drink of water
so she waits and waits and waits and waits and waits
for it to rain."
I'd recommand spaced repetition. Here's an article about it, with a section specifically dedicated to poetry https://borretti.me/article/effective-spaced-repetition
(1) "His vassals tell him that he could potentially press his victory and drive them from England entirely."
From my understanding? Nope. There isn't an "England" at this point, but a hodge-podge of independent kingdoms. Alfred is king of Wessex, with no claims on any other kingdoms, apart from something like "Hey, Mercia, you guys surrendered to my grandfather back in the day so you owe me fealty".
Which doesn't really do him much good, since the Vikings are occupying London which is located in Mercia and the Mercians have enough problems of their own to deal with. At the time of the events in the poem, he's holed up in the marshes and fighting as a resistance leader, not a king of a settled realm. After his first big victory, as described in the poem, the best he can do is "this half of the country is our territory and that half is yours":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great#/media/File:Britain_886.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great
"He won a decisive victory in the Battle of Edington in 878 and made an agreement with the Vikings, dividing England between Anglo-Saxon territory and the Viking-ruled Danelaw, composed of Scandinavian York, the north-east Midlands and East Anglia."
(2) The treaty with Guthrum did make peace. Also, Guthrum is now Christian. This is a big thing! He is now bound by a relationship to Alfred! And in a time when there isn't a nationality as identify (remember, there is no "England"), being fellow-Christians fills that breach. Turning around and massacring your (new) fellow-Christian king and his subjects is not a nice thing to do, and will cause people to regard you as untrustworthy and not believe any treaties you make with them.
"One of the terms of the surrender was that Guthrum convert to Christianity. Three weeks later, the Danish king and 29 of his chief men were baptised at Alfred's court at Aller, near Athelney, with Alfred receiving Guthrum as his spiritual son."
Alfred and Guthrum carve up territory, Guthrum goes to his new lands, and it actually works out pretty well. *This* bunch of Vikings are now settled down and mostly peaceable:
"With the signing of the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum, an event most commonly held to have taken place around 880 when Guthrum's people began settling East Anglia, Guthrum was neutralised as a threat. The Viking army, which had stayed at Fulham during the winter of 878–879, sailed for Ghent and was active on the continent from 879 to 892."
It's the *other* bunches of Vikings that are the trouble.
(3) Now I'm not just king of Wessex, guys!
"A year later, in 886, Alfred reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again. Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. Soon afterwards, Alfred restyled himself as "King of the Anglo-Saxons". The restoration of London progressed through the latter half of the 880s and is believed to have revolved around a new street plan; added fortifications in addition to the existing Roman walls; and, some believe, the construction of matching fortifications on the south bank of the River Thames.
This is also the period in which almost all chroniclers agree that the Saxon people of pre-unification England submitted to Alfred. In 888, Æthelred, the archbishop of Canterbury, also died. One year later Guthrum, or Athelstan by his baptismal name, Alfred's former enemy and king of East Anglia, died and was buried in Hadleigh, Suffolk. Guthrum's death changed the political landscape for Alfred. The resulting power vacuum stirred other power-hungry warlords eager to take his place in the following years."
So Alfred goes back to rule in Wessex, leaving his half of Mercia under the governance of his son-in-law. Everything in the garden is rosy, except for those dratted Danes:
"After another lull, in the autumn of 892 or 893, the Danes attacked again. Finding their position in mainland Europe precarious, they crossed to England in 330 ships in two divisions. They entrenched themselves, the larger body at Appledore, Kent, and the lesser under Hastein, at Milton, also in Kent. The invaders brought their wives and children with them, indicating a meaningful attempt at conquest and colonisation."
*This* is the second battle he has to fight, and where the young courtier is complaining about Those Dratted Danish Invasions never seeming to end. And Alfred more or less agrees: after all, what can he do? Go off and invade Denmark and conquer it and make it part of his own realm, so there won't be any more Viking raids? Yeah, that's not going to happen, so all he can do is fight *today's* battle and clean their clocks (and the clocks of any other invasion forces that tootle along):
"Those who escaped retreated to Shoebury. After collecting reinforcements, they made a sudden dash across England and occupied the ruined Roman walls of Chester. The English did not attempt a winter blockade but contented themselves with destroying all the supplies in the district.
Early in 894 or 895 lack of food obliged the Danes to retire once more to Essex. At the end of the year, the Danes drew their ships up the River Thames and the River Lea and fortified themselves twenty miles (32 km) north of London. A frontal attack on the Danish lines failed but later in the year, Alfred saw a means of obstructing the river to prevent the egress of the Danish ships. The Danes realised that they were outmanoeuvred, struck off north-westwards and wintered at Cwatbridge near Bridgnorth. The next year, 896 (or 897), they gave up the struggle. Some retired to Northumbria, some to East Anglia. Those who had no connections in England returned to the continent."
And that's why Chesterton finishes with the weeds creeping over the White Horse once again, with the news of the victory in re-taking London happening off-stage. The weeds don't care about human wins or losses. Nature continues on, whether Alfred is king or not. And this is what Alfred understands that the young courtier doesn't: there is no end. You have to do it all, over and over again. If you want something, you have to work for it and work to keep it.
Alfred was intelligent, capable, ambitious and a good ruler. He encouraged the revival of learning and the arts, as well as taking back territory and expanding his kingdom until he made himself "King of the Anglo-Saxons".
