Be History or Do History?

The be somebody/do something fork in relating to history

I’m currently reading David Crouch’s book, more of a monograph really, The Chivalric Turn: Conduct and Hegemony in Europe Before 1300. It is my personal pick for the pick-your-own side quest month of our book club. Since we’re trying to approach history, specifically the 1200-1600 period, from a machinic perspective, I figured codes of conduct, which reduce humans to rule-based automatons to greater or lesser extent, ought to provide an interesting lens. Alongside, I’m also re-reading Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the best known lighthouse of the associated literary tradition.

Crouch’s monograph is not easy reading. It is full of sentences like this, packed with words I had to look up:

“The florilegist rubricated his abstracted distichs as 'Prouerbia Ur-bani', selecting each distichon for its moral content”

But it’s worth it, because you get a truly live sense of the history. The basic thesis is that there was a “Chivalric turn” in Central and Western Europe around 1200 that is widely misunderstood to be an intrinsically aristocratic phenomenon, but was actually an aristocratic capture and enclosure of a more democratic society-wide phenomenon.

Before the chivalric turn, courtly culture in the High Middle Ages was associated with a relatively democratically accessible social milieu (or to use a term I just learned, habitus), based on broad, society-wide archetypes of good-personhood (“preudomme”), in a Europe-wide society offering both good upward social mobility, and horizontal/geographic labor mobility. But in the Late Middle Ages, it turned into the aristocratically captured habitus we’re familiar with, based on low upward mobility, much stricter birth-based class boundaries, and perhaps not coincidentally, stronger monarchial control of the feudal classes (especially after Philip IV’s 1307 destruction of the Templars).

By the time of the Reformation, the knightly class had been reduced to a kind of hidebound, degenerate farce; a shadow of its former self. When Cervantes wrote the affectionate but ironic Don Quixote between 1605-1615, he was trying to recover a deeply romantic sensibility that had been lost for a few centuries, and buried under layers of contemporary degeneracy.

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July is side-quest month at the Contraptions Book club, where you get to pick your own book within the broad theme of 1200-1600 CE horizontal history. Suggestions on page. Chat thread here.

We’re also doing a mid-year Zoom hang in 2 weeks, on Thursday July 17th, at 8 AM Pacific. If you’ve been reading along with the book club, or seriously intend to join for the second half of the year, RSVP here (capped to 30).

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The understanding of the chivalric era that has come down to us, as represented in fantasy starting with the Arthurian legends, represents the vigorous peak of the tradition, when it had already broken away from the non-aristocratic roots Crouch documents, but hadn’t yet descended into corruption and weakness on the wrong side of the rise of centralized monarchial power.

You see hints of this history in modern knights-and-dragons fantasies, where imagined societies still allow talented commoners to break into the aristocracy by demonstrating prowess at jousting tournaments they sneak into. The upper classes hadn’t yet fully pulled the ladder up after them.

This pattern, of course, is as old as the feudal-monarchial cycle itself. The basic dynamic is that while central monarchies are weak, a highly competitive and horizontally organized landscape of feudal lords emerges, and the baronial class does not have to kowtow to the king. But this flips when monarchies grow stronger, and drive a vertically integrated societal structure. And for some middle period of the cycle, codes of honorable, courtly, noble conduct prevail, with some degree of power, complete with literature that aims to teach it to new entrants.

In the feudal-ascendant stage, weak monarchs typically need to come crawling to the baronial class for funds and military resources, usually on poor terms, and baronial rebellion is easy. The monarch is not much more than a Schelling point for times when the baronial class needs to stop infighting to undertake a bit of cooperative activity, like crusading. When feudal lords have the upper hand, there is typically a competitive market for knightly talent, and the knightly class enjoys horizontal labor mobility across lordly courts and halls (from where we get words like courtliness and courtesy, the culture of manners and associated genre of literature that is Crouch’s focus). Entry into this class is fairly open from below, and knightly heroes share main-character energy with the commoner class (as we see in the tale of Robin Hood, who is ambiguously poised between the two classes).

But in the monarchy-ascendant stage, the reverse is true. Baronial classes lose power and control, get more tightly attached to courts, and compete with capital-city courtier classes, whose power derives from sources other than land holdings. The monarch typically has strong direct relations with an urban population that is economically powerful but lacks land-based wealth. The itinerant knightly class, meanwhile, is typically demoted in status. Much of its function is commoditized into standing imperial armies, with a shift from heavy cavalry to light cavalry and infantry. What remains of the knightly class becomes horizontally immobilized and closes itself off to entry from below, to preserve what remains of its power. It finds itself sedentarized horizontally, from continent scale to nation or regional scale, and begins to decay to the extent it remains attached to its codes of conduct.

