Assistant Village Idiot

This one is tough to teach to children sitting in the back seat of the car, even with many repetitions over many years, and even if they have some ability.

Trust me on this. You may eventually consider it worth the effort, but...

We are now trying to at least expose the daughters of the eldest to this sort of thing, just so that they get some vague sense that not all Christmas songs are happy and cute. In their later years, they will need to know that "Jingle Bells" is not especially sustaining when your spouse is undergoing tests for a possible worrisome diagnosis. I hate winter/Santa songs masquerading as carols. To be fair, my wife finds them great fun, and requests them with sly grins when we choose in rotation. She bats her eyelashes just to spite me.

I remember her book 20 years ago and it was very influential for me! Sally Satel on political destruction of good medicine.

We have been here before. Quillette has what looked like a promising article, especially as it attached the street cred of Martina Navratilova to the essay. Yet the very title of IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination Blah, Blah, BLAH! DAMMIT! tells you the conclusion it will reach. It's sort of like "The PRC discussion of whether the Tienanmen Square Protests were legitimate," if indeed any such topic could even make it to print. Please stop wasting my time. We know where the conclusion will land. Or also "The Instapundit Independent Forum on Whether Vaccine Mandates are Soviet Tyranny, Fascist Excess, or merely Unamerican Leftist Overreach." Yawn.

I would love to regard this competition document as a legitimate discussion of competing rights, which one side of this discussion keeps trying to do. Yet the other side of this does not. There are some rare but legitimate exceptions to the usual binaries about who can be called what, sexually. That has nothing to do with the bulk of the discussion, which is carried on by people who would like to be fair and reasonable versus people who have clear High-Functioning Autism or some form of OCD or Borderline Personality Disorder and a need to externalise all conflict to what horrible oppressors YOU are rather than face those demons about their sexual identity in their own souls. That is the Borderline dynamic, to externalise and get you to argue about things and fight, so that they can get some distance and root for a side rather than suffer the reality of their (very painful) disorder. I feel terrible for them that they have these disorders and think I would be even more of a societal disaster than they are if I had to face it myself. I am smart and would make you pay emotionally, just because I can, and I wouldn't want to face truth. But that's what's happening. There is no legitimate intellectual discussion here.

Turner's Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome people keep being included to pad the numbers, but those kids believe they are (respectively) female and male from earliest ages. They have no doubt. They are being used against their will in the discussion, and lots of them are pissed about it. The political dodge is to try and steer them to the idea that "No, no, no! You aren't angry at us for using you! You are angry at those other terrible people who don't accept you as 100% right! You're on our side, really. Now shut up and sit in the back row."

But there it is. One side of this issue wants to discuss it, and the other wants to punish people until they get their way. It is rather like the last seventy years of Palestinian- Israeli discussion. One side believes there are two sides to the issue. The other wants to just kill them.

Robert D Kaplan has long been brilliant on geopolitics. I have read some of his books and should probably read more. Here he reflects on what the US abandonment of Afghanistan means for the region, and ultimately for the world powers.

Subtitle: We don't have a reason, we just wanna.

I was listening to entirely secular but very agreeable people discuss Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, NASA and the advantages of manned versus unmanned space exploration and had the overwhelming feeling that nothing has changed since I first started thinking seriously about this after reading CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet in the 1980s. There are important philosophical issues that should be undergirding any such discussion which are simply absent. It is not as if I am finding they are disagreeing with my premises so much as they are simply oblivious to any of it.

They discuss one possible motivation for much-more expensive manned travel and eventual settlement that humankind might somehow "need" this, because of environmental or geopolitical problems. We might need to have a place to settle ourselves because we have rendered this world...what? Too dirty even though 8B of us are surviving here so that we have to find a way to get a few hundred of us off the earth to "rescue" the species? Whew. We got a few of us onto Mars or Europa just in time, eh? Mankind is saved! Or because the first moon landing was all about America showing its primacy, maybe a Mars trip could be a joint affair with America, Russia, Europe, China and India! This would be about cooperation instead of competition and geopolitical warfare this time. And that would clearly be so much better for the 8B of us because...why, exactly?