"Historian Richard Abels sees Alfred's educational and military reforms as complementary. Restoring religion and learning in Wessex, Abels contends, was to Alfred's mind as essential to the defence of his realm as the building of the burhs. As Alfred observed in the preface to his English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, kings who fail to obey their divine duty to promote learning can expect earthly punishments to befall their people. The pursuit of wisdom, he assured his readers of the Boethius, was the surest path to power: "Study wisdom, then, and, when you have learned it, condemn it not, for I tell you that by its means you may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it".
I don't think the idea is the Alfred made a treaty with the Danes *so that* the eternal revolution could be preserved. I think it's that it was the best he could have done at the time. At the end, he's reminding his men that the eternal revolution is in fact inevitable. He's not saying we should deliberately act to preserve the bad forces that make it so; no, those we should fight, understanding all the while that they can never be entirely extirpated.
Not sure if Chesterton thought about it, but one good reason Alfred couldn't just permanently end the Danish problem is that that would have required killing all the Danes living in England, which would have been a very un-christian thing to do.
One hundred years after Alfred king Ethelred the Unready actually tried to do exactly that in the St. Brice's Day Massacre. Historians are not agreed how much that massacre was actually an attempt to really kill all danish settlers, but it is almost certain that its main effect was uniting all Danes and their allies and so to finally cause the total invasion of England by Sweyn Forkbeard. Perhaps the belief that an evil could be finally ended by a thorough cleansing is just a bad idea, that have only ever had bad consequences for the countries that tried it.
Look at this way: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times". But there's one easy solution to this problem: simply never create the good times. Never fully defeat the enemy. The revolution must continue, forever.
I have a slightly different take on that old aphorism. "Sometimes strong men create good times. Just as often, strong men create hard times and bully everyone into saying times are good."
I think "strong" and "weak" in the saying are meant to be interpreted as moral strength, not physical strength.
I think you're assuming too much if you assume everyone who uses this aphorism understands it as you do. Sidebar: I know one weight lifter who considers most types of (male) physical weakness to be signs of moral weakness. This is his favorite aphorism. It's very vagueness likely broadens its appeal.
Haha, I didn't mean to claim that everyone does use it my way, maybe just that I would prefer if they did. 😉
But also, the saying doesn't really make sense to me if it means purely physical strength. Physical strength alone just isn't that useful in the modern world.
I would grant that weight lifting could be one way to develop discipline and character. I just don't think it's the only way.
Sure. My friend’s way of reading the aphorism is uniquely stupid. Just one example of several different ways to interpret the saying.
> I would prefer if they did.
Well, go scour the appropriate horse until they do, then.
>Physical strength alone just isn't that useful in the modern world.<
So what you're saying is, good times created weak men?
I don’t think of England as Viking-free but I guess it would be too much to suggest that Alfred had the wisdom to recognize there was something in the Vikings worth preserving, bringing into the fold.
Also somebody needs to watch “The Last Kingdom”!
The Vikings do not represent an enemy. They represent the fact that there is an enemy!
Consider a different biblical image: the poor you will always have with you. Now why might that be? Eliezer has a tweet thread where he asked a similar question about resource scarcity; in a world which is abundant in all material things except oxygen is there poverty? That bottlenecks we shall face is true, don't know bottleneck lasts forever. The war against scarcity seems eternal. Economists have said that this is because human wants are infinite. But really it is more that dynamic human societies have many white horses that must be cleaned at different great in different ways. Every person conceived is a white horse on the verge of being overgrown, some will not be successful, some will be blackened by the mud of injustice, others overwhelmed by the weeds of misfortunes, others can shine only if others pull their weeds for them, and some refuse help at all. We know of no way to run a society with a zero error rate. Though we will continue to fight it, the poor we will always have with us.
Similarly with the Vikings. Alfred is not betraying his children's children by making compromise with sin, rather the story is meant as a lesson concerning the battle against human travail, but not any individual human travail. It's a platonist vision not an aristotelian one. Alfred narratively is not allowed to have a lasting victory, because lasting victory is not possible in this England.
--
I'm not fully convinced by this reading. And I think Chesterton could have improved the poem, especially the end. But part of the secret to Chesterton is that all of his works were written in a hurry. And besides, I would call his true masterpiece The Man Who Was Thursday.
This point about refusing to solve a solvable problem reminds me of a description of the conflict between modern progressives and conservatives as hinging, in at least many cases, on the question of whether progressive policies have the character of, "We should abolish Mondays." The thing unpleasant about Monday is that you have to start working again, after having some time off. It is fundamentally an un-solvable problem. You could shuffle the schedule around, but so long as you take time off, and then start work again, starting work will be an unpleasant contrast, relative to leisure. In many cases conservatives feel that progressives are trying to spend government money on solving problems, and will end up just moving the problem somewhere else.
The question, of course, is always: Are they right? In some cases they may seem to be. For instance: It is foolish to simply give people big housing vouchers, if it is illegal to build more housing. All that will happen is that housing will become more expensive, and consumers of housing services will be effectively just as poor as ever. But this doesn't mean the problem of housing scarcity is fundamentally insoluble. We do, in fact, have the technology to build a bunch of condos and apartments. Mistaking a solvable problem for an "I hate Mondays" type problem will lead one to behaving in a resigned / despairing manner rather than trying to fix it.
The more I think of it, I wonder if *daisies* might be intentionally ambiguous. Do you want a world without daisies? A world without wildness? Maybe some square footage without …
I have, literally, scoured weeds off of the Uffington White Horse. The Ballad is deeply beautiful and inspiring.
And the review made a pic of folks scouring weed deeply beautiful and inspiring. No small feat.
Why is Alfred referred to as Albert?
