Grittiness, realism, honor, and the life in the middle-ages

[Arthmail]

I guess I don't understand why there is not room for both. I would watch Band of Brothers as well as Lawrence of Arabia, because both offer different perspectives, different ideas. But there is certainly room for both. We in the fantasy genre seem intent on turning things out, if only to stir endless debate.

[Green Gogol]

I do not disagree with you at all. But I think we have a different perception of what gritty is. Perhaps the word gritty is wrong for me to use. I don't know. Anyway, I agree that it's much more complex that just black and white. And I say it's also much more complex than gray too. Saying us is good and them is bad is ignorant. What I mean by gritty is not violence, or gore, or whatever. It has more to do with the moral compass of the story. How do the characters react to violence, to sexism, to racism, and all the ugly things you can imagine. Maybe my initial question was a bit naive because it probably can't be answered. And I guess it was badly formulated. The question is not, "did people really do those things in the midde ages?" But rather, "how did people react to those things in the middle-ages?"

The point of the example was to make people think about this black - white - gray thing. White would mean capturing the guy, be the hero, saving the girls. Black would mean go finish the job with the girls, then join this guy in his violent rampaging. Gray would mean look the other way and continue walking. But the possible reaction are endless, and much more complex than just those 3.

Now all I'm saying, is this: I don't dislike grit. Grit can be good, or even great. But at the same time, to take the most common example, if you are going to include rape in your fantasy, then do it because it serves a purpose in the story you are telling. Don't include rape just because. Or to put it another way, don't do like Jordan's WoT, and have girls smooth their dress all the time, which is only annoying and doesn't add anything to the story, except maybe 500 pages of text.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, I've begun reading Bakker's "The Darkness that comes before" yesterday.

EDIT2: Really interesting article by Bakker: http://www.sffworld.com/2000/06/why-fantasy-and-why-now/

[Zorral]

Why don 't you do some research of your own, since it is so easy to do, as this article in Wired shows you.

Moreover this fixation on rape in the long centuries of what are known as the middle ages more or less seems, shall we say, perhaps not healthy, even, perhaps, creepy? Women were doing so much in these centuries, particularly in England and the Low Countries, as instrumental as they were in the wool trade in all its aspect from the raising and breeding of the sheep to running mercantile empires founded on wool, but that included other textiles as well. There are so many works of history documenting this, from articles in academic journals to even popular history published by commercial rather than academic presses. They are easy to find when you search google or your own library's catalog.

As far as treason, scheming and rivalrous nobles, a terrific read is Thomas Penn's The Winter King: The Dawn of the Tudors (2011), which is right at the transition from the medieval era and the close of the Wars of the Roses, and into the Renaissance, at least in England -- ushered in with the printing press, "discovery" of the Americas and the Reformation.

One of the ways one can tell this is an excellent book for the general reader is how snippy the academic reviewers are about this historian writing a book geared for that audience and published by a trade publisher instead of inaccessible academic one -- at three times the price. Penn gets slammed for not doing "original" research personally, but synthesizing what his academic colleagues have done in the last years, and making it accessible by using merely literate language instead of stultifying jargon, and being published by a press that distributes to readers outside academia.

(Gads how much harm to our discipline those antiquated historians do!)

[Arthmail]

I have no more time to respond for most of the rest of the day, but I never said us and them as a basis for rational thought. I mentioned it as a mechanism by which men slaughter men.

And all of this need not be war. And gritty is a terrible fucking word. And I'm out for the day. Peace, bitches.

[SeanF]

Why don 't you do some research of your own, since it is so easy to do, as this article in Wired shows you.

Moreover this fixation on rape in the long centuries of what are known as the middle ages more or less seems, shall we say, perhaps not healthy, even, perhaps, creepy? Women were doing so much in these centuries, particularly in England and the Low Countries, as instrumental as they were in the wool trade in all its aspect from the raising and breeding of the sheep to running mercantile empires founded on wool, but that included other textiles as well. There are so many works of history documenting this, from articles in academic journals to even popular history published by commercial rather than academic presses. They are easy to find when you search google or your own library's catalog.

As far as treason, scheming and rivalrous nobles, a terrific read is Thomas Penn's The Winter King: The Dawn of the Tudors (2011), which is right at the transition from the medieval era and the close of the Wars of the Roses, and into the Renaissance, at least in England -- ushered in with the printing press, "discovery" of the Americas and the Reformation.

One of the ways one can tell this is an excellent book for the general reader is how snippy the academic reviewers are about this historian writing a book geared for that audience and published by a trade publisher instead of inaccessible academic one -- at three times the price. Penn gets slammed for not doing "original" research personally, but synthesizing what his academic colleagues have done in the last years, and making it accessible by using merely literate language instead of stultifying jargon, and being published by a press that distributes to readers outside academia.

