Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett

Author:Deirdre Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

6

Defending Home, Hearth, and Hedge Fund

“Merlyn,” said the king, “tell me the reason for your visit. Talk. Say you have come to save us from this war.”

—T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn

When T. H. White began writing the concluding volume of his wildly popular Once and Future King1 series, in which he recounted the adventures of King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table, he intended for “that one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot” to represent something quite different from what emerged in the published version or the glitzy musical and film it spawned. Merlyn was indeed appearing before Arthur on the eve of impending war with his son Mordred, trying to “save them.” “I have suddenly discovered,” White wrote to his former Cambridge tutor, “that the central theme [of the saga of Arthur] is to find an antidote to war.”2

White’s main point—that violence always begets violence and war is never justified—is framed in distinctly evolutionary terms and uses examples from animal ethology. Merlyn delivers an antiwar—and somewhat antimankind—lecture and then demonstrates alternatives with King Arthur’s animal mentors from the earlier books. Merlyn tells Arthur the following (playing perhaps a bit loose with the facts):

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