Month: June 2026

Schadenfreude (n.): the feeling that Australians get listening to Northern Europeans moan because the temperature got above 30 degrees for a few days

We all need to have a few vices in life. One of mine is the pleasure I get every few years or so when there’s a European “heatwave”. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I get to sit back in the mild temperatures of a southern Australian winter and watch the British or Germans take to social media to complain about the heat.

That would be fun enough, but it gets even better when the Americans chime in with the inevitable, “Why don’t you just install air conditioners?” Apparently, air conditioning is an article of faith in the US. Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and a split system in every room of the house. To be deprived of temperature control is the equivalent of a human rights violation. Thomas Jefferson hand built the first ever air conditioner for his home, Monticello, didn’t you know?

In fairness, air conditioning tech was largely developed in the USA, so Americans do have reason for patriotism there. Perhaps that has something to do with why Europeans have come to despise it. For them, air conditioners are apparently the primary cause of global warming. Installing one is akin to murdering your firstborn child.

The issue of European summers has some personal relevance for me. I am genetically endowed with northern European skin. My dermatologist reliably informs me that I have the whitest skin it is possible to have without being an actual albino. That’s not good when you live in Australia. Not only are most parts of the country naturally sunny, but there are far stronger levels of UV than northern Europe.

As a result, it takes my skin only about 15 minutes of exposure to the Australian summer sun before it burns. Sunscreen can alleviate that problem, but it doesn’t prevent sunstroke. My only option is to remain covered when I go outside during the hottest time of the year. Spending a day in the summer sun requires military-grade precision planning: the right clothes, the right hat, water, deodorant, etc. That’s been my life experience with summers ever since I was a kid.

As a young adult, I happened to spend a couple of summers in Northern Europe. What a pleasure it was to realise that I could go outside for several hours without sunscreen and still not get burnt. That was true even when the temperature got into the mid-30s. Moreover, the weaker European sun meant that even the same ambient temperature never felt as hot as it would here in Australia. Suddenly, my genetic endowment was a blessing and not a curse.

All of this explains why I have some personal interest in European “heatwaves”. But this year was a little different because, at the same time as the heatwave and the associated online whining about it, I happened to be reading a short poem by Wordsworth, and I had a mini-epiphany that is relevant to debates around the environment, climate, air conditioners, and all the rest.

Readers will probably know that Wordsworth was the preeminent “nature poet” of the 19th century and one of the central figures in the Romantic movement in art more generally. In many of his poems, Wordsworth explicitly contrasts “nature” against what we might call “civilisation”.

Now, this little word “nature” is fundamental to the entire Western philosophical and intellectual tradition going back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. The ancient Greek word was φύσις or physis (pronounced “foo-sis”). It doesn’t seem to have been a widely used word at all, but it was adopted by the philosophers as a way to account for the fundamental properties of reality. For example, Thales said that water is the fundamental principle of matter.

It might seem obvious that Thales was using water as a metaphor, but no less an intellect than Aristotle took him literally and believed that he really was saying that water was somehow the fundamental principle of life. Since we can’t ask Thales what he really meant, it’s impossible to confirm either way. The same ambiguity holds for Wordsworth. Did he mean we really should “talk to the birds” in order to know what to do, or was he using that as a metaphor for following our instinct?

Whatever the real answer, it is clear that many people have taken Wordsworth literally. In fact, the modern environmentalist movement has been significantly influenced by Romantic art and especially the nature poets. Thus, our current debates about air conditioners are being conducted on intellectual premises that have been around for several hundred years and rest on a dichotomy of nature good/civilisation bad.

There’s a whole series of posts that could be written about the philosophical and scientific developments that led us to this point. For example, it cannot be a coincidence that the worship of nature began at the exact same time that modern physics was born. The word “physics” comes from the Greek word for “nature”. But ancient Greek physics was holistic and integral. By contrast, modern physics is reductionist and analytical.

Modern ideas about nature follows from this schism which has only gotten more pronounced with the continued advance of science and technology. Another way to think about it is that environmentalism and nature worship are irrational in direct opposition to the extreme rationality of modern science.

That is the broad philosophical background to the modern concept of nature. But what occurred to me when reading Wordsworth last week was something more mundane. Wordsworth famously lived in the Lake District of England. It’s a beautiful area. However, just like the rest of England, it is not what we would nowadays call a “wilderness” because it is the product of a very long period of human cultivation. Arguably, there is no wilderness at all in Britain or most of Western Europe.

Thus, for Wordsworth and the other European romantics, nature does not denote wilderness. It refers to a cultivated environment. By definition, a cultivated environment is human-friendly since it is humans who have been doing the cultivating. Therefore, a “return to nature” was not really about abandoning civilisation in general. Rather, it was a return to the pleasant and beautiful cultivated lands of the past.