Huh, I always proofread these for grammar errors etc, and I caught several in this one, but I missed that Alfred was called Albert about five times. Must be one of those things like "the the" which is too obvious to notice. I've corrected it.
I attended a scholarly presentation on historical persons (of one family, so first names were being used) which kept changing the first name of one of the principal characters. First he was Arthur (his real name), then he was John, then he was something else. The presenter never noticed until I inquired in the question session.
I spotted another error: The review says "We see this idea repeated in the Balled [sic]", but the last word should of course be "Ballad" instead.
Excellent! Now I have to go read it again. It's been too long.
The Twitter link is dead, or goes to a private account.
archive.org to the rescue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220224181704/https://twitter.com/ursulabrs/status/1434791291653558275
ursula says:
As a teacher of poetry what I can tell you for sure is people want poems to rhyme. They want poems to rhyme so bad. But we won’t give it to them
If I had a tankard to bang on the table, I'd be banging it right now while shouting YES YES YES 😁
You get it. You get what he was saying in the poem. Yes, I'm biased as all get-out here, but you guys knew that already, so this is one of at least two contenders for overall winner as far as I'm concerned.
I'll just quote another English Catholic 'pale stale male' about what is hope:
Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (Conversation of Finrod and Andreth):
'What is hope?' she said. 'An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none'.
'That is one thing that Men call "hope",' said Finrod. 'Amdir we call it, "looking up". But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is "trust". It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?'
Anyway, I'm happy now. I would say to anyone reading this review, go look the poem up and try reciting it out loud. It's verse, it's meant to be said, and the swing of it will bring you along.
This review has definitely motivated me to go read Chesterton. I've seen many many references here over the years but I haven't actually picked up one of his works myself yet. Any suggestions on the best approach to him?
On the non-fiction side I would start with "Orthodoxy": despite the name it's a lot of fun to read, and it does a great job of explaining the foundations of Chesterton's thinking and philosophy.
On the fiction side, his "Father Brown" mystery books are probably his most popular works (according to legend, whenever he started running out of money he would tell his wife that it was time to write another Father Brown book), and if you like mystery stories they're fabulous. "The Man Who Was Thursday" is probably his best fiction book, but I find "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" just as good, if not better.
Fortunately all these books are easily available in web versions on Project Gutenberg, since they are long out of copyright.
Orthodoxy: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130
The Innocence of Father Brown (first in the series): https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/204
The Man Who Was Thursday: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1695
The Napoleon of Notting Hill: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20058
On "faith", I am of the opinion that the modern version of "faith" (which just renders down to belief) is an impoverishment of a very rich concept that is better maintained in how the word is used elsewhere.
To have faith in God is not to believe in God, but rather, something more similar to *trusting* God, and keeping to the faith is not merely continuing to believe, but in continuing to have that trust, and to behave as if that trust is valid.
Hi Thegnskald!
Just this morning, I learned from a lecture by Alister McGrath that although the first word of the Apostle's Creed in Latin, "Credo" is typically translated as "I believe"... in the Latin at the time, it meant "to trust or confide in a person or thing; to have confidence in; to trust."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6rOVUXF9BY&t=779s
Kind regards,
David
Yeah. Faith is a process that starts with belief. But doesn't end there. It doesn't even end in knowledge, because faith is incremental. In a way, the faith process (believe something might be true, act on what it tells you, learn if it is true, repeat) is how we learn anything that is true. Religious or not. Which makes sense--God is the source of all truth, even about His creations.
How about, "to be faithful to God"
> We see this theme repeated throughout the poem
This section is not a quote, but is put in a quote block.
I was going to say that too!
A beautiful poem and an excellent review. However the cynic in me can’t help but compare the moral to the heathen tale of Sisyphus.
Well observed. Though the original pagan view of Sisiphus is: he is damned and cursed. - while atheist Albert Camus can not help but see it from a Christian/Catholic tradition. And imagine him "happy".
http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/intermission-i-i
> “It is good to be a living person in the Underworld,” Tantalus says, “since there is nothing here that can actually kill you.”
> There is a distant cursing. There is a distant rumbling.
> Sisyphus, rolled over by a distant boulder, screams.
> “There are also disadvantages,” Tantalus concedes.
That particular chapter's conclusion features an alternate solution which, fortunately, can be succinctly and elegantly proven to be more or less universally applicable, without the proof itself requiring reference to any sort of benevolent higher power.
There is a big difference though: Sisyphus's eternal labor has no point or purpose. The eternal labor to preserve the White Horse has a point: the point is to keep the White Horse around. Presumably for the people who scour it that's a meaningful purpose, renewing the Horse so that their children and their children's children will live in a world with the Horse in it.
In contrast, the only purpose of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill forever is to punish him. Nobody (including himself) benefits from his labor.
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
The other thing is: Sisyphus needs to spend all his time on the boulder (presumably). Scrubbing the white horse or fighting the occasional Viking doesn't take up all your time and leaves a lot of your life free for other things. Life is full of dumb tasks that need to be done over and over again for no permanent effect, like brushing your teeth.
> There is a big difference though: Sisyphus's eternal labor has no point or purpose. The eternal labor to preserve the White Horse has a point: the point is to keep the White Horse around.
That just sounds like circular logic to me. Keeping the white horse around isn't the same category as Sisyphus' busywork... why?
At minimum, because the existence of the White Horse is something that matters to some people, and the people who scour it find the continued existence of the White Horse and their participation in it's maintenance meaningful. Because of the scourers actions, generations yet unborn will get the enjoy the sight of the White Horse, just as he has, and his grandfathers did, and their grandfathers. That means something to the scourer at minimum, which is why he chooses to scour.
