Held Until Called For

A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Geld, meaning payment. The man-price: a sum owed by the killer, or by the killer's kin, to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, and once it was paid, the feud was closed. Grief became arithmetic so that grief would stop becoming graves. The same law kept a darker word beside it. Morð. The killing done in secret, by night, and left unacknowledged. The one killing the whole system could never settle, because a price cannot change hands until the killer has a name, and the debtor of a morð has none. Between those two words there is a gap a thousand years wide, and my new novel lives inside it. The book is called The Wergild. It is the tenth novel of Fractional Fiction, and today I want to tell you what it keeps.

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The Animal We Blame

Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it was a family after a holiday turned sour, or a whole country after a hard season of news. The group did not sit inside its own failure and ask what everyone in the room had done to cause it. It scanned the faces, found the one person who fit the mood, and set the entire weight of the trouble onto that single back. You felt the air in the room change when it happened. You may have felt the change move through your own chest. The problem had a face now, and a face can be sent away. That move is old. It runs deeper than the workplace and the country, older than writing itself in most of the places where it still survives. And when human beings reach for a body to carry their fear out of the room, they keep reaching for the same shape. A horned animal, dark, a ram or a goat, walked to the edge of the settlement and driven off into the waste with the sickness riding on its skull.

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The Synthetic Cause

Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the most successful memes this country has produced. Confederate veterans engineered it after the war, men who had lost the fighting and refused to lose the meaning. Jubal Early and the people around him built a version of the war in which slavery was a sideshow, the South fought for high principle, and the enslaved stayed content until Northern armies disturbed them. That version was false when it was written. It won anyway.

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Synalosis: The Shape That Closes

Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Alesia, and then did something stranger than a siege. Caesar built two walls, one facing inward at the men he had caught, to hold them in, the other facing outward at the quarter of a million Gauls marching to break the ring, to keep them out. Miles of timber and ditch, raised in a few weeks, and the object of all that labor was a number: the count of futures still open to the men inside, which the walls drove down to one. The one left them, when the digging was done, was capture.

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The Goldfish that Never Swam

This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed from the hour someone forged it to the moment it convinced a civilization that it had lost its mind. I spent two years on it, in part because I owed the work. I helped carry the lie. You have heard the louder version of my number, the one that beat mine and traveled the world. The human attention span, it says, has fallen to eight seconds, one tick shorter than a goldfish's. You have met it in a TED talk, on a morning show, inside a slide deck built to sell you the software that will rescue the same focus the previous slide told you that you had lost. It is one of the most repeated figures of the age.

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How a Country Chooses Its Fools

So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned the old orator into a national figure of fun, and the dispatches were funnier than they were fair. Then Bryan died, five days later, and Mencken wrote an obituary that buried the man before the grave was dug. The prose was brilliant. It was also a kind of murder, a reputation killed while the body was still warm. A play came along a generation on, Inherit the Wind, and finished the job. The meme was sealed, and it has been copying itself ever since. 

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Not My Thing

In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for Master. "S" for Slave. The next morning the roles reversed, and the children who had ruled became the ruled. No one in that room was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. 

I want to talk today about the book I built out of that morning, and out of fifty years of watching that morning return in new costumes. It is called Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. That armband was one early specimen of a method that has since grown into an industry.

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