Why was such a return necessary? Well, it is again no coincidence that nature poetry arose at exactly the same time that industrial capitalism first appeared on the scene. Men like Wordsworth had no direct experience of working in factories or anything like that. They were gentlemen of leisure. But they didn’t like what they saw, and who can blame them? The Lake District is self-evidently more beautiful than the slums of industrial Manchester back in the day.

The point is that the back-to-nature movement in Europe was always really a back-to-feudalism, at least in relation to the literal understanding of nature as the cultivated environment of the past. It arose in direct opposition to industrial capitalism, although, to make matters confusing, Romanticism was also in opposition to the old aristocracy which had formed the political basis of feudalism.

All of this made sense in the context of western Europe. But, at exactly the same time, a very different understanding was driving events in the USA, Canada, Australia, and similar places. The settlers in these regions were confronted with land that they believed to be uncultivated. Their mission was to cultivate it. At least in the United States, that is what mostly happened. For reasons of geography and climate, the mission was not carried out to the same extent in Australia and Canada.

It was only after this long period of cultivation was coming to an end that the concept of “wilderness” started to take hold of the popular imagination. With almost all land now turned to human purposes, leaving some areas untouched by human intervention was seen as desirable. Thus, there arose a subtle but important difference between “nature” and “wilderness”.

One of the defining features of wilderness is that it is a place that is inimical or at least indifferent to human life. To this day, Australia is famous for being a dangerous place filled with deadly creatures, but that is just because we still have huge areas of wilderness. The same is true in Canada and some parts of the US.

Therefore, it’s important to distinguish between the Romantic ideal of the return to nature, which was always primarily a European goal, and the preservation of wilderness which arose in the USA. One of the differences is in the poetry and art. The Romantic poets could write stanzas about listening to the wisdom of the birds, but, as far as I know, nobody has written a poem about the wisdom of bears, red-bellied black snakes, or box jellyfish.

The distinction between nature and wilderness has become largely confused in our time and it’s a good idea to learn how to spot the difference. The main nature or environmental movement (if it can still be called that) follows in the footsteps of Wordsworth and the romantics. It is mostly about ensuring that our lived (cultivated) environment is one that is conducive to human happiness. Often mixed in with it is a fringe movement that actually worships wilderness. Since wilderness is inimical to human happiness, this movement is really anti-human. It is an offshoot of modern nihilism.

The great air conditioner debate of 2026 fits mostly into the former category. Americans insist that aircon is conducive to human happiness. Europeans appear to be still toying with the Romantic idea that a return to feudal “nature” is possible and desirable (especially the Germans). To install air conditioners would be to admit that the “solution” to the problem is technology.

I don’t expect either side to convince the other and, in any case, I’m happy with the status quo. If Europeans installed air conditioners, then we wouldn’t get the pleasure of listening to them whine about the heat, and where would be the fun in that?

Life got in the way. See ya next week.

Supposedly, we live in a capitalist economic system. Most people would not know, however, because it has been conveniently airbrushed out of modern scholarship, that the origins of capitalism were indistinguishable from politics more generally. Indeed, there was no real discipline called economics. It was called political economy and it was more about politics and morality than about solving mathematical problems. The desire to reduce economics to mathematics is a recent one and coincides with the ascendency of a group who don’t want their power questioned on political grounds: the technocracy.

If you go back and read the original capitalist theories, such as those of Adam Smith, you find that economics is talked about in its political dimension. One of the cornerstones of that was that the consumer should have the power. Through their purchasing decisions, consumers guide the economy towards the production of things that people actually want and away from things that people don’t want. This latter fact is the more subtle, but no less important, point. In capitalism, you can punish producers by not buying what they are selling.  

The reason this idea arose in the first place was because, way back in Adam Smith’s day (18th century), the guild system was still in place, and that system gave producers a monopoly, meaning that consumers could not withhold demand since there was nobody else to buy from. As a result, there was no way for the market to punish producers for inferior quality, and the guilds were able to abuse their power by charging higher prices than they otherwise could get away with.

Thus, capitalism had a built-in political angle to it. Consumers must have the power to choose how to spend their money, and they must have the option to withhold it. Only then do producers have to pay attention to what people want, and only then does capitalism work the way it’s supposed to. One of the main jobs of government is to stop the formation of monopolies since these shift the power away from the consumer.

Now, it has to be said that this system is not without its problems. One of the main ones is that positive feedback loops were created during times of recession. People would respond to adverse conditions by tightening their belts, which reduced demand, causing producers to lay people off, causing unemployment, causing further reduced demand, and so on.

