It's Only Pumpkin Pie That's Burning

The average person today has more arms and legs than ever.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Appropriately enough, it seems like this one-liner has only ever been written by people incorrectly believing they’re quoting something older. It usually shows up attributed to Mark Twain, but he was a bit more florid and used a different metaphor. The first case of this exact metaphor in English might be the very florid translation and commentary, in an 1845 journal, of a Russian-language history of Russian religion.

The vision recurs; the eastern sun has a second rise; history repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme; ages are prototypes of other ages, and the winding course of time brings us round to the same spot again. We feel as in a dream; even in waking life we see objects sometimes, and think we have seen them before, and know not where; and the mind revives a primordial recollection and dreamy mirror of the past.

I’d rather pull an even pithier quote from that rhapsody.

“Ages are prototypes of other ages. — A.N. Mouravieff” — R.W. Blackmore

The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Away From Cannibalism

I like drawing historical parallels. (Really, I just like drawing parallels, the more strained the better—give me any two TV shows, and I’ll give you a long explanation of why they’re basically the same show.) I also believe in progress—that civilization is improving on almost every axis we care about. This might read like a tension in the essays I’ve been writing recently—if history is repeating itself, how can there be progress? It doesn’t feel like a contradiction to me. History’s not repeating itself exactly, and you can see improvement in the parallax.

Cornelis Tromp was a real gimme, parallel-wise. I think it’s fair to say that Tromp keeps happening to us. But the most horrifying aspects don’t show up in the reprise. Mike Pence remains uneaten. Some of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol building faced serious legal repercussions. (The people who stormed the building in The Hague didn’t face any. There was one guy who kept the hearts of his victims from that day as souvenirs in his home, and showed them off to visitors. This would not, in fact, happen today.)

Modern-day Tromps have to at least say something like “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Usually exactly that. Hypocrisy and disingenuous virtue signaling are signs and causes of moral progress. Signs, because in olden times Tromp didn’t have to pretend to be any kinder than he was. Causes, because our impressionable youth often take these claims at face value, and end up actually internalizing them.

Celebrate Our Progress As Well As Our Potential

There are a lot of Boomers who are not latter-day Orangists. They often sound pretty despairing these days (as does anybody old enough to remember the 20th century). I think this is a cognitive bias, a mistake. We primarily compare the present to the future we want, or the alternate present we wish we had. We don’t treat the past the same way—what’s the point? The past is the past. But that means we end up focusing on everything we dislike about the present, while treating the past more even-handedly. So we end up feeling like the past was better than the present, which is rarely the case in any more objective sense.

Nate Silver notes that our orange man is currently asking, rhetorically, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

The long, strange political shadow of 2020

Which is weird. Those of us who are around to answer this question were mostly miserable four years ago, in 2020. But he seems to think this is a winning line, and he might be right. The pandemic is a brute fact. It happened. We can’t change any part of how it happened. So we write it off. The past is neutral. The present is full of all sorts of things going wrong, which feels more salient than things having gone wrong. “Going” is present tense, while “having gone” is called the past perfect tense. “Perfect” derives from a Latin word that means “complete,” which is how it came to mean both “as good as possible” and, in grammar, “anything that’s already finished.” (One of these days we’re going to have to get around to overthrowing the Roman Empire).

We should change this mindset. Focusing on where we have room for improvement is important, but we need to balance it with gratitude for the improvements of the past. Celebrating progress helps us to remember that it’s real.

I occasionally get non-politicians challenging me with a longer-term version of the “are you better off” question. “Are you really happier, more fulfilled, more enlightened than you would have been a hundred or a thousand years ago? It’s not that your values are just more aligned with the present’s values, since you’re a part of the present, creating the illusion of moral progress out of what’s really just meaningless drift?”

My stock comeback is “I have, statistically, more limbs than I would have had in the past, so yes.” This is me saying something literal and common-sense in the weirdest possible way, out of insecurity at how much more sophisticated their view sounds than mine. In the past, my chances of having an arm or a leg lost to disease, or an enemy sword, or primitive medicine, were higher—the higher the further back in time you go, mostly. Prosthetics were also worse, as were accommodations for disabilities. Although people have always tried to help the disabled! The oldest human skeletons we’ve found include people who survived multiple bone fractures at the same time and lived long enough for them to heal, which implies they had something happen to them that would’ve been fatal if they hadn’t had help. We by and large have the same values we’ve always had, we’re just better at them.

