Jerusalem Meets Westeros: What Game of Thrones and History Reveal About Us
After putting it off for more than a decade, I finally started watching Game of Thrones. I've never been a big fan of medieval, fantastical, war-heavy dramas with Old English accents, so I didn’t think GoT was for me. Boy, was I off on that count. GoT, everyone else already knows, is genius. Having just passed the halfway mark in S3, I'm getting excited for the classic Red Wedding episode I've heard so much about. At the same time—perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not—I’m reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s brilliant biography of the Middle East, Jerusalem: The Biography. Montefiore's book is remarkable and even more genius than GoT.
The parallels between these works are startling: intricate, layered storytelling, endless cycles of human trial and triumph; and, at their heart, the deeply complex, tangled bonds of human relationships. Histories, aspirations, and struggles ripple through both narratives, profoundly shaping lives. It’s shocking—and a little unsettling—how nearly every page of Jerusalem reads like an episode of Game of Thrones. Both the real Jerusalem of antiquity and the fictional Westeros lay bare humanity ensnared in relentless cycles of power struggles, betrayal, and redemption, clashes of faith and identity, and the constant pull between individual ambition and collective survival.
Together, Jerusalem and GoT, push us to examine the ties that bind—family, politics, faith—and confront whether humanity has truly evolved. Are we still chasing power and wealth and engaging our tribalist tendencies as relentlessly as we did millennia ago? Have we learned from history, or are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes under a shinier, more technological guise? The more we ask, the less comforting the answers seem. For all its speed, technological glitter, and productivity advances, modernity often feels like a polished, accelerated echo of the Middle Ages. But is it really? We know what Steven Pinker would say, but as I consider the Darwinian scramble and frothy malaise of our current world, I'm not so sure.
As a lifelong believer in and champion of progress, innovation, and the betterment of ourselves and our society, I’m unsettled by my conclusion above. I genuinely enjoyed and agreed with Pinker’s excellent book, Better Angels of Our Nature: life has improved for most people, violent death is at its lowest point in history, and I also agree, we are living in an increasingly enlightened world. However, even as progress marches us forward, we—human beings—are still tethered to our basest instincts, replaying cycles of power, greed, and folly. Perhaps most sobering of all, modernity hasn’t erased these flaws—it has only sharpened them. We don’t just repeat history’s mistakes; we’ve learned to perfect them, wielding tools of destruction with a speed and scale that history’s most ruthless tyrants could scarcely have imagined.