Sisyphus did not choose his task, and it has no meaning to anyone beyond sending the message "Do bad stuff and you'll get punished forever"; the punishment being, never-ending and work that is meaningless to you.
> and it has no meaning to anyone beyond sending the message "Do bad stuff and you'll get punished forever"
This sounds like a more valuable product of one's labours than "Woah a white horse" frankly.
True!
Sisyphus can stop pushing the boulder any time he wants; he's just too proud to admit that there's something he can't do.
There's definitely another epic feature missing: no talking boat!
I was sad to see that scene cut from the Unsong reprinting. It was a quality bit.
I think I either made that up for Unsong, or got it from an English teacher who was wrong and had made it up themselves. IIRC I checked and there was no talking boat in eg the Iliad.
Yeah, but it was funny.
You may have been remembering the talking figurehead of the Argo, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts.
Tolkien on The Ballad of the White Horse (letter 180):
“P (Priscilla) has been wading through The Ballad of The White Horse for the last many nights; and my efforts to explain the obscurer parts to her convince me that it is not as good as I thought. The ending is absurd. The brilliant smash and glitter of the words and phrases (when they come off, and are not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the ‘North’, heathen or Christian.”
Elsewhere, he is rather fond of Chesterton, and even this letter suggests that his initial impression had been much more positive. But there is a somewhat overly sentimental feel to some parts of the poem that apparently irked Tolkien, and of course nobody ever was likelier to bristle at historical inaccuracies concerning England!
I do wonder what his objections to the ending were, and how they relate to Scott’s.
I don't know what Tolkien's specific objections were, but in terms of style their writings feel very different.
In everything he writes Chesterton gives the impression of throwing something down in a hurry (he said he wrote his newspaper pieces in the pub minutes before they were due).
BOTWH certainly gives that impression, it's uneven. The best bits are brilliant, and as a whole it's great, but it has many bits that are untidy or slapdash.
This seems a way away from Tolkien's way of doing things, and I can see Tolkien finding it grating.
"I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite.
Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of the Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes. If the reader is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten Times articles than one Tit-Bits joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keep myself on the whole on the level of the Times: it is only occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of Tit-Bits.
I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written; they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start for Highgate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest. In these essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick."
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
This is beautiful. I'd like to say more than that, but I can't find the words.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm
This was a great review. My only objections are the statements at the beginning that the poem is "about conservatism" and "is Chesterton’s love song to conservatism as he understands it." The review goes on to explain Chesterton's understanding, but in Chesterton's own words, and in fact, this isn't "conservatism" at all.
Yes, I thought this! Indeed, in the quote from Chesterton where he explicitly mentions conservatism and progressivism, he seems to be in favour of what he calls progressivism. "[A]ll conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not."
This is only true if you’re inoculated in what passes for modern conservatism in American politics. Chesterton’s idea of conservatism is best espoused by Chesterton’s Fence: not the that the fence should never be reformed, but that it should not be reformed until the would-be reformed understands what purpose it served. The “progressives” that Chesterton targeted in his day were of two stripes; industrialists who wanted to sweep the world of old away in favor of capitalism and material things, and communists and socialists who sought to destroy the entire old order in favor of their new vision for men. Chesterton was so opposed to both of these visions that he developed his own idealized system of economics (distributism) as a third way. Today we don’t think of Bezos/Thiel/etc as “progressives” but I think Chesterton would have put them in them in that category, and I think he was right. They and what we now call “the left” are in a great haste to destroy the old way of being and doing, and have not given any great thought to why the people of old lives that way. A real conservatism is alive and constantly being renewed, but it also gives our ancestors a heavy vote in the process. Orthodoxy expands on this at some length.
It seems more about conservationism ("how to keep what's good") than conservatism ("everything that is, is good") although as a Christian presumably he'd believe the Creation to be essentially good, the devilish meddling notwithstanding.
It certainly does not seem to concern - at least not directly - conservatism as a political ideology or movement.
I can't tell you when it happened, but at some point Chesterton became a distributist. Distributists define themselves as standing in opposition to state socialism AND laissez faire capitalism.
Yep, I came along to say exactly this. The kind of Christianity represented here seems to be beautiful and noble and radical - not what Christian conservatism is today, and not what it has ever been, so far as I understand it.
I'm not quite convinced by the white horse as a conservative argument, either. It suggests that we have to weed and renew the white horse because that's the tradition; and it's the tradition because it's necessary to weed and renew the white horse. But somehow no-one seems to have explained why the white horse is good. I'm guessing Chesterton thinks it's obvious that the horse is beautiful, and that's motivation enough. And as it happens, on the subject of the white horse itself, I think everyone would agree. But sometimes the things that people think are beautiful change, like the hierarchically structured nuclear family. Does he have an answer for what to do when the motivation changes? I dunno.
Another nice example people gave is the fact that the Vikings ultimately win, via France. At this point, 1,000 years later, should we carry on Alfred's perpetual revolution? Should I kill my Anglo-Saxon neighbour?
What a brilliant essay!! Thank you.
I do think the quotes are tad excessive, but easily skippable if one is so inclined, and everything else is readable, engaging, interesting and informative.
And surely I can't be the first person requesting the edit of the Alberts to Alfreds?
RE: "But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact...If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution."
I don't know anything about him beyond his Wikipedia page, but is Chesterton really proposing that society is the painted post as it stands? Maybe so, based on these opening lines:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
That seems awfully facile to me, and if I'm understanding it right, would undermine the legitimate moral lesson that we must continually fight to protect what's good in society.