This problem was eventually solved through government intervention to smooth out the cycle of boom and bust. In practice, this meant that the government took people’s money through taxation and used it to stabilise the economy. One of the main ways this was done was to create massive bureaucracies in health, education, etc., which had the effect of providing permanent demand since these roles were outside of the business cycle. Since “education” and “health” are assumed to be universal goods, it was hard to argue against these moves.

But there was another factor at play at the time which played a much larger role in getting the public to acquiesce to these measures. It’s hard to believe nowadays, but once upon a time the government had to ask the public for money directly in order to fund things it wanted to do. For example, at the start of WW1, war bonds were sold to raise money for the war effort. Once again, the concept of political power through purchasing decisions is relevant here. You could silently oppose the war through the simple act of not buying war bonds and choosing to spend your money elsewhere.  

More generally, this is how democratic politics operated in the pre-war era. If the government wanted to do something, it had to get money from the public specifically for that purpose. Of course, the money was concentrated in the hands of the rich. But, at least in theory, the power was vested in the public in the same way that economic power was. If you didn’t want something, you just refused to pay for it.

That all changed during WW1 because, once it became clear that the war was not going to be over quickly, governments forced the public to pay through income tax and other measures. When the war was over, those taxes didn’t go away. The exact same dynamic repeated during WW2. The public had been conditioned to a new state of affairs where permanent taxation was considered normal. Nobody in our time even remembers anything different and nobody in a position of power is going to remind us that it did used to be different.

But the biggest innovation was not in the permanence of the taxation but in its frictionlessness and invisibility. The increased sophistication of the accounting and banking systems meant that tax was removed before the taxpayer even saw it. From a psychological perspective, it is a very different thing to have money in your hand and then to be forced to pay some of it in tax than it is to never have the money in the first place. The reason why the job of tax collector has been a dangerous one throughout all of history is because his job was to take away what you already had. The modern taxation system takes the money before you even possess it. It has replaced the tax collector with a system that runs silently and invisibly in the background.

If we come back to the politics of this, what has happened is that a significant chunk of a normal person’s earnings and therefore their purchasing power has been removed and handed over to the government. If you don’t like what the government is spending it on, there is nothing you can do in the short term. Your only option is to wait until election time and vote for a different political party. In practice, however, the decision has become not whether to take the tax but only how to spend it, so, again, the spending decision and the power that comes with it has been taken over by government.

Now, there was a lot of debate at the time all this first started over whether the massive increase in state power was justified and what problems it might cause. Opponents claimed that the state’s monopoly position would lead it to become coercive and unresponsive to citizens’ desires in exactly the same way that an economic monopolist does. Looking around the Western world right now, I think it’s very clear that this criticism has been borne out. Western governments barely even pretend to care what the public thinks anymore. They don’t have to. The tax money will continue to flow anyway.

All that would be bad enough, but there’s another angle to this, and it relates to the aforementioned banking and finance system. It is these systems that allow the government to collect tax in a completely frictionless way, and so it is no surprise to find that the government is all in favour of them. But the banking and finance systems have also morphed into something very different from what they once were.

Once upon a time, you put your money in the bank because hiding it under your mattress came with the risk that somebody might break in to your house and steal it. Nevertheless, the mattress idea was viable because the value of the currency as a whole was stable and you could trust that the purchasing power of the money wouldn’t depreciate significantly. Your decision to save money was the equivalent of withholding spending from the economy because there were strict rules on banks over lending out depositors’ savings. The act of saving was synonymous with the act of not spending. It took money out of circulation.

Fast forward to today, and there is almost no way to take money out of circulation. If you save money, it becomes immediately available to some other group to spend on your behalf. Banks have almost total freedom to loan out your deposit as they see fit. If you put the money in government bonds, the government spends it. If you put it in stocks, companies can leverage that for their own spending and operations. You could, of course, take the money out in cash and hide it under your mattress, but the rate of inflation is such that it will lose purchasing power rapidly.

What has been removed is the ability for any of us to withhold our money from being spent, which was a cornerstone of the political philosophy of capitalism. Now, if you save money, you are inadvertently funding some other economic activity which you may not support and may, in fact, actively oppose. You’ll never know what it is, of course, because the financial system is itself completely frictionless, automatic, and untraceable. All money is funnelled into a giant bucket from where it flows in whatever direction the system wants it to. Power has been taken out of the hands of individuals and handed over to “the system”. The same problem holds for the mandatory retirement plans that most people are forced into nowadays.

