Why Has No One Seen The Green Knight?
A review of an underwatched film
I had originally planned to write a post about Europe for this month, but instead I wrote a review for The Green Knight. Oops! Post contains spoilers for The Green Knight. But, let’s be honest, you weren’t planning to watch it before reading this, were you?
Have you ever wondered what honor was? What it meant? Why people could possibly choose to die for it?
The Martian is a book about a snarky scientist stranded on Mars and the mission to bring him home. The world of The Martian is the world of astronauts and applied science — that is to say, a cruel, capricious, sharp world that can punish you in more ways than could fit into one billion editions of Nature. At one point, NASA engineers attempt to send food in the form of nutritional bricks to Dr. Mark Watney, the aforementioned involuntarily-martian scientist. It’s a rush order. The engineers do all their engineering magic, poring over the weight, payload, etc.1 of the vessel and cargo. Normally, they would never approve something on such short notice but, begrudgingly, they send out their schematics with a strikingly confident (to a layperson) expected success rate — somewhere in the high 90%s.
Now, here’s a thought: what happens to nutritional bricks when they get to exit velocity-level speeds? It turns out, the book goes on to explain, that they compress and turn near-liquid. Without the firm structure of a solid, a small jolt can push a liquid into a different shape — and liftoff is full of small jolts. A different shape means a different weight distribution and a different weight distribution means a catastrophic failure.
For all the values the engineers planned out, I’m sure their math was impeccable. Yet once in a while, we all must be reminded that the world is an inhospitable place for even the best laid plans of mice and men. There are so many different ways of things going wrong — so many different modes of failure.2 On our side, we have our guesses, our reasons, our theories — each a portable compression of our experience, a way to move knowledge from the past to the future. On the other, a maelstrom. So we try! And the process of discovery has been nothing more than the continual discovery of failure modes and their preemptions. What a miracle these preemptions are! Solutions are the lifeblood of humanity. Yet problems precede solutions, and problems are more numerous than the stars.
Learning by Doing (Good)
Is ethics any different? We don’t usually think of it as an iterative science, but, I mean? Kind of? As in…
People destroy their life and others’ through shortsighted hedonism; self-discipline (to at least such an extent) is necessary for an ethical life. People are sanctioned for beliefs which later turn out to be right; tolerance is a virtue. Individuals and communities can destroy themselves through cycles of provocation and recrimination; forgiveness and forbearance are morally good. Perhaps these stories don’t get at the whole of these complicated moral notions, but consider the inverse: if people could be at complete ease with one another and themselves, without all the mistakes and temptations and conflicts, would we have any need for such notions? Or would the good simply be what we were? I ask: does the universe have a name for gravity?
Beyond ivory towers and leather armchairs, moral notions and sanctions are coined to guard against moral failures. We have on the one hand moral notions bubbling up from frank attempts at living and on the other moral theories attempting to explicate that of which morality actually consists. They are different. Related, in some fashion or another, but different. The point is this: moral ideas do not spring, unbidden, from the “moral notions” compartment of our mind. They are solutions to failure modes — attempts to bring together, at varying levels of specificity and abstraction, all the different ways we can be bad at being, well, good.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can be read in part as a taxonomy of these moral notions.3 Most of the text is some form of “too much X is bad because it becomes Y; not enough X is bad because it becomes Z. So the important thing is to balance the amount of X so that you are able to respond to each circumstance in the right way.”4 The twist for Aristotle is that he then says “hold up, I bet you noticed that I keep framing the right thing as being between two wrong extremes. What if that’s the real rule of good living?” And that is, extremely roughly, how we get Aristotle’s definition of virtue as the golden mean — a calibration of a sort of practical wisdom (phrónēsis, in the Greek) based on moderation and balance.