(Gads how much harm to our discipline those antiquated historians do!)

I share your views on that book. I had no idea that he'd got some snide reviews over it.

[Happy Ent]

And I guess it was badly formulated. The question is not, "did people really do those things in the midde ages?" But rather, "how did people react to those things in the middle-ages?"

As I said upthread: if you care about these things, read Stephen Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, which contains an informative historical overview (not only about the Middle Ages) about both how violence has declined, and how its perception has changed, throughout our civilization.

As a first approximation, the past is a foreign country to us, both brutal and callous.

[Clueless Northman]

As I said upthread: if you care about these things, read Stephen Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, which contains an informative historical overview (not only about the Middle Ages) about both how violence has declined, and how its perception has changed, throughout our civilization.

Except the book is scientific bunk and purely ideology-driven, and smacks of 19th century positivism. We just can't have real stats about violence, deaths, murders and war casualties - specially civilian ones. I mean, in many cases, we just can't guess if 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 or more of the Chinese Empire died during some civil war. Heck, we don't even have any final stats about WWII - though we probably have a +/- 15% estimate.

The same way I'm quite wary of people claiming the Middle-Ages were mostly peaceful and more peaceful than any other time before 1945 in Europe. I'm pretty sure the average Roman in 110 our 150 AD thought that "peace in our times" was achieved at long last and there would only be a few rebels and petty barbarians on the outskirts, that would be dealt with quickly the few times where they would dare to pop up.

Besides, his thesis is pointless since most of these "pacifying" trends are being reverted right now under our own eyes, including in the West. Not to mention it's widely acknowledged that the key reason why large warfare between main powers was avoided since 1945 is because of what actually ended the previous bloodbath, and which would actually dwarf every single historical era's violence by a wide margin - raw pure violence at the atomic level delivered on a global scale.

Though of course he has some interesting anecdotal information and even data, which shows that things were quite bleak, in many places and many times, in the past.

[Shryke]

Except the book is scientific bunk and purely ideology-driven, and smacks of 19th century positivism. We just can't have real stats about violence, deaths, murders and war casualties - specially civilian ones. I mean, in many cases, we just can't guess if 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 or more of the Chinese Empire died during some civil war. Heck, we don't even have any final stats about WWII - though we probably have a +/- 15% estimate.

The same way I'm quite wary of people claiming the Middle-Ages were mostly peaceful and more peaceful than any other time before 1945 in Europe. I'm pretty sure the average Roman in 110 our 150 AD thought that "peace in our times" was achieved at long last and there would only be a few rebels and petty barbarians on the outskirts, that would be dealt with quickly the few times where they would dare to pop up.

Besides, his thesis is pointless since most of these "pacifying" trends are being reverted right now under our own eyes, including in the West. Not to mention it's widely acknowledged that the key reason why large warfare between main powers was avoided since 1945 is because of what actually ended the previous bloodbath, and which would actually dwarf every single historical era's violence by a wide margin - raw pure violence at the atomic level delivered on a global scale.

Though of course he has some interesting anecdotal information and even data, which shows that things were quite bleak, in many places and many times, in the past.

????

[Richard]

Except the book is scientific bunk and purely ideology-driven, and smacks of 19th century positivism.

I think you're going to have to back that up with some evidence. The hard data for the decline of violence that we do have is pretty incontrovertible, and Pinker's argument that you have to look at percentages rather than absolute figures makes pretty solid sense. Additionally, as he mentions in numerous places, the places where past data is patchy suggest figures even less conservative than he's giving.

I've seen the book take some critical flak, but mostly it seems to be piqued left liberal types, incensed that all the injustice in the contemporary world can be seen as a better state of affairs than before, and thrashing about looking for post de facto justifications to dispute the idea. I haven't seen anyone actually take down the central premise.

Also, I see absolutely no signs of the pacifying trend being reversed - what do you mean by that?

And whether or not nuclear weapons have been a major factor isn't really relevant - the end result is still an overall decline in bad behaviour.