We can see that all of this is the exact same problem that Adam Smith described more than two hundred years ago; only the situation is infinitely worse than the medieval guilds. At least the medieval guilds produced goods that people wanted to buy and sold them directly to the customer. We have created a system where the political, corporate, and financial institutions of society have no accountability to anybody. They may do as they please knowing that the money is going to continue to flow in any case.

That leads to the final point to be made. The political philosophy of capitalism said that consumers must be free to make purchasing decisions. Your decision to buy something or not to buy something forced the market to produce something you actually wanted. The fact that you had to sacrifice your money to get a good or service meant that you had skin in the game too.

The incredible thing about the modern system is that it often produces things that are “free”. How many times have you heard a politician say that such-and-such a program will be offered “free” to the public? This is only possible because taxation is automatic and invisible. Only people who have forgotten that they even pay tax can be convinced that they get things for “free”.

But this pattern has also spilled over into the private sector where the industries that run on the invisible money flows of the financial system also now offer products for “free”. That’s why most of the internet is “free”.

All of this is the inversion of the political philosophy of capitalism. Modern consumers don’t just not have the power to withhold their spending on what they don’t want; they are not even asked to buy the things they might want. The system offers for “free” that which was paid for by taking money that should have been yours in the first place.

It’s no coincidence that all of this went in hyperdrive with the collapse of the USSR and the neoliberal agenda of the 90s. That’s also why Western societies have become increasingly delusional over the last few decades. Nothing makes sense because this invisible system produces results that nobody asked for and nobody is responsible for. Money just flows all over the place and produces whatever results it produces.

One of the side effects is that our “elites” of our time have become almost comically detached from reality. In fact, the main job of politicians and the media is increasingly to just make up stories for why things happen which nobody seems to want to happen. The stories change rapidly, and they often contradict each other. This year’s story is the exact opposite of last year’s. There is no story that makes sense because the lower levels of the system have removed responsibility from and accountability at the transactional level.

We have created a society where people are no longer able to exercise the option of doing nothing. To withhold your purchase is a core feature of capitalism because it means you don’t fund that which you do not support. That option has now been almost completely removed. We have created a system which is incapable of doing nothing. Among other things, that’s why technologies that nobody had even heard of five minutes ago like mRNA “vaccines” or LLMs suddenly become world-changing events, at least until the next world-changing event. You almost feel sorry for our elites who are forced to be forever running around chasing the next big thing. They are the headless chickens of history.

One thing I inadvertently ended up doing as part of researching my recent book on Shakespeare was a comparative analysis of the various intellectual frameworks that have been used to interpret literature down through the centuries. What I noticed was that, although the content of the ideological models has changed drastically over the centuries, there is one key property that they all lack, which prevents them from understanding the works of Shakespeare or any other stories of comparable greatness. In order to understand what has been missing, let’s do a lightning summary of the various schools of literary interpretation.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that, during the Renaissance, classical models were dominant. Literature was judged according to Aristotle’s focus on mimesis and catharsis, the Stoic idea of moral instruction, and the Horatian ideal of beauty. However, under the influence of scholastic philosophy, the ancient models were also turned into strict rules that were handed down like the laws of God. Among other things, these rules determined whether a work was a tragedy, a comedy, a pastoral, etc. Just as the schoolmen argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, they had heated debates about whether such and such a work fulfilled the criteria to make it a tragedy, or whatever. Most writers of this era consciously or unconsciously wrote their works to accord with these kinds of “rules”.

It was in the middle of the 18th century that the neoclassical paradigm began to be superseded by a new way of thinking that would eventually be called Romanticism. Strict rationality was abandoned in favour of a focus on passion and emotion. Another prominent feature of Romanticism was a fixation on the author of a work of literature. Thus, the Romantics were always concerned with trying to reverse engineer the author’s intentions from the work itself. Breaking the rules could then be seen as a form of artistic expression and perhaps even a sign of genius, one of the favourite concepts of the Romantics.

The backlash against this excessive focus on the author began in the late 19th century with an intellectual movement that aimed to treat stories as quasi-independent entities. This was the precursor to the idea of a “meme”. The propagator of a meme (its author) is not important. What is important is the content. In relation to stories, this translated into a focus on the plot and thereby facilitated an appreciation for how certain stories evolved over time, seemingly independently of their authors.

At around the same time, psychoanalysis took Romanticism’s fixation on the author and modified it by attempting to reverse engineer not the author’s conscious intentions but his or her unconscious mind. Psychoanalysis also contributed the concept of the archetype to literary studies and was able to trace recurring character patterns in various works spanning different historical periods and cultural backgrounds.

