"And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest's, and smote off his ear. Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
- Matthew 26:51-52.
“Men said openly that Christ and His saints slept.”
-The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
What can happen when the political institutions that can ensure the rule of law can no longer pierce through the uncertain future, and when the fate of those institutions themselves come into question is displayed with violent force in the aftermath of the sinking of the White Ship in Anglo-Norman Britain. In November of 1120, the White Ship was supposed to bring King Henry I's seventeen year-old son and the rex designatus, William the Aetheling (“Aetheling” –ÆtÞling- being a traditional Anglo-Saxon title used by princes eligible to sit the throne), to England following after the King's own ship.
William was the hope for the future of the Anglo-Norman nation for his marriage with the daughter of the count of Anjou promised peace after generations of hostility between the Normans and Angevins, as the natives of Anjou were called, to a finish and William's interactions with King Louis VI of France promised peace between the Anglo-Norman realm and France.
King Henry I managed to secure a lot during his reign, including the establishment of one of the most professional governments in Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, when his heirs head was dashed upon the rocks of the Norman coast, so was the hope of a smooth, predictable transition of power after King Henry's inevitable death. This was a grave threat that jeapordized the prosperity of the realm, and could unravel it in a succession crisis if Henry I could not find a solution to it in his lifetime.
Despite a small retinue of illegitimate children, William the Aetheling was his only legitimate son, and his death brought upon his domain the shadow of a future succession crisis upon his death. Even though the desperate king tried to place his daughter, Matilda, a woman experienced in politics after being the consort to the Holy Roman Emperor though failing to provide him a male heir before his death, into the position of heir presumptive.
Despite Matilda’s political experience, the plan of a female ruler sitting the throne was one that the barons could not have much confidence in for reasons of culture. After all, the offices of a ruler was one of leading armies, sitting in judgment, and issuing royal proclamations; all of these duties were inextricably male within the context of Medieval European society and thus one for a king, not a queen.
With Matilda as his heirt, Henry I could never ensure the certainty of a smooth transition of power upon his death, and this in turn undermined the coordination of Anglo-Norman political institutions. Before the White Ship, William was the clear legal heir whom everyone could stand behind, and around whom the choreography of the Anglo-Norman political system could dance. That was not so with Matilda for there was simply not way of knowing whether he claim would be accepted by her lieges upon Henry I’s death, and so her accession of power was not a fact those lieges could rely on in the future. And so the barons had to wait for Henry I to die and to see if there would be a challenge to Matilda’s claim.
In the end, the concern and uncertainty was justified. It took but a month after King Henry's death for another noble, Stephen of Blois, Henry's nephew and Matilda's cousin, to install himself as king in Westminster, and for most of the local lords to rescind on their promises to the late king that the would accept Matilda as Queen, and to swear to King Stephen instead. Thus began the Anarchy, a civil war in England and Normandy fought between 1135 and 1153, though those who lived through it preferred to call it a much more poetic name: the Shipwreck.
The Shipwreck lasted for just under two decades as forces loyal to King Stephen and forces loyal to Empress Matilda, her husband Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjoy, and finally her son Henry FitzEmpress, who would become the Duke of Normandy, vied for control of the Anglo-Norman crown. That the succession crisis was not solved within a short war, but continued over a period of two decades with two rival factions claiming the legitimate authority of kingship, with two separate centers of power being established centering around the courts of both Stephen and Matilda. There were now competing mints, systems of patronage, courts, and diplomacy within the Anglo-Norman realm, both of which claimed supremacy. This wreaked havoc in its political organization; as the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported: “Men said openly that Christ and His saints slept.”
King Stephen, who had no proper claim to the throne under primogeniture, was unable to secure the loyalty of all the nominal vassals to the Anglo-Norman king. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes:
When the traitors saw that Stephen was a good-humoured, kindly, and easy-going man who inflicted no punishment, then they committed all manner of horrible crimes. They had done him homage and sworn oaths of fealty to him, but no one of their oaths was kept. They were all foresworn and their oaths broken.
