For the last month, I’ve been running a “sci-fi governance” book club. Co-leader Divya Siddarth came up with the structure. Book club participants can choose any science fiction novel of their choosing: the only requirement is that they read with a particular focus on the system of governance contained in the story, and explain that system to the club. Questions include: How does production work? Are there stable institutions of power? Run how, by whom, for what? What are the organizing principles of the society? How is technology used to build regimes, or subvert them? Our ultimate goal is to use these images of futuristic governance to better understand our own. Divya is working on the Collective Intelligence Project, which is worth checking out - it’s an initiative researching new models of governance.
For the book club, I cheated, and chose The Arthurian Legends: An Illustrated Anthology. For reasons I’ll explain, I think reading early European fantasy follows the spirit of the club requirements, if not the law. Below is the essay I wrote for the club, shared with permission.
Ancient people groups as disparate as Achaemenid Persians, the Ksiung-nu, the Huns, early dynastic Japanese, Slavs, Mongols, and Germanic tribes share a particular social form, what historian Christopher Beckwith calls the comitatus. The comitatus, unearthed in mythic narratives and in burial sites, is the “sociopolitical-religious ideal of the heroic lord and the war band of his friends sworn to defend him to the death.”
There are a few essential features of the ancient comitatus: there is always a core group of warriors, referred to as friends, but also as wolves or pack animals. They often have a ritual suicide pact: if the leader of the band is killed, the others kill themselves or are executed. They are buried alongside their leader in full regalia, armed for battle in the next world. The comitatus lives together, they eat together, and typically sleep in the same house. In developed versions, the core comitatus is ringed by a larger bodyguard; it too is organized around allegiance to the lord, not along modern military lines. This isn’t a dense kinship network, but a hub and spoke model, oriented around one personality. As a friend of the lord, you receive a place in the world, riches, a community, a lineage, and you give your life. This social form pops up from Beowulf to early Indic poems.
The legend of King Arthur and his knights, for all its medieval and chivalric glosses, is rooted in a cultural form extremely similar to the comitatus. Although Wales received it from different predecessors than the “Central Eurasian Culture Complex” (Beckwith’s term), something like it is alive and well between AD 450 and AD 650, when the original Arthur breathed. The Arthurian narratives describe a politics of personal virtue, where a leader’s goodness causes goodness in his war band, who are in turn good to their society.
I think I’m justified in bringing Arthur into our sci-fi governance reading group for two reasons.
For one, the early medievals who built our Arthurian legends had a similar orientation towards the past and its fantastic characters as we do to the future and its sci-fi characters. Where we project our dreams forward, they projected theirs back. Our visions of utopia rely on a feeling of progress so instinctive it’s almost unnoticeable. For the English, Welsh, French, and German audiences of Arthur, utopia lay somewhere in the past, and their stories reflect that.
Secondly, the comitatus and other Arthurian social governance forms are so foreign, alien, and fantastic to us they might as well be dreams from the future as from the past. Arthur offers us a governance form interested in completely different challenges from those we’re attuned to.
There’s a rich debate over the historicity of Arthur, which I’m not qualified to get into, but which is quite interesting. I recommend Actual Aurochs’ newsletter if you want to go down this rabbit hole. TLDR: We have strong evidence, from the Welsh Annals and circumstantial, that Arthur existed, and accusations that Gregory of Monmouth invented him out of whole cloth are specious.
Arthur gets adapted into a host of stories, almost too many to count. He’s pure warrior king in the early Middle Ages. In one account, Arthur almost sacks Rome, before being dragged back by a family betrayal. French court poet Chrétien de Troyes adapts Arthur into a high court romance in the twelfth century, and German romantics follow with their own chivalric interpretations. In the late 14th century, Arthur’s court makes its appearance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, what Barber calls “the most superb accomplishment of medieval English Arthurian writing… and the climax of English alliterative poetry.” In the fifteenth century, we get full epic cycles tracing the rise and fall of King Arthur’s court. Arthur’s medieval splendor goes out of style during the Reformation and the Enlightenment among the literati, only to be restored in the Victorian era.
What matters most in the political world of Arthur is court dynamics, but not the bureaucratic intrigue we’re used to imagining. All politics is personal; everything that matters politically is downstream of personal conflicts and their resolution. What matters, morally and politically, is character: which of your war band can be trusted, which is capable of great deeds, and who loves whom.