One of the participants actually did say "It's an interesting question whether we think spreading across the galaxy really is mankind's destiny." What is this destiny you speak of? Mankind has a destiny? Who says? Who gave us this destiny? If you think this isn't our destiny, on what basis do you think we have any destiny at all? These are frankly, the smartest and most tech-savvy and connected people in the world, and these questions don't even seem to occur to them. The discussion quickly reverts to the technical difficulties. But even more worrisome, they seem to have some dim awareness that people might not consider this valuable, and always, always move immediately to "It's like the settling of the New World, or of Australia. There were risks and not everyone made it, but it generally worked out." The question switches again from "is this morally justified" to "Will this eventually pay itself back?" or "But isn't this just a great adventure?" With the question of "why?" being quickly shuttled off to "You must just be objecting to the risk or the cost, and we just covered that."

The questions do not even occur to them. For decades many of us have stroked our chins and said "All these teleological assumptions and moral justifications will have to be addressed sometime," but the reality is No they won't. It's not that these people aren't going to come to answers to these questions we find suspect. It's that they aren't going to answer them at all. They are going to Mars because they wanna. Any challenge gets diverted into irrelevant questions.

One interesting bit of this is to reflect this back to the exploration of the New World. Those people and the settlers who came after are accused of many bad motives, such as seeking money or slaves. There is some truth in that, probably. There are also the justifications of Europeans trying to spread Christianity or Civilisation, which is now regarded as an especial colonialism and evil. But I think we are overlooking what we see in front of us now in a similar situation. Some wanted adventure or to get rich, but most of the sailors and settlers just wanted a job. Shucking clams might have taken them instead if circumstances had been slightly different. Glory? Maybe a few. But mostly, people had no real reason at all. They just wanted to. Just like now.

Folks like us read CS Lewis and still debate what mankind's proper action should be,of the few hundred out of 8B of us. I don't think it matters. We can say until we are blue in the face that it is necessary to answer these values questions. I guess not. All of these discussions are just spilling over with unquestioned values and...so? Does it change anything? They are going to do it anyway,and there will be some vague default answer for the underlying justification. But mainly it's going to be "But we wanna."

Here I am, ignoring the lesson I just wrote about in Worst of Sinners and giving you the prediction that a thousand other people could give, because I think it Should Be Heard More, while ignoring what might be the quieter, more specific lesson that I have actually been commissioned to. But here it goes, and I will think about whether there is something I can bring that is not readily found elsewhere.

There is a new Covid variant. Some people will be predicting that this is very, very terrible and we need to revert to strict cautions. Others will insist that this is no danger whatsoever, but "they" want you to panic and control your life, so ignore them and go breathe on everyone. This will be the default belief of a subset of us/them/our noble lads/those evil bastards on the caution issue, and have no relation to any actual scientific data. To the accusation "Well, they always say it's dangerous and scream we're all going to die" I would point out that there have been several previous variants - check the Greek alphabet - where there was no such prediction. So that accusation is false. OTOH, the desire to have one's worldview reinforced is very powerful, so horrible as it is, there may actually people who are secretly rooting for this variant killing people, just to show those others what poopyheads they are.

The most common type of virus mutation is more contagion, less virulence. So that's the way to bet, (All of you actually know something about this as I write, but I don't. A neighbor tried to inform me but I waved her off. I want my prediction to be clean.) And if so, then the calculations change going forward. It is never a good thing to get a disease. Even mothers who take their children to "chicken pox parties" know it is a calculated risk, even if it is worth it. But more natural immunity versus very low death risk is different than Delta, maybe even something of a Delta reversal. But I will know more in a few minutes. For now, your takeaway is to ignore all the screaming on both sides from people who made up their minds months ago about today's information. You will be happier for it. That is one of the bits of advice I actually am here for.

Let's all take a Lamaze Cleansing Breath here, as a lovely social worker I used to share a team with used to say.

Thanks to Richard Cocks over at The Orthosphere (JMSmith's site) for this paper out of the University of Edinburgh (lin and Bates 2021) about attitudes regarding economic redistribution, fairness, compassion, and envy. Just for openers.

Richard links to it as part of a larger discussion about associations of Leftism and Self-Interest. He discusses AVI fave Jonathan Haidt along the way, though not much of it will be new to folks who have followed my discussions of him here over the years.

