The child with the sword

When I was twelve years old a schoolfriend confessed to me that he would like to kill someone with his bare hands. “I wish people fought like that these days” he said wistfully as we walked across a sun-dappled schoolyard, oversized backpacks flung over one shoulder. “Bows and arrows, swords, spears. It was so much more manly when they fought like that.”

I probably nodded. In fairness to us The Two Towers had just come out in cinemas and if there’s anything that might get a twelve-year-old boy full of bloodlust it is watching men standing in the rain personally mowing down thousands of faceless orcs with a sword as they shout things and stand for the truth and justice and the like. Watching those movies had an overpowering effect for many boys of my age that wouldn't be matched until girls made their appearance a couple of years later. It is so embarrassing now that we don’t much want to interrogate it other than make the odd self-deprecating crack about grown men being overwhelmed by the sword fights on Game of Thrones. I contend that if we did we might understand our political moment a little better.

It can’t have escaped the notice of anyone who has trawled Wikipedia for history articles that those on military history are far and away the best-researched. Obscure battles from World War II have every regiment that fought in them with all their insignia perfectly accounted for. The equipment of a Sassanid infantryman from 500AD is lovingly detailed. I would commend the curators of these pages for their commitment to the full documentation of human knowledge if I didn’t recognise in that online imbalance toward all things martial the child in me who desperately wanted to wield a sword in a Tolkienesque battle. The idea that I am not the only one is slightly disturbing.

The modern wannabe warrior is a relatively well-documented and mocked stock character: think of Mark Corrigan of Peep Show complaining that his girlfriend would be more impressed if he took MDMA than if he had fought at Goose Green. While the sense of having missed a time when men were men is famously keen amongst internet dwellers who favour Trilbys and trolling, it is also probably present in the depths of far more men’s psyches than they would like to admit. The child who adores the violence of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings will perhaps never entirely leave us.

The sense of having lost a world of honour, manly single combat and heroic struggle is hardly new. The Greeks lived under the intimidating shadow of Homeric warfare: the futile suicide of Sophocles’ Ajax has all the hallmarks of a society anxious about the loss of an honour code in a new era of doubt and relativism. The political scientist Robin Archer gave a fascinating account of how the left wing movements of Europe opposed the outbreak of the First World War right up to the point where the language of medieval honour codes was introduced into public discourse, at which point the Victorian schoolboys inside them all appeared to cave in and they were foaming for war with the best of them.

The susceptibility of even intelligent and modern men (and I am talking about men) to these swords-and-sandals lapses is scary to me because of how rarely we might admit to it in public. We do understand how stupid it is, but show me King Theoden riding along his battle line screaming his battle cry and something deep inside me stirs. Were we to start talking about this little boy more openly, we might also be able to talk about two bogeymen of the modern liberal world, Donald Trump and ISIS, more effectively.

Imagine in two hundred years’ time you are an American citizen living in a nation dominated by China. Imagine a preacher comes along who tells you of the founding fathers and the war they fought against tyranny. Imagine the sense of the lost empire of greatness, the Númenor sunk beneath the waves that can be dredged up again by men of equal martial prowess and honour. It would be entirely to miss the point of Jefferson and Hamilton if America were to become the lost medieval kingdom of King Arthur, but that is what on some level Trump is offering: the return of the king. The return of a time when men were men, evil was confronted, swords

were unsheathed with a proper schiingg sound rather than the damp P.C. squelch they seem to make these days.

What I am painting is the birth of the American ISIS, with the founding fathers as the Salaf, the Rashidun, the rightly-guided: not because their argument was correct but because they won the war. The caliphate, we must remember, is as much a civilisational argument as a religious one. There is a reason jihadis carry swords, and have themselves photographed on horseback. They are historical re-enactment societies gone crazy. Their argument is that the caliphate once dominated the world, that it was run by proper honourable men, and that weakness, foreigners and effeminacy destroyed it. But it can be reclaimed. How far different other than by scale is that to Trump’s appeal?

In Moshin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist the narrator Changez (whose name appears to be a pun on what he does during the novel, but is more significant for being the Urdu version of “Genghis”) frequently suffers these kinds of reveries.

 We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.

I read the book in 2009, and only now does Hamid’s real insight hit me. For Changez the reason to hate America was never religious. The point was about civilisations: it was about the pride of his civilisation dented by long supplication, it was wanting another Mughal Empire to rise and defeat its foreign conquerors, build more Tajs Mahal. The religious element is only important in this view as long as it supports that sense of cultural revanchisme, just as for Trump supporters Christianity has more to do with a lost America than it does with a pacifist Galilean carpenter. It is not for nothing that in the days following 9/11 Changez imagines New York as a castle, and the army heading to Afghanistan as an avenging horde storming out of its gates. He may think of himself as modern, but his imagination is thoroughly medieval, and his lack of self-awareness on this point will ultimately lead him down his path of vengeance.

If we are going to face up to the challenges in the new reactionary feelings that will continue to sweep the globe as globalisation and modernity continue to deny us our certainties, we will have to start by acknowledging these impulses in ourselves. Am I disgusted at the ultra-violence on Game of Thrones? Yes. Do I still feel a little childlike thrill at the drawing of a sword? Yes. Can I do anything about it? I have my doubts. But at least I can tell people I feel that sense of longing for a simple and confrontational world, shameful as it is. Half of our democratic polity is made up of women, who for obvious reasons have very little sense of connection to that world and won’t understand that pull unless we make it clear.

More than this we have to have an argument about dignity. If America is going to avoid the hypermasculine idiocy of a lost imagined past, and Sunni Islam is going to reject the empowering fantasy of a reborn Salafi civilisation, then the elites in charge of those societies have to work out a way to talk to the desires that make those visions attractive. 

White Americans want to find a sense of dignity in a changed world, and unless they are praised, loved and raised up by their media and government, they will look back to a time when they seemed to have that honour. Islamic society, prostrate under colonialism and economic stagnation for so long, will need to be praised and honoured as the successor to the Abbasids with the modern equivalent of the tolerance and learning of that society. In the end only being treated with dignity and as genuine equals will prevent young men from trying to force that respect with violence. From the ganglands to the Fertile Crescent this has proven true. If we were to seriously discuss the history of the caliphate we might be better at seeing wannabe jihadis from Bradford as the crazily misguided Tolkien re-enactors they basically are.

The honour society is gone. It is less than Falstaff’s air, the mere memory of a breeze. But those who think that they can just ignore the child within them calling for blood and dragons and sword fights and honour are missing the point. Ignore it in yourself and someone else will issue the clarion call for those who will still listen.