Due to the largely taxonomical nature of much of Nicomachean Ethics, there is a sense in which the real exercise left to the reader is to train your judgment (or practical wisdom) to know the boundaries between X, Y, and Z. The goal is not, really, that you come to understand a set of easily-applicable rules, but to grasp the gestalt of a situation and react accordingly, always as X (but not Y or Z) would prescribe. Moreover, one ought to love virtue, to enjoy and live for it. For Aristotle, the virtuous are not those who can read all the rules and follow them. After all, what rules could truly apply to the rude complexity of moral quandary? Rather, the virtuous are those whose whole self is aligned with the good.
Zoom out a bit more and, discarding for a moment whether Aristotle is factually right, you can see his whole theory of ethics as a moral notion. Enjoying doing the right thing, indeed loving it, is an incredibly effective way to do the right thing more often, and complexity is often the order of the day when it comes to our interpersonal interactions. Contrast this with the main concern of, say, deontological ethics, which is organized around notions of rights and duties. Rights and duties are absolute, and though it may be helpful to enjoy the idea of doing your duty, that is not the primary goal. The goal of deontological ethics is action in alignment with duty, whether you enjoy it or not. In virtue, the goal is a self in alignment with the virtues, so that you find doing the good natural and clear.
Here is a situation where the virtues are more clearly important:
I am the adult child of an alcoholic mother, and now I am a mother myself. I love my mom, and we have a very close (albeit tumultuous at times) relationship. My upbringing wasn’t by any means all bad. My family was incredibly dysfunctional and maybe a little toxic, but also loving and supportive in our own weird way.
Still, my life has been defined, influenced, and certainly scarred by my mother’s drinking, behavior, and mental-health issues—denial being chief among them. In my late 20s, I gave up trying to help her and went about the business of breaking out of the chains and cycles of my family. Distancing myself from my mother and family was heart-wrenching, but I am living a healthy, positive, and deeply fulfilling life because of what I did.
I am now 43 years old with a 3-year-old daughter, and we live a few thousand miles away from my family. I own my home and work full-time, and I’m a single mom by choice. Life is wonderful, except for the fact that my mother, now 72, is deteriorating both mentally and physically. Her living situation is awful. She’s something of a hoarder, her house is dilapidated and dirty, and her drinking has begun to take a toll on her health in myriad ways. Recently, while highly intoxicated, she fell down the stairs in her home.
She has been asking me for years to move home, and I’ve always been very clear that I would not. But now I am so conflicted. I feel this tremendous guilt for no longer taking care of my mother. I know she needs me. But when I had my daughter, I made a promise to her, and to myself, that she would never grow up in the chaos that I did. I want to protect her from that. I don’t want her to see her grandmother like this either. But am I just sentencing her to a different type of damage? The damage of teaching her to walk away from family in their time of need, and of denying her a relationship with a grandma who, despite being deeply flawed, loves her? I don’t want that for her either.
I just don’t know what to do. For me, when it comes to my mom, the damage is long done. But my daughter has a clean slate. How can I protect her without also harming her in the process?
How does one navigate such a situation? Here, the question is knowing what action is right, of balancing all the complexity of human foibles and competing obligations on your head.
Here is a situation where rights and duties are more clearly important:
A man will be hanged if you lie, but the only way to tell the truth is to admit to behavior which will result in serious social consequences for you.5
Here, it is nigh impossible to love the action you know is right, yet at the same time it is so clear that to speak the truth is what is required of you. No clarity required, and no virtuous alignment in your bones. It is not good living; it is necessity — it is your duty.
Humans are fallible creatures who need, from the start, guidance in just about everything. But above all, perhaps, we need guidance in all the failure modes we will encounter dealing with the most complicated things in the world — other humans. Doing wrong can be easy but shortsighted, doing good unclear but fulfilling — the notion of virtues can be helpful. Doing wrong can also be alluring, doing good obvious yet painful — the notion of duties can be helpful. Prior to any critical probing, these notions bubble up because they are useful.
Even if you do not believe in a moral notion as a true description of reality, you can believe it as an artifact of human life. You can read moral notions ‘backwards’,6 taking them as reflections of our myriad fallibilities more than as descriptions of ethical truth. And sometimes, being touched by a moral notion, getting a feel for the failure mode someone so long ago attempted a solution to, can be far more instructive than 500 pages of right-thinking moral theory.