To belabor the analogy, it's equally as clear to me that there are Vikings intent on destroying the Horse, as it is that the Horse is imperfect and crusaders from within might want to improve it. If you blindly treat the latter as the former, you'll get a sclerotic society with frozen mores. Maybe this is too much subtlety to ask for in the genre. But I think if you're going to treat it as a paean to conservatism in the real world, it seems like a fatal flaw.
Apropos of frozen mores, here's Chesterton on female suffrage: https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/wrong-with-the-world/47/ & https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/wrong-with-the-world/18/.
But isn't that the heart of conservatism? It's in the name, for goodness' sake. The world has changed, of course, and that's because the conservatives failed. That's what's driving the current wave of reactionaries: to defeat the progressives, so they can paint the post white again.
Sure, but I guess I'm reacting to the characterization that this piece represents some nobler form of conservatism. Cards on the table (as is probably obvious), I don't start from a place that is sympathetic to the ideology. But based on the tone of the reception here (e.g. Scott calling it his favorite poem), I was expecting a more robust or nuanced defense.
Whether or not you think it's noble, it's certainly more effective. Modern "conservatives" took the status quo for granted, and it fell apart before they could even properly react. Change and entropy is inevitable unless it is actively resisted.
It's flattering rhetorically, and strategically an effective proposal. I just don't think it's a sophisticated or convincing one. Among other things, it's ahistorical--not in the literal sense that the post discusses, but in that it doesn't consider how a conservative consensus is formed (the Horse has existed for all time). The modern conservatives were presumably a product of change themselves...
I take your point that I may be incorrectly reading the poem (and the post) as more of an apologia than a call to action. But I do think it's worthwhile to evaluate the material on its merits, if we're going to go around praising it.
I think what it actually represents is the nobility of conservatism. It would be surprising for an ideology to be so popular, if there was nothing noble about it at all.
Incidentally, I think you are perhaps underestimating the degree to which you approach things from a conservative perspective, when circumstances call for it. Just like I might approach things from a progressive perspective at times, without consciously thinking about it in those terms. I don't think it would be wise to view absolutely everything through the same ideological lens.
I don't see the need to assume there's any connection between the popularity of something and its nobility.
I'm going to challenge your categorical dismissal of frozen mores. Just because our mores needed to evolve in the past, that is no guarantee they need to evolve today. And just because our mores need to evolve today, that is no guarantee they need to evolve forever.
While our mores can never be perfect, I can imagine a time when then potential cost of further experimentation might vastly outweigh the potential cost of freezing mores today.
So you feel as Chesterton says is the modern division into Conservatives and Progressives?
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
Or, to emphasise the importance of definitions, from the detective story "The Flying Stars":
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
A conservative is someone who wants to conserve. A conservator in a museum does the same thing, and I don't think anyone objects to "if we wish the items to remain whole, action must be taken to take care of them and repair any damage, and even simply to maintain them as they are". You don't just leave things alone without acting on them, and you don't blindly refuse to touch anything because it's fine as it is. It's fine right now, but if you leave it alone, the weeds grow over it.
From the chapter "The Eternal Revolution" in "Orthodoxy":
"The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative. But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in Radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil’s suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy — the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury."
And to return to the poem, from the chapter "The Age of Legends" in "The Sbort History of England":
"There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope — which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped — but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic."
I find almost no value in this Chesterton quote and I am left to assume his lofty reputation is based on his fiction.
>Apropos of frozen mores, here's Chesterton on female suffrage
I guess these are supposed to make Chesterton look bad, but that really only works if you read them as uncharitably as possible.
Ch. 47, your first link, seems to be basically a standard objection to small-l liberal democracy, which is the tendency to "liberate" even those who do not perceive themselves to be in need of any liberation. The entire argument is contigent on the idea that a majority of women are themselves are opposed to women's suffrage, and Chesterton is clear about that. Even today small-l liberals have the tendency to try and liberate people who want nothing of the sort - how many bazillions were spent trying to liberate Afghani women at the point of a gun, even though they (apparently) wanted none of it?
Ch. 18, your second link, is in fact remarkably prescient. Chesterton does not deny that women have been treated badly and even as servants in domestic life. He just argues out that sending women into the workforce isn't going to solve that problem:
>"I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time."
Quite a few studies show that on average, modern working women continue to do most of the housework and "care" work even if they also have a full time job. Chesterton appears to have correctly foreseen that problem.
The second half of this is generally an observation that women are not the same as men, and have psychic traits that would likely reshape the workforce:
> "Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm.
"Human resources" did not exist in 1910, but Chesterton appears to have described a certain kind of HR lady perfectly. Helen Andrews made a similar point here:
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources
When you consider that Chesterton was writing these things over 110 years ago, he comes off as downright progressive.
I think it was Theodore Roosevelt that said something like this about women being able to vote: "I am for it, but I do not think it will make much of a difference, because they'll still be choosing between the same candidates that the men are." (Which was basically accurate - people who expected women to vote in large numbers for, say, pacifist candidates ended up disappointed.)
There was a fair bit of extra support for prohibitionist candidates from newly-enfranchised women, but that would up disappointing in other ways.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the name of the author of the book being reviewed was in the post’s title or subtitle? The way it is now, we have to delve into the review to discover this basic piece of information.
If you're not going to read the thing, why would you care who the author is?
I've never heard of a "Ballad of a White Horse" before this, as far as I know, but I have heard of GK Chesterton. Standard book reviews usually list the title, author, and even additional bibliographic information about a book, at the beginning of the review, because that puts a bunch of standardized, often useful information, in one place, where potential readers can see it before starting in on the review, and people who were so moved by the review might see it after and go out and get the book.