Finally, the 20th century gave us the postmodernist, deconstructionist, and existentialist (hermeneutic) schools, all of which focus on the audience rather than the author. Thus, we have the idea that there is no universal meaning to a work and that people from different backgrounds will have different readings. This is closely related to the Marxist school which had already divided the audience into different categories based on class.

There have been other schools of interpretation, but this brief summary will suffice for our purposes here. We can see that literary interpretation has investigated the author, the audience, the emotional effect on the audience, the morality of the story, the structure of the story, the archetypes of the characters, the existential effect of the story on the reader, the class dynamic, the power structures, the comparative history, and all kinds of other properties. But there is one thing that has been missing from all of these frameworks. Incredibly, none of them bothered to investigate what is the most important part of every story. Every story is about a hero and the transformation that they go through. Without that, there is no story.

There was one thinker in the 20th century who did finally place stories in their correct context. Joseph Campbell coined the invaluable concept of the hero’s journey and noted that every story is about the hero’s transformation. However, because Campbell was investigating “myths”, and doing so within a psychoanalytic paradigm, his work had a quasi-mystical tinge that appealed to the hippie generation but which was all but completely ignored by modern academia.

Still, this failure cannot be attributed to either Campbell or his specific ideas. What our brief historical overview has shown is that thinkers from Aristotle onwards have religiously avoided getting to the heart of what a story is. They have systematically failed to address the main point. That cannot be a coincidence. There has to be something more fundamental going on.

The irony is that every normal person who is uneducated in the fine art of literary interpretation automatically understands stories as a transformation of the hero. To use a modern concept, we approach stories with empathy. It is another irony that German intellectuals had to discover this idea for themselves in the 19th century. The same irony is behind the fact that Harold Bloom said that Shakespeare “invented the human”. Only people removed from normal human intercourse at a young age and initiated into the artificial world of academia could fail to appreciate that this is what everybody does by default. But, again, the Western academic tradition has been ignoring these truths for two millennia.

The much larger issue at stake here goes all the way to the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition beginning with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. From the very first, “truth” has been defined in the abstract. It was not to be found in any specific story, certainly not in an empathetic connection with the hero, but in the abstract principles that governed the story. In the exact same way, you couldn’t derive the “truths” of politics or religion from any specific instance of them. Thus, philosophy, and especially modern science, has been predicated on ignoring specific instances. To care about the hero of a specific story was irrelevant, something best left to the vulgar mob. The job of the intellectual was to focus on the abstract principles.

The influence of this belief was not constrained to the hallowed halls of academia. It structured society in a more general fashion. Prior to Shakespeare, there were two main camps of storytellers. Firstly, there were wandering minstrels, poets, balladeers, and others who travelled around telling stories at fairs and other public events. These people eked out a subsistence living by focusing on entertaining the public. The kinds of stories they told were meant to appeal to the common folk and were suitably bawdy and down to earth as a result.

The second types of stories were those that came from the intellectual and religious institutions of society. The latter were invariably morality tales designed to instil correct thoughts in the lower classes. The former were written according to the “rules” that had been constructed by the schoolmen. Writing those kinds of stories was more like a game to be played than our modern idea of artistic inspiration, which was promulgated by the Romantics. If you didn’t know the rules of the game, you couldn’t appreciate the story.

The uneducated person had very little interest in either of these kinds of stories, because what the uneducated person wants out of a story is the human element. Plus, most people are not generally interested in having condescending moral dogma imposed on them. That didn’t prevent the authorities from jamming the works down everybody’s throat anyway. (Is this starting to sound familiar?)

Shakespeare was born at a time when the old institutional and political arrangements had broken down due to the Reformation. Alongside a mini-economic boom that occurred in England, and London in particular, one of the unanticipated results was that popular art suddenly became a profitable enterprise. Indeed, Shakespeare ended up becoming quite wealthy later in his life due to the commercial success of his plays.

The dynamic that occurred in Elizabethan England was very similar to the music industry of the 1960s and 70s. There was a large paying public creating an excess of demand, and therefore a high price, for great theatre. That was already unusual. What was more unusual was that the public included members of all social classes. That is why Shakespeare’s works could combine elements of both the minstrel tradition of popular storytelling targeted to the common folk and the higher intellectual tradition that came from the learned classes. This is not only true of the content and presentation of the works, Shakespeare shows it directly in the relationships between various characters. Thus, we get combinations such as Prince Hal and Falstaff, Hamlet and the gravedigger, or, in tragic form, Othello and Iago.

