1??????????????Soul Bound
1.1????????????Finding her Feet
1.1.6??????????An Innocent Profaned
1.1.6.13???????Sharpe Lecture: sacrificial narrative
The lecture theatre slide showed a seemingly random collection of coloured dots.
Dr. Sharpe ignored it as he started talking to them:
“Prestige is the admiration somebody gets because of their reputation. It is a thing that many value, even deliberately putting themselves into situations of near certain death in order to gain it. In many cultures, winning a reputation on the battlefield for being a brave and successful soldier has been the key to social advancement as well as military promotion.”
“And half of you couldn’t accurately repeat back what I just said, because you’re so busy squinting at the picture behind me, trying to find meaning in the apparently random.”
He switched the picture off.
“That’s what humans do. We’re not the strongest animals or the fastest. But you can’t beat us when it comes to learning. Our brains thirst for pattern. If you tell a human about three events, then no matter which order you depict them as having happened, the human brain will start constructing a narrative linking them together, filling it out with expectations about other events in the timeline.”
He brought up a slide showing three images:
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A beautiful woman and an armoured knight standing with their hands in contact
An armoured knight wielding a sword facing an angry ugly man wielding a club
A beautiful woman and an angry ugly man standing with their hands in contact
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“Try it yourself. Spend a moment working out what’s going on then tell your story to your neighbour.”
“Now pick a different order for those same three images. How does that change the narrative? Would it alter things if the woman were wearing clothes matching those of the man with the club? Or if she were shown as a princess, matching the social status of the knight? What about if she were smiling in one picture, and weeping in the other?”
“Suppose instead of seeing the images first hand, all you had to go upon was the verbal description from your neighbour’s story, and then you’d been asked to illustrate it. What additional details would you have added to the pictures? What assumptions would you have made?”
“The art of the storyteller differs from that of a historian. The storyteller prunes down the list of events they mention to just those needed for their audience to construct in their minds the narrative the storyteller wishes to convey. Or if they don’t, then in cultures with an oral tradition, the pruning may happen anyway by repeated re-telling and re-imagining. Our brains are so used to this that we get surprised when reality doesn’t match our expectations of satisfying narrative closure.”
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A beautiful woman and an armoured knight standing with their hands in contact
An armoured knight wielding a sword facing an angry ugly man wielding a club
A beautiful woman and an angry ugly man standing with their hands in contact
A beautiful woman wielding a bow facing an armoured knight wielding a sword
A beautiful woman wielding a bow facing an angry ugly man wielding a club
An armoured knight and an angry ugly man standing with their hands in contact
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“We can use this.” Sharpe paused to sip some water.
“When a series of events happen, we may be able to predict that our opponent is going to tell an audience about just some of those events in order to spin a story, in order to create in the minds of the audience a narrative that will incline them towards beliefs or actions that benefit our opponent.”
“If we can get our story in first, or inform the audience about events or details our opponent chose not to relate to them because they don’t serve his purpose, we can create in their minds a counter-narrative. It then becomes a battle. Not just of whose list of events is the most complete and accurate, or even of which narrative best fits the pre-existing expectations of the audience, but of who is the better poet.”
He brought back the first slide showing the dots.
“Talking of battles, this image is an autostereogram. If you defocus your eyes the correct amount, you’ll see the image of a dashing cavalry soldier riding a horse, his saber raised.”
“Can anyone see it?” a few hands raised.
“Interesting. Because I lied. It only shows a horse. No soldier.”
His audience looked at him uncertainly. Their other lecturers didn’t do this sort of thing, even in psychology lectures, but Dr. Sharpe always managed to get them off balance somehow, force them to think about their assumptions.
“For a long period in British military history, mass charges by cavalry were the decisive moment in battles. If you were an ambitious young officer, it was quite common to try to invite yourself along to join in a charge, despite not belonging to the cavalry, because that’s where the prestige was. Ambitious officers such as Louis Edward Nolan.” he changed slide to show a young captain, covered in gold braid, standing by a tall horse.
“Nolan was British but he wasn’t raised in Britain, and that counted against him. His parents were in the diplomatic service so he was born in Canada, educated in Austria and served in India. He tried so very, very hard to overcome this, even writing well received books on cavalry tactics and becoming an aide to important generals. Eventually his hard work paid off when, during the Crimean War, he was sent by the army’s leader to carry some hastily drafted written orders over to the soldier in charge of an elite brigade of light cavalry, telling them to stop a small disorderly bunch of enemy infantry from escaping with cannons the infantry had earlier captured from the British by over-running a position. Nolan felt this task underestimated the capabilities of the cavalry. It was too easy. There was no glory to win.”
“So what happened?”
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“Nolan took advantage of a feud between the leaders of the light cavalry and heavy cavalry and added verbal clarification to the written orders, which he knew there would be no time to check or countermand. He directed the light cavalry at a far bigger entrenched group of cannons in the opposite direction, and invited himself along on the charge. If the cavalry succeeded, it would be a decisive moment in the battle, and he could finally return to Britain with the social standing to get a good marriage and live a life of ease. Death or glory!”
