Tag: status

The Book of the Order of Chivalry – One of the greatest books I have ever read

Almost every week nowadays, I marvel at the things not taught to me when I was in the education system.

It’s a common refrain – ‘Why aren’t they teaching this?’, ‘Why aren’t they teaching that?’ – but I mean it in an even deeper sense. It’s not just that there are certain things that are not taught – they’re not even mentioned. An example of this is Anglo-Saxon history. I was taught nothing about Anglo-Saxon history when I was in school. This is astonishing given that the Anglo-Saxons were the start of the English – all of the history of the British Isles before that is British history but not English history. But even more than that, in the entire five years I spent at secondary school, I don’t think the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was mentioned even once.

There are also many examples of things not being taught or even mentioned from my university education. I could write hundreds of blog posts (not an exaggeration) about how low quality my university education was – there’s no point trying to cover it all here. But in addition to many utterly bizarre choices in course structure, there were hundreds of important things that were never even mentioned. In physics we were not taught the conceptual framework around waves properly to understand radiation pressure or the derivation of the black-body spectrum curve; we were not taught Minkowski diagrams properly; we weren’t taught measurement and uncertainty properly. In mathematics we were not taught matrices properly, or the principles of limits. We didn’t even really do complex numbers properly, though we did do a lot with them. The way we were taught quantum mechanics was utterly abysmal. And we were taught absolutely nothing about the history of physics.

I could go on and on and on, but that’s not what this post is about. It is in the time since leaving the education system that I have learned about these things. Everything I know about Anglo-Saxon history – which, of course, went into the writing of On The Subject Of Trolls – I have learned myself.

If you have grown up in Britain around the same time as me (I am a millennial), you will have heard the word ‘chivalry’ thrown around from time to time. You of course know that it has something to do with mediæval knights – it was some sort of practice that they had or ideal that they strove towards. You will have heard the word ‘chivalry’ used to refer to certain kinds of behaviour in the modern age – usually things as drab as holding doors open for people. You will also have heard the word used by feminists. Over the last 30 years, they have typically used it in a derogatory sense, referring to actions or behaviours that they consider to be outdated and offensive to their belief system.

All of this – everything that has been said of ‘chivalry’ in popular culture in the last 30 years (at least) is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it is completely wrong. It doesn’t even get the basic ideas of what actual chivalry is right.

I have recently been reading a book on heraldry. This book makes reference to other works as it goes along, and at one point – quite early on – it describes a book called The Book of the Order of Chivalry. This book was written in the 1200s, and it describes exactly what chivalry was supposed to be, and what knights were supposed to do. I had no idea that there even was such a book. What’s more, The Book of the Order of Chivalry was apparently considered to be the standard text describing what chivalry was for a very long time. What an extraordinary thing – that there is a definitive text telling those who aspire to be knights what a knight was and what chivalry was!

When I saw this a few weeks ago, I was already complaining in my head of how this wasn’t ever mentioned to me while I was in the education system. I looked around online to see if I could read it – for old texts, very often you can read a scan of them somewhere online. I went onto Amazon to see if I could buy a modern copy of the book – and I could – there was a modern translation of the book available. (Not so modern as to be affected by the rot that is currently creeping through academia.) I bought it.

The Book of the Order of Chivalry is not a long book – in the translation that I have, it doesn’t even pass fifty pages. But when I was reading through it, it was nothing short of enlightening. And I don’t mean that in an exaggerative sense – reading it was as though the light of knowledge was shining into my mind.

Chivalry is an entire system for producing persons of good character – persons who are well trained in the various martial arts of a knight, and so are very physically capable, but who are also learned, and so very mentally capable. It is a system that, through the production of such persons, produces a good and orderly society. It also contains methods of self-regulation – necessary for when someone comes along who tries to subvert the system.

Although The Book of the Order of Chivalry was written in the 1200s and is specifically about knights, and those who wish to become them, many of the prescriptions it gives about how knights should be could apply to anyone, in any time period, who wants to be a good person or build a good society. That’s one of the things that was so fantastic about it – huge parts of it are completely relevant to life today. Some of it appears to be astonishingly prescient – there are problems that exist in the world today that this book has the solution to. And this is what makes it downright outrageous that this book has seemingly been hidden from us in the modern age – the solutions to many problems that exist today – sometimes very specific problems – have been known for centuries.