Shakespeare himself straddled the schism between the intellectual classes and the general public. He was an educated man, but he spent most of his time in the theatre, which, at that time, was a seedy environment frequented by people of ill repute, again very similar to the rock scene of the 60s and 70s. As a result, Shakespeare never became an intellectual. In fact,  it’s clear that he rejected the stale pretences of the intellectual and moral tradition of the middle ages. One of the ways he did that was to foreground the human element in his stories. Although Shakespeare deals with the highest questions of human existence, he does so through his characters rather than through artificial intellectual conventions.

One of the results of this is that the only way to understand Shakespeare is by understanding his characters as human beings, and that is why the various intellectual traditions of Western culture have all failed to get to the core meanings of his work. It doesn’t matter whether the ideology is neoclassical, romantic, Marxist, deconstructionist, postmodernist, or whatever, the result is always the same. This follows because Shakespeare was not just objecting to the specific details of any ideology, he was objecting to ideology in general.

All of this is directly relevant to the time in which we live because Western culture continues to churn out ideological-intellectual frameworks. Indeed, with the massive expansion of academia in the post-war years, we are producing such drivel at an unprecedented rate. The only redeeming feature of it all is that nobody reads it.

Meanwhile, the “elite” class of society is still populated by the same kind of moral wowsers that were around in Shakespeare’s time. In fact, the Puritan movement arose in the 16th century as a reaction against the breakdown of the old institutions. The early Puritans managed to shut down some of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime. Later, when they came to power following the British Civil War, they actually had the Globe Theatre in London demolished. No doubt, they would have burned all the copies of Shakespeare’s work if they’d had the chance.

Thus, there is something more at stake here than simple intellectual disagreement. The Puritans and the intellectuals both hated Shakespeare. They hated the human element in his work, exactly the element that had been deliberately excluded from Western “high culture”.

The exact same dynamic is present in our time. Of course, the neo-Puritans that are churned out in industrial quantities by modern universities can’t have the Globe Theatre pulled down anymore. But they can ensure that Shakespeare’s works are “reinterpreted” according to whatever ideology is currently fashionable. In fact, I’d say for such people it is a psychic necessity to do so lest they have to actually confront what Shakespeare wanted to show us, namely, humanity.    

One of the things that Shakespeare does in almost all of his works is to set up a comparison point for the hero(es) of the story. Sometimes, this is a friend, as in Macbeth vs Banquo or King Lear vs Gloucester. Most of the time, they are an antagonist. Thus, we get Othello vs Iago, Hamlet vs Laertes, or Romeo vs Tybalt. In Henry IV, the comparison point is between Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, the two young men who will eventually meet on the battlefield at the end of the play. But this is part of a larger familial comparison since the king is going to war also against Hotspur’s father, the Earl of Northumberland. We can represent this as follows with the top row being the father and the bottom the son and heir:-

That’s the way it should be, but we know by now that it is not the way it is because Hal is not fulfilling his duties as either son or prince. Meanwhile, it is Harry Hotspur who is making waves by running amok in the north, conquering everything in his path. His deeds earn him the grudging respect of the king who laments the fact that his own son is not doing likewise. There is an irony here. Henry IV’s kingdom and his own life are under threat from the very man that he admires. Meanwhile, his eldest son, who is not causing trouble to anybody, is the one who is supposedly in the wrong.

Prince Hal is the odd one out because he has detached himself from the mentality that the other men assume, which is that the pursuit of honour on the battlefield is the sole good in life. Hal is, at the very least, exploring other possibilities. He has a mentor in that respect, and this gives us the classic Orphan-Elder relationship that appears in so many stories and which I have written about extensively in the past. Falstaff is the older man who has initiated Hal into the wrong side of the tracks known as “Eastcheap”, which was a real street in London that, in Shakespeare’s day, was the place to go if you wanted to have some fun.

(Fun etymological note: the word “cheap” used to mean “market” in English. Thus, Eastcheap was the east market. The word “cheap” is related to the German “kaufen”, meaning “to buy”).

A better way to think of the comparison that Shakespeare sets up in the story is that we have a three-way split. Hal has separated from his father and is receiving an initiation into wine, women, and song from Falstaff. Due to his recalcitrance, he has been kicked out of the royal council and his place taken by his younger brother, John of Lancaster:-

Recall that the main body of every story features a hero who enters the sacred state where their identity is un-whole, unholy, and unhealthy. The state of affairs we have described counts as sacred for several reasons. Firstly, Hal is estranged from his father and his family more generally. Secondly, he is engaging in immoral and illegal behaviour. Thirdly, his absence violates the rule of primogeniture whereby the inheritance of the father must be passed to the eldest son. His younger brother has stepped in to fill the void, but this cannot be a permanent state of affairs.