Brief aside: the Arthurian legends also have a much more nuanced view of human character than I’d expected to find. While my initial impression was that the Knights of the Round Table were uncomplicated heroes, Marie de France says things like “Arthur looked upon his captive very evilly.” Some characters [Galahad] are truly saintly (Galahad), but the vast majority of Arthurian figures, from Lancelot to Gawain to Tristan to Guinevere to Arthur himself, are turbulent, human, real.
This social world is oriented completely around Arthur. There is a total unity between the health of Camelot and the health of society. When the king is “so joly of his joyfnes,” as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, there’s a knock-on effect. His knights and lords are captivated by his virtue, moved by it, and proceed to give well to the people in their care: peasants, travelers, widows, orphans. Arthur’s personal qualities also spur pro-social, heroic endeavors: venturing out to slay a serpent is typically prompted by an especially generous feast at court. The war band takes on completely new endeavors, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, when Arthur takes them on.
The Grail is such a complicated piece of Arthuria that I don’t think I can treat it justly here: it carries too many layers of symbolism to understand without further study. For a glimpse down the rabbit-hole, see Alexander Dugin’s contention that the Grail exists today as a runic monolith in the Arctic/Hyperborea, inscribed with the original human language.
Arthur in his pomp is a giver of good gifts, and creates such an aura of bountiful generosity in elite circles that the whole society follows suit. One could call it a moral trickle-down economics. Generosity of spirit is perhaps the highest virtue of Arthurian myth.
Perhaps because of the personalized nature of Arthurian rule, governance is fragile. When the regime buckles, it’s typically the result of a member of the comitatus reneging on his moral commitments: either he betrays the king through pride, or (just as often) through adultery. Clashes between the knights also tear at the governing fabric, making coordination against outsiders impossible. Checks and balances only exist in the push and pull between different knights and their instincts. Of course, Arthur is a king, with formal potestas as well as intangible auctoritas. But that power often seems weaker than his charismatic, personalized power.
In later Arthurian stories, in particular the chivalric dramas, the political is subsumed even further beneath the personal. Tristan and Isolde, Barber tells us, describes a relationship “above the everyday ways of the world. They are no longer subject to the ordinary laws of men, and can only be judged in terms of their fidelity to each other and to love’s ideals.”These Arthurian stories have very little to say about governance: their politics are merely a backdrop for romantic narrative.
Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Arthur introduces early criticism of democracy, and mass society, in particular the fickle nature of mobs. When Arthur’s treasonous nephew Mordred rebels, “much people drew to him; for then was the common voice among them that with Arthur was none other life but war and strife, and with Sir Mordred was great joy and bliss.” Beneficiaries of largess have short memories: “many there were that King Arthur had brought up of nought, and given them lands, might not then say him a good word.” Later, when Mordred and Arthur are on the verge of signing a truce, a knight hacks at a snake with his sword and causes pandemonium. Mass slaughter occurs as a result of the foolishness of crowds.
The Arthur narratives take for granted that status, honor, and dignity matter to people wielding power. In this sense, they’re more honest than our stories about our regimes, even as they are completely uninterested in questions of inequality or democratic participation. They argue that what motivates governing individuals is the desire to be recognized as doing good, and that character is transmitted through honor/shame dynamics within a small band. It’s heavily implied that only this kind of hub-spoke relationship can generate and preserve the virtue required to govern nobly.
One question I’m left with: what do Arthurian social dynamics look like in a world with a recognizably modern or futuristic state? Can a bureaucrat have such strength of character as to personally shape the personalities around themselves? And would it matter for governance if so? One point often made by critics of American decline is that our elites don’t feel noblesse oblige, and aren’t interested in either Christian or pagan ideas of commitment to their subjects. How much would that change if we had an elite capable of inspiring higher levels of devotion in their circles? Put another way, can you meme elites back into noblesse oblige? There’s a conventional corporate wisdom that institutions look like their leaders, and I think that’s true everywhere, bureaucracy or no. But in the Arthurian world, that heuristic is almost the only one that matters.
Big thanks to Divya Siddarth, Raymond Zhong, and Saffron Huang for feedback and edits.