Courtly culture, in the Late Middle Ages aristocratically captured sense we primarily understand it today, typically corresponds to the variety found when the monarchial phase is ascendant, but the baronial class hasn’t entirely lost power. Class boundaries are hardening, but haven’t become effectively impervious. This is the world depicted in Arthurian literature — a rising, unifying king, a potent but declining baronial class, and a still-vigorous, horizontally mobile (both socially and geographically) knightly class that is starting to switch loyalties from the baronial to monarchial class.

It is notable that in the Middle East, this cycle was generally much more muted. Cavalry was usually light cavalry (with a few exceptions like Persian cataphracts) and the rise of standing armies of light cavalry and salaried infantry happened earlier. Land holdings required to sustain a mounted soldier were much smaller.

Crouch notes, in passing, examples from antiquity as well, pointing particularly to China and Gupta-era India.

That reference made me think of a couple of episodes from the Mahabharata, which reached its final form during the Gupta era (320-550 CE). The two stories worth noting are the episode of the commoner Ekalavya, and the debut of the secretly noble-born Karna into the story at a knightly tournament as a commoner. Both stories, I think, reflect Gupta-era society rather than the mythic-historical period of the epic itself. And the consequentialist code of dharma-with-noble-exceptions illustrated by the epic (and explicitly laid out in the Gita), I think belongs in the Gupta era (which also happens to be the era when the caste system is thought to have hardened). The idea of dharma in the Mahabharata rhymes strongly with European chivalric culture.

There is an additional in-universe twist — the Mahabharata has a frame story where the epic is actually being narrated to a descendant of the Pandavas by a sage, well into an established monarchial age, in order to get him to be a better king.¹ The Mahabharata establishes the legendary monarchial thread of Indian history (the Bharata clan from which modern India takes its official name), just as the Arthurian legends do for British history.

Similarly, Journey to the West I think can be read as a story about a late stage of a feudal-monarchial cycle, set in the Tang era, but reflecting the historical circumstances of the Ming era. There too, we find a code-of-conduct element, an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian elements (the Monkey King gets a literal shock-collar around his head, that gets used when he violates the code).

In both these Asian cases, we find the same curious pattern that we find in the Arthurian tales. Just as the Arthurian tales are set in mythic time but mirror the historical character of the Late Middle Ages, the Mahabharata, and Journey to the West, use one mythologized era to hold up a mirror to a contemporary era.

I suspect we’d find additional examples in Japanese history, but I’m not familiar enough with it to pick out clear examples and associated works.

This pattern of using a mythologized historical era to reflect the nature of a contemporary society is not an accident. We’ll look at our own times in a minute.

It is worth noting that the feudal-monarchial cycle does not end with the arrival of modernity and the eclipse of horses in warfare. Suitably abstracted, I think the cycle has continued to this day, even in the military world. Knightly heavy cavalry has given way to special forces (not to the more literal descendant, tanks) and their bespoke, temperamental helicopters. The baronial class now runs armaments industries. Drones have replaced longbow archers.

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I am not a historian, and this post isn’t about history per se. I am interested, rather, in the sense of history, as present among mainstream masses, and how history functions in the contemporary imagination. How does the modern mind pick out historical eras to engage and identify with? What aspects of those eras get preferentially picked out? What eras get studiously ignored and not identified with? Why?

We are not the first generation to cultivate a systematic sense of history, obviously, though we’re perhaps the first with a strong enough sense of empirically validated and scholarly history that can serve as an imperfect ground truth. We can test our sense of history against this, should we choose to. Mostly though, we don’t. We choose to blur myth and history even though, unlike our ancestors, we mostly have the knowledge required to avoid doing so.

Most people do not want their sense of history to be true, they want it to be meaningful and motivating. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get both at once.

There is perhaps no better example of this than how the European Late Middle Ages are present today in the Western zeitgeist.

There is, of course, the actual continued living presence of that history, in the form of social and political fault lines and echoing dynamics in modern Europe, which historians like Crouch concern themselves with.

But what is more interesting is the nostalgically reconstructed, packaged, and marketed popular sense of history. In this case, a sense of history produced primarily by and for an entirely different continent populated by a people several degrees removed from the original history — America.

