Author Archives: Johnny McDermott

TH White’s story of King Arthur is unconstrained by the traditional myths. He reinvents the world of round tables completely, influenced by the horrors and futility of war.

His Merlyn, and the way in which he experiences time, is a mind-bending concept that has fascinated me since childhood. Scholars of the work debate aspects, but roughly, he began his existence at the end of time, and moves backwards to the beginning. Thus he knows outcomes but has little power to change them:

… one gets confused with time… gets muddled… if you know what’s going to happen to people, but not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening… Like drawing in a mirror. (The Sword and the Stone, 1938)

It is a very difficult plot device to wrap one’s head around, and in the end it is not clear it works coherently. The theme remains unblemished: you can know the outcomes, perhaps not by supernatural means but say forecasting and the opinions of experts; you can tell people what this means for them, what is going to happen; but you cannot hope to persuade them if you do not know what has happened to them.

We are a party that has a clear diversity problem. I have no figures, but responses to these posts them to be from the same class of people. People like me. I have some experience of what I thereafter called the real world, but am under no illusions that, although I may have lived amongst men with less privilege, I did not become one of them. How can we hope to change minds when we do not properly understand how those minds form? How those deep divisions entrenched? We have our own trenches to dismantle, if we are to have any hope of affecting positive change in power (presumably by sharing it). Assumptions about Brexiteers and their beliefs, their capabilities and education, their backgrounds and true grievances, have made it impossible for us to spell out what we clearly see to be impending doom.

Thinking of Merlyn’s tormented journey backwards through time, led me to question our approach to winning the argument. I find wisdom in his words, but he offers no solution. I believe the point is to recognise that we cannot hope to control the actions of others. Applied to our political situation, we cannot hope to control the setting within which we try to win the argument. Views are entrenched, and we must investigate how they became so in an impartial manner, if we ever hope to alter them. We must learn what happened, before we can figure out what we should propose is going to happen.