THE LONG DEFEAT AND ITS FORMS

Hello all! Bouncing around again, but this topic has relevance to things like Conan and Freddy Nietzsche and Tolkien and GK Chesterton; and Batman. And Byzantium!

So what’s the Long Defeat? You’ll hear about it in literary criticism (that’s what this blog is turning into at any rate), and I’ve heard it enough times to where I think I need to organize its different examples. Like with terms such as “The Renaissance” and “Romanticism”, the Long Defeat is as much as a collection of broad examples as it is a specific thing. Got that? BUT that is what I must insist you keep in mind—don’t view the Long Defeat(s) as literal truth. If the Long Defeat is literal truth in any of its forms, we’re screwed, and yet if true, no one has figured out how to alter the mechanisms of it?

…What is the Long Defeat? It is about death and decay, the running out of momentum, energy, pizzazz. It is not about dying—dying is just premature death. Rather, it is about Time, the separation of moments. Nor is the Long Defeat necessarily about cause-and-effect, but instead is running out of the ability to cause effects. You can even say that it is about getting old, but the Long Defeat does not celebrate wisdom or a fulfilled, complete life, ready to pass into the next adventure. The Long Defeat is a sullen beast, that hates change and endings. In some cases, the Long Defeat happens because mortality is not respected.

Who started it? I believe Tolkien coined the term in his non-fiction essays and letters. For Tolkien, the Long Defeat is the infinite lessening of the good. It is not a linear process. For Tolkien, it is like walking down a flight of wide, broad stairs. You step down one, the next is broad and seems okay; you step down another, go lower, but this stair is a wide and broad as the next. Step another—you’re still lower, but the step is still broad and wide. Each step is worse than the last, but you lose all sense of difference between the steps. When does the weakening ever end?

Mythologically, the Progression of the Worse is common enough. The Greeks had the myth of the Five Ages of Man, as written by Hesiod. Short version: Gold men of the first age were superheroes who had it easy all the time, the Silver men after them were kinda meh in comparison but were still superheroes; the Bronze men after them were thuggish, coarse cavemen but still were superhuman; the Hero men was the age of the classic Greek demi-gods (Hercules and Achilles and co.), and the Iron men are the ordinary, mean, weak shlubs of normal humans like you or me. (Some versions may have the Stone men come after us, who would be dumb-as-rocks ape creatures who were barely above the animals.)

For Tolkien and Christians, the Progression of the Worse was related to the Fall of Man. People forget that the Bible talks about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and those descended from Cain. In the story after Cain, humans become progressively worse and more disconnected from God, becoming more and more wicked and more incapable of being good. The idea was even around in the time of the early Church, around the 200s AD. In this century, Christian monasticism was being organized, and from the beginning, the early monks realized there would be a degeneration even among their spiritual brotherhood. Why? Partly related to the doctrine of the Fall, partly due to environmental factors. No, it wasn’t from pollution, the first Christian monks built the first monasteries in the deep deserts, away from the cities!

Related to the Fall, it was for the monks an accepted fact that man, a creature of God, is separated from Him, and as man continues in his separation he becomes less and less good. The other factor—actually it is about pollution! The pollution of sinfulness. In Christian teaching, choosing sinfulness lessens your ability to choose goodness. Now, multiply that, on a mass scale, or even go to the small-scale nation of Israel, who is consistently called a stubborn, stiff-necked, obstinate people. They refuse to be good and obedient to God, which makes it harder for Israel to be holy and obedient later on in time. Another factor is the lack of heroism. How can you be good unless you are tested? If there are no monsters to fight, no wicked to resist, how can you be tested? And yet, if you don’t practice your heroics, you won’t be a hero in the time that evil rears its ugly head. It is a vicious cycle, where bad choices and a lack of practice lead to a decrease in virtue. For those early monks, they predicted that at some point, even holding onto simple Christian beliefs and saying simple prayers will become so difficult that even saying “I love Jesus” will be considered a heroically virtuous act!

For Tolkien, too, there was another factor in the Long Defeat—pride. In Tolkien and elsewhere, a people or hero is doomed because of an act of pride. Namely, they reached for too much. They wanted something they were told they could not have. It is very understandable to crazy people like you or me, but for the people Tolkien had in mind, they had no excuse. They had met and talked to God and angels, were given a splendid paradise, and possessed many gifts that no one else had—and they threw it all away. I speak, of course, of the people of ancient Numenor, who wanted their long lives to be even longer, and turned to the worship of devils and human sacrifice to get it. They had their nation flooded, Atlantis-style, for their punishment.