Take the following paragraph from the translation by Noel Fallows:

The king or prince who unmakes the Order of Chivalry itself not only unmakes himself as a knight, but also the knights who are subordinate to him who, because of the bad example set by their lord and so that they will be loved by him and follow his evil ways, do what does not pertain to Chivalry or its Order.

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

In other words, if any knight acts in a way that is not in accordance with true Chivalry, he not only unmakes himself as a knight, but also all of the knights he trains or is in command of.

This is a principle that is relevant not only to Chivalry, but to any organisational structure, in any time period.

Take another paragraph:

If the squire should be dubbed a knight because of fineness of features or a well-built, well-proportioned body, or because he has fair hair or carries a mirror in his purse […] you debase and diminish the Order of Chivalry.

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

What an amazing thing to read! Don’t just reward people with status and power because they are good-looking – it’s a principle that can apply to every society in every time period.

Take another one:

The prideful, ill-mannered squire who speaks and dresses crudely, has a cruel heart, is avaricious, mendacious, disloyal, slothful, irascible, lustful, drunken, gluttonous or perjurious, or who has other vices similar to these, is not suited to the Order of Chivalry.

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

To how many people does this apply today! Every week there seem to be more and more people who could be described in this way. And not only are they not suited to the Order of Chivalry, they are not suited to any position where they have any influence – particularly positions of cultural influence, which they seem to currently occupy.

Here’s another:

Do not seek nobility of courage in the mouth, for it does not always tell the truth, and do not seek it in resplendent vestments, for beneath many a resplendent cloak there is a base and weak heart filled with evil and deceit.

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry

I would like to give more quotes from the book, but I fear I could very easily pass the threshold of fair use. This book is filled with good advice on how to be, how to act, how to live, how to learn, how to teach, how to train, who to trust, who to grant status, how society should be.

Chivalry – true Chivalry – is not just a few trite mannerisms – it is not just a set of pedantic rules for small actions. It is an entire way of life – and one designed to improve society. It is a tragedy that we have forgotten what it is.

It’s worth mentioning that Llull is adamant that you cannot be a knight unless you are a Christian – nothing truly chivalrous can follow without that. I am a staunch atheist. In the era of New Atheism, I was a more combative one (which was of course a big part of what New Atheism was), but nowadays I am not, and I find those who retain that combativeness towards Christianity to be rather cliché and tiresome now – it’s not needed anymore. So I can appreciate the value of the ideas in this book without being a Christian. At the same time, it’s interesting how Llull often writes about the importance of using reason and scientific knowledge (‘scientific’ perhaps not quite in the modern sense), and of avoiding superstition. Such ideas would have been very pleasing to the New Atheists of 2007-2012.

It is outrageous that modern popular culture – and modern feminism – lies to us about what true Chivalry is. It is outrageous that the modern education system does not tell us what it is. It is outrageous that the modern education system doesn’t even tell us about the existence of this book. And it is outrageous that wisdom that has been around for centuries is hidden from us – wisdom that we could use today.

Reading this book was enlightening – not because I didn’t know or believe many of the ideas that are in it – a lot of them are actually ones I already knew and agreed with – it was enlightening because I was realising just how long this knowledge has existed for. It was there. It was always there.

It was also remarkable just how much the ideas overlapped with ideas from another part of my life: Taekwondo. I have done Taekwondo for more than 20 years – it’s been a huge part of my life. Taekwondo has a moral dimension. What was amazing reading this book was how mediæval Chivalry (from Europe eight hundred years ago) and Taekwondo (which developed in Korea in the last century) have produced many of the same ideas. Two completely unconnected cultures produced the same ideas. Extraordinary.

True Chivalry is, in many ways, the antidote to the poison that is modernity. It is the balm that could heal many today. It is not something to be contemptuous towards – it is quite possibly the very thing that we, the English, need at this moment in time.

I have not shown you the very best part of the book – that should be saved for when you read it yourself. And I think you should read it yourself. There are very few books that I would say that everyone should read, but this is one of them. Every Englishman should read this book.

You can get the version I read here: https://amzn.to/3HDxmmT (affiliate link).

P.S. While I have tried to be very clear here as to the reasons why I like this book so much, in time the reasons will become clearer still.

Kenobi – Episode 2 – A Complete Disaster

This review is only going to be about the first fifteen minutes or so of the episode, because that’s all I could stomach watching. I couldn’t watch any more – it was that bad. It’s rare that I can’t finish watching an episode of a television show if I intend to review it, but this episode was so bad it was repulsive.

