The Afterlives of Baciyelmos
By William Egginton
A famous scene from Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel Don Quixote revolves around an object: a well-used metal bowl that belongs to a barber. Because it is raining, the barber puts the bowl on his head while riding his donkey. The book’s delusional knight, seeing a man riding a steed with a metal bowl on his head, decides that the bowl is the fabled Helmet of Mambrino, attacks the unsuspecting barber, and claims his bowl as a spoil of war. Later in the story the barber returns to make his case to some travelers gathered at an inn. The travelers, for their part, feign confusion about whether the object in question is a common barber’s bowl, a bacía in Spanish, or Mambrino’s famed helmet, yelmo. Into this commotion Sancho Panza throws a brilliant neologism and dubs the object a baciyelmo.
Today our world is full of baciyelmos—objects, ideas, or people who are ascribed radically different identities by different communities. A historically fair and inclusive presidential election for one group is a steal for another; a life-saving vaccine for one group is a mind-controlling chip for another; a heroic Jewish president and war hero for one group is a Nazi for another. In all cases we are dealing with a similar epistemological and political problem: how different groups come to assess the same entity in such radically opposed ways, and how a society—or, indeed, the community of humanity—can settle such conflicts in ways that avoid further demonization and violence.
It is precisely here that Cervantes affords us an important lesson.
First, knowing you are right is not enough. Indeed, in the novel merely knowing that the object is in fact a bowl offers no advantage whatsoever in the debate about its identity. Ukrainians with Russian relatives have tragically witnessed this same dynamic as they have tried to convince their loved ones that Ukraine is suffering from Russian aggression and not being cleansed of Nazis.
For Cervantes we never have unadulterated access to what we are arguing about, but rather always encounter that thing nested in layers of context that determine how we understand, value, and even perceive it. To put it another way, we encounter the world as portrayed by the media we use to communicate about it, be they books or theater, in Cervantes’s day, or television and social media in our own. And the more those media blur the divisions between their representation and the world they represent, the deeper the adherence of particular groups to the interpretation of reality that grounds their identity.
Don Quixote’s worldview stems from the idea of Spain as a mythical Christian nation in perpetual righteous battle with infidels who threaten it from all sides. As he says at length to anyone willing to listen, he believes that all his nation’s ills could be quickly solved by, in essence, making Spain great again, by returning to the old ways of knights-errand righting wrongs with the awesome strength of their faith and their arms. Yes, his vision of such a mythical past comes from fairy-tale nonsense, but state propagandists also pumped out official histories of the Spanish nation with similar attributes to the tales of chivalry that so ensnared Don Quixote’s fancy. Likewise, for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is a region of the historical greater Russia he dreams of reviving, just as for MAGA adherents their leader promised the restoration of a lost Golden Age, now unjustly stymied by evil election stealers.
More than representing how and why such contextualizations determine our reception of the facts we choose to believe, Cervantes also offers a model for how to engage in today’s debates. Crucially, just raising our voices and intoning words like fact or evidence won’t get us very far. The barber’s attempt to do just that results in a hilarious poll taken among all those present. Naturally Sancho votes for the Helmet of Mambrino story, which supports his claim that the saddle packs he himself stole are the gainfully won trappings of an enemy knight’s steed. Indeed, in situations of conflict we tend to double down on the interpretation that is woven into our identity, because our identities and interests deeply inform the reality in which we interpret our facts.
Precisely because he understood how tightly our facts are woven into the fabric of our identities, Cervantes focused not on those disputed facts but on how different groups framed and understood them. In other words, his response to the baciyelmos of his day was to create the very scenario of the baciyelmo as a way of guiding readers to see their investment in the interpretations that decide what count as facts.
To do something similar today we need arguments or works of art that prod us to reflect on rather than reaffirm the frameworks we are invested in and that show how we tend to defend the facts that uphold those frameworks. This is not a panacea. Just as we are unlikely to be converted to a different interpretation of reality by engaging with a single argument or artwork, we shouldn’t expect members of opposed groups to suddenly adopt our interpretations. But perhaps seeing stealections and chaccines as something like baciyelmos—objects whose contested interpretations stem from investments that are integral to our identities rather than simple facts the other side fails to grasp—will make it easier to pause and consider, to revise our beliefs when reasons emerge to do so. Perhaps it can even generate empathy with other groups at a time when doing so might be the last thing between us and our extinction