What of the flip side? Of nations and people who are not threatened by evil, and who do not over-reach? Here I turn to G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), that jolly Prince of Paradox. (His book, The Everlasting Man, converted C.S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity.) For Chesterton, the Long Defeat is not necessarily from an act of pride, but from despair. Chesterton lived at the height of the Victorian Age, when little England was a superpower who conquered the world. There were no threats nor a lack of prosperity in Chesterton’s time; for England, wars were easy, and the whole continent of Europe was second-place compared to England. This was nothing new—every Empire from Rome to China to the Ottomans gets to where they are untouchable and have accomplished everything.

It's here, at this height, where Chesterton notices that people then begin to say ‘Is that all?’ So says Chesterton “Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.” (These and other quotes coming from The Everlasting Man.) People don’t know what to do with their lives when they have everything, or when everything that can be done has been done, and done perfectly! The best that people can do at such a height, is, to merely maintain the high height. There is no longer an up or a down, there is only a flat plateau. And people, get tired. Life becomes dull, monotonous; high-living day in and out. There’s nothing to fight anymore, nothing more to earn. ‘We might almost say’ goes Chesterton, ‘that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline’—that is, the good things have worn themselves out. The blessings that motivated people ‘refuse to bless’.

So what do the people then do? They give up. Not immediately. They give up, a little bit each day. Give up the effort. Give up the things that gave them meaning. They even give up on sacrifice, that small act of having a hard day today to have a better day tomorrow. They give up on doing the hard things—the things which make them a badass—for the easy things, or for nothing-at-all. External reward no longer keeps them going—they already have everything. Do they have an inner drive to keep going? If they keep going ‘for the sake of going’, they’ll go insane. You know, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result? Something different, something better? …Do they have a purpose anymore? Beyond, just, existing?

Doesn’t this happen to all cultures? Didn’t I imply it? Well, now we’re moving to a historical model. Like with scientific models, take the Long Defeat as a historical model with a lot of salt. Everyone tries to solve the riddle and patterns of history! Don’t because you’ll end up a fool of history. You see with cultures, empires, the Long Defeat isn’t necessarily an instant or direct collapse. Sometimes a culture bounces back from the brink, but less than before. I bring up Byzantium, the other Romans people forget. The Byzantine empire almost died five times over, and finally died on the sixth time in 1453.

Like an accordion, its territories stretched and shrunk, stretched and shrunk, from the reign of Constantine the First in 306 to the last in 1453 with Constantine the Eleventh! Constantine, the first one, and his sons started the Empire, and the fools after him almost lost it, only for Leo to save it in 457 and then his successors almost lost it to the Persians; then Justinian brought it to its highest height under his reign (527-565); then Heraclius (602-608) saved the Empire after Justinian’s inept successors, then Constantine IV against the Muslim Arabs, then Leo III in (717-741) against the Persians, then Romanos I in 920 and Basil II in 976 against the Bulgarian barbarians…and that’s just the first half of the timeline! Every 100 to 150 years, the Byzantine empire was on the brink because of its own stupidity/laziness, and a man of great talent brought it back. The man in question didn’t have to be a great general, either—Justinian was a politician through and through, and never fought a battle in his life; Constantine IV was, for most of his life, a prince-in-name only and ruled over by a powerful council of viziers, until he grew a backbone and had them assassinated for incompetence.

But each time, the borders shrank more and more, and Byzantium followed the same-ish pattern of incompetence that got it into trouble in the first place. Truly! The same pattern of incompetence, repeated over a thousand years, until Byzantium was a speck on the map. What was it? A powerful man rules as emperor for several decades, and his several successors sit on the laurels, letting the unearned glory go to their heads; they either make stupid decisions or become spoiled brats, or both. Meanwhile, the wealthy aristocrats, who greedily acquire as many privileges as they can, take too much, and cripple both the military-man and the working-class man, until a powerful man dope-slaps them and puts them back in their place. That powerful man becomes emperor. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And never again does Byzantium get bigger.