The Age of Chivalry, of course, absolutely saturates the American historical imagination past the horizon of its own founding mythology, which begins in 1492 just as the Age of Chivalry was wrapping up for good.

Beyond occupying a significant share of Hollywood’s energies, this history fuels everything from Renaissance fairs to table-top gaming worlds and video games. Arguably, even the mythologization of the (brief and rather inconsequential) Wild West era of American history, complete with famous gunslinging cowboys and rancher-barons, is part of the same choice.

The underlying sense of history is not so much inaccurate as remarkably uninterested in actually important historical details, and obsessively focused on somewhat peripheral but tangible and physically dramatic elements — tournaments, weaponry, armor, military tactics, clothing, and of course the culture of manners. This includes in particular the seductive element of courtly love that has not just inspired a million modern fantasies, but also exerts a strong selection pressure on historical memory itself; elevating, for instance, Dante over other medieval writers.

One of Crouch’s (refreshingly unsentimental) “takes” is that the institution of courtly love was not in fact particularly important. While it was consequential (helping contain a widespread legitimated rape culture among other things), it was not the central feature or purpose of the institutions of chivalry.

When you contrast the story of chivalric culture as it actually unfolded with the story that is remembered in the popular (and to some extent, scholarly) imagination, the dissonance is quite sharp.

Modern claimants of the culture, a couple of degrees removed in America, idolize the cosmetic appearances of a particular milieu, and practice a kind of loose atemporal world-building extrapolated from the appearances. They choose to remember, and anchor their identities to, the culture at its height, when it offered the most narratively potent mix of maximal horizontal and vertical mobility for the most people. Beneath the unexamined instinctive attraction, there lies a fairly transparent utilitarian calculus. The rise and fall of that era are ignored, resulting in an imaginary world that endlessly rehearses a historical reference era at its height, Groundhog Day style.

It’s not hard to see why this era is appealing. Commoner men could aspire to work their way up and sideways as high and far as their talents and taste for adventure could take them. Commoner women could hope to parley beauty similarly, into wealth and status by marrying up (hypergamy). The game was learnable, and open to those with the appropriate aptitudes. But not too open! A few advantages of birth or connections could help, and were welcome, as does a sense of being a Chosen One destined for greatness. The game was open to commoners, but also loaded against them, and governed by rules that recognized specialness.

As Dan McAdams shows in The Redemptive Self, this is the narrative Americans typically organize their lives around: Just special enough to get picked out and turned into a winner in a game that is kinda-sorta fair.

Perhaps most importantly, the skills required to access better lives in the early chivalric age were not just learnable, but were actively being taught and modeled by those with an interest in backing fresh talent, who largely focused on teaching cosmetic elements. These were the angel investors of the chivalric social economy. You just had to acquire certain sorts of clothes and weapons, clean yourself up a bit, and learn to comport yourself in certain ways. With an angelic mentor or two, the world was your oyster. You could cultivate not just appearances and opportunities, but legitimacy, with aptitude and effort.

The genre of literature Crouch writes about existed to institutionalize not just the culture of manners itself, but widespread access to it.

No wonder people get attached to this history. It is fertile ground for escapist fantasizing, in a world that increasingly wants to trap you in the circumstances of your birth.

One way to understand the nostalgic, sentimental sense of history attached to chivalric culture is that it offers an easy version of John Boyd’s be somebody or do something choice: Getting attached to a sanitized, sentimentalized nostalgic memory of a historical era that appears to have offered greater access to agency for less effort allows you to be somebody, while also, at least in your daydreams, doing something.

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I was wondering about a question — what is the modern equivalent of courtly culture and an associated stylized genre of literature meant to help you gain access to it? Renaissance fairs offer satisfying larps, but where can you find actual lives on offer, for those willing to do more than daydream?

One good candidate is the world opened up to you by Ivy League and equivalent-prestige educational institutions in America, and the associated pipeline from aspiration to graduation to arrival into a narrow set of “suitable” professions — white-shoe consulting, banking, finance, media and publishing, law, and politics.

A good tell is the incidence of unpaid or low-paid internships. A major way medieval aspirants learned the chivalric code was by being raised as foster children at distant courts where they were effectively held hostage for political reasons. But they were not restrained as kidnap victims — they and their parents willingly accepted the valuable socialization into a continent-scale habitus of opportunity. It was mutually assured destruction with education as a side-effect. It strikes me that sans the race/religion angle, this kinda rhymes with the Ottoman devshirme system too. Modern unpaid internships too, operate against a backdrop of wealthy older adults creating opportunities for each other’s children, as a side-effect of entangling each other in a network of mutual obligations. Opportunities that are much harder, but not impossible, for those outside the network to access.