As discussed last week, the sacred state of affairs is easily rectified in the story since Hal simply rejoins his father at the start of Act 3 when the war breaks out between the king and the rebels, led by Harry Hotspur. This would be a violation of the “rules” of storytelling because the middle part of any story is supposed to be the sacred state, but what we see instead is really the holy state of a dutiful prince helping the king to win a war. But it turns out that the story is not really about Hal and his father, but something very different.

Shakespeare gives us a very different sacred state by having Hal do something wacky. Once the war breaks out, the young prince make Falstaff an officer in the army and gives him a contingent of troops to lead. Into the middle of a warzone, Shakespeare inserts the classic pleasure-loving Fool character who had been a stock figure in comedies since ancient times. He sets up a possible confrontation between a drunk, womanising criminal and the gallant but overzealous Harry Hotspur. Shakespeare is exploring what can be thought of as two parts of Hal’s identity or two models that Hal has for living. On one side is the Warrior. One the other side is the Fool.

All of this is fitting because Henry IV is a comedy and it is funny to watch Falstaff find various ways to weasel out of the fighting. But the larger theme of the story is not just a personal one in relation to Prince Hal but a matter of culture. Shakespeare calls into question an assumption that had dominated since ancient times which is that society should be organised around an ethic of military valour. The question is: does such an ethic create the need for bloody battles even in situations where there is no real reason for it. The king has offered an olive branch to the rebels but they reject it because, for them, the only way to resolve disagreements is by killing each other.

Harry Hotspur is the character who most personifies this mentality and so let’s take a moment to sketch out his journey using our now familiar three questions. 1) What is Hotspur’s starting holy state? 2) What is the sacrifice he makes to begin the transformation? 3) What may he get out of the transformation?

The answer to the first question lies in the story that precedes Henry IV in the four-play sequence that is called the “Henriad”: Richard II. As we alluded to a couple of posts ago, the main problem for Richard was that he failed to beget a son and heir, and this opened up the problem of succession for his reign. However, he is also portrayed as a weak and indecisive king who commits an injustice against his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke leads a rebellion against Richard that includes Harry Hotspur as an ally. Although his role is small in the story, Hotspur is therefore a fighter on the side of justice alongside his father. Both are allies of the future king Henry IV. This is the holy state for Hotspur.

Another relevant detail that is introduced in Henry IV is that Hotspur is married. When we bear in mind that the nation has been at peace for some time when the story begins, we might expect a young man in Hotspur’s position would settle down and have a family. Instead, what Shakespeare shows us is that Hotspur seems addicted to the thrill of battle and the honour that it wins him. The one person who doesn’t care about any of this is his wife, Kate. She complains that she never sees him, and there is a scene before the rebels commit themselves to the war where Hotspur, Mortimer and their wives enjoy a moment of domestic tenderness that doesn’t last because the young man is too eager to get into the fighting.

Shakespeare makes it clear that not only is Hotspur’s addiction to war damaging to the nation, it is damaging to his own family. Here is a man who does not know how to enjoy the finer things in life. He is always dreaming of the next battle. Since war is a sacred state, we might say that Hotspur is addicted to the sacred and cannot abide the holy state of peace. He sacrifices peace for war. That is the answer to our second question.

Our third question is, ‘What does he hope to gain from this battle?’ In truth, he has very little to gain in economic or political terms. He has some legitimate grievances against the king, but these could be easily resolved without recourse to fighting. We are led to the conclusion that Hotspur simply likes fighting for its own sake and invents whatever justifications lead to that outcome. Thus, the main thing he stands to gain is one more victory to bolster his reputation as a fearsome warrior. But he already has that reputation and one more battle isn’t going to make that much difference. Therefore, Hotspur has little to gain and everything to lose.

Hotspur is addicted to honour. Honour is the exoteric, outward-facing aspect of identity. There is nothing wrong with honour as long as it corresponds to real virtue. While Hotspur was supporting Henry Bolingbroke in a just war, his honour was deserved. However, the fighting he has been engaging in recently is based on far more spurious grounds. While it is true that he has won battles based on his obvious merits as a warrior, the question is whether those battles are themselves just. If not, are they really deserving of honour?

Hotspur’s endless striving for more honour is explicitly contrasted against the behaviour of Prince Hal at the start of the play and especially his mentor Falstaff, who is a man that is completely without honour, being a fat, ugly, petty criminal who hangs around in a bad part of town. In any other circumstances, a man like Hotspur would be judged infinitely superior to Falstaff. He is courageous, skilful, and passionate. But, as we have already alluded to, it is Hotspur who instigates a civil war which could easily have been avoided. The kingdom has been at peace, and Hotspur simply does not know what to do with himself.