The Metaphysics of Honor
Moral philosophers don’t really talk about honor. But it’s a really interesting moral notion. Like deontology, it is focused on actions and the reasons behind them, and not their consequences. Like virtue, honor is something you have, not something you do. Honor has connotations of pride, of fairness, and of respect. Honor is deeply related to promises and rules (like deontology), but also related to spontaneous generosity and supererogatory, heroic acts. One stakes promises on honor; some of the most damage you can do is not pay your debts. Honor, in one sense, is and expression of the moral glue between the past and present.
The most interesting part of honor as a moral notion is its metaphysics: honor is something you can lose. Honor is something that can be staked on promises and such, something almost wagered against your future actions. Honor is, far more than other moral notions, an imaginary thing. Honor, for the knight — its most classic adherent — is something you would rather die than lose. Virtues you learn, duty you follow, and honor you protect.
But, as we discussed, a moral notion is fine and all on its own — it can be quite the thing to behold — but our question should always be where it grips reality? Moral notions are an attempt to navigate all those strange, tragic, beautiful little combustions between human nature and the world. To what direction does honor point? A moral notion begins its life as a cautionary tale. For honor, The Green Knight is such a cautionary tale.
Honor and The Green Knight
A meeting of Arthurian knights is interrupted by the Green Knight, who proclaims that anyone can attack him and win his axe, but must meet him in one year and take the same blow from him. Gawain, needing to show his excellence as a nephew of King Arthur, to etch his name into the round table, to prove his worthiness, boldly steps up to the Green Knight and decapitates him. After a moment of silence, the Green Knight begins laughing, picks up his head, and tells Gawain to meet him one year hence, on Christmas Day.
Gawain appreciates his new fame, not considering until late in the year that he will, in fact, need to hold up his end of the bargain. Yet he misunderstood, didn’t he? He was young, overeager, unwise. Must he really, in a year, pay such a price for such a fool’s deeds? He is, of course, honor-bound. And what is a knight without his honor? Is Gawain willing to find out? Is he willing to die so he never has to? He sets out for his rendezvous with the Green Knight.
It would be terribly silly to die for this, to choose to die not because you do not want to live but because of the rules of some wager. And what pressures a knight must endure! Make a story to tell of himself? Why can he not just live! Why should he die for nothing when he could die defending something important, something real, far more real than the rules of some wager? A wager is nothing, it is wind, vibrations in the air long dissipated into the background noise of the world.
Gawain journeys long, alone. He meets various strange characters whose vignettes are, I’m sure, loaded with symbolic significance. Another review would say something quite interesting about them. But I would rather not give too much away that you leave this review considering watching this movie even less than you came in. Gawain finds the Green Knight, waiting for him to wake. The Green Knight wakes. Gawain lowers his head. The Green Knight begins to lower his axe. Gawain flinches. The Green Knight stops.
He could simply leave. In his journey here he has been swindled, tempted, beaten, and mistreated. And what? He will die? For what? For whom? For swindlers? For temptresses? For bullies? Absurd. In fact, he has a belt that he has been promised will ensure he take no harm so long as he wears it. He needn’t even cheat the rules! He might keep the belt, take the blow, and stand laughing, just as the Green Knight had! And what would that be? Not retaining his honor? Not keeping his word? Or, at least, the letter of it? Who could argue that? And yet…
A vision: Gawain leaves the Green Knight. He lives. He has a child with his lowborn love. He takes his child, leaves his love, marries a noblewomen. His uncle dies. He watches his child grow. He becomes king. What king? His child dies in battle. His kingdom is embattled. He is mistrusted. His family leaves him. He is alone, in a king’s robes, in a dusty room. His castle is raided. Just before he is killed by invading knights, he takes off his green belt and his head falls from his shoulders.