The Lion King

I recently learned (thanks to a Civilization VI game expansion pack) about Sundiata Keita, a 13th century African emperor. Sundiata had some kind of congenital disability. It was probably inherited from his mother, Sogolon Condé, who was known, not in a complimentary way, as a “buffalo woman.” According to the Epic of Sundiata, his father, a petty king, had heard a prophecy that if he had a child with an “ugly woman” the child would be destined for greatness. So he married Sogolon. (He found this out after already having had some children with a more conventionally attractive wife, so Sundiata ends up as the youngest-son-with-a-glorious-destiny we all want in our epics.)

Sundiata spent his childhood unable to walk. He struggled to use the crude mobility devices his people were able to make him. The blacksmith Nounfari made him an iron rod to help him stand. It broke. In one version of the story, he only manages to walk after his father dies, and his mother, who must’ve known a thing or two about their condition, takes over his care.

Once Sundiata was able to move at all, he got stronger and stronger. He united West Africa under a pluralist, federated government (“emperor” is the standard translation for his eventual title “mansa”, but “president” might have more appropriate connotations). Under his rule, the states within the Mali Empire took major steps forward. He’s credited with agricultural improvements, and with introducing the growing and weaving of cotton on a large scale. Mali became the economic powerhouse that allowed his great-nephew, Mansa Musa, to become by some accountings the richest person to ever live. Toward the end of Sundiata’s reign, there was even a Pax Malia—that condition, which used to be quite rare, where nobody in a wide area can initiate violence without organized repercussions.

But Sundiata’s reign was only 20 years! He died when he was about my age, not yet 40, probably by drowning while trying to cross a river. If he’d had better prosthetics, think what more he might have accomplished. And/or how many more sunsets he could’ve gotten to watch.

Sundiata had many epithets. One of them was "The Lion of Mali”. The name Sundiata derives from his mother’s name and a word for lion. Disney’s The Lion King owes a lot to Hamlet, but it’s also considered a modern-day adaptation of The Epic of Sundiata.

Griots Are Essential

We have more details about Sundiata than his European contemporaries. Historians are pretty sure the King of Sweden at the time had some sort of disability, but have no idea what his relationship with his mother was, let alone the name of the blacksmith who made his mobility devices. This difference is due to the West African tradition of griots (pronounced gree-ohs, also some of them prefer jali), a hereditary role that (from my outsider perspective) seems to most closely translate to “journalist.” Europeans projected onto them their own idea of a “royal bard,” which they definitely were, but griots are, and always were, much more than that.

In Sundiata’s Mali, every potential future leader had a griot embedded with them from early childhood. Most villages had a griot, too. Their sacred responsibility was to observe history as it happened, from the big to the small, and then turn it into entertaining performances and catchy songs so that it would live on.

To this day, griots act as mediators, putting conflicts into context to help resolve them. A traditional West African wedding involves a griot, or a duet of griots from each side, singing the stories of the two families being merged. They constitute an unbroken line of knowledge, wisdom, and joy.

We need griots. Without them, our victories are transformed into defeats. Some tweet from some politician, which I’m not going to bother to look up, snarked about how environmental crises are always overblown, saying something like “you never hear about the hole in the ozone layer anymore.” Yeah. You don’t. Because we fucking closed it. We got so much right with that one. We did the science right. We did the initial science communication right (thanks, Dad!). We did the international collaboration right. But we failed to celebrate our achievement correctly, and that failure made all future environmental crises harder to solve.

It’s not enough to write our progress into our textbooks. We need to sing it.

How Have I Not Talked About Dar Williams Yet?

Dar Williams is a great singer-songwriter. Now that I’ve just dropped an f-bomb for the first time on this blog, I’m tempted to keep dropping it, such as to properly intensify the word “great”. But I won’t, because it’s an unforced error to chase away some readers. Dar knows this stuff. Like Dolly Parton, she gets paradoxically under-appreciated because she’s enjoyed by a diverse audience, so maybe people instinctively assume that she’s a lowest-common-denominator sort of artist. Honestly, “lowest common denominator” is a bad phrase. It’s the worst kind of elitism to think that anything that lives in the intersection of many tastes is defined by the least sophisticated among them. Finding the lowest common denominator is hard and useful work, in art as in math.

My favorite songs of hers are the short stories. Cute, brief peeks into the life of everyday characters, through which we are invited to see one part of the grand sweep of human progress.

The Babysitter’s Here is the story of a young girl who idolizes her teenage babysitter. It asks, implicitly, this question: “As children, we imprint on whatever adults happen to be around us. Then we grow up to be adults like them, and role models in our turn. So how is it that each generation seems so different from the last?” And it gives part of one of the answers. We instinctively, without really understanding, pick the best adults of the random ones available. At least, slightly more often than not, which is all you need for evolution.