Hotspur represents out-of-control ambition which seeks honour for its own sake rather than as subservient to higher principles like truth, justice, and pragmatism. In a time of peace, Hotspur insists on war. Meanwhile, Prince Hal and Falstaff are making use of the relaxed conditions to have themselves a good time, something which Hotspur seems physiologically incapable of doing.

Of course, Falstaff is no better. He is physiologically incapable of courage, discipline, and truthfulness. Shakespeare presents us with two men whose characters exhibit opposing vices. Virtue lies at the midpoint between them, and the man who sits at the midpoint is Prince Hal himself. During the peace at the start of the story, Hal hangs around with Falstaff having a good time. When war breaks out, he takes up his place at the head of the army and shows courage, valour, and skill equal to Hotspur. Hal is able to adapt to the circumstances, something which neither Hotspur nor Falstaff can achieve.

Although it is true to say that Hotspur and Falstaff are just as bad as each other, it is also true that Shakespeare does give the advantage to the Fool. There is a very good reason for that. Classical literature from ancient times all the way through the Renaissance had foregrounded heroes like Harry Hotspur. Indeed, in the ancient world, winning honour in battle was the only game in town. The same was true of the medieval world, and this led to certain dysfunctions that Shakespeare must have been aware of because he builds them into the core of the plot of Henry IV.

Prince Hal is the eldest son and, according to the rules of primogeniture, the sole heir. Families in this era had many children to make up for the high rate of infant mortality. This was especially true among the aristocracy who had the wealth to afford it. If the entire inheritance goes to the eldest son, while the daughters get married off with a dowry, what happens to the other sons? Well, for aristocratic sons in the medieval world, there was only one real option open to them, and that was to become a knight. Thus, the only option to accrue some kind of honour was to fight in battle.

Many of the younger sons of the aristocracy took this path, but it was also the case that many chose instead the exact path represented by Falstaff, i.e., crime and debauchery. The Middle Ages had a real problem with wayward younger sons of the aristocracy causing trouble. Thus, Shakespeare’s dichotomy between Falstaff and Hotspur doesn’t just work at the personal level but also at the societal.

Once we understand that, we understand another subtly of the story which is that the Bard flips the standard roles around and make the eldest son, Prince Hal, the one who engages in crime and debauchery while the younger brother, John of Lancaster, becomes the dutiful child to his father. This gives John an opportunity to win himself honour without having to leave the family, something that was denied to the younger sons in medieval times. Meanwhile, Prince Hal gets to have some fun, which was exactly what was denied to eldest sons. The result is a royal family that becomes more balanced and well-rounded by the end of the story.

The future King Hal has therefore learned something that his father is ignorant of. He has learned that the pleasures of life have their own place and should be pursued for their own sake. He has also learned that the endless striving for honour is not a good in itself. King Henry is aware of the problems caused by ambition but his solution is to try and start a war externally so that the aggression of men like Harry Hotspur is turned outwards rather than inwards. The future King Hal will have one more potential solution to that problem, which is to encourage his subjects to simply enjoy themselves.

However, it is not Hal but his Elder, Falstaff, who Shakespeare has make these points in his soliloquies in the final act of the play. Included here is the classic line “Discretion is the better part of honour”, meaning that ambition and valour are not goods in themselves but must be tempered by the pragmatism which Hotspur lacks.

But Falstaff asks an even more philosophical question: “What is honour?” He answers, “A word. What is that word honour? Air.” Honour is nothing more than the idea which other people have of you. Chasing honour therefore implies placing your self-esteem in the hands of others. That is one problem.

A second problem is that, because honour is nothing more than the opinion others have about you, it is easily tarnished by those with ulterior motives. As Falstaff notes, “Detraction will not suffer it.” The trouble with honour is that it is far too easily destroyed by slander. Thus, the pursuit of honour for its own sake is flawed because honour is too easily taken away.

As we alluded to a couple of posts ago, the royal court in the time of Shakespeare attempted to uphold the honour of the royal family by way of laws and various measures to protect against slander. But, of course, the royal court also conducted extensive propaganda, such as the fictitious story of Henry V. That is a third problem with honour. By the same process by which the bad money drives out the good, propaganda drives out truth. Honour loses value by a process almost identical to monetary inflation.

Therefore, Falstaff represents Shakespeare’s solution to the problem of honour. In a world where people are going to slander you anyway, you might as well pursue your own happiness and pay no attention to what they say. That lesson could not be more applicable than it is in our time, where the internet has made lies and slander as easy as a mouse click . You can laugh about it with Falstaff, or you can cry like Harry Hotspur.