The effects of this fracturing of royal authority within the realm meant that the plans for security could no longer be centralized through royal authority, and thus the institution that everyone expected to be able to coordinate plans for security could no longer function.
Instead, each baron had to plan for his own security, uncertain both about who were his enemies and about the outcome of the succession crisis that would determine who is their liege lord; that uncertainty was reflected in the plans each baron made for his own security. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle further records, continuing from the last quotation:
For every great man built him castles and held them against the king; and they filled the whole land with these castles. They sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on the castles; and when the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men.
The widespread construction of castles, which would normally be regulated by the crown, across the English countryside was symptomatic to the decay of royal authority and the lack of coordination within the realm for the provision of security.
After all, a castle could provide a baron protection against a rogue lord's attacks into his territory and even protection if one of the royal pretenders marched through his territory. However, what they do not provide is the efficient provision of security for what could have been supplied with oaths, the determent that the promise of the king's justice provided within the realm, and the protection that royally organized forces provide against enemies without. That option, though, relied upon the coordination mechanisms that were now dysfunctional due to the protracted conflict between Stephen and Matilda.
Despite the proliferation of castles, violence intensified in the realm as foreign Flemish mercenaries prowled the countryside in devastating extended campaigns of attrition and as King David I of Scotland invaded the northern portions of England. The anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani recorded one instance of the brutality of the Anarchy:
(The king) set himself to lay waste that fair and delightful district, so full of good things, round Salisbury; they took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was a more cruel and brutal sight, fired the crops that had been reaped and stacked over the fields, consumed and brought to nothing everything edible they found. They raged with this bestial cruelty especially round Malborough, they showed it very terribly round Devizes (where Empress Matilda had nominally set up her court), and they had in mind to do the same to their adversaries all around England.
The Anarchy gradually grew into a war of attrition between both Empress Matilda and King Stephen as neither could establish themselves as the single monarch through a clear victory, though both were willing to fight on.
The ravage of the countryside was not the only scourge brought upon the Anglo-Norman realm. Indeed, there was also the great legal uncertainty that hovered over the nation, uncertainty made worse by the feudal system of governance that relied on personal loyalties between lieges and their lord. This problem was displayed when Geoffrey Plantagenet, consort to Empress Matilda, took Rouen in 1144 and was recognized as the lawful Duke of Normandy. A legal consequence of this was that now Anglo-Norman barons in England with lands on both sides of the Channel were thrusted into the impossible position of having to pay fealty to two competing lords for their estates. Without being able to know what lord would reign in the coming years and whether the writs of Stephen or Geoffrey would be the law, the barons were paralyzed in the management of their estates because they would not know whose writs to base their decisions on. With the royal institutions of governance unable to create a certain future of royal succession, the legal question of to which lord lieges owed their allegiance to itself became uncertain thus further hurting to the rule of law since now there was not an abstract principle determining who was their liege lord, but each baron had to make an arbitrary decision between either Stephen or Geoffrey..
Eventually, Henry FitzEmpress, who was now claiming succession to kingship from his mother Matilda, launched an invasion of England in 1152 that lead to his army meeting that of King Stephen's at Malmesbury, where Henry laid siege to one of Stephen’s castles. However, tired of the drawn-out war, concerned that this battle would not bring an end to the Shipwreck just as earlier engagements had, and with no reward to fighting, neither pretender's army wanted to meet on the field. Instead, they forced Henry and Stephen to agree upon a ceasefire. After this ceasefire, Henry FitzEmpress was quickly able to gather many dukes behind him with the promise of good lordship, and after a circuit across England during which he held court in the countryside instead of setting out brigands to burn crops. By this end of his tour of England, Henry had established himself as a credible alternative king.
Finally, the Anarchy came to an end with a settlement at Wallingford, a small town along the Thames dangerously close to Stephen's center of power in Westminister. There, where once again both armies refused to fight and Henry and Stephen's lieges forced them to talk. After three months of negotiations, King Stephen agreed to adopt Duke Henry as his legal heir, and it was sealed with a kiss of peace within the Winchester Cathedral, symbolic because it was an important for past Anglo-Saxon kings and humorously it was where the remains of St. Swithun were interred, an Anglo-Saxon saint said to be able to restore broken eggs to entirety.