This pipeline is fueled by a literature that spans it, from test prep/ essay applications to commencement speeches, to guides for breaking into specific industries (the “courts”), and of course trust funds paying for those unpaid internships. The pipeline then delivers you into the upper echelons of East Coast society, still dominated by inherited wealth, but sufficiently open to upwardly mobile new wealth that goes to the trouble of acquiring a particular culture of manners (including patterns of hypergamous courtship that aren’t that far removed from the historical precedent).

Commencement speeches today of course, are much more varied, and more apparently focused on substance than appearances, than chivalric how-to literature. Yet, the similarities are strong. The choice of topics, the gestures at a particular worthwhile “way of life” lurking behind practical life choices, warnings against various temptations to degeneracy, emphasis on lofty interpersonal values. And while there isn’t as much finishing-school content (dress, table manners, posture), there is definitely a good deal of advice-giving on topics such as giving presentations and marketing yourself. All the ingredients are there. Both chivalric literature and commencement speeches teach not just a game, but an associated pragmatic gamesmanship required to play it well under not-quite-fair conditions.

I’d say this culture peaked around 20 years ago. Gen Z is the first generation graduating into its decline era.

The Global Financial Crisis and Obama’s executive overreaching in that period perhaps served as the 1307 Philip IV vs. the Templars moment. Trump’s ongoing kneecapping of universities and use-and-discarding of Elon exploit precedents first set in the Obama era.

We are now about 20 years into the aristocratically captured degeneracy phase. That we’ve had more bad emperors than good in the last 20 years (even Obama’s reputation in hindsight seems to belong in the monarchial overreach phase in hindsight; GWB was the last emperor who was puppet-mastered by his barons) is no accident.

Commencement speeches today are less notable for their weak attempts at idealistic-pragmatic inspirational content (more substantial examples of which can be found in Steve Jobs’ and David Foster Wallace’s speeches from 2005) than for the tawdry dramas of cancelations and deplatformings that usually accompany them. Today, powerful commoner student bodies shop around for mercenary speakers willing to say what they want said, rather than speakers who might tell them what they perhaps need to hear. I don’t entirely blame them. They’re graduating within a decaying institutional landscape where idealistic older-adult speechifying ought to be considered suspect by default.

Elite university culture is not the only candidate. Another candidate is the culture of Silicon Valley, with aspiring entrepreneurs jousting with pitch decks through the baronial landscape of venture capital houses, egged along by an entire Hustle Code literature (with the codes of honor being attached to term sheets rather than tournament rules or college essays). This pipeline, notably, tries to compete upstream with universities, cultivating an alternate early entry point of mythologized dropouts.

Compared to the Ivy League pipeline to East Coast high society, Silicon Valley culture represents a somewhat earlier stage of the cycle perhaps, but not by much. The landscape is hardening fast from a baronial startup landscape to a monarchial one, comprising the large platform companies and the largest VC firms (the latter being increasingly indistinguishable from East Coast PE firms, sovereign wealth funds, and the larger family offices). All are now led by individuals with grand imperial-scale political ambitions, like Thiel and Musk.

I broke into Silicon Valley circles relatively easily around 2012-13, after moving to the West Coast, and remain uneasily grandfathered-in today at the margins, despite my awkward political leanings. I doubt I could break in today. There is vastly more loyalty testing and purity testing that gates access, and a memetic version of birth-pedigree testing that I’d fail. Beyond a point, you have to be red-pilled to get in today. Even without Elon as a major bridge figure, Silicon Valley has been decisively captured by the Trump administration, and is closing itself off as a result, just as history would lead you to expect.

The culture of the Trump tribe — a powerful emperor with a commoner base surrounded by weak courtiers and degenerate knights in a tightly bound court of loyalists with no independent power basis — corresponds to the later part of the Late Middle Ages. Rather appropriately, he is really getting going after a pandemic. As with Covid, the Black Death served as a sharp discontinuity in the unfolding cycle (in our extended analogy, if Obama was Philip IV, Trump (and Biden) would be some mix of Philip VI and Charles IV, and we’re about to enter into the equivalent of the Hundred Years War).

