Montaigne’s Heiress

For those who have seen the discussion I’ve been having on the FDR board, I must lead off by saying that this is NOT in any way a rant against the people posting in that thread. If anything, it is a rant against a certain deeply-ingrained attitude – what that is and by whom it was ingrained I shall have occasion to speak of later – that has taken hold of modern man, and simply won’t let go. It’s the sort of idea that I’ve wanted all my life to fight. That I have pledged my life to fight.

The “thing” of which I am speaking is the notion that our ancestors and their actions and mindsets are simply unfathomable. That we, at the pinnacle of technology, living in an age when man is no longer the measure of all things, cannot understand how ancient man thought and felt, what his cares and sorrows were, or that we can do nothing but measure him according to our standards, and have him come up short.

The truth is that things simply aren’t that different. Anyone reading this blog – I assume that everyone reading this blog is an exponent of western culture, and currently lives in the west – has MUCH more in common with any first century Roman than he has with any twenty-first century Hindu, or Buddhist, or Daoist, or [insert eastern religion here]. Any westerner has much more in common with those flowers of 14th century chivalry Jacques Lalaing or Enguerrand de Coucy than he does with anyone who has grown up in a culture which is primarily eastern.

Why such a veil between us and our ancestors? How did it come about?

Chiefly, I think, by the priggish and parsonic moralists of the Victorian era, that great ruin and ruiner of history. For in the Victorian era, interest in the Middle Ages as a sort of romantic time was revived. Victorians viewed the Middle Ages much as Rousseau viewed his noble savage. A sort of creeping eighteenth century sentimentalism crept into the Victorian notions of the Middle Ages. Anything that was not to their liking was either highly sanitized or overblown into a horridly crude charicature of the actual events/persons/mindset in order to provide some sort of saccharine moral lesson. It was in the sick and sickening Victorian mind that such abominations as “ius primae noctis” and other stupid and ahistorical notions of the right of the lord to sleep with a peasant woman on her wedding night. Yet this unproven and unprovable “fact” finds its way into the popular imagination, popular histories, and popular culture.

The Victorians had a need to be superior. A need to maintain their empires of the mind as well as of the flesh. A need to rule both their conquered lands and to maintain the notion that they had a right to do so by dint of their superiority. A sort of intellectual “white man’s burden” to clean up history and make suitable extracts from it. The Victorians re-interpreted medieval art, clothing, and literature to suit their own “refined” tastes. They had to be superior to medieval man, though, and so the era was re-characterized as 1,000 years of plague and war. Yet the plagues and the wars were much more common in the Victorian era than in the medieval! Victorian society was in retrograde. It was going BACKWARDS from the heights achieved by the Enlightenment, and it needed to cover its tracks. (This is why the myths still persist today. We are as a species nowhere near the intellectual heights achieved by the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or even the High Middle Ages, not to mention the Romans and Greeks. We are a species in retrograde.)

It is generally known amongst historians that any book written in the Victorian era is pure rubbish, and should not be relied on in scholarly works. (There IS some true history in Victorian books, of course, but this can always be taken from other sources, much better researched and written, and with more reference to primary sources.) And yet the Victorian histories are PRECISELY where most of the drivel that is fed to children in schools these days is taken from. The learning in schools, of course, is 100 years behind the forefront of historical research.

The veil was not always down. We did not always view our ancestors through the dark glass of centuries. No. The people of the Enlightenment did not view history as dead and gone. The writers Froissart, Tacitus, Livy, Thucydides… these were all their friends. The attitude was not of foreigners or distant strangers looking backwards at time through a mirror. The kinship was acknowledged. The Enlightenment acknowledged how much it owed to the Renaissance, to the medieval scholastics, and to the Roman and Greek historians. A wall was not set up between “them” and “us.”

Why such a difference between Enlightenment man and Victorian? The Victorians, much as I blame them for benighting and condemning my “friends” in the past, they did not cut their sins from whole cloth. They inherited them from others. From whom? From other people who needed the same sort of self-aggrandizing BS that the Victorians did. Yes, ladies and germs, from the Renaissance.

The people of the Renaissance were, of course, much closer in mindset to their immediate ancestors in the middle ages than we are. They therefore had a greater need to differentiate themselves from them than we do. Renaissance tomes are filled with interesting paradoxes – filled with a tension between the nobility, still living in the middle ages, and intellectual man, living in the new world born of commerce, ingenuity, and exploration. They tend to discount wholesale anything that came between the fall of Rome and Petrarch. The fad was for everything Roman and Greek. Chuck everyone and everything else out, and in with Cicero, Plato, Socrates, and Sophocles. (This would happen again in the Enlightenment, which was a reaction to the odious splendor of the Baroque.)