“For Nolan, it was death. He was one of the first to die. And with nobody else along who knew the truth, the light cavalry had no option but to obey what they thought were their orders and carry on charging, resulting in their being massacred. It isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Cockups on that scale have happened throughout history. A few people get demoted or executed, it may get deplored and gossiped about in the papers for a few weeks, but nothing really changes. Hardly worth mentioning at all.”
“But not this time. This time there was a poet present. One of the most brilliant in the history of English poetry, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”
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Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
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“Nolan sacrificed those men on the altar of his own pride and ambition. But Tennyson told a different story, and his counter-narrative won.”
“And that’s what I want to talk about today. Sacrifice and counter-narratives. But not the Biblical type of sacrifice, with perfect white lambs and bulls being led to the slaughter. I’m talking about self-sacrifice. What some consider to be the ultimate form of altruism, and others depict as insanity and extremism.”
“The next slide is ugly but memorable. The question before us is whether it deserves to be remembered, or rather what it should be remembered as. What does it mean?”
With no more warning than that, he brought up a picture of a monk sitting at a busy road intersection deliberately setting himself on fire and burning to death.
“Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer for this photograph. It shows a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sacrificing himself in the capital city of Vietnam, in protest over the persecution of the country’s Buddhists by the then prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem.”
“Was it effective political action? It gained attention world-wide, putting pressure on Diem and causing him to announce reforms. The reforms were quietly cancelled once attention lessened, but yes, I think we’d have to categorise it as effective. Certainly it was more effective than if Duc had stood there holding a sign, or if he’d taken a gun and shot a few soldiers before being killed in return.”
“That was effective. But many similar protests have not been. One reason why is that, once you’re dead, you’re not around to defend your actions. It becomes easy for those you are protesting against to construct counter-narratives. Let’s start by looking at some of the most common counter-narratives raised when such protests happen.”
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What protest? Fake news, it didn’t happen.
We can’t rely on anything he claims, because he’s obviously not rational. Rational people don’t kill themselves. He wasn’t ill-intentioned, just suffering from the delusions of persecution common to conspiracy nuts. He was just depressed or angry or mentally ill.
He’s a hypocrite. If he really believed what he claimed to believe, he would have taken more care not to cause mental trauma to people watching. Look at his life, he wasn’t perfect. He even expressed some objectionable opinions about different topics.
He’s mentally incapable of thinking for himself and making sound judgements because he’s too young or poorly educated. He’s a tool of the minority who are our enemy and who are exaggerating how bad things are for them, in order to get us into trouble. They lied to him. Look at this small factual inaccuracy in the manifesto.
He’s over-educated, an elitist who isn’t really one of us. He didn’t really grasp the consequences, and would have given up but he was too cowardly to.
He’s so old, he was going to die soon anyway.
He’s selfish. He was just doing it in order to become a martyr and win rewards in an afterlife, or to gain attention and become famous, or out of hatred for us or to gain redemption for previous despicable actions.
He had no previous despicable actions. He’s a puritan fanatic sneering at us.
He showed pain, he’s a coward, or he only realised at the end he’d been manipulated.
He didn’t show pain, he had nothing to lose, his sacrifice wasn’t a big thing.
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“What the protests which were effective had in common is that they had defences against many of these counter-narratives.”
“It is hard to claim an event didn’t happen, when you have a Tennyson or a Browne there, vividly recording it.”
“It is hard to claim the sacrifice is a tool, when they clearly in their own words present a sound basis for why they chose their actions.”
“It is hard to claim they didn’t value what they gave up, when the recording shows how bitter the decision was.”
“It is hard to claim the sacrifice was foolish, when the innocents being protected are also shown, and it is clear that all other reasonable avenues to protect them have been insufficient.”
“It is hard to claim the sacrifice can’t be related to, when the records show how human and relatable they were. The shopping bag being held by a man standing in the way of a tank.”
Sharpe paused, looking around to check the students were following his reasoning.
“That last is an important point. Much of this applies if, instead of dying, the sacrifice is the running of a risk of dying or similar devastating consequences. When Gandhi''s followers lined up peacefully in front of British troops who hit them in the face with gun butts, when people following Martin Luther King were beaten up or imprisoned, that too was a sacrifice on their part. And it opens up the issue of one last major counter-narrative:”
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It was a bluff. They thought the enemy would stand down, rather than kill them.
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“And that’s a partial truth. Often the person putting their life on the line does hope that it won’t actually reach a point where they die. That’s the difference between a soldier who volunteers for a risky mission but who hopes he can survive it, a martyr who takes an action in sure knowledge that others will kill them for it, and someone like Duc who took his own life in protest.”
“I don’t recommend martyrdom or self-sacrifice as a political strategy. Too often it is ineffective or even backfires. But if you are ever in the position of Tennyson or Browne, present when someone else puts their life on the line for a cause, remember the possible counter-narratives, and make sure you record the evidence you’ll need to construct defences against those counter-narratives in the event that the hero doesn’t survive to defend themselves.”
“Next week I’ll talk in more detail about this history of non-violence, and strategies that are more fun and more effective than killing yourself.”