An ideal state

Amgueddfa Cymru, Caerdydd

Inverted Commas 10: Ideal City

1. Steal Nothing, whether it be an abstract idea or another life.
2. Examine Everything.
3. Pay a Fair Price.

These are the laws of the city state in the Valley of the Golden Cloud, from Michael Moorcock’s fantasy The War Hound and the World’s Pain (1981). The city guard who announces this adds,

“And remember, to lie is to steal another soul’s freedom of action, or some fragment of it. Here a liar and a thief are the same thing.”

As Captain Ulrich von Bek suggests, these laws sound excellent, even ideal, to which his companion Sedenko adds, “And simple.”

Yet, as the guard rejoins, they sometimes require complex interpretation. Which then leads von Bek to muse that it had been many years since he’d been able to believe in absolute justice, and some weeks since he’d believed in justice of any kind. He’s been living through the Thirty Years War after all — and we seem to be living through an equally tumultuous period of modern history, with similar concerns about justice.

Underneath its layers of sword-and-sorcery Moorcock’s fantasy is a novel of ideas, however superficially expressed. In this apparently ideal city in the Mittelmarch the protagonist finds it hard to subscribe to idealism. He is sceptical when the fifteen year old Queen Xiombarg XXV tells the travellers

Here we believe neither in Heaven nor in Hell. We worship no gods or devils. We believe only in moderation. We are satisfied with this state of things. Reason is not subsumed by sentiment here. The two are balanced.

Ulrich retorts that he has always found balance “a nostalgic dream”, and that in reality it can be very dull. Despite the existence here of music, painting and plays, he asserts that such ideas of moderation require no true struggle: “Thus they defeat human aspiration.”

Though young people from the state go outside to learn of human misery, of pain and of defeat, the Queen patiently explains that “they bring their experience back. Here, in tranquillity, it is considered and forms the basis of our philosophy.”

Captain von Bek’s final thoughts are that the inhabitants “possess the complacency of the privileged.” It is a damning judgement; doubly damning because the irony is that the Valley of the Golden Cloud exists in the Mittelmarch, a borderland which is neither of this world, nor yet of Heaven or Hell, so that the inhabitants are neither damned nor not-damned.

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In early medieval Europe lands which bordered established states were termed marches, ruled in what was in time to become a united Germany by marcher lords called margraves. Von Bek’s travels through Mittelmarch (which came close to some of these fluctuating borderlands of history) therefore was a journey through debatable lands.

The Valley of the Golden Valley turns out to be a kind of European Shangri-la (in what we assume are the Alps instead of the Himalayas) but, as a mountain-locked Utopian Neverland, is it too idealised to ever be true? And does it have drawbacks that are not at first evident?

Let’s have another quick glance at those laws:

1. Steal Nothing, whether it be an abstract idea or another life.
Surely there’s nothing controversial here? Though it does imply ownership, and maybe — as the state is ruled by a young unelected queen — it’s more capitalist constitutional monarchy than communitarian polity.

2. Examine Everything.
This suggests a level of personal and societal critique, does it not, and probably scientific curiosity: no bad thing I would imagine, unless it leads only to navel-gazing.

3. Pay a Fair Price.
This implies that profiteering is frowned on, and is perhaps a reinforcement of the first law. But it’s hard to imagine that human greed, along with intellectual laziness, has no presence in this Valley.

Which may be where the guard’s admission of complex interpretation being necessary comes in.

Ulrich’s scepticism regarding this state’s ideal of balance between Reason and Sentiment centres on what he calls a nostalgic dream becoming very dull. From their clothes Ulrich guesses that the inhabitants are literally living in the past because fashions are from two or three centuries earlier. The Myth of a Golden Age, a Land of Cockaigne or Eden before the Fall doesn’t take into account human aspiration, he suggests.

I’d go further: it doesn’t take account of the primitive limbic system of human beings, and principally the amygdala, seat of emotions. When it comes to the crunch, basic emotions take precedence over rational thought, meaning that the balance sought by Queen Xiombarg’s citizens will always be precarious.

No wonder the simple laws of the Valley state require complex interpretation. Especially when the penalty for law-breaking is either banishment — or death.

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I wrote about the significance of liminal spaces such as marches in this post. My review of this novel was posted here.