Demosclerosis and the Armagnac-Burgundian feud

My research specialty, fifteenth-century France, rarely offers examples pertinent to modern American life. But in this recent period of “demosclerosis” the story of the relentless feud between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians sheds light on our impasse.

The idea of the day is that our congress is an obsolete mess, excruciatingly ineffective compared to the parliamentary systems of our benchmark nations. Journalists like James Fallows undoubtedly are right that the problem is systemic. As Fallows notes in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, our only realistic hope of a way out to start shifting incrementally towards cooperation. Because after all, we are not going to suddenly trash the constitution and develop a parliamentary system wherein one side rams through its legislation. This is where the lesson of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud becomes instructive, and, I believe, offers some hope.

Feuds seem chaotic to modern eyes, but they follow a logic, serving as a form of government in periods where a central power capable of enforcement is lacking. Feuding was a fundamental part of politics in early modern France, a means of assuming and challenging power. If someone wanted to defend against an incursion, he appealed to his lord for military support. A small armed group attacked the aggressor. If one side was stronger, the conflict ended. If the sides were of equal power, however, the conflict would devolve into a long series of attacks and retaliations. Worse, seeing the central conflict, smaller players would settle their own unrelated quarrels by attaching them to the central one, hoping to resolve in this way problems that they did not have the strength to handle on their own. The Armagnac-Burgundian feud got rolling when the King Charles VI began to suffer episodic madness. His male relatives attempted to seize power during his periods of insanity, entering into a rivalry that produced various murders, constant warfare and pillaging, and enable the conquest and occupation of France by Henry V of England. The feud stretched from about 1405 until 1435.

And yet it ended eventually. Our current situation bears the hallmarks of a feud. No single enforcer is capable of bringing the recalcitrant parties to heel, and the parties are of roughly equal strength. One attacks and withdraws; the other retaliates and withdraws. The conflict cannot end because neither party is powerful enough to annihilate the other. In the meantime, special interest groups hook their causes to the central conflict, hoping to resolve problems they cannot settle on their own. But in the case of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, after years of warring and misery, the two sides finally ganged up to get rid of the English. Yes, in our case, the eternal conflict between the Democrats the Republicans is caused to a large extent by the representational abnormalities that are the fault of a decrepit system put in place over two hundred years ago. Huge swathes of the population are under or over represented, leaving business to be carried out by small groups of interested parties rather than by the people through elected representatives. Yes, progress is rendered impossible by the Republicans refusal to play ball at all. Still, it is only our feuding mentality that has brought the system to a complete halt.

But history shows that sooner or later feuds tend to run out of steam. One side either become stronger than the other (this could happen over the next several years as the demographics shift) or the feuding mentality simply runs out of steam as the generations change. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a level of hatred sufficient to fuel a feud. Do we really need to jettison the constitution? Probably not. Let’s just demystify the feuding mentality, long and loudly: let’s make medieval French history a mandatory course in high school and again at university.

et si domus super semet ipsam dispertiatur non poterit domus illa stare – or??

It’s been a difficult few days. All of the hope of the past year has gone, vanished with the frightening realization that our division is implacable. Rationality has no purchase here in the land of religious conversion and rebirth. As far as I can see there is nothing to look forward to, there never will be anything to look forward to, all that there is or ever will be is obstruction. Maybe I will feel optimistic again someday, but it has been a long time now that our point of stasis is virulent populism; any little deviation towards decency and intelligence is quickly pushed back.

And yet, I’ve always felt that nothing can be that depressing as long as it is not unprecedented. And there is nothing but precedent for bitterly divided populations. It must be ingrained in our nature, although I can’t quite see which evolutionary aim hating our brothers would have served. I try to drift above all of it, look down, and see us as a squabbling family. The kids form two groups, always fighting with each other. Certainly my own family divides into two groups. Which comes first? Does it start at the micro or macrocosmic level? Do we hate each other by nature or do we hate each other because of politics?

Should we just be two separate countries? Why did Lincoln fight so hard to save the Union? What would he say today? If our goal was to keep a poor country from our border, what did we gain? There is Mexico, in any case. Is it self-evident that a house divided against itself cannot stand?

I will at some point try to reach beyond the divide and recover the intelligence of conservative thought in the U.S. Nothing can hurt you too much if you understand it. But not quite yet. For the moment I will just take comfort in knowing that the divided house is a historical constant: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians; Catholics and Huguenots; Catholics and Anglicans; Gibellines and Guelfs; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Jacobins and Girondins: Irish Catholics and Protestants; Sunnis and Shiites. And the U.S. of course has always divided into Red and Blue, the slave and the free states. I don’t know that it makes it any easier to stand, but maybe the road to hope leads through resignation.

Float above the fray....