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror offers an aristocrat’s eye view of the Black Death’s aftermath that is particularly relevant to this part of the discussion. What was left of baronial and knightly culture either attached itself to monarchies, or reorganized itself into mercenary companies, such as John Hawkwood’s White Company (the polar opposite of King Arthur’s round table), trading an association with idealized Arthurian chivalry cultures for more actual money and power. Trump’s geopolitical machinations uncannily resemble those of the post-Black Death era, when monarchs paid the dangerous mercenary companies to go away and interfere in distant wars instead of mucking up their domestic political arenas. Many Trump policies have this quality of exporting problems to distant lands, and wrapping Somebody Else’s Problem fields around them.

John Hawkwood’s era of unsentimental and mercenary knightly adventures does not attract anything like the sentimental, nostalgic narrative energy that draws inspiration from Arthurian tales. The Hawkwood chapter of history, coming at the long tail-end of chivalry culture, is remarkably ugly and brutal, with few elements redeemable even with the aggressive laundering and airbrushing Hollywood is capable of.

By the time you get to that era, the narrative focus of the historical-nostalgic imagination is already beginning to shift to Renaissance and Age of Exploration archetypes of heroism — daring sea captains, fiery religious warriors, inventors, and artists.

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One effect of actually reading history, as opposed to indulging in nostalgic escapism, is that your sense of liveness and deadness gets complicated, subverting the naive but wrong instinctive assumption that liveness is associated with the present, and deadness with the past.

Liveness is associated with historical dynamics that still persist powerfully today, regardless of how old they are, fueling active do something choices, while deadness is associated with be somebody choices.

So the feudalism-monarchism cycle and associated habituses (habitii??) governed by codes of conduct that rhyme with chivalry is arguably alive and thriving today. It didn’t die with the passing of cavalry forces into history. It simply got transposed to new domains, where wars are fought with different sorts of weapons. The story of AI, for example, is starting out at a monarchial peak of the cycle.

On the flip side, there are people nominally “living” today with a sense of history so dead, so attached to be somebody nostalgic inheritances, they might as well be dead. And it isn’t the renaissance fair larpers I’m talking about here. It is reactionaries suffering from acute restorative nostalgia engaged in unironically revanchist projects based on ludicrously sanitized understandings of history.

There’s a better way to cultivate a sense of history. It is not as meaningful perhaps, but is more motivating (there is a tension there — larps are meaningful but not motivating, while liveness tapping is motivating but not immediately meaningful).

To tap into liveness in historical processes is to write yourself into the A plot of history, even if only in a minor role, and even if you must suffer setbacks and dark chapters. To construct and inhabit resolutely escapist nostalgic memories is to be part of the B plot, even if at times it plays out in the glare of the spotlights and dominates the headlines.

As I read the Crouch book and re-read the Arthurian legends, I find myself repeatedly asking, do I identify with these people and their rules or not?

It is an inescapable human tendency — to see yourself in the mirrors offered by other lives and the historical tales they inhabited, especially those in the distant past, with fewer ugly details that must be ignored. Equally inescapably, we tend to identify with high-point chapters in those lives and stories, while studiously ignoring bleak end-games and dark valleys.

Was the Age of Chivalry admirable or despicable? Should you fantasize about being a knight or baron, or not? Should you larp their codes of conduct or not? Should you seek to recreate a historical habitus in some updated form?

It depends on which chapter you’re talking about, and the broader context in which those codes of conduct were practiced. The exact same behavior may count as noble in one chapter and ignoble in another. The same habitus may be oppressive in one era, and empowering in another.

But a reliable guide to healthy identifications with history is to dowse for and identify with liveness over deadness.

And liveness rarely lurks where pageantry and splendor do.

1. I recall reading a bit of an English translation of the Mahabharata that translated “Raja” as “Baron” rather than King, and rather explicitly mapped the milieu to baronial rather than imperial Europe. The result is clumsy and hard to read, but is not a bad historiographical choice actually. To the extend the epic is based in history, the period it took place in, circa ~1200-800 BCE perhaps, would have been before what’s called the mahajanapada error, before any large empire-sized kingdoms emerged. The historic Pandavas and Kauravas would likely have been baron-scale chiefs ruling regions corresponding to perhaps a few sub-state districts in modern India. The drama got inflated to epic, subcontinental scale over the next ten centuries or so, as every actual historic dynasty attempted to write itself into it, and trace descent from epic times.