Recently, I finished re-reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light
of the Sun, which is quite good (nearly equalling The Lions of
Al-Rassan in my estimation). I also recently watched King Arthur
(the one with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley). Since this was a few
weeks ago, I can't remember if I went to go re-read the Kay book after
watching the movie or not. In any case, I tip my hat to Synchronicity
here. Between the two of these, I was struck by two things.
Thing the first: What is it about British mythology that so much
of it is about preserving order against chaos? The resonances here
with T.H. White's Once and Future King are clear and, I'm sure,
deliberate on Kay's part. While there's definitely such a thing as
Too Much Order (e.g. East Germany pre-1991), most British mythology is
contrasting order not so much against license as against rapine and
pillaging -- defense against marauding invaders.
Is it simply that much of British history is about just that:
defending against invasion? (Or succumbing to it in a number of
cases....) Certainly British history's foundational stories often
involve repelling invasion -- think of the Spanish Armada, or the
Battle of Britain -- or successful invasions, like the battle of
Hastings.
But certainly there is a long British tradition (one that J.R.R.
Tolkien subscribed to, certainly) that sees maintenance of order as a
cardinal virtue -- to allow people (well, people with enough money and
time and the right set of sex chromosomes) to tend their gardens and
drink beer at the pub. (There's an argument to be made that this is
Conservatism in its best sense, but you certainly wouldn't recognize
that in today's Republicans in the USA.)
What's interesting about this vision of maintaining order is that a
significant part of the goal of order is allowing people to learn
things and write (and read) books, and forge bonds with each other,
instead of fighting with each other. (I sense another rant coming,
about the differences between US and British SF and how that might be
connected to differing histories and shaping ideas about colonialism.
More on that later.)
Mythology, n.
The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin,
early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the
true accounts which it invents later.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's
Dictionary
The second thing is more from The Last Light of the Sun than
King Arthur, but the latter did touch on it a bit. I don't
think it's a huge plot spoiler to reveal that part of The Last
Light of the Sun touches on the remnants of mystic power in
Britain by including beings from Faery.
Kay's alternate-world Christianity (Jaddism) has declared belief in
Faery to be heresy. Kay works this interestingly, because in this
alternate world, Faery and its power is in fact real, and several of
the characters have to deal with the fact that their Church is pushing
something that blatantly contradicts reality.
What I wonder, in a Devil's-Advocate sort of way, is whether the
long domination of Europe by the Catholic Church, with its stamping
out of all heterodoxy, might have made it easier for the development
of modern science in the European Enlightenment.
Imagine the counterfactual setup: a Europe where dozens or
hundreds of belief systems ruled. (And by "belief systems" I mean
things that include claims about the way the universe works that are
actually empirically falsifiable, and mostly -- mostly -- avoided by
modern religions in the European-influenced world.) In this
counterfactual Europe of the 1500s, the natural philosophers of the
day would have had to tackle dozens or hundreds of different
cosmologies, instead of one, to convince enough people that what they
were saying was right.
To set up a Straw Man for a moment, I would guess that some (naive)
Cultural Theory types would argue that this hypothesis is wrong
because science is merely a competing worldview that historically
supplanted parts of the Church's cultural hegemony. Of course, since
this is my Straw Man to knock down, I say hogwash! Science is
ultimately about empirical evidence, evidence which can convince other
people, even those who don't agree with you or your theories.