[Galactus]

I remember many historians being sceptical, but that tends to be because this kind of huge meta-analysis almost always comes under flak. (Especially when it is phrased the way Pinker does)

That said, he's not exactly being revolutionary: There is a fairly big change in the way violence happen within the historical record. (it seems to be linked to increasing state power and intervention in the affairs of ordinary people, deferring to various forms of arbitration becoming more common than direct violent action)

[Brendan Moody]

Pinker's basic argument may well be accurate, but the book is full of sloppy argumentation, dubious data, and bizarre assertions. The chapter arguing that non-state societies are more violent than state societies lumps together the former despite great differences in time period, location, etc., ignoring all possible sources of variation except the one that fits his thesis. The chapter on the middle ages, apart from reinforcing the same "everything was awful" stereotypes we've discussed in this thread (misunderstanding etiquette manuals and misusing astrological allegories in the process), relies on outdated population estimates; London, for example, is now thought to have been larger than was previously believed, producing a lower murder rate, one pretty much in line with contemporary American urban centers. The discussion of the early 20th century is ridiculously reductive; he tries to blame World War I entirely on Gavrilo Princip and World War II entirely on Hitler. His big chart attempting to prove that the 20th century doesn't rate highly in the overall history of human atrocities is peculiar; apart from consistently using non-specialist estimates that actual experts would consider laughably high, it treats as equivalent wars lasting a few years and processes lasting centuries. Is it really comforting that about as many people died in twelve centuries of the Middle East slave trade as in four years of World War I?

The frustrating thing is that a less crude version of the book's underlying thesis would be credible, indeed uncontroversial. Of course the rise of ideals of tolerance and the capacity of the state to redress many injustices will have contributed to a decline in violence (and while the evidence is by its nature sketchy, I'd be willing to stipulate that such a decline has occurred, at least on the level of rates). But there are other possible factors as well, of which Pinker is unduly dismissive. His entire discussion of the influence of medicine on declining murder rates prior to the twentieth century is "doctors before the nineteenth century were quacks who killed as many patients as they saved." Somehow I think the history of medicine was a little more nuanced than that. He's equally cavalier about the possible role of rising prosperity. A serious historical overview wouldn't be so blindingly monocausal.

The focus on rates, while useful as a counterpoint to the cheap tyranny of big numbers, can also be taken too far. As one reviewer put it, "Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens." At a certain point, the scale of violence raises a separate set of questions about how human societies are changing, leaving one to ask whether we're seeing a decline of violence or what the same reviewer called "a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion."

And there are the claims that are just weird. For example, he writes, "Military men are inconspicuous in public life, with drab uniforms and little prestige among the hoi polloi." I suppose Harvard professors don't make it to many Fourth of July parades, but surely at some point in his life he's seen a dress uniform? He's not much of an intellectual historian, either-- the contributors to his "coherent philosophy" of "Enlightenment humanism" are an utter mishmash, as you might expect from someone who manages to describe Jesus and Isaiah as "Western seers." Perhaps most tiresome is the frequent dismissal of anyone with an alternate theory as having an ideological ax to grind, quite striking in a book where all the evidence just happens to align with Pinker's own worldview. But that's The Better Angels of Our Nature in a nutshell: 100 pages of interesting ideas, and 700 pages of confirmation bias.

[Happy Ent]

That said, he's not exactly being revolutionary:

Neither does he try to, or claim to be. He just summarises a lot of historical research from the literature.

(I wouldn’t trust the book if it were revolutionary.)

The flak against Pinker comes from those people who conflict with Pinker’s single ideological axe: utopias. Be they religious people, fascists, or communists.

[Clueless Northman]

I'm not sure we can really speak of confirmation bias, for this small obvious fact I mentioned earlier: we have no fucking data about the past, only guesses.

On the one hand, it's not only medieval London population estimates that were too low. Pretty much every estimate of city, country or empire population before the 19th century has turned out to be quite wrong and too low, with the few cases where there were census that seem moderately reliable (as in Rome's population in late Republic / early Empire).

On the other hand, we might have precise numbers about public executions, but we'll never know how many unreported killings happened in any given century. We haven't the fuckiest idea how many people were butchered by the Mongols, we can only guess it was in the tens of millions.

Heck, in less than 30 years, the estimate of WWI casualties I've seen in encyclopedias has gone up by 50%.

So, there's just no way you can have any scientific data to back up any theory in any way. You can only make educated guess.

I don't totally disagree with his points though - it's quite obvious that strong States will reduce the killings at an individual level, because they can exert control and violence on the people at large.

I disagree with his reasoning that there's a continued and growing trend, like it was better with any passing era.

From what I can see in history, we don't have an unending improvement. We might have long periods of endemic and low-level violence, mixed with periods of consolidations of big powers / empires that ensure stability and lower internal violence once they're established.