This review and the comments made me think of a certain scene in the TV show Vikings: https://youtu.be/CPMSzstuVD0?si=D7VFw6JkZuSgVXTA&t=120
Warning: this scene is VERY SAD
“I always believed that death was a fate far better than life …”
I only wish that Christianity had been a religion that upheld this one idea, that life, writ large - the life of this planet - is the great treasure.
Instead, it’s fetuses and murderers.
Other living things are barely even a special case, at least in the Protestantism of my experience.
> Protestantism
There’s the problem
The poem has tremendous bounce and gusto, and the point that everything good needs maintenance is excellent.
Still, I'm left with factual questions. Is Christianity actually that good? Is it that much better than other religions?
For that argument you'll be wanting Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy". In the introduction he writes "These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics."
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images.html
Strictly speaking, for the poem’s purposes it only needs to be better than the Vikings’ religion/ culture.
I thought Christianity was supposed to be better than Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (at least), but maybe that's from Lepanto or something.
I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re saying. Chesterton obviously thought so, and provided what he would consider arguments in his writings.
If the claim is that this specific poem compares Christianity to these religions, then maybe it’s me being dumb and missing it?
If you’re saying that this conclusion is implied by the logic of the poem, then I don’t think so. Guthrum converting to Christianity is clearly considered an improvement, but this doesn’t mean that him converting to e.g. Islam wouldn’t be.
I should think that it goes without saying that actual Islam, nor Hinduism, nor Buddhism nor all the rest, do not function the way Chesterton says they do. Christianity is not the only source of the kind of hope he is celebrating.
I hope it also goes without saying that Christianity has frequently acted as other people's "weeds"--an inimical force that pulls down all that some culture wants to preserve.
Please note that I am not saying that Christianity is any worse than other world religions, just that's in terms of the effects it has had on non-believers it isn't any better.
Chesterton is not really the author to read if you want “the logical case for Christianity.” Someone else suggested Orthodoxy, and it is indeed a great book, but it’s not going to be what you want if you want, like, a point by point rebuttal of Dawkins and Harris. For that you’ll want to look at someone like Edward Feser or Trent Horn.
"Cleaning the White Horse" should be a turn of phrase for the work that must always be done.
I'd prefer "Scouring" over "Cleaning" as it's a traditional term for it and a bit more memorable. This would be a handy idiom; I agree.
Sigh. I rather wish there were epic poems about the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. People have split the nucleus and men have stood upon the Moon. And the footprints on the Moon will last ten million years https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6BjNNddehiI . Not all accomplishments require ceaseless maintenance.
We got distracted from going to the moon for a few decades, lost the ability to do so, and now are trying to spend billions of dollars getting it back (and failing!) Sounds like a thing that requires ceaseless maintenance to me!
>We got distracted from going to the moon for a few decades, lost the ability to do so, and now are trying to spend billions of dollars getting it back
True! Many Thanks!
>(and failing!)
That remains to be seen. The current plan is for Artemis III to land people on the moon in 2026. I suspect that it will be delayed, perhaps 50:50 odds on whether it happens say by the next election cycle in 2028.
>Sounds like a thing that requires ceaseless maintenance to me!
And yet the Apollo 11 LEM descent stage still sits there, a monument that men did indeed walk the lunar surface. True, we cannot do the same this year, but it _was_ accomplished. The astronauts' footprints on the moon _do_ remain there. And large parts of the knowledge of how to do it were not lost.
edit: To clarify: I view the endurance of the Apollo 11 landing site as a side issue. My original "Sigh" is about the poem being about
Yet another war. Again. A conflict between armed groups. Again. "Willie McBride, it all happened again. And again, and again, and again, and again."
I don't really _care_ that King Alfred picked himself off the ground and fought another battle. Frankly, from the vantage point of over a thousand years after his battles, I haven't got the foggiest idea of whether the world would have been on balance better or worse if the Danes had won, and I doubt that anyone else can tell either. I would rather celebrate that men walked on the moon and that people split the nucleus.
To pick another example of something I would rather celebrate: Smallpox no longer spreads around the globe. It had no animal reservoir. Once we got everyone vaccinated, the wild virus went extinct. Barring some bastard actively releasing it into the human population again, it is _gone_. That was a permanent achievement.
Scouring the carvings on an airless moon every few million years (plus the occasional preventative asteroid deflection) might seem like near-constant maintenance work, to the kind of people who can throw around 10km/s delta-v as casually as Alfred the Great getting up in the middle of the night to visit the latrine. https://qntm.org/free
>https://qntm.org/free
Cute! Many Thanks! In our own system Pluto and Charon are doubly tidally locked - but not with so small a separation.
>Scouring the carvings on an airless moon every few million years (plus the occasional preventative asteroid deflection) might seem like near-constant maintenance work
Hmm???
>Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years.
For _human_ purposes, if something needs maintenance every ten million years, that's just about indistinguishable from not needing it at all.
"And yet the Apollo 11 LEM descent stage still sits there, a monument that men did indeed walk the lunar surface."
Like the Roman ruins in Alfred's times? Works so impossible to be done by the hands of man, to the thought of the people of that day, that they must have been made by giants?
'From the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, 87: 'eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate.''
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderer_(Old_English_poem)
We walked there once, will we ever do so again? That's the point of the 'ceaseless maintenance', you can't just rely on "well we know how to do it and we've done it, of course everyone will remember how" because as examples throughout history have shown, no, everyone forgets.
