The Times They are A-Changing

The Slow-Release Poison of Post-Modernism

The question of what changed in society to enable it to develop from mediaevalism to modern economic powerhouses is a fascinating one.  One centrally important change was in the way men thought about the world and their place in it.  Who am I?  Why am I here and alive?  What are my duties and responsibilities?

Medieval man had a set of fairly standard answers to these questions.  Modernist man had a different understanding of life and being, and answered these questions differently.  Post-modern man has a different set of answers again.  The different answers were (and are) all religious in nature. 

The change from medievalism to modernism took place amidst developments in Christian doctrine; those changes in understanding essentially produced what we call the Modern period.

Modernism itself then went through two major developmental stages.  Early modernism was essentially Christian in nature and philosophy: it answered the questions above accordingly.  Later modernism moved away from orthodox Christianity to deistic-atheism, changing its answers to reflect this.  Post-modernism's religion, for its part, is materialistic atheism.  In each of these stages or phases, the questions above have been answered differently. The outcome and results have been very different. 

Charles Taylor documents the post medieval, early modern answers to the questions, who am I? why am I here? and what are my duties and responsibilities?  A major change that moved Europe from mediaevalism to the modern age had to do with "secular" work.  Taylor's is one of the best summaries we have read:

Legends and Myths

The Myth of the Dark Ages

The standard secular humanist perspective on European history was wrapped up and handed to us by Enlightenment philosophes.  The basic thesis was that rational thought and accomplishment ended with the waning of the Roman Empire.  It was succeeded by the Dark Ages--a period of ignorance, disease, poverty and brutality--until Charlemagne (circa 800AD), who represented a flickering, dying ember of former glories.  But human history did not recommence its triumphant upward movement until the Enlightenment, which it began to hymn brazenly, and with just a smidgen of self-serving chutzpah, declaring "We are the Champions of the World". 

Nowadays only the untutored cling to such a deceitful trick, and then only for the purposes of propaganda--which is elegantly appropriate, since this was largely why Gibbon wrote his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The way the story "rolled" was to magnify Rome and its Empire and contrast its glories with the succeeding degradations, then slip in an association of the "decline and fall" with the spread of Christianity (a superstition undermining classical thought), leading to the "inevitable" conclusion that the Christian religion was bad for the general well-being of mankind. 

Here is Gibbon's paean of praise to Roman accomplishment:

Thankfully We Live in an Enlightened Age

A Warning to Jews and Lepers

Atmospheric calamities provoke ignorant fears.  Scapegoats must be found.  In the early 14th century, Europe was troubled by very, very bad weather--somewhat akin to what the UK, Europe, and the United States have experienced over the past eighteen months.

The summer of 1314 was uncommonly cold and wet in Europe.  Crops rotted, harvests were late, and alarmed authorities placed price controls on farm products and firewood.  All these were routine disasters that had happened many times before. 

The awful weather of 1314, however, was just the beginning of a succession of catastrophes.  Bad crops seldom happen two years in a row, but the weather in 1315 was even worse than during the previous year.  Heavy and incessant rains caused flooding that smashed dikes.  Rising rivers destroyed villages.  Violent storms crashed onto the coasts [c.f. the floods and storms in the UK this winter, Ed.]  The tragedy stretched from Scotland to Italy and from the Pyrenees to the homes of the Slavs.  Food prices rose over fivefold and starvation was widespread.  Even that was not the end.  The weather wreaked havoc once again in 1316, causing the worst famine in European history.  People ate cats, rats, insects, and animal droppings, and then, lacking anything better, dug up corpses in the burying grounds.  Epidemics and violent crime were widespread.  Bloody and public self-flagellation was common.  Scapegoats--Jews, lepers, noblemen--were murdered without hesitation.  [Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000),  p.97]

Some observations spring to mind.

Slow Learners

A Hundred Blows to a Fool's Back Is Wasted Effort

The attempt to comprehensively regulate and legislate human commerce has been with us ever since Adam.  It has always ended in signal failure.  That alone should teach us something.

Medieval sumptuary laws are an example.  It was widely thought that a craftsman who plied his trade, selling goods or services to support his family was engaged in a holy and righteous calling.  But a merchant who bought and sold goods for a profit without adding any value to them was a greedy exploiter.  Go figure. Consider R. H. Tawney's description:

". . . But the man who buys [a thing] in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God's temple."  By very definition a man who "buys in order that he may sell dearer," the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity.  He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, "is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, is serves the lust of gain." [R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1923), p. 34f.]

Laying aside the matter of intentions, motives, and goals in such ways of thinking, just focus on the application of such ideas.

Excelsior Lowlanders

Modern Avatars of a Dark Age

For folks in the Northern Hemisphere it has been a pretty torrid winter.  We are thinking not just of the extreme cold in Canada and the United States, but of the floods in the United Kingdom.  However, it seems that the flooding in that country was immediately caused not by heavy precipitation, but substantially by the government's application of a foreign Greenist religion.

Consider James Delingpole's indictment:

The Real Dark Ages

Intellectual Snobbery Plays Tricks on Both the Dead and the Living

The dominant narrative of Western history runs something like this: the classical age (Greece, Alexander, and Rome) represents a crowning glory of human achievement.  This age was marked by an explosion of refined cultural achievement, knowledge, discovery, and scientific advance.  It was followed by the Dark Ages when the West came under the aegis of the Christian faith and its attendant superstition.  During nigh on a thousand dark years, the West lived in penury, illness, and degradation, presided over by tyrannical feudal despots and a superstitious religion.

Then came the Enlightenment which threw off the shackles of religious superstition and began to recover the glories of the classical age.  Out of the resulting explosion of knowledge and cultural advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came the Western dominance of the world--culturally, politically, academically, scientifically, and so forth.

But as Voltaire observed, "history" is a trick the living play upon the dead.