I seem to be out of the woods. My taste is still not right - things taste more sour than usual, but that is at least not life-threatening. I went to the market tonight on the tenth day. I do still have achiness and cold, and as happens when one is suspicious, I wonder whether every stiffness is some more dire symptom. But I put in a short hike on the rail trail even though it is below freezing.

My wife is no better but no worse over the last two days. Tired. Hard to focus. Hopefully on her tenth day on Wednesday she will be free enough to rejoin the rest of us Thursday AM.

I think of Lenny and Squiggy, unfortunately

In Bronze Age Weirdness I spoke about the ease with which we assign interpretations to the archaeological record. In the absence of written records, anyone digging up the Christian churches of Europe in the future would note that the entrance is usually in the west while the altar is in the east. It would be easy to conclude, and some early non-Christians did, that this has something to do with the sun and worship of the sun. There is likely something to this, but echoing the Jewish custom of facing toward the Temple in Jerusalem, and then just Jerusalem in general, is more clear from the record. Yet the unimportance is more important to notice. The orientation is there and common enough that it would seem automatic to conclude this must have been important to them. Yet there isn't much mention of east-ness or west-ness having much significance in Christianity in general in any era. It isn't in the creeds. No one seems to have split off from anyone else over the deal. It's almost entirely just leftover custom. Even though the Church grew up in many places where the orienting of buildings and customs to the sun was of enormous importance, so that we would expect that this would bleed over into our faith at every turn, it mostly doesn't. A few places at the edges and that's it.

Many burials in groups in the Indo-European tree have both men and women lying on their sides, facing east. I read repeatedly that this means it was very important to them and likely had large religious significance. Well, maybe. Yet even if it had large original significance, there is no way of concluding definitely from that that a thousand years later they cared about any of the same things. In most cultures of the world, doing things "the correct way," such as getting married, getting buried, or celebrating Arbor Day is a collection of unrelated and misunderstood things. Brides in out culture did not originally wear white to signify virginity, but wealth. Daddy could afford to buy a fancy dress that couldn't be used again for anything else. (They often did, though, for christenings.) Who remembers that now? And why should they? It's recent, and maybe will change soon. First-time brides wear white, because that is the correct way to do things. Trying to dig too deeply into what this "means" for our whole society is ridiculous.

Worth remembering whenever they dig something up. Even very important rituals can have confusing, mixed meanings in our day, why not theirs?

Do you remember that rule?

The interviewer was asking what new insight DNA had brought us about a particular find, in which a man's thighbone had been made into a flute. The archaeologist nodded "We could tell from the other burials that this man was the grandfather of the group, and further examination suggests that they had kept his disarticulated bones and carried them about. There seems to be another bit of him twenty miles away. They made the flute out of them nearly sixty years later."

"Fascinating! That really tells us quite a bit about the sort of society this was then, doesn't it!"

There was an uncomfortable pause before the archaeologist burst out into laughter. "It tells us that these people were nothing like us and we haven't the faintest idea what they were thinking."

"But we can imagine a way in which a people were attempting to show respect for an ancestor and carried his bones around...perhaps he had a special love for music and played the flute himself..."

"No, no, you're going at it all backward. Once we have the data then we can start to make a story out of anything. It's automatic for human beings to try and explain the world by making up some little story. You can make one, he can make one. I can come up with a few immediately, because things like this happen all the time to us. But it's all bosh. No one alive today out of the eight billion of us thinks of making grandfather into a flute. It's only in retrospect that we can create these tales. And if there's once thing we've learned in archaeology over the last two hundred years, it's that all those stories are going to be mostly wrong."

The Advent season does not really begin until Sunday, but many Christians informally consider that it is okay to start once Thanksgiving Day is over.

I'm going a lot of unexpected places here. I got too cute in introducing this in the previous post, throwing you off. I didn't do that for humor and writing-reveal purposes, it was just clumsy.

There is a longstanding joke in medicine that you should prescribe a medication when it is new and still does magic, because after a few years it is less magical and becomes just one more treatment with an array of effects and side effects. What is being described is our impression about its value, of course. The efficacy of the medicine has not changed.