It seems that the one benefit I should be able to expect from living in exile would be some distance regarding my country, the one gift the ability to watch politics with interest but without the pain. This is not the case so far. I am as passionately attached to what happens here as would have been had I lived here physically. New Year’s resolution: to float above the fray, like a large Buddha statue, with a large benevolent smile on my face, loving, but remote. To embrace both sides of my country. Let’s try with the election of Scott Brown to the US senate, one of the greatest disappointments I have experienced in months, and I’m not even from Massachusetts. I may be too sensitive to live in this world, and this is a serious problem. Let’s get to the bottom of this.

The emotion, heartache, – as opposed to a rational reaction about what is happening in my country - I suppose is inevitable because as we all now know, we choose our political affiliation based the identities we are trying to cobble together rather than the actual policies that we support. Our political party represents ourselves, our self-image. Hence all those people voting against their self-interest because to call themselves Republican makes them pure and virile rather than muddled and girl-ish. Hence those ridiculous statements that came out during the interviews with “independents” during the last presidential elections. Remember that bizarre real-time monitor of the independents’ reactions as they listened to the candidates? How they would explain their reactions in terms of how they were perceiving the candidate’s toughness on national security? Or whether he had given the interviewee an impression of trustworthiness, whatever that means? The last thing on earth we should be valorizing is emotional reaction to a debate. And yet there we were pretending that it was a legitimate way to decide how to vote, proposing that voters listen to their instincts to choose the president. At least people who declare a party have some consistent set of principles, however nebulous and emotional, attached to the party. They are not just blowing in some wind tunnel of spontaneous reactions.

But let’s admit and look beyond the disappointment. I am disappointed because it is humiliating to be a citizen of a country that responds positively to a pick up truck. This is pure elitism on my part. Let’s get beyond it. More specifically, I am embarrassed to be part of a national narrative that promotes itself as a society of freedom-seeking, independent-minded pioneers who just want the government to leave them alone when the story is so patently false. The story gives us an excuse not to read through the information that is available, which would make it clear to us what every other civilized nation on earth can see and what we ignore, that we are all governed by the immensely powerful healthcare industry, which we have not elected. And an excuse to facilely embrace a handsome guy who looks like a movie star playing a military officer because he riles us up with more of the story, posing us as hero fighting those corrupt politicians.

I am tired of analyses of competing narratives: if we attach our current division to the tale of implacable hatred that has divided us since before the Civil War, since the pact with the devil, that "compromise" with southern slave owners when the country was founded, there is no way out. But for the moment I see no other way to explain our apparrently instinctive dislike of each other. (Or to be clear, I should say their dislike of me. I don't care about them. I do not send the red side of my family spam promoting my political ideas. They do that to me, apparently eager to pile on me, the way bullies persecute kids who like to read.) Yet surely there must be some interesting nuances. And surely I can examine these without pain. Here is my solution: displace the too-raw story of today into our horrible and beautiful history. Look harder at Thomas Jefferson and try to understand him, sympathize with him, rather than disdain him. And once I’ve done this, maybe I will be able to accept without cringing this kid-like group of compatriots who think they are tough when they are just deluded. And maybe love them some day.

Sounds like the beginning of an important odyssey to me. Important because at the end lies freedom from embarrassment, the possibility of watching the political show with equanimity.

I will begin by accepting with resigned but genuine affection Obama’s decision not to do what all other majority parties in all other civilized nations do as a matter of course – push his legislation through. The ninnies who love pick up trucks have spoken, and because Democrats are the default marginals even when they are the majority, we will defer. It cannot be otherwise. It is in the very nature of the American character that they are loud and strong, even though a minority, and I have to accept it, just as I accept the monotonous bullying spam from my family without protest. I don't have it in me to do otherwise, and I would not want to have that in me.

L'essentiel c'est la contingence

La nausée struck me first, at least as far as I can remember, when I was in kindergarten, in Watertown, South Dakota, on a dreary grey day, as were all days in the winter during that time of my life (or, should I say, as were all days with a few brilliant exceptions during that time of my life; or should I say on a dreary grey day during the winter of my life), and, inside, we were all shepherded into some circle game that involved skipping around the outside of the circle. I’m quite sure that even at that age I was painfully self-conscious, aware of myself as a ludicrous bundle of bones and knobs with a cap of boy’s hair that I never felt to belong to me on top of my head. But the feeling became overwhelming as I took my turn skipping around the circle, heels clicking on the dark green tiles, yes, clicking, because my mom always bought me shoes with funny little heels, and suddenly recognized my own knees flying up at me, bony, covered with my weird spectral mottled skin, and experienced them as completely alien to me. I was undone.

I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?

I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.

What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.

In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.

In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.

Post script:

Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.

Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.

There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.

Bella detesta matribus

My son is threatening to join the military. I hear those mothers and wives singing “Johnny has gone for a soldier,” but their men had no choice. Can he truly go off to war simply because he needs more structure in his life? Surely there are alternate ways to find structure.

My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.

The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.

Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?

I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.

He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.

In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.

I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.

They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.

