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Friday
In addition to listening to Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam on our way to and from Maine (I wrote about this on Monday), Julia and I enjoyed his Shepherd’s Crown. The novel is the last in his young adult series about teenage witch Tiffany Aching and the last book he wrote before succumbing to Alzheimer’s and death. In this work we see Tiffany step into adulthood and assume unofficial leadership of the witch community.
I write about it today because I think Pratchett provides one answer to an urgent question raised by fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. In an essay written this past March, the New York University historian asked what we can do to address America’s current moral collapse. As she depicts our situation,
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
To advance their project, Ben-Ghiat writes, authoritarians cultivate and reward at state she calls “moral deregulation,” which she says is
a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled.
Good literature pushes back against authoritarianism, and there’s a special place for quality young adult literature in this battle. Although schools may not assign Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series, many students become enthralled with Pratchett’s comic fantasy world when they encounter it, sometimes reading all 41 of his Discworld novels. A work like Shepherd’s Crown emphasizes the importance of working selflessly and tirelessly on behalf of the larger community, even as our country’s leaders embrace unbridled greed, glorify empty glitz, and betray the Constitution, religious principles, and foundational social norms.
The characters who embody this corrupt ethos in Shepherd’s Crown are the elves. The witches who oppose them, on the other hand, devote their lives to healing the sick, delivering babies, negotiating disputes, and sometimes even trimming the toenails of elderly persons who can’t accomplish the task themselves.
I mentioned in my previous post that Pratchett in certain ways defines himself against Tolkien, even while owing him a great debt, and one sees this rebellion in his depiction of elves. Tolkien, of course, idealized elves, so much so that his fellow Inkling Hugo Dyson said—this when Tolkien was reading aloud a draft chapter from Lord of the Rings to the Oxford writing group–“Oh fuck, not another elf!”
Though Pratchett’s elves, like Tolkien’s, are beautiful and enchanting, in Pratchett this is just a façade that they use to disarm humans. In actuality, they are self-centered, sadistic beings who love to play cruel jokes and who tease their enemies before torturing and killing them. They do so, however, while looking like this:
[The queen] had chosen to sparkle today. The everlasting sunlight shining through the exquisitely carved stone windows had been pitched exactly to strike the tiny gems on her wings so that delicate rainbows of light danced around d the audienc ehcamber as she moved.
And this:
When Tiffany got back, Nightshade took the healing ointment, and it seemed as if with each smooth stroke the little elf blossomed, becoming more and more beautiful. There was a sparkle about her and it was like a syrup that covered everything. It shouted, “Am I not beautiful? Am I not clever? I am the Queen of Queens”
To which Tiffany, who has been expecting this attack, screams, “You will not put your glamour on me, elf!”
The glamour proves to be a potent weapon, however—just as it can be in our own society—and the elves use it to undermine the self-esteem and the self-belief of their enemies, after which they chop them into pieces. In the novel they have the chance do so following the death of Granny Weatherwax, the powerful witch who has been guarding the border between fairy land and Discworld. Tiffany, who is to take her place, does not yet have her self-confidence, but we watch as she comes into her own. At one point she finds herself dealing with Nightshade, the former queen of the elves, who has been ousted in a palace coup, had her wings torn off, and cast almost dead into Discworld.
Tiffany instructs this amoral being into how to get along with others. Such is the state of our times that the witch’s advocacy of empathy reads like an attack on current government policy. (Recall that Elon Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”) Here’s one of their interchanges:
“I have been watching humans,” said Nightshade as they were clumping back up the road. “And I can’t understand them. I saw a woman giving an old tramp a couple of pennies. He was nothing to do with her, so why would she do that? How does it help her? I don’t understand.”
“It’s what we do,” said Tiffany. “The wizards call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing the world from their point of view.
As for what the old lady gets in return, Tiffany responds,
Well, she will probably feel what we call a little glow, because she has helped someone who needed help. It will mean that she is glad that she is not in his circumstances. You could say that she can see what his world is like, and—what can I say?—she comes away feeling hopeful.”
Nightshade counters with an argument that the right is currently using to strip people of their Medicaid benefits:
“But the tramp looked as if he could do a job of some sort, to earn his own pennies, but nevertheless she gave him hers.
Tiffany replies, “Well, yes, that sort of thing does happen, but not always, and the old lady will still feel she has done the right thing. He may be a bit of a scamp, but she tells herself that she is a good person.
Tiffany concludes this discussion by talking about why it’s better to work with people rather than use one’s superior power (magic in her case) to force them to do things. “We humans definitely need other people to keep us human,” she says, and then,
“Well, what we witches have found is that power is best left at home. Magic is tricky anyway, and it can turn and twist and get things wrong. But if you surround yourself with other humans, you will have what we call friends—people who like you, and people you like.
Over the ages, she notes, kings have learned to rule by consent—“we like having them as rulers, if they do what we want them to do”—and notes that kings and people both eventually realized “that it was better to work peacefully with everyone else.”
The queen of the elves eventually comes around, but I seriously doubt if Trump and his minions ever well. Instead, like Pratchett’s elves, Trump uses glamor as a weapon, taking people who look good on television and making them as cabinet officials. Figures like Department of Justice head Pam Bondi, Homeland Security director Kristi Noem, Department of Defense Director Pete Hegseth, and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt may be beautiful on the outside, but each is working assiduously to demonize Trump’s enemies and promote his authoritarian agenda.
In such an environment, how do we get young people to value (to borrow from Wordsworth) the “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” that comprise “the best portion of a good man’s life”? How do we encourage them to pursue a life of service over one of grift and corruption? Compelling characters like Tiffany Aching, who invite emulation, can play a vital role.
