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--></style><title>(urth) Long Review Essay on Wizard
Knight</title></head><body>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="+1"
color="#000000">May I inquire, gently, _why_ you find the knightly
ideal</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="+1"
color="#000000">"troubling"?</font></blockquote>
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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+1" color="#000000">I know
that this opens me up to a (fully justifiable) charge of ducking an
issue that I myself raised, but I don't want to get<i> too</i> far
into this... largely because I don't think I can without getting into
broad political (if not historical and moral) questions that are
really off topic to Wolfe. I guess what I'd say is that my
objection (or that objection) only stands to those who find the
knightly ideal -- at least in the comparatively undiluted form that
(if I'm right) is presented in Wizard Knight; to the degree it's
present in Tolkien, as I said in my initial review, it doesn't bother
me nearly as much -- and from others, a simple "well, I like and
approve of the politics" would be enough for us to agree to
disagree.<br>
<br>
I also don't think my objections to the knightly ideal are
particularly original, nor for that matter particularly well
thought-out (I do study history, but my focus is American history, so
the topic doesn't come up much).<br>
<br>
But, all that said, the briefest version is that my objections to the
knightly ideal are those which have been made frequently, those
inherent in modern ideals and those portrayed from many different
angles by many different authors (some of which you cite!). It's
fundamentally hierarchical in a fixed, birth-by-class sense; it relies
on fidelity to persons (not simply family and friends, but in larger,
political senses) rather than ideals and institutions in a way that --
at least in the modern world -- becomes very destructive; it supports
the use of violence as a legitimate means of settling disputes in
cases where it is not the last resort; and so forth.<br>
<br>
(On that last point, I'm now wishing I'd bookmarked a fascinating
piece I read recently, summarizing a scholar's work, about how
cultures of honor arise in places where there is no dependable rule of
law, from the frontier to ineffectively policed urban settings to
criminal cultures, and therefore honor, backed up by a threat of
violence, arises as a substitute. But, of course, I didn't
bookmark it, and probably couldn't find it again. Alas.)<br>
<br>
I think that, fundamentally, the knightly ideal is conservative -- in
one of the important senses of the term -- and I am not: I believe in
liberal ideals such as the independent rule of law, democracy, the
fundamental equality of all persons, etc, which arose as part of the
transition from the medieval to the modern world -- and the
abandonment of the knightly ideal was part and parcel of that
transition.<br>
<br>
It's certainly an open question for me whether the knightly ideal was
good in its time and place, or was always fundamentally problematic;
I'd be open to the idea that when it arose and flourished it was an
important, and indeed moral, value system. But in the modern
world it tends to arise in fundamentally conservative realms where it
is -- I would argue -- quite problematic, and frequently
destructive.<br>
<br>
In this regards, I would note that the American culture that was
closest to the knightly ideal -- which placed enormous value on the
virtues of honor, courage and fidelity, in knightly ways, and which
has in fact often been thought of as a chivalric culture -- was the
culture of the upper classes of the antebellum white south, the
"aristocratic" slaveholders.<br>
<br>
There's a lot of nostalgia for that world in this country. (I
think that a lot of conservatives -- who aren't the least bit racist
personally, don't long for the restitution of slavery, or even Jim
Crow, etc. -- don't realize the extent to which their values
originate, historically, in that culture. Doesn't mean it isn't
true.) I don't share it.<br>
<br>
... And see, there, now I've gotten political. But that's the
answer I can give you.<br>
<br>
SF</font><br>
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