Let’s dissect this episode moment-by-moment.

Kenobi lands on a city-planet called Daiyu. It’s like Coruscant, but not. As soon as Kenobi comes out of the spaceport terminal, he looks around at the busy environment as though slightly scared of it all. Already, this is bollocks. Obi-wan Kenobi has been in environments like this for most of his life. He’s spent a huge amount of time on Coruscant; he’s been all over the galaxy as a Jedi Knight, to countless different planets with different peoples, cultures, and technologies. He would not be scared of a busy street. ‘But he’s been living in isolation on Tatooine for ten years! He’s changed!!!’, I hear the Twitterati scream. No. When you’ve had that much experience of all these kinds of places, ten years on Tatooine is not enough to make you scared of it all again. What is this bizarre obsession with diminished characters that Hollywood and idiots on Twitter have nowadays? They relish in the idea of making great characters shit. It’s grotesque. Kenobi is a Jedi Master – he didn’t stop being that just because the Jedi Order was disbanded. He should still be an extremely powerful Jedi. He does not have this timidness at the end of Revenge Of The Sith; he doesn’t have it at the start of A New Hope. This is bollocks.

Kenobi goes and asks a random person about a ship he’s tracking. Why? Why does he go and ask this person? It isn’t apparent. And then we get some more insanely expository dialogue – the person replies ‘You’re in Daiyu now. All signals in or out are blocked. People like their secrets out here.’. This is just pathetic. A real person, in this setting, would not talk like this. This line reeks of the writers wanting to say something to the audience, but not having the talent to do it in a naturalistic way. The line is also performed in a way that only Hollywood actors can do – as though this one line is going to be their big break into television, if only they can perform it with enough over-the-top American brashness.

We see a lingering shot of a street on this planet. It lingers too long, suggesting that this street is somehow central or important – it’s one fucking street on a city planet – this street is not important. We see Kenobi wandering down the street, looking at the others on it. The framing of the shot and the primary-school-level acting of the other actors make you painfully aware that this is just a set (somewhere in Los Angeles, I assume). It’s a caricature of a ‘bustling street’ – makes you wonder if the writers and directors have ever even been down a busy street. (Perhaps this is enduring effects of America’s car-centric, non-walkable cities.) Kenobi just wanders around – you’d have no idea he was on a time-critical mission at all.

There’s a homeless clone army veteran at the side of the street. This allegory isn’t just on-the-nose – it’s kicking me in the head, I collapse, unconscious, and then it’s kicking me on the ground out of baseless spite.

A lot of people nowadays accuse television shows of being ‘political’. Now, this isn’t really a correct use of the word ‘political’, which ought to mean ‘having to do with polity’, where ‘polity’ means ‘the organisation and governance of human society’. This is a television show – it has nothing to do with organising society. But I know what these people mean – the term their looking for is ‘social commentary’. This is social commentary – it’s making a comment about society.

Now, I’ve written many allegorical stories in my life. In some of them the allegory is very obvious – deliberately so – and in others it’s a bit more obscure – also deliberately so. Now I would hope that my stories have never come across as preachy or patronising. (I would like to think that I could tell if that were the case, and edit that tone out, but it might be that when one is writing an allegorical story, one just can’t tell if it’s going to come across that way.) Because it is bad when stories or story elements come across as preachy. I think it’s particularly bad when the message is something that’s so obviously true (yes, it’s bad that there are so many homeless people – this isn’t a revolutionary thought), and when so little effort is put into the metaphor (I mean, here, they just have a homeless veteran in the street – that’s it – that’s the extent of the allegory – put some fucking effort in). It comes across as someone thinking they’re a genius for coming up with something everyone already knows and putting in very little thought or effort.

I think it’s fine for stories to have social commentary in them, but if it comes across as preachy, it completely pulls you out of the story, and you realise you’re just hearing the opinions of the writers. And I think in order to not be preachy, it’s got to be more deftly done than this.

We are 1:30 into the episode, and there has already been THIS much wrong with it.

Some Stormtroopers walk along the street saying ‘Clear a path.’. Why?