>That's the point of the 'ceaseless maintenance',
Many Thanks! I was originally looking at a different point, that I prefer to celebrate that the moon landings _happened_, even though we currently don't have the ability to replicate them. Perhaps Artemis III will actually land on the moon again.
I'm with Scott on this one. It doesn't count if no one can see it to be inspired, and we've thoughtlessly left that capability to rot. If we manage to get it back, someone is going to have to write the Ballad of Elon Musk, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.
You don't think William McGonagall would be up to the task? 😁
https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-18831
excerpt from Saving a Train:
But he resolves to save the on-coming train,
So every nerve and muscle he does strain,
And he trudges along dauntlessly on his crutches,
And tenaciously to them he clutches.
And just in time he reaches his father's car
To save the on-coming train from afar,
So he seizes the red light, and swings it round,
And cried with all his might, 'The bridge is down! The bridge is down!'
So forward his father's car he drives,
Determined to save the passengers' lives,
Struggling hard with might and main,
Hoping his struggle won't prove in vain.
So on comes the iron-horse snorting and rumbling,
And the mountain-torrent at the bridge kept roaring and tumbling;
While brave Carl keeps shouting, 'The bridge is down! The bridge is down!'
He cried with a pitiful wail and sound.
But, thank heaven, the engine-driver sees the red light
That Carl keeps swinging round his head with all his might;
But bang! bang! goes the engine with a terrible crash,
And the car is dashed all to smash.
But the breaking of the car stops the train,
And poor Carl's struggle is not in vain;
But, poor soul, he was found stark dead,
Crushed and mangled from foot to head!
To the extent that the LEM doesn't require constant maintenance by people who love and preserve it, then the LEM isn't what the poem is about. It's about all those institutions that make civilized life possible--without constant upkeep, they degrade. The horse is just a metaphor, after all.
Many Thanks!
>To the extent that the LEM doesn't require constant maintenance by people who love and preserve it, then the LEM isn't what the poem is about.
And I'm not enthusiastic about the poem, in at least two different senses.
a) I don't really _care_ that King Alfred picked himself up and fought yet another battle. From the distance of a thousand years, I have no idea whether the world would be a better or worse place if the Danes had won, and I don't think anyone else knows either. I just view their war as "yet another battle between two armed groups"
b) Maintenance is a _cost_ . The more maintenance an institution, machine, or structure needs, the worse it is. A pipe that constantly needs leaks plugged is less valuable than one that holds water _without_ further effort. There _are_ a few triumphs such as the eradication of smallpox which look like they will require no further effort. There are _many_ cases where an invention or discovery was difficult to make, but the effort to teach it, while nonzero, is far smaller than the original effort. I prefer to celebrate such advances more than those that require constant maintenance.
IMHO you are missing the point of the poem:
>From the distance of a thousand years, I have no idea whether the world would be a better or worse place if the Danes had won, and I don't think anyone else knows either.
I'm fairly sure that Chesterton cares as little as you do. It's just a metaphor. Haven't you ever had the experience of having lost everything you were striving for, and having to find the wherewithall to pick yourself back up and keep trying? Chesterton wants you to see those banners waving.
>I prefer to celebrate such advances more than those that require constant maintenance.
Really? I'm skeptical-as in, I don't believe you really mean this. How about a relationship? A garden? A lifestyle? There are many, many challenges in life that cannot ever be "one and done." I am guessing that you actually have experienced this and found the determination to carry on somehow. That's the hope Chesterton is describing.
Many Thanks! I am not missing the point of the poem, but rather am _disagreeing_ with the point of the poem.
>Really? I'm skeptical-as in, I don't believe you really mean this. How about a relationship? A garden? A lifestyle? There are many, many challenges in life that cannot ever be "one and done."
My point is that constant maintenance is _crappy_. It is not something to be celebrated, but something one grits one's teeth over. Yeah, I _do_ really mean this.
There are many, many situations where the right response to discovering that something requires a great deal of maintenance is to yeet it. To reiterate:
Maintenance is a _cost_.
We don't have to eradicate smallpox again. But we do have to have a medical institution that can treat and eradicate disease effectively, and that does require maintenance; we've seen it backslide before. (For instance, in the 19th century medicine stopped believing that fresh produce would prevent scurvy.) Surely "it was cool how we had that accomplishment one time" would be pretty hollow if it was *just* about the particular accomplishment itself, with no cause for reflection on how we might achieve similar things in the future.
>We don't have to eradicate smallpox again.
Many Thanks!
>But we do have to have a medical institution that can treat and eradicate disease effectively, and that does require maintenance; we've seen it backslide before.
And the more maintenance it requires, the less of an advantage it provides. Ideally, we want to move as many illnesses into the "solved problem" category as possible. It is better to have a robust institutional structure which was can be reasonably sure won't unlearn how to solve deficiency diseases than one that requires constant oversight because it always has a substantial rate of screwing up.
>Surely "it was cool how we had that accomplishment one time" would be pretty hollow if it was _just_ about the particular accomplishment itself, with no cause for reflection on how we might achieve similar things in the future.
I disagree, but I'm going to take an example from another field, because medicine deals with such a complex system that there are a nearly endless series of problems to solve.