Mortal City is how I was introduced to Dar as a tween (thanks, Kit!). It follows an unhappy woman in a city wracked with bad planning and chronic infrastructure issues. (The city is never named, but people who’ve lived in more than one East Coast city are pretty unanimously like, “oh, you mean Boston.”) I really want to just spoil the whole plot here, but that’s rude, so I’ll only point out two subtleties in phrasing. The story takes place on a cold evening where citizens are being asked to use as little power as possible, because they don’t want brownouts affecting the hospital. So all the lights go out.

It was like another century
With dim lamps and candles lighting up the icy trees
And the clouds and a covered moon

This temporary loss of power is a disaster. It fills her with despair. But the disaster is that the city becomes, in that one way, “like another century.” The disaster is some of the blessings of modernity being interrupted. In centuries gone by, we never lost electrical power due to bad city planning. That’s not, actually, a good thing. The first 2 million years of human history were one long power outage.

She argues with another, more optimistic peer about the city. To her, the city is dying. It’s a mortal city. To him, the city is surviving, it’s just not doing a satisfactory job caring for the people inside it. The final two lines offer us a choice between the two perspectives. Some lyrics sites have her singing the same line twice, but the difference is audible on the track I embedded above.

We are not lost in the mortal city.

We are not lost in a mortal city.

Maybe our city is mortal, maybe it isn’t. Either way, we’re in it together.

The Christians and the Pagans is the last song I want to highlight. It’s the source of the title of this post. It depicts an awkward-but-polite impromptu holiday gathering where most of the characters are Christians, but two guests are a gay Wiccan couple, and nobody is quite sure how to negotiate that. But they muddle through. As Cousin Amber’s plus-one Jane puts it—

But we love trees, we love the snow, the friends we have, the world we share,
And you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere.

The narrator comments, to the audience, that

I think magic's in the learning,
'Cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning.

This transforms the whole song. It’s no longer (just) a story about partially overcoming a wide cultural divide. It’s now a story about how their shared culture has learned ways of dealing with differences that are so far removed from “burn the heretic” that the idea seems absurd. It’s from another century.

Dar sings stories of the present and recent past, stories that acknowledge the evils of the present—sexism, intolerance, Boston, etc. Along with them, she subtly reminds us that these stories rhyme with older ones, and come off better in the comparison. The past is the prototype of the present.

This is the griot energy we need in our art and history. I know I’m being a little self-serving here—I don’t know if there’s a precise word for what I’m doing with this essay and other recent ones, but I’m definitely trying to give “Dar Williams, but Substack.” For the record, deeds are even more important than the record of them. Simba’s the hero, not his grumpy advisor-bird Zazu. Go do some, please. And maybe also invite someone along to tell your story.

Bonus: Griot Koras

“Kora” happens to be a word of power in many cultures. My last post was about the Bible character of that name, and its title was a pun on a modern hero-myth of the same name.

The Greek goddess of the changing of the seasons was also sometimes called Kore or Cora, deriving from a word that just means “young woman.” (My theory is that the book Kora in Hell is a pun on the Biblical and Greek Koras. The Greek Kora lives in the underworld during the colder months.)

Griots don’t just inherit history from their parents, uncles, and aunts. They inherit technology and technique, too. Their signature instrument is the Kora.

Photo by Mouha.ibs, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The other Kora that comes to mind is the Maori “kia ora”, or the repeated “ka ora!” in their most well-known haka. All Polynesian languages have some variant of this—in Hawaiian it’s aloha. Depending on circumstances, it can mean “l’chaim” or “amen” in addition to “hello” or “goodbye”. In the haka, it’s the positive half of a chorus about fear transforming into joy.

It’s striking, isn’t it? Probably a coincidence, although the Polynesians sure got around while all these languages were evolving, so who knows? (Someone, maybe. Not me.) Kora means something very different in each place, but in all of them, it’s a word that brings us out of the darkness to, singing, step into the sun. Hebrew’s Korah is trapped beneath the earth, but Hannah’s prayers are lifting him up to heaven, and his children are a hereditary line of bards. Greece’s Kora escapes from the underworld every year, to bring the Spring. The West African Kora is a tool used to tell stories of triumph over adversity. The Maori haka is literally about going from being trapped below the ground to stepping into the sunlight. The 2010’s Korra goes through a hero’s journey, and redeems the world by finding the seed of light within a dark spirit.

I’m sure I could go on, I’d just have to look up what the word means in other languages. I love civilization, and drawing strained parallels between different bits of it is my love language. But it’ll make me, anyway, happier to just leave it at the list I have, compiled accidentally while researching other things and watching cartoons. Presents like that are part of civilization’s love language when it talks to me.

Kia ora.