When the vaccines came out a year ago I was excited, like most other people. It looked to bring the end in sight more quickly. It was a new layer of safety for people of my generation and created hope that relatives in nursing homes could soon be visited again. There was an initial flurry of people telling us they were horrible and unsafe, but as I pointed out at the time, most of these fell into two camps: antivaxxers and people selling alternative treatments, who needed for previous reasons for the vaccines to be discredited; and anti-Trump forces who wanted to cast doubt on anything he could take credit for. I was appalled to learn that the rollout and endorsements and been held back even by some for whom science is their profession, solely in order to prevent him from having credit. I focused on pointing these things out. I think I would have justified that by noting that these were the prominent arguments the society was now having, and were thus important for people weigh in on reasonably. Hold that thought. The fact that I had something else to offer to the discussion did not occur to me.

It half occurred to me. When there were very quick objections that this seemed precipitous and there might be side effects I thought it important to note from my own experience that there are always side effects, and this is to be expected. Not necessarily a problem in itself. But there is a second half to this that I knew but was oblivious to. When there is an expectation of magic, there will be a snap-back, a counter-reaction when it dawns on people that the new treatment is not magic. In their disillusionment, people will not merely complain that the new treatment isn't as good as hoped, they will start trying to find ways to show that it is actually bad. It is as if we overcompensate for believing too much by believing too little.

I have seen this happen enough times, including a couple of major changes in psychiatric treatment that were large enough to be among the defining points of the careers of all of us, that it really should have been front-and-center in my thought. The development of clozapine, for example, really was magic. Patients who had been psychotic for decades came alert and said "I felt like I was living in this fog and had no way of getting out. Then I woke up could say things again." Parents would say, weeping, "This is the child we have not seen for twenty years." Eventually we would find that patients who had done moderately well on other medications did extremely well on clozapine. Again, magically well. It is still the gold standard of antipsychotics, decades later.

We were told about the rare but deadly side effects right from the beginning and exercised extreme caution, unprecedented caution, in initiating the drug in a patient. And yet even that was not enough. It was even a little more dangerous than we thought. We lost patients to the direct effects of the drug. Few, very few, but there they were, dead. They had at least been alive a few weeks earlier. We almost lost one of my favorite patients of all time, one of the few I considered an actual friend even when he was horribly crazy.* The drug worked with him, magically. Then he developed the one truly deadly side effect and nearly went cold. We could no longer use it, and he went largely back under the waves of mental illness again, lovely and kind but inaccessible.

The counter-reaction began. Clozapine isn't magic. Fine. It actually SUCKS. Oh please. It kills people and is the most dangerous psychiatric drug we've ever seen. That is, frankly, a high bar to get over. You have to stop doing this. No. We have to go back to the Goode Olde Dayes when psychiatry was based on lengthy psychoanalysis and gradually working out the id-ego-superego conflicts to get free. Or maybe to change our whole conception of mental illness...

Okay, I'm getting worked up all over to fight a battle that was won thirty years ago. The counter-reaction was fueled by the clamoring Freud/Jung/Perls/Szasz/Laing/Satir/Jackson tribes clutching at their last straws to preserve their idiot theories. Declaration I want those who come after to remember because it is going to be lost: It was not accidental that the Recovered Memory and Satanic Ritual Abuse psychoses of the providers arose at that time. Because clozapine treated not only the positive symptoms (hallucinations) but negative symptoms (initiation), it destroyed the last shreds of their explanatory power. They were firmly consigned to the Worried Well forever, and they hated it. The long knives were out and the counterrevolution had begun, not in spite of the magic of the medication, but precisely because of it. Because in the rest of us, we did feel bad that we had said "This is magic," and then it was only really good.

That is the big example, but others have happened and more are coming in. Ketamine is going to be magic, but it is complicated and also damaging and doesn't work on some people it was supposed to. Ditto deep-brain stimulation, vagus nerve stimulation, low-dose psychedelics, EMDR. All magic, all destined to go through periods of sudden condemnation and unpopularity.

In the humanities there is such an overarching control of Theory that despite the near-continuous attempts to create counterrevolutions, I don't think any have taken hold. It keeps looking inevitable, but like the arising of Brazil as a world power, is forever threatened but never-happening.