Consider the role of timekeeping in finding a ship's longitude. To make a very long story ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude ) short, John Harrison developed chronometers from 1731 through 1762 which were sufficiently accurate for this purpose. Since then, of course, time measurement has been continuously improved _but the original problem was solved and stayed solved_. If NIST never made another refinement to timekeeping, all of the applications which run on the clocks with today's accuracy will continue to work. Not everything requires "how we might achieve similar things in the future"
Yeah, Jeffrey, it's a pain that every day you have to eat food and breathe air. How much worse humans are than rocks - a rock doesn't need three meals a day and sleep and water! Humans constantly require maintenance, it's such a drag 😁
The Pessimist
by
Benjamin Franklin King
Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes
To keep one from going nude.
Nothing to breathe but air
Quick as a flash 't is gone;
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.
Nothing to comb but hair,
Nowhere to sleep but in bed,
Nothing to weep but tears,
Nothing to bury but dead.
Nothing to sing but songs,
Ah, well, alas! alack!
Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back.
Nothing to see but sights,
Nothing to quench but thirst,
Nothing to have but what we’ve got;
Thus thro’ life we are cursed.
Nothing to strike but a gait;
Everything moves that goes.
Nothing at all but common sense
Can ever withstand these woes.
>a rock doesn't need three meals a day
True! Many Thanks! Yet most people, myself included, enjoy eating. Most acts of maintenance drudgery - not so much...
For centuries, man believed the moon was made of cheese.
Over 25 years ago, man landed on the moon and learned it was made of rocks.
We haven't been back since.
Behold the power of Cheese.
https://youtu.be/bze-4tInJgI?si=8Jx2ju4x7o8L2TnW
Good review. I can't resist a bit of a hobby-horse gripe of mine though: free will is by no means a requirement for hope, virtue, moral responsibility, or any other thing that makes life worth living. I think Chesterton wants to assume otherwise because it is convenient for his theological arguments. But asserting that determinism is the death of hope is ironically an anti-hope position when the balance of evidence is against the existence of any meaningful sense of free will.
Chesterton expanded on his thoughts regarding free will, and why he believed it was so important, a bit in "Orthodoxy":
"Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say 'thank you' for the mustard."
He also wrote more on this in an essay he wrote for the magazine "Clarion" titled "Why I am a Christian":
"You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life. That means that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he goes on treating them as if they had.
"The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.
"The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic."
Chesterton's point seems to be that the primary "evidence" against free will is theoretical and philosophical in nature, while the evidence in favor of free will is empirical (making choices and willing one thing over another is all something we experience directly, making it as empirical as something can get) and practical in nature: you cannot really behave as if you have no free will, even if you believe it.
I agree that we have to act *as if* people are culpable even if there is no free will, but it is beyond me to imagine how that acting could possibly be *true*.
In what sense is anything true, then? We act as if there are such things as protons and gluons and electron holes https://www.xkcd.com/2817/ and space-like or time-like or light-like curves, and that gives us the power to turn ordinary rocks into various magic boxes that answer riddles, or annihilate cities.
We act as if there is such a thing as free will, or civil rights, or aggregate demand and inflation, and that gives us the power to turn starving bandits into happy, healthy citizens.
We invented the word "culpable" to refer to certain people's relationship to certain of their actions. We came up with a theory behind it that involved non-determinism and spirituality. Just because that theory turns out to be false doesn't mean that "culpable" doesn't refer to that relationship between people and their actions, just that this relationship works differently from how we thought.
(I would say the same about "free will".)
There are a number of physicists who are not so sure that we live in a fully determined universe. If you buy Godel-like arguments, then even if it is, we can never comprehend the universe on that level, and events must continue to seem unpredictable, even in principle.
But of course that isn't what Chesterton was saying (he wasn't a physicist or a mathematician). He was saying that too much emphasis on empiricism and logic will deprive a person of the poetry of life. That dismissing paradoxical mysteries that cannot be solved as not being real shows a diminishing return. I find that STEM style thinkers tend to disagree, but every artist I ever met agreed with Chesterton whole-heartedly.
Physical determinism and Incompleteness have nothing to do with one another. You should be very skeptical about pop-science explanations of Godel. It's a very precise mathematical statement that cannot be applied to all of metaphysics as you're doing in your first paragraph.
Also, to that extent that actually physicists stray from "shut up and calculate" to consider the metaphysics of the measurement problem, I'd bet money that a wide majority would say the universe is inherently random, not deterministic.
I see that I explained myself poorly. The physics experiments aren't connected to Godel's theorem, and Godel isn't necessary to the argument. The experimental results are well documented, and won a Nobel prize in 2022: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/
I VASTLY prefer non-rhyming poetry. When I read rhyming poetry silently, I always read it as if it is non-rhyming poetry. I mentally ignore the rhymes.
"What's the point of even reading it then? Clever rhymes are the whole point of rhyming poetry." Well, that all depends on poet. Some rhyming poets lean more heavily on rhymes, while for others, it almost more of an afterthought. it's definitely true that a lot of rhymed poetry is wasted on me, especially the short poems. All the more reason for me to stick to non-rhyming poetry most of the time.
Anyone else noticing how the Book of Ecclesiastes, for the most part, sounds just as cynical as a Viking song? Of course, it famously ends on a positive note, but I don't think that positive ending ENTIRELY contradicts the main body of the piece, though it's been a while since I've read this.
And in contrast, the Anglo-Saxon culture was generally very much like that of the Danes; the contrast in actual history has little of that seen in the poem.
The poem Deor cites legends we mostly know about from Norse sources (when at all), while being *all about* keeping up the hope you need to go on in the face of adversity, as does the Battle of Maldon. I'm not very familiar with the literature from the far side of the North Sea, but I bet Jackson Crawford could name a dozen examples without much thought.
Note that Chesterton himself warned against reading too much history into his poem. The Danes, and even King Alfred himself, are really just metaphors.