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The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things-from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals-if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture-we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte Darthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'1
The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'.2
Necessity of Chivalry by C. S. Lewis
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This is one of my favorite writings of his.
The most distressing reality I've had to face as an adult is that whores expect chivalry. To not offer it as a "regular" person is to become an immediate enemy. On the other hand, high-value males who don't offer it, and seem uninterested in doing so, are regarded as even more desirable for it. I wish I could be nice to women again, but I get way more action being a dickhead.
I'm just gonna say I identify as a pregnant woman and deserve more shits than any women do. They can't even reject it or they're bigots
This board has captured the pool of men who have both the incentive and capacity to change society and culture for the better.
Being shut out of free love degeneracy is a good thing, it protects you from corruption. Free love is the silver it bribes men with so they have no incentive to change anything. Persecution is the lead it uses if it judges that it can just destroy the man, or if the silver is rejected.
What I'm saying is perhaps a rehashing of the Enkidu gambit, but with a spin: Enkidu is the wrong archetype. The righteous man is what this corrupt order fears most. By being denied corruption, you can be this existential threat to the evil worldly order, if you're willing.
A man without temptation cannot be enslaved.
Wrong answer. Chivalry has been defined in this post as middle-ages chivalry, i.e., the warrior code. Sharing a word doesn't mean two concepts are the same, that's midwit-think. The chivalry you're talking about is the complete perversion of the original, and is better termed simpdom.
I'll be damned.
Someone just told me why I keep coming back, without telling me why I keep coming back. Without being ever being able to articulate it, I've been coming here for a long time and whitepill posting. I realize now that it's because I think alot of people on here deserve it, need it, or are generally capable of respecting it, at least on an abstract level. I'm not entitled to be heard, but people here will still listen if I have something worthwhile to say.
I guess I just wanna say, good post man.
I pray the robots listen. I'm a visitor here. God bless you and your work.
I don't care what a fat writter has to say about life.
No doubt the knights in his head would beat him to death with a club would he ever spout such nonsense to them.
Oh. That.
Yeah, there's no denying the merit and value of what you have to say, and I'm all for it, 100%
But most people on here won't listen. But don't lose heart over that.
Because the ones that are worth talking to will hear you out and perhaps take inspiration, even if they're a quiet minority.
May your ancestors smile upon you brother, hope to meet you again.
I'm not sure men like this exist anymore.
What, you may ask, is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world? It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be practicable-the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it-but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die.
Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. The heroes of the Sagas know nothing of it; they are as 'stern to inflict' as they are 'stubborn to endure'. Attila 'had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired'. Even the Romans, when gallant enemies fell into their hands, led them through the streets for a show, and cut their throats in cellars when the show was over. At school we found that the hero of the First XV might well be a noisy, arrogant, overbearing bully. In the last war we often found that the man who was 'invaluable in a show' was a man for whom in peacetime we could not easily find room except in Dartmoor. Such is heroism by nature - heroism outside the chivalrous tradition.
Lancelot and Aurther were FICTIONAL CHARACTERS.
FUCK OFF
I love the concept of chivalry, but its not very historically accurate.
youtu.be
The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.
In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.
If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections-those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be 'meek in hall', and those who are 'meek in hall' but useless in battle-for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed. When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. The ancient history of the Near East is like that Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilization. Then they become civilized themselves and go soft. Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. Then the cycle begins over again. Modern machinery will not change this cycle; it will only enable the same thing to happen on a larger scale. Indeed, nothing much else can ever happen if the 'stern' and the 'meek' fall into two mutually exclusive classes. And never forget that this is their natural condition. The man who combines both characters - the knight - is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.
OP, are you familiar with this book?
amazon.com
I highly recommend it.
You're fictional. You're a series of lies you've told yourself, and a collection of stories that probably don't adhere to the truth of the reality you occupy.
I hate lancelot and arthur, but one thing I've learned is: Stories aren't exactly fiction, they're drawn from somewhere, from someone, from someplace. I'm an avid reader and I've learned some of my most powerful life lessons from stories.
Things should be rooted in reality and truth, sure. But we should never disdain the ability of a story told to change lives or spur inspiration.
will read
In tire world today there is a 'liberal' or 'enlightened' tradition which regards the combative side of man's nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the 'false glamour' of war. And there is also a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a 'modern invocation'. Already in our own Kipling the heroic qualities of his favourite subalterns are dangerously removed from meekness and urbanity. One cannot quite imagine the adult Stalkey in the same room with the best of Nelson's captains, still less with Sidney! These two tendencies between them weave the world's shroud.
Happily we live better than we write, better than we deserve. Launcelot is not yet irrecoverable. To some of us this war brought a glorious surprise in the discovery that after twenty years of cynicism and cocktails the heroic virtues were still unimpaired in the younger generation and ready for exercise the moment they were called upon. Yet with this 'sternness' there is much 'meekness'; from all I hear, the young pilots in the R.A.F. (to whom we owe our life from hour to hour) are not less, but more, urbane and modest than the 1915 model.
>'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'
>demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man
Kindly forgetting the part where that ideal knight cucked his sworn king and turned traitor over it
Blah blah blah shut the fuck up
I heard some dipshit bald christcuck onions sipping monks made up chivalry to stop knights from raping wee maidens
I like my version better