There was much work to be done to heal the war-weary Anglo-Norman realm, but the peace between the two competing kings meant that in the first time in two decades the line of royal succession was clear. Royal authority was finally unified and universal providing the basis for the return of the rule of law
Leo Tolstoy, a human dove par execellence.
So, let's play a game of hawks and doves. The way that it works is that we shall model a society, which for mathematical simplicity I shall assume it has an infinite population (curious how that would make things simpler rather than more difficult, but I digress), and within that society there are two types of people: hawks and doves. For this game, people in this society will interact with others within this society randomly and when they do they will interact according to the behavior determined by their type.
One one hand, we have the doves, who keep Tolstoy and Gandhi on their nightstand and who believe in the natural goodness of cooperating with their fellow brothers and sister. When doves will cooperate with everyone that they meet up with. On the other, we have the hawks, who have a worn copy of The Leviathan on their nightstand and who believe that they need to do anything in their power to get the resources they need to live their short and brutish lives. Hawks will use violence on whomever they meet in order to secure a marginally higher payoff from the encounter than the doves would have. Everything does well when doves meet other doves, they cooperate with each other in good will and then go on with their lives. However, when a dove meets a hawk, the hawk will commence the use of force against the dove and the dove, not wanting to violate their pacifist beliefs, will flee. When two hawks meet each other, though, the two will fight leading to a large loss for both of them.
The payoffs for each meeting are as follow. When two doves meet, they each cooperate together and receive a payoff of 5, quite the reward. When a hawk meets a dove, the hawk gets a payoff of 7, marginally better than the payoff for a dove, whereas the dove absconds empty-handed. There are disastrous consequences when two hawks meet, and they will both leave worse off than when they meet, each receiving a payoff of -3. This is explained in this handy table with the payoff for the column players being on the left and for the row players on the left:
What determines members of these two populations are not determined by the genes within people's bodies, but the ideas in their minds. We shall assume that over the time leading up to the start of our thought-experiment, the angelic nature of the human being has been in ascent and the arguments for pacifism have been victorious. Now everyone has got a copy of Tolstoy in their coat pocket and the idea of pacifism in their minds. Everyone is a dove. Can this situation last, though?
That is what we are interested in and after paragraphs of exposition its finally time to get down to answering that question. Without assuming that all men are angels would everyone in this fictional society remain a dove. I contend that they would not. There are now incentives to be a hawk that I now argue we must accept will lead this population back towards a mixed population.
That incentive is that there is now a higher pay-off to being a hawk than a dove. How do we know this? With some math. Let “P” be the percent of the population that is doves (this will mean that 1-P is the percent of hawks in the population), the expected payoff for being a dove can be expressed:
D=5P+(1-P)0
=5P
For those who have never seen this before, the expected payoff is the pay-off that the person in question would get for meeting a dove multiplied by the ratio of doves in the population add the pay-off for meeting a hawk multiplied by the ratio of doves in the population (this is where the assumptions of infinite population and random sampling are important, but they're not important enough to go on about here). The expected payoff for being a hawk can be expressed as:
H=7P+(1-P)(-3)
=10P-3
When the population is all doves (i.e. P=1), this leaves us with expected payoffs of:
D=5
H=7
So, once a dove picks up a copy of Hobbes and mutates into a hawk, the society will be ripe for more hawks to follow. After all, under these circumstances, the hawks will flourish getting higher expected payoffs each time they meet someone than the doves. If we assume that people can willfully change the memes in their mind, then the change will be even quicker as doves have their fidelity to pacifism tested by the temptation of a higher payoff. Doves on the margins will then convert to a new creed and follow new strategies.
When will this process end? It will end when there are no more incentives to be a hawk, when the expected payoffs of the two strategies are equal and when there are no more incentives to concert. We can calculate what the population will look like:
D=H
5P=10P-3
P=3/5
Ergo, once the population is 3/5 dove and 2/5 hawk, the payoffs that the two classes can expect equalize. Since there is no longer any difference between the two classes' payoffs, there is no longer any incentive for people to change their strategy. What this means is that the population will settle into an equilibrium at those population ratios with no force for change present until an external force acts upon it.