History goes in long cycles, I think. There was the eastern mysticism of ancient Egypt and the early Greek civilizations. Then came republican and stoic Greece and Rome. Then Byzantium carried the pale, flickering flame of humanity until it burst into high and glorious splendor in the High Middle Ages. The flame sputtered again in the wastes of the 14th and early 15th centuries, until the higher per-capita wealth left in the wake of the Black Death sparked increases in commerce and then, at last, a second Renaissance. This collapsed in the fitful struggles and decadence of the Baroque, which was rescued by the wonders of the Enlightenment, and… now we are again benighted. 300 years of… god.

Now, some of this is what the Victorians would have us believe. Weird, eastern, pantheistic Egypt. Straight-backed and philosophical Greece and Rome. Muddy, plague-ridden, benighted medieval Europe. A bright flame of beauty and grandeur in the Renaissance. Decadence and gain-seeking in the Baroque. The collapse of the divine right of kings and the ushering in of science in the Enlightenment.

All of these are caricatures. Some of them are useful caricatures. Not all. And the middle ages always, ALWAYS gets the short end of the stick. Because people can’t resolve its contradictions. They can’t appreciate them. That wall thus descends. Anything that we can’t make sense of, or don’t want to, we must discard, and certainly disown.

What would it mean, though, if you have more in common with a medieval peasant than a Hindu untouchable? What would it mean if you acknowledged that peasant, and his mindset, as similar to you and to your mindset? I’ll tell you what: Christians have the same violent reaction when contemplating the fact that we evolved from apes. It is the same sort of fear, revulsion, and disbelief.

I’ll let you in on a bit of a secret: a medieval peasant was Christian because he had to be. Not because someone would come and bonk him on the head with a sword if he wasn’t. We define mysticism as belief which is outside the accepted laws of nature. But the peasant didn’t know them. He didn’t know the laws of thermodynamics, except by what he could empirically observe. Kepler wasn’t around yet. Nor was Newton. The basis of science was not yet laid. The medieval peasant didn’t know the laws of nature that we do because he couldn’t. And, frankly, he had as much reason for believing in divine influence in daily life as we do in gravity. I’ve never seen anyone prove gravity to me. I’ve never seen the mathematics behind it. But I can see my watch falling off the table when I push it. And to a medieval peasant, the fact that it rained after he prayed to Jesus was not due to condensation in the sky of water from the oceans, but because he prayed. That, to him, was an empirical, observable fact. He had no other, and could have no other. No other belief was possible to him in the absence of science.

You can think of the rise of science in terms of your own knowledge. Did you study aeronautical engineering at age 7? No. You studied simple addition. Then multiplication. Then algebra and geometry. Then calculus. And then when you finally had the base knowledge required, you began to study applied science – if you ever did. Well… criticising a medieval peasant for being “supersitious” is like criticizing a 10 year old for not being able to show you the mathematics behind gravity. He doesn’t know because he can’t yet know.

There are, of course, many modern people who share the medieval view that things for which they don’t have an explanation are the divine will of God. They need God in their lives, at the switch, manning the controls. The fundamentalist Christian is thought of as “medieval” in his mindset. Yet it’s not even of the fundamentalists that I’m speaking. Medieval man was ingenious. He invented, he made, he shaped, and he worked with his mind and his hands. Medieval man was, in his crude way, a scientist. An empiricist. Look at any medieval castle. Just look at it. And try to forget skyscrapers. Try to forget the modern era. Look and think: this was built by MEN. By hand. Hundreds of men with hand tools. Hundreds of men working out how to get 1-ton blocks of stone from hundreds of miles away. Hundreds of men doing the calculations to figure out how to lift them. Hundreds of men hauling with all their might to place each stone. All by men. Look at Chartres Cathedral. A masterpiece of exquisite beauty. Made by men. Made with machines powered by men, and thought of by men. By empiricists and scientists living in that most “benighted” of all ages. You look at a cathedral and tell me that there was not greatness in men’s souls. And you tell me that we should not be proud to be their intellectual descendants. You just try it.

The Victorians, of course, stood at the pinnacle of history (or what they believed was the pinnacle of history) casting aspersions at the logical equivalent of mathematics-challenged 5-year-olds. And we still do the same today. We still teach our children the shopworn tenets of Victorian exceptionalism. And it’s really, really time we stopped.