Thus, while I am not unique in knowing this about the vaccines beforehand, I was unusually well-placed to point out to y'all "This is just about to happen. The vaccines aren't magic, because they never are, but they are fine. They will underperform according to expectations in some areas, and that will piss people off enough that they will go to the Dark Side and say they are dangerous. They will have downsides, but that is no big deal when one looks at the actual numbers underneath instead of the stories - many of which are from people who have other agendas if you take a moment to examine. However, because there was such an incredibly high expectation and positive spin about them, it was inevitable that there would not only be a mild snap-back, but that a positively rabid rejection very soon." But I was paying attention to other things that a million other people could see just fine and express better, and the chance passed.

So here is my real point, larger than Covid: This happens to all of us all the time, because we too get blown about by the winds of every teaching. We get distracted away from what our unique gift is into things any number of people could do. It's what I complain all the time about the Church doing. My son's church does podcasts, and after spending 18 months discussing gay marriage every other week they have gone on to discussing racism in the church every other week, and then the pandemic, and now who knows what will be next? What will be the Cause O' The Month? My own denomination, if you go to the central website, does the same thing. It's all what's fashionable now. There's nothing wrong in general about the Church noticing, trying to understand, and addressing such things. The drive to "speak to" the issues of the day from a Christian perspective is fine.

But after complaining about the Church doing that so often, I am a little sheepish to note how easy it is to fall into that myself. Among several good missions of the church there are also some key missions. Not getting around to those because we are wondering what our vaccination rate is is rather missing the point. Lion's Club can do that. The League of Women Voters can do that. The PTA and Food Bank and Red Cross can do that. Sometimes the great sins look like small sins at first, and their subtlety is their danger.

There will be a new fashion for the church to get distracted into coming along soon. I don't know what it will be. Conservatives will get their heads jerked around responding to some other fashion. The schools do it every year or two and liberals essentially live for these...and I am likely to fall into another new one myself, if only I knew what it was. As in Matthew 24: But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready; Well, yeah. If I had known...

The same as me addressing the hypocrisy of scientists or hammering home recent updates about bad reasoning about covid. That's not a sin in itself. Yet there is something I could have brought that was more valuable. We have both general and specific callings.

*We are not supposed to use that word anymore, and I get it. It is still used behind closed doors but it has a subtler meaning for us. My dear friend has a mental illness. I do not define him as a "crazy" person, that is not his identity. That there is a Person who is separate from the Illness is very clear. In fact, painfully clear. But when everything is off and medications are absent or inadequate he is sometimes so disorganised, so psychotic, so different from regular humanity that describing him as something separate is not the dehumanising word one would think. It is in fact the opposite, the acknowledgement that the real person is temporarily obscured. Consider it similar to a person with dementia, who inhabits the body of a person you loved and uses his voice and mannerisms, but is not the same.

Colleges have an underlying incentive that they don't tell you about in promoting "community." They want you to keep sending them money after you or your children leave the place. Therefore they promote the idea that you belong to the special ones even before you quite get there, in the acceptance material.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

It is very pronounced at the Ivies and Seven Sisters, of course, but they also try very hard at Ivy Wannabees like Duke and Bucknell, and state schools use it to promote a sort of loyalty to your region, to the whole interconnected local world even when you move away. They don't make that much money from shirts and hats. Texas A&M promotes itself as a very tight-knit ongoing group, we have learned now that Ben has been in Texas so many years. Religious colleges do it - I think with more justification.

This is much of what is behind colleges doing all sorts of ridiculous permittings and forbiddings and creating the illusion of campus-wide statements against racism. We know from the occasional polls which filter out that most students don't care much one way or the other about the individual events, which they often support the general idea of but find the specific expressions a bit crazy, and certainly intrusive. The news stories generate outrage from parents and local groups and place the schools in some legal jeopardy. Conservatives usually complete the picture by figuring that what they must be getting back is status from their academic and liberal institutional friends, and work to undermine that. Some. That's some of it. But when you remember that convincing everyone that they are part of a community, one that can be tapped for resources for years to come, is the value embedded so deeply in their thinking that they don't even notice it most of the time themselves, a lot of these antics are understood. That an individual protest might be patently foolish and indefensible is not the point. The idea of the college as community must be preserved and expressed at all costs.