Then we get an absolutely disgusting scene. A random person comes up to Kenobi and says ‘You wan’t some spice, old man?’. This is very obviously a reference to the ‘deathsticks’ scene in Attack Of The Clones, but this time, rather than Kenobi instantly telling this person to go away and rethink their life, this person just gives him one of the substances she’s selling – Kenobi doesn’t even agree to take it – she just puts it in his pocket.

The sheer arrogance of the writers to do this. Apparently they were so insulted by a scene in the prequels telling a drug dealer to maybe stop selling that shit (I would guess because some of these writers are obsessed with consuming a particular intoxicant themselves), that they wanted to put in a new scene where instead Kenobi is just given some of this shit – doesn’t even get a choice. I have had the misfortune to meet a lot of very arrogant people in my life – I have never seen arrogance like this. It’s pathetic, disgusting, and grotesque. To be so self-obsessed, smug, and self-righteous that when given the opportunity to write a sequel to another writer’s work, all they can do is think about how they can undermine and displace what that writer did, to put their own vapid, self-centred, immoral worldview into every corner of it. There are few things in this world that I have been more revolted by.

We are then introduced to a fake Jedi who is some kind of people-trafficker. This allegory is harder to not notice than a used dildo in a public library. This scene tries to be funny, but it’s a style of humour that is very un-Star-Wars.

Kenobi then goes through some kind of drugs factory – again, this allegory is harder to not notice than a condom in a bride’s hair. This scene looks more like something out of a contemporary Marvel action show than something out of Star Wars.

Kenobi then finds his way further into the building / complex. It’s not really very clear where he is (other than a film studio somewhere in California). It’s a bit weird that the first street he tried on this city planet just happens to be the one with the building where Leia’s being kept, but that’s what happens when the writers are thinking more about shoving a message down the viewers’ throats than worldbuilding.

Kenobi is immediately found by some goons. They fight. We see that Kenobi has gotten a bit out-of-practice. Again, what the fuck is this obsession with diminishing characters?! This guy is a very skilled Jedi Master – taking on two goons should be piss-easy, even after ten years. Why? Because this guy is an incredibly skilled force user, and that doesn’t diminish with age (see Yoda). Bizarrely, Kenobi doesn’t use the Force or his lightsaber at any point in this fight, despite both being available.

There’s another fight. Kenobi continues not to use the Force or his lightsaber, for no good reason. Another goon comes in; there’s some pointless dialogue. Then the goon says ‘You’re not a Jedi anymore, Kenobi.’, and here once again we are hearing the voice of the writers, not the characters. The writers are thinking about Kenobi as ‘no longer being a Jedi’ – that thought was in their head when they were writing this show. But this just shows how utterly misguided they are. You don’t stop being a Jedi just because the Jedi Order has been disbanded. That would be like saying you stop being a Christian if the Vatican shut. Jediism is a way of life, and a belief system. As long as you continue to live the Jedi way of life, or continue believing in its tenets, you are still a Jedi.

We see a bit more of the Inquisitor – not the main one – the other one – Reva, I think she’s called? This actress has absolutely no ability to come across as menacing or threatening whatsoever. (And this time it can’t be put down to bad writing – she has some very short, simple lines, that should be easy to deliver well, but they are weak and ineffectual. This is what happens when your understanding of evil is merely a caricature of evil.)

Kenobi finds Leia, and once they’re out in the street again, Leia says ‘You seem kinda old and beat up.’ – once again, this is just the thoughts of the writers. This is such basic shit – I don’t think I have ever seen such bad writing in a television show. (I might even include the ending to Game of Thrones in that.)

The inquisitors talk to each other for a bit – the main one and Reva, with a few throw-away lines from the others. The whole thing comes across like an annual review in a big corporation, not like two dark side users talking to each other – it’s quite comical. The main inquisitor guy tells Reva that she’s the ‘least of us’ because she ‘came from the gutter’ – for fuck’s sake – when have force users ever cared about class? Dark side users care about one thing: the accumulation of power for its own sake. Your status is determined by your power, not your class. They don’t give a shit about where you came from.

The main inquisitor guy then puts Reva on leave, promising that HR will speak to her later.

And that’s it. That’s the first fifteen minutes. I couldn’t watch any more, and won’t. I mean, bloody hell, almost every frame of those fifteen minutes had an issue. It’s so bad it’s almost nauseating – I feel like throwing up.

This show is quite possibly the worst television I have ever seen, and I will not be watching any more of it. This isn’t Star Wars, or even remotely connected to it. This is artistic defilement.