One aspect of that point of equilibrium of interest here is the question of what creates the environment of incentives that holds the population of hawks in balance. It certainly isn't the doves. They simply retreat whenever they meet a hawk lest they break their oath of non-violence. Instead, the only factor within this population that holds the hawks at bey is the ratio of hawks within the population. It is the danger of meeting another hawk and the negative payoff such an event yields that provides a disincentive for being a hawk. As the ratio of hawks in the population increase, the payoff for being a hawk increases until individuals are better off switching to non-violence.
The moral of our fictional game? Violence is only held in check by violence. If man were an angel upon this earth, then our approach here would be useless since no human being would be tempted to give up her moral convictions by a worldly payoff. However, the timber of humanity is crooked and so to expect an edifice to be built of it that perfectly corresponds to the moral laws of the world is to drink deeply from the font of naïveté.
If society is to maintained and cooperation preserved, then there must be a way of holding violence in check. The doves cannot do that. A population of Doves cannot protect itself against the mutation of hawkish ideas within it and it cannot hold those who hold those ideas in check. Only a population of mixed hawks and doves within this model can. To once again quote Orwell: "Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." The Doves free ride on the mechanism that the Hawks provide to keep other Hawks in check. They keep their hands clean, but it is only because others commit violence that they are able to do so.
The pacifist errs by asserting that peace and violence are contraries; instead, they are more often two heads of the same coin. The threat of violence, and its occasional use keeps the incentive towards the more devilish features of human nature in check thereby allowing the more angelic to flourish in human cooperation. There are even times when even the most dovish of human beings must be roused to violence in order to preserve the hope for peace and prosperity in the future:
Declare this among the nations
proclaim a war,
rouse the warriors to arms!
Let all the soldiers
report and march!
Beat your plowshares into swords
and your pruning hooks into spears
let the weak man say, “I am a warrior!”
(Joel 4:9-10)
Is America's Police Problem a Gun Problem?
From "The Ferguson Protests: Guns, police, and the people" by M.S.:
If the problem of police brutality can be explained via America's obsession with guns, then what explains Eric Garner's death, surely an instance of police brutality. A choke hold, not guns, caused Mr. Carner's death, yet his death is apart of the same general phenomenon: The excessive willingness of American cops to use lethal force. By arguing that the problem of police brutality is simply a problem with America's attitudes towards guns, M.S. lets the larger issue, that the police tend to answer to no one but themselves and the district attorney's they help to elect, slip away.
Also, if M.S. actually understood video games, he would recognize that video game violence never actually solves real-world social conflicts. Violence can solve problems in science-fiction games like Halo, but when games approach actual social conflicts, violence only serves to beget more violence. Even the campaigns of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series serve to emphasize that little of what the protagonist is doing is actually solving social conflict. The entire genre of 'violent video games', if I may speak about such a genre, isn't about solving social conflicts. Blow back is everywhere in those games, and consciously so.
If one actually wants to solve social conflicts, as opposed to, say, pwning some n00bs, one needs to find games different from Halo or Call of Duty. Strategy games like Civilization V or Crusader Kings II are more about that, and they provide plenty of different paths other than the sword for solving problems, such as culture in Civ or dynastic politicing in Crusader Kings.
The truly violent video games, Bioshock and Dead Space being examples, with both exponentially more violent than the most shiny iteration of Call of Duty, aren't about solving social conflicts. They're about survival in a violent world. Doing what it takes to survive in horrible situations. The violence of the games being manifestations of those horrible situations. There's actually little social about them, and there isn't much conflict solving going about in either them. The violence also serves to emphasize the brutality of the situations which the protagonists find themselves in. The culmination of the second act of Bioshock wouldn't be nearly as shocking if it weren't so terribly violent.
Posted by Harrison Searles on 08/18/2014 at 01:29 AM in Commentary, Video Games, Violence | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reblog (0) | | |