The Knight and The Gardener

The at-one-ment notion is Joseph Campbell’s. While he uses this idea throughout his many works, I’m drawing from many places within The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books, 1949), Myths to Live By (Penguin Compass, 1972, pp. 30, 154), and Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion (edited by Diane K. Osbon, HarperPerennial, 1991, pp. 29-32).

Here I am drawing from Joseph Campbell’s telling of the Galahad and Parzival stories from The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (Penguin Compass, 1968, p. 428-570).

Joseph Campbell often said that George Lucas was his greatest student. Lucas used Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the structure for all six Star Wars films. This structure is rendered in a more readable form in Christopher Vogler’s fantastic screenwriting guide The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers 3^rd Edition (Michael Wiese Productions, 2007). The classic set of interviews with Campbell on the major patterns that repeat across all the major world religions, The Power of Myth (Anchor, 1991), was filmed in the library at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. Journalist and ordained Southern Baptist minister Bill Moyers conducted these interviews during the late 1980s, shortly before Campbell’s death. The Wachowski Brothers, creators of The Matrix series, also drew very heavily from Campbell’s insights. Both film series—their main plotlines and most subplots—are modern retellings of stories from the major world religions.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC Comics, 1986) is the masterwork of the graphic novel (comic book) storytelling form. The book deconstructs practically every superhero trope, but also serves as a serious existentialist work. Time magazine once cited Watchmen as one of the best English-language novels published since the magazine’s inception in 1923. Simply brilliant.

James Ellroy, author of L. A. Confidential (Mysterious Press, 1990), the novel on which the film is based, is a quintessential Knight author. His major themes include the difficulties of doing good without doing evil along the way, and vice versa. Called “The Demon Dog of American Literature,” Ellroy has redefined hardboiled noir writing in recent years. His novels are not for the faint of heart, but impossible to put down.

The best books on what al-Qaeda really wants include Through Our Enemies’ Eyes by Michael Scheuer (Potomac Books, 2007), The Osama Bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006) by Peter Bergen, and The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage, 2007) by Lawrence Wright. Wright is also the screenwriter of the movie The Siege (1998). While there are many other good books on al-Qaeda, these are usually the three I recommend people start with.

Daniel Craig is my favorite Bond, and Casino Royale (2006) is my favorite Bond film. In case you were wondering.

Why do I characterize Mulder and Scully in The X-Files as Gardeners rather than Knights when they are FBI agents—the closest thing American civilian life has to real-life knights in shining armor? The answer is simple—they almost never draw their guns or move into direct conflict mode. They are seekers of truth, not warriors for righteousness. A quick way to tell whether a heroic character in fiction is a Knight or a Gardener is to ask how central that character’s weapons are to his or her quest.

Johnny Cash claimed in a song to have once “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Subsequent studies have shown that a shot to the Reno is rarely fatal.

The Upanishad and Symposium stories are drawn from Campbell’s telling in Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion (pp. 29-32).

A good book on this is The Song of Songs: A New Translation by Ariel and Chana Bloch (Modern Library Classics, 2006).

Much of this is drawn from controversial Episcopal priest Matthew Fox’s thinking. I don’t subscribe to all of Fox’s ideas, but I agree with his basic orientation. Fox’s best-known books are Original Blessing (Tarcher, 2000), and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (HarperOne,1988). Famously long-winded, but intriguing, the best distillation of his basic orientation is found in the interview with Fox in The Future of God by Samantha Trenoweth (Morehouse Group, 1995, p. 237-260). Fox uses the Meister Eckhart quote here as well.

Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Charles Scribners and Sons, 1958) should not be missed. It’s a classic ethical, religious, and existential work.

The original line is “Fundamentalists don’t need a God, but must have a Devil,” frequently spoken by Dr. Martin Marty, professor emeritus from University of Chicago’s Divinity School and co-editor of The Fundamentalism Project series (with Dr. Scott Appleby). Marty is paraphrasing philosopher Eric Hoffer’s line that to have a militant movement you need no God, but must have a Devil. See http://cslr.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/media/PDFs/Journal_Articles_and_Book_Chapters/20.EILR.Marty.pdf for this and more. I also strongly recommend The Fundamentalism Project series. It’s the definitive work on fundamentalism theologies and movements across the major world religions. When you have about two years to read the whole thing, it’s worth it. If you don’t, the “User’s Guide” at the beginning of Fundamentalisms Observed (University of Chicago Press, 1994) explains fundamentalism as a human pattern that repeats regardless of religion, and identifies the “family traits” shared by all fundamentalisms.

This puts into context Vice President Dick Cheney’s famous line that U.S. forces would be greeted by Iraqis as liberators. It also puts into context former Ambassador John Bolton’s quip to BBC’s Jeremy Paxman on March 25, 2007 that if it were up to him, he would have conquered the country, handed the Iraqis a copy of The Federalist Papers, and left.

This is from Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. The full text can be found at The Churchill Centre’s website www.winstonchurchill.org.

The full text of Senator John F. Kennedy’s acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency of the United States from July 15, 1960 can be found at www.jfklibrary.org.

“’Risk’ is the secular word for ‘faith’” is something my father, Dr. Robert D. Dale, has said to me many times.

I walked the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas in the summer of 1996, before the compound was rebuilt. The Davidians had left the site in state. The Reverend Jerry Falwell said these words on CNN on the program CNN Debate on October 24, 2004.

This is my attempt to summarize counterinsurgency doctrine as found in the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and elsewhere. T.X. Hammes is a retired Marine colonel and author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21^st Century (Zenith Press, 2004), The “outgovern” line is from his Washington Post article “The Way to Win a Guerilla War” from November 26, 2006, page B2. Another good book on counterinsurgency strategy is The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen (Oxford University Press, 2009).

This story can be found in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo by John Henry Paterson (1907) and dramatized in the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. The reconstructed lions are currently on display in the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

This Knight orientation toward diplomacy is reflected, for example, in the title of former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton’s book Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations (Threshold Editions, 2007).

The “Able Archer” story can be found in J. Peter Scoblic’s U.S. Vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security (Viking Press, 2008) pp. 135ff.

Monologist Mike Daisey’s rendering of the “War of the Currents” story—from which I draw—can be found at Public Radio International’s Studio 360’s Show #904, “Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius,” January 25, 2008, www.studio360.org.

U2 frontman Bono tells this story in Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 86-87.