All Saints' Day in exile

It is a particularly brilliant November 1, which of course is at odds with the very meaning of the day, heralding for those of the northern hemisphere the coming of winter and for me New Years. November 1 is my personal New Years. I sit here, with the mass of my life flowing through my consciousness, all those gorgeous elements, Irish, Minnesotan, French, German. I am Northern European through and through. I have nothing of the exotic green and little flashes of lurid color that characterizes this place. It is all alien to me. This is all about land. If this were Iceland I could be at home. But in this backwards, menacingly and disorientingly bizarre place, no. No.

But let’s drag this back again to the possible payback of living in a state of perpetual disorientation, a state of physical and psychological exile. Such a life fills one with a permanent sense of anger, but maybe a productive anger. A refusal to accept anything and a belligerent attitude towards everything. We exiles are eternally vigilant, with adrenalin coursing endlessly through our circulatory systems.

Living in exile forces one to confront and consolidate one’s own mythology. I have re-established contact with the endless Wim Wenders sky of the Midwest, the trip across, across, across what exactly? The limitless space of the plains. Catching a glimpse on the horizon of the bright lights of a city. I have reclaimed the prairies, which used to seem like an endless rugburn. I have also embraced the sorrow of my national past, the absolute horror of the crimes we perpetrated. I have integrated slavery into the narrative of our past, which means that I have recognized how absolutely irreconcilable our foundational values of freedom are with the reality of what we did and continue to do. I will not back down on that. But in recognizing the falseness of the social compact I have listened again to the voices of the founding fathers, and I feel their distress as they hit up against that intransigent Southern-white-guy block ready to defend slavery to the end. I hate and love in equal measure Thomas Jefferson, planter, elitist, true hypocrite, pretending to be a man of the people. His black-white vision of morality, mistrust of government, stubborn desire to dismantle, his dirty politics; and yet, his despairing fear to look at where his ideology led because the result was too horrific, nothing less than the end of everything. He held on, like we do sometimes, to civilization, because we just have too much to lose. I despise his modern counterparts with every breath in my body, and yet I understand their obsessive need to turn their eyes away. And just as I hate them, I love John Adams, despite his need for approval, even as I love the contingent of American ready to fight oppression of all kinds, because after all who is going to do good unless they are petted and fed approval?

In exile I have come to appreciate the intelligence and deplore the populism of us in a way that I could not have otherwise. I have a safe place here from which to utterly loathe vulgarity.

In exile I have a place to develop as a scholar. There is trade-off here; I am surrounded by mediocrity unrelieved by the flashes of brilliance one finds at home. But I have time. Mediocre myself, I need to be around brilliance to develop ideas. But without the time afforded by this easy easy culture, I would not have developed at all. Maybe the paradoxes are clearer, too.

And, finally, being here keeps me on the move, physically, which is the necessary correlative of mentally. I have to travel more, much more, than I would otherwise, and with every trip comes a portion of knowledge.

Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:

Exile is a strange darkness. My heart is black. It used to break, but now it shelters an endless dusky pain instead. Or is it my liver that aches? That's where French people hurt. No, it is because I am Prometheus, liver pecked to bits anew every day.

The difference between here and there is so stark. I can count out change there, speak to the cashier with no accent. I return as an alien. Here I am a cartoon, a sad Poindexter, a creature with no context. But let the metaphor work in the other direction; after all, this isn’t Tomis on the Black Sea. There are planes. I could leave if I had to. Let’s pluck the pleasure from this bad relationship that I choose not to end for a mass of compelling reasons, let's stop throwing the sorrow into lugubrious relief. Living in exile is like being horribly in love – the payback, pleasure in the sorrow has to be psychologically significant or we wouldn’t do it. So I will find the pleasure and ignore the cost. Yes, I stretch my hand into the dark water, search for something down there – even if it is just a minnow.

Here is my pleasure - it is the nostalgia. Tears not quite shed. I can summon up huge expanses of earth where I am not alien. Quebec, for example. All of my childhood myths crowd together on the Plains of Abraham. We learned that the French, searching for a northwest passage, came down the St. Lawrence; that Pierre Radisson floated down into Minnesota; that missionaries tried to convert the Indians. And all of it spread out forever under those huge skies, relentless, and troubled with roiling clouds. These same skies hung, hang over Minnesota, land of the silver birch, the same hugeness and cold brittle air. I am at home in Quebec. The names of the Indian tribes and their languages live on in the places there, like they do in Minnesota.

At home, part of my fantasy was that Jefferson never sold Louisiana and that we in Minnesota spoke French. Those people are actually alive; they live in Quebec. That French is mine, that bizarre, broad accent and twangy nasals that melt the vowels down. North American French. My multiple mythologies find a home in Quebec.

Most of all, Quebec has fall. When I was in Quebec last fall, I swam twice in the early evening in the hotel, a heated pool half in half out of the building. Fluffs of condensed air billowed from the surface of the water outside. I could see the pinkish orange of the setting sun between the gusts of clouds. This memory is a minnow, grab it, it flicks between my fingers, it slips away, but I touch it. I could live in other places. But just not here. Just not here.