As the title says, I hadn’t been writing here for something like a year and a half. And it’s not like I have anything big or important to write about either, but I figured it’d be a pity to let this site just wither away without updates, so let’s just have one here, even if it’s going to be more scatter-brained than usual.
First, I know it’s been a year and half since then, but Guy Windsor invited me to show up to his Sword Guy podcast, and the episode with me went up a few days after the last time I posted here. You can check out the episode either on Guy’s main site or from the various podcasting venues linked out from there.
And then. I don’t know. There’s a casual episodic fiction project I’ve been working on for the last couple of years or so, and it’s basically an isekai (crudely put, “thrown into another world”) story where a modern staff officer has to figure out how to survive in the middle of the other world’s equivalent to the Napoleonic Wars. One of the things I ended up having to research is how people in that era (in our world, obviously) would have interacted with ideas of rulership/kingship and political legitimacy, which led me to delve deeper into how early-modern European absolutism was based upon the idea of the divine right to rule — something that has been around all along since the earliest human governments, but only really took in its definite form (in the European context anyway) with the substantial growth in state capacity in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as the need to use that state capacity to enforce religious uniformity (Peace of Augsburg, cuius religio eius religio, and all that). But background aside, the realisation that people could feel so comfortable with deriving political legitimacy from an external force that can’t be held accountable to any human or worldly authority simply floored me. I mean, for all my parents’ efforts to give me a religious upbringing, it never clicked with me, and as I grew older I certainly got more comfortable with more humanist foundations for my politics. But that also meant I never really thought that deeply about what politics built on non-humanist ethics would look like. This left me feeling kind of stupid because, now that I thought of it, Indonesian (or at least Javanese) politics still seems to revolve around the idea of a divinely-anointed “just king,” and I can’t help noticing that a great deal of the election rhetorics here seems to be aligned more with being on the right side and voting for the candidate God (because in the Indonesian constitution, it’s always a monotheistic God-with-a-capital-G) has already bestowed with the right to rule rather than actually giving the candidate the popular mandate to rule. How did I manage to miss that all these years?
On the good side, though, that might mean I have a rather familiar model I can borrow to wrap my head around some of the ultra-royalist ideas going around back then. Which I’m going to need if I want to be able to write convincingly from the viewpoints of characters who have never questioned their monarch’s legitimacy in their entire lives (at least before the story began anyway).
sillynewsboy 