Certainly, he could run, but what to? What is a life without his honor? A lie — if not in letter then certainly in spirit. And which is more important to life? Letter, or spirit? A false letter is the task of an eraser; a false spirit is a plague. Relationships are promises — one who cannot keep a promise is ever more lonely for all the allies they draw to them with their dewy, facile words. Find a way around your oaths and you are left shackled to nothing, to no one. Every word whispered between lovers, every joke cracked amongst friends, every dear nag or rebuke or rebuttal — every touching of souls you have ever experienced has been nothing but the same oath told over and over again: we are bound together; I will not forsake you, and you will not forsake me. My word, the saying goes, is my bond. Forsake your word and you forsake your love, your kin, your hope. A slide from decency is a terrible thing, all the more terrible for how manageable each individual indignity is in its own time. So again, please, tell me to what he could leave.
Death or Ruin
Honor is, above all, about keeping one’s word, and the precarity of that position. Losing one’s virtue is a continuous process — a slow glide from excellence. Losing one’s honor is a fall from grace — sharp, discrete, complete. Attempting to un-break one’s word is like trying to put feathers back into a pillow. More than that, honor is about the importance to oneself of retaining one’s dignity. Even if you owe the world nothing, even if you have been swindled, beaten, taken advantage of, or oppressed, doing wrong to others is an injury to yourself as well as them. There is a certain pride, a certain transcendence in honor. There is a belief that something matters more to us than our petty advantages and interests. That comes close, it seems to me, to a belief in the possibility of love. Lose that, and you find yourself in a troubled place.
There is so much to be wrought out of The Green Knight. Its beautiful landscapes, soulful performances, and compelling writing all pull you deep into the heart of Gawain’s quest. For all its touches of magic and mysticism, it is the otherworldliness of its human characters which most pulls it out of our time. It’s a wonderful example of that lovely genre of stories which feel realer for all their unreality. It is not a perfect movie, but for how good it is, I am surprised to have never had my question “have you seen The Green Knight?” answered in the affirmative.
Perhaps honor is not of our moment; perhaps it is something of an anachronism. Its irrational sentimentality, its earnest pride, its whiff of chauvinism — each estranges it from a reasonable, fashionable, modern sensibility. Yet nothing in humanity is new under the sun. Every generation’s struggles are nothing but another’s played on new instruments. Honor was never merely the plaything of Europeans with funny names and long titles; even when, in the trenches of WW1, it found itself abused as a cattle prod sending young men to the slaughterhouse, it did not die. Honor is part of our common inheritance, and no perversions or fashions will remove it therefrom. It is almost exactly when a moral notion feels anachronistic that to be touched by it is most valuable.
Why could one choose to die for honor? Because life without honor is poisoned, false, lonesome. To watch The Green Knight is to be touched by honor.
“Honor — that is why a knight does what he does.”
I am not an engineer.
The fact of these unconsiderables, roughly, seems to be a main idea of The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.
I went to a lecture on virtue ethics once, and the professor gave a striking question: “how many virtues, since the day of Aristotle, have we discovered?” His answer was one: tolerance. I’m less sure than he of this, in part because the boundaries of the term “virtue” seem somewhat fuzzy to me. Provocative, nonetheless.
E.g. too much courage is recklessness, not enough is cowardice.
You may notice that this situation is far less textured and far more concise than the first. Of course it is. The failure mode that deontology is most related to is one where it is clear what the situation needs, but that is at odds with what you desire. The more texture, the more complexity that is necessary to fully understand a situation, the more likely you are outside the home of deontology. The best artistic expression of this failure mode in morality is Albert Camus’s The Plague — in a plague, it is so obvious what is necessary. But what will you do? Or, as Camus notes:
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
I take this verbiage from a blog post about the history of philosophy. Though my use is not quite the same, it certainly bears some family resemblances. Though perhaps a better connection is to the notion of bravery debates, as moral notions talk past each other due to presuming that they are prescribing different solutions to the same problem, when more often they are prescribing the same Solution to different problems.