1 Timothy 1:12-20

I had a realisation while sitting in a parking lot with my trunk open, waiting for someone to put what I had requested into it. It followed the pattern of "I wish I had written...I said it, but should have said it more clearly...But other people were worse...and more annoying...and more unfair and stupid and lockedmoreintothemomentthantolargerperspectiveEVENTHOUGHTHEY... and but I knew...I knew...why was I not clear?..." and through further chains to the quiet thought "I was well-placed, by personality, training, and those around me to bring this lesson forward a year ago. And I did not for many reasons, none of them particularly admirable." I did better-than-average and thought that good, and did not do the job I was commissioned for. You Had One Job, as the internet humor often has it. It will take a bit to absorb this. But I had things I could have told you a year ago but did not because I thought other things more important. It wouldn't have saved the world, but it would have improved your lives, the only small circle that I have.

I'll patch things together the best I can.

Damn.

Note: My intent is not to beat myself up in public, but to provide a record of how such things occur, so that others can follow the trail.

Symptoms worse, which was a surprise, as I thought I was in a recovery trend the last two days. Not a good sign, but not terrible, and I am getting the monoclonal antibody infusion on Friday. I hadn't realised that it would be hard to arrange, as the availability is unpredictable.

As is often the case with illness, it is will that is sapped more than ability. I feel I could mentally focus if I had to, but see no point in that. We can respond well at such times when we have to, when there is an external pressure that drives us. But trying to find that internally is elusive, as if there were no solid ground to stand on. I suppose I could read something or listen to a podcast, but I keep putting off getting started. This too shall pass.

I have not looked at much serious discussion about how to avoid gerrymandering other than "We should stop those other bastards from cheating." I am sure that this is but one of many out there, but this is the one that hit the ground in NH today and I thought folks might like it.

How To Make Voting Districts Fair To Voters, Not Parties

It will be tougher to fix than people think, as people move out of areas where they believe they are not being heard, but want to be, and have been doing this for a while.

I started this six days ago. Life changes.

It is unsurprising that the subject of persecution comes up in a discussion of Jewish genetics.

Distinctions need to be made. Bias against a group can go on at low level for years - maybe centuries - and no one much remarks on it, because everyone just accepts that's the way things are. Some people have this status in society, some have that one, but it's just normal life. All but the smallest societies are stratified, often much more than ours in some ways. When we think of the archaeology of burials, for example, think how our own will look. The stone markers will be different, but the clothing and burial objects of the rich and all but the very poorest are going to look similar in the US.

Persecution gets noticed when it is intermittent. The tone of outrage is often hugely "We thought we were accepted here. We thought you were our friends!" Modern girls look on the lives of women in the past and think "I would never put up with that." Sure you would. It was normal life. You would have the same focus and concerns as the women around you.* We put up with a lot because we don't really think of it s putting up with anything.

Permissions also change with class or group. In many places the elites have to hold to the official religion and keep up observances, but the peasants and poor in general have more minimal requirements. No one much cares what they do out in the provinces. Show up Christmas and Easter. Don't harm the sacred groves. Don't do anything obviously undermining the status quo.

If a population keeps growing in a region, how much are they being persecuted on an ongoing basis? There may indeed be status differences between groups, and they may be entirely unfair. Ingroups tend to set up some privileges for themselves everywhere. If you belong to this religion you can't marry into the nobility. Well, but how many people were marrying into the nobility anyway? Has there been a run on this? The Jews increased greatly in number once they entered the Rhineland. But we don't know this from historical records all that much. There is a gap of about a thousand years 500-1500 in historical information about Jews in Europe. They kept up a lot of writing about religious matters and then held tight to it, so we still have that aspect. And we are now figuring out from genetics and archaeology a lot of the missing pieces. So how do we know there were so many in the Rhineland? Because there were lists of the martyrs from the First Crusade. They show up in the historical record as persecuted badly. But that is likely because it was an exception, one more example of "But we have lived among you for years! We thought we had a place here!" Does that mean they were fully accepted members of that society? Not in the least. But whatever prejudices they had visited on them didn't rise to the level of being mentioned, and their population increased.

* The world where you go back there and refuse to put up with it and set a good example is more fantastical than the time travel itself. Yes, modern fantasy novelists like to set up stories like that, of girls trying to break out(!) of old ways and become a wizard, or a warrior, or a bard or some other previously forbidden role. (Tolkien and Lewis were early examples and did it well.) But that is largely a modern value.