Perception is a Spike Turned Inward: Reflecting on Contemporary Events through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This essay examines how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a critical framework for understanding contemporary moral and epistemological failures. Through the lens of the Green Knight as a monstrous figure embodying both judgment and transformative grace, I analyze three recent events that exemplify modern evasions of moral reckoning: Richard Dawkins' rigid empiricism and dismissal of symbolic thought, Archbishop Justin Welby's institutional protection over justice in response to abuse allegations, and the mechanized violence of drone warfare that distances aggressors from the human consequences of their actions. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of symbolism and Slavoj Žižek's theorization of Christ as monstrous rupture, I argue that the Green Knight represents a necessary disruption to ideological stability—a force that refuses to allow individuals to remain comfortable within their inherited frameworks. The essay contends that contemporary figures of authority, like Gawain's pentangle, construct artificial systems of certainty that ultimately fail when confronted with moral complexity. By "puncturing the fantasy" of both medieval romance and modern rationalism, I demonstrate how the poem's central figure challenges us to recognize perception itself as "a spike turned inward"—a violence we enact upon ourselves in pursuit of certainty. In an age of algorithmic chaos, institutional corruption, and dehumanized warfare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains urgently relevant, offering not nostalgia but a medieval mirror reflecting our contemporary inability to submit ourselves to genuine transformation.