But like I said, it’s a historical model, a way of understanding things. Don’t take it as word from God.

But what of the Long Defeat, in literature? Here book authors usually show some awareness of Tolkien, but they forget an important part of his formula. I’ll get to that at the end.

Take the Batman comics, like the storyline of The Long Halloween (1996-1997), which explores the decay of the Long Defeat. Overall, The Long Halloween is still a murder mystery story, one so complex that it stumps Batman himself for a whole year. But, in the background, The Long Halloween isn’t about the murders—it is about the decay of Gotham. No matter how much Batman struggles, he is doomed to fail. All he is doing is keeping the symptoms in check. Gotham City, in the story, is rotten to the core, incurably so, and even refuses to be cured of its evil! The story explores the question ‘Why fight evil when it is inevitable?’ Do any of Batman’s actions matter? Why does he insist on using the methods he has (not-killing, respecting the court system, gizmo-gadgets, fear, etc.) when they seem to do nothing?

(If you’ve noticed, those are also the same critiques leveled at Batman even in modern stories.)

When used in literature, it seems to me that the Long Defeat is used to emphasize horror, dread, helplessness. The End is Nigh! All hope to stop it is lost, for the End cannot be reversed or pushed back, only halted in place. Why try to stop it though? The End whispers a stop to the pain, and threatens you with more pain if you fight back! And yet, people who aren’t Batman go to pretty extreme measures to fight back anyway. Here, in this horror literature, the spectacle, the drama becomes ‘what length are the protagonists willing to go?’ Will the protagonists sacrifice the innocent, if that means the group survives? Will the protagonists sacrifice their own morals, their own code of honor, if that means getting through one more day? The pressure becomes so great that the protagonists become the very monsters they fought against, and in time are destroyed by the next generation of heroes, doomed to follow the same fate—all in an attempt to stave off the inexhaustible annihilation!

Ugh! There’s a word for this kind of schlock, and it’s called ‘grimdark’! I’ll be covering a number of dark, morbid fantasy settings, and all of them can follow this ‘grimdark pattern’ out to a tee. Grimdark-style works are when the Long Defeat has lost all the plot and has devolved into torture-porn. It is not a healthy genre. It is dark and miserable for darkness’ and misery’s sake—and it is stupidly popular in the nerd communities. I have a good idea why, but I’ll get to that later.

Taken to its extreme, the theme of the Long Defeat eventually praises death. Any author who uses the theme needs to be careful with it, because it can lead to a miserable, numb stagnation—a slothful hell, if you will—where your only options in the plot of the story diverge to ‘just let everyone die’ and ‘everything must be kept in miserable stasis, unchanging’. This drastically misses out on how Tolkien and Chesterton viewed the Long Defeat. Just as Tolkien coined the term, he also coined its counterpart, its culmination—the eucatastrophe*, the ‘good disaster’.

[*yew-cah-tass-tro-phy]

Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe is the reversal of the Long Defeat. For Tolkien and Chesterton, it is literally God saving the day. It is some kind of intervention, however impossible, that averts the end. It saves not in a shallow way, but in a way so thorough that it is like the Long Defeat never started! Most authors, and maybe most audiences, don’t like it, because it is too much like a deus ex machina; or maybe they don’t like it because they are miserable; or maybe because they don’t like the idea of God or good fortune? But, with Tolkien and Chesterton, the Eucatastrophe isn’t a save-the-day button. The Eucatastrophe works within the story—and that is why authors hate it so much! It’s too damn hard to pull off! They usually write themselves into a corner with no alternative.

The Eucatastrophe is the Eagles saving the hobbits; it is the Ring being taken from Sauron and landing in the hands of the most unlikely heroes; it is a monk’s prayers to God saving innocent people from a fire*, and it is even finding out that God was your secret help the whole time*.

[*Chesterton’s novels, The Ball and the Cross and The Man Who Was Thursday, respectively.]

Without the Eucatastrophe, the Long Defeat becomes perverse. Life stops becoming worth living, and hope becomes a delusion. It makes for a very boring end and quite a self-indulgent life. Drama becomes an empty show—no one showed up to the theatre, not even the actors! The Eucatastrophe is difficult, because it implies the mysterious; something, beyond what we can see, and beyond what we can say.

…

More to follow!