More precisely lower personal violence, State violence being a distinct possibility. Then of course, such consolidations were made with blood and massacres. And if big State entities can limit the level of violence in their population, lowering homicides and whatnot, they also make killing on a wide scale easier. Basically, we swap countless vendettas between villages - which would could a significant portion of population but every time at a low body count - for mass-scale murder, be it in massive foreign wars or with the destruction of some internal group/community, which can be totally wiped out - fewer occurrences obviously, since there are fewer big nations than small towns, but with casualties several orders of magnitude higher each time things go bad.

And it has to be said that this goes for Rome, for China, for the Middle Ages as well as for the 19th/20th centuries.

If I had to pick some trend, it wouldn't be a constant improvement, far from it. Rather some sinusoidal, or even better, some spiral, with lows getting lower with each era - as the technology increases and the massive powers grow bigger - and highs getting higher - for the same reasons basically.

This also means that - something Pinker says well, and which kind of defeats his main theory - things can go worse again. We can go downhill pretty fast and crash hard - we just need one major resource crisis and we'll see how the West is civilized, how people show empathy and solidarity. Heck, far rights are on the rise throughout the whole of Europe, and if the economic crisis goes on - or if some EU country really goes down -, the Golden Dawn thugs that gets 10% in Greece won't be an abnormality for long.

[Errant Bard]

Heck, far rights are on the rise throughout the whole of Europe, and if the economic crisis goes on - or if some EU country really goes down -, the Golden Dawn thugs that gets 10% in Greece won't be an abnormality for long.

Abnormality? You look at France, Italy, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, or Hungary, the far right already gets more than 10%.

[Clueless Northman]

They mostly aren't genuine neo-Nazis with flags and militias beating up people on the streets, killing the odd leftist their party leaders don't like. Not yet at least, thankfully.

[Green Gogol]

Terry Jones Medieval Lives documentary looks pretty interesting.

[Galactus]

Neither does he try to, or claim to be. He just summarises a lot of historical research from the literature.

(I wouldn’t trust the book if it were revolutionary.)

The flak against Pinker comes from those people who conflict with Pinker’s single ideological axe: utopias. Be they religious people, fascists, or communists.

No, the flak comes from people who find these kinds of vast attempts at creating grand narratives highly problematic, him relying on unreliable sources and estimates, etc. etc.

Whether or no he is *right* in the end has little to do with the problems of his work.

[Happy Ent]

No, the flak comes from people who find these kinds of vast attempts at creating grand narratives highly problematic, him relying on unreliable sources and estimates, etc. etc.

I don’t understand.

After finishing a book like Pinker’s, I visit the Wikipedia article for the book, scroll to the criticism section, and try to read up on the published criticism of the book. I follow several links and read many of the critical reviews in full.

Do you think the Wikipedia article misrepresents the criticism leveraged at Pinker?

(Or do you just mean to say “I dislike Pinker’s book because of…”. That’s certainly valid, and I’m happy to listen to it.)

The following criticisms I find invalid: (1) “the book gives only an imcomplete picture of X”. This is undoubtedly true, but the book is 800 pages already. It struck me as very, very dense, filled with data, notes, copious and references, caveats, etc. Could a 1600 page book be better? Sure. (2) “create a grand narrative: that’s an argument against any kind of synthetic work. As a reductionist, I have sympathies for that sentiment, but it’s not interesting. You can’t criticise a book for succeeding at a project you don’t like.

On the other hand, the criticism leveraged from religious and postmodernist traditions I find completely valid. (I just completely disagree with those criticisms.)

To the extend that Pinker reports numbers that come from historians who are lying liars who lie, I’d be very interested in pointers to different datasets. I obsess about data. (I’m aware of the arguments in the Wikipedia article.)

[Clueless Northman]

Thing is, having a 1600 pages book with more data, or pointing to differing data, wouldn't change a thing. We just don't have the data, period, and I don't see how we'd ever get reliable data on past centuries and past millennia.

Heck, even in 2014, we don't have precise population figures for many countries, and there are even Western countries who dont make population-wide census - for whatever stupid reasons, be it cost or privacy. Makes it kind of hard to argue in one way or another.

I also have the impression he fails to he understandable bias that he lives in a period of lull, in an affluent country, feels quite comfortable, and extrapolates this as a general tendency; actually, that kind of theory makes me think the author ascribes some kind of teleological sense to history. I'm pretty sure some thinkers thought the same at the peak of the Roman Empire, or in the very early 1900s.

[Datepalm]

I also have the impression he fails to he understandable bias that he lives in a period of lull, in an affluent country, feels quite comfortable, and extrapolates this as a general tendency; actually, that kind of theory makes me think the author ascribes some kind of teleological sense to history. I'm pretty sure some thinkers thought the same at the peak of the Roman Empire, or in the very early 1900s.

That isn't a counter argument to the thesis though.