Read biographies of the lesser and greater nobility of Europe. It reads like either a soap opera or a gang war. My friend Rowyn did a master's thesis on La Morte D'Artur and researched Mallory and his world a great deal. Her conclusion was the King Arthur legend got such a revival because the gangbanger-like "knights" of the land understood they were pretty scummy but had just enough decency to wish they were better than they actually were. At least, a few of them, like Mallory, who left some correspondence that he wrote while writing Morte (I think it was in prison).
I mean, the War of the Roses was one long litany of faction jostling, betrayals and realignments. Only when it could not be avoided did actual battles happen o_O Since Martin modeled his civil war on the War of the Roses afaik he's being pretty true to history.
I'm not sure if you recognize the revolution in cultural norms in the last 800 years. We no longer think children are chattel; the drunkeness is a great past time (at least, its not a UNIVERSAL opinion), we don't have women in legal captivity to anything like the same degree (and now men end up in legal captivity too, sometimes, let no one say there is no progress...) I mean, in the middle ages it was fairly common to have a peasant just lose it, kill his worst enemies, rape one or two of them and kill himself. We think that "going postal" is a modern thing but from what I read it happens _less_ today. They didn't really seem to think that murder was bad. Cockfighting was popular, as was bear baiting, and killing a Jew or Arab or other minority while far from common was not treated as anything but a problem of public order.
I'm not saying we're all saints now by any means. I largely think we're about as evil overall, just we've bribed more people with affluence and diversions...and we have strong customs and ideologies which constrain how we express our antisocial impulses. The great problem for our society is that lately the meme has gotten steam that the real way to act out is to use the rules to fuck people over. This has always been a problem to a degree, but with the vast explosion of rules in our society, the potential lever to move heaps of excrement onto others is MUCH longer.
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zvi and
I don't think its that cut and dried
Date: 2009-03-28 03:37 am (UTC)I mean, the War of the Roses was one long litany of faction jostling, betrayals and realignments. Only when it could not be avoided did actual battles happen o_O Since Martin modeled his civil war on the War of the Roses afaik he's being pretty true to history.
I'm not sure if you recognize the revolution in cultural norms in the last 800 years. We no longer think children are chattel; the drunkeness is a great past time (at least, its not a UNIVERSAL opinion), we don't have women in legal captivity to anything like the same degree (and now men end up in legal captivity too, sometimes, let no one say there is no progress...) I mean, in the middle ages it was fairly common to have a peasant just lose it, kill his worst enemies, rape one or two of them and kill himself. We think that "going postal" is a modern thing but from what I read it happens _less_ today. They didn't really seem to think that murder was bad. Cockfighting was popular, as was bear baiting, and killing a Jew or Arab or other minority while far from common was not treated as anything but a problem of public order.
I'm not saying we're all saints now by any means. I largely think we're about as evil overall, just we've bribed more people with affluence and diversions...and we have strong customs and ideologies which constrain how we express our antisocial impulses. The great problem for our society is that lately the meme has gotten steam that the real way to act out is to use the rules to fuck people over. This has always been a problem to a degree, but with the vast explosion of rules in our society, the potential lever to move heaps of excrement onto others is MUCH longer.