Oh, dear. I got the exact opposite impression about Tuchman's mirror
when I read that book. I thought the 1300s were a time of coming
out of a stagnant social order into the modern age, with a kick from
the black death.
What happened with the famines and epidemics was that Europe's
peasant population suddenly declined. Yet the lords still expected
the same incomes as before. The Great Peasant revolt in France was
viciously put down by the knights, but they could not get the
peasants back on the estates. The lords had to start offering
rented land at reasonable rates to get anybody to work the land.
The age of Serfdom ended. It had begun eight centuries previously
when the conquering Franks set up a military government after
destroying the Gallo-Roman kingdom that existed for a short while
after the fall of the western Roman empire. They made the Gallo-
Romans serfs.
Far from the church developing more authority in this time, its power
collapsed. This was the time of the great schism, when there were
two, sometimes three popes around, all claiming to be the real pope.
I get puzzled about somebody who thinks these medieval monks like
Abelard and Anselm were examples of enlightened thinking. The idea of
'reason' has been the biggest problem with western civilization down
to the present.
In the present, we are also struggling to come out of an outmoded
form of social organization and those who benefit from this
organization are resisting fiercely. But they are steadily losing
authority. Good sense eventually overcomes rationalism, but it
usually takes a disaster like the black death, or an environmental
collapse.
Rationalists are people who can not get it that there is no such
thing as 'objectivity'. Everyone's thought is conditioned by
experience and what they have been told and believed are 'laws of
nature'. Good sense is the innate human ability to get outside of
self and preconditioned thinking , and ask what is actually
happening. Education is mostly about neutralizing this ability and
conditioning people to think in the 'rational' framework hammered
into them.
When people who have been taught to be 'reasonable' encounter
something that contradicts 'reason' they cannot understand it and
think some 'forces of darkness' are gathering.
Actually, the forces of good sense and peacefulness are gathering.
The dark forces that have prevailed are now frantically trying to
make everything 'rational' again.
tr
On 26-Apr-08, at 3:47 PM, Ed Weick wrote:
> I've been looking through stuff I've written during the past few
> years and found the following, which seems relevant to the
> discussion of memes that has been a dominant feature of the
> Dissenters list recently. It may be of interest to some of you.
>
> Ed
>
>
> A Short Essay on Viruses
>
> Some recent postings have raised the fascinating topic of the
> effect of disease on history. Recurrent pandemics such as bubonic
> plague, cholera, typhus and influenza have played an enormous role
> in defining the course taken by peoples for several centuries
> thereafter. Syphilis has brought dynasties to ruin. The viruses or
> bacteria which were at issue affected physical health. I would
> suggest that another type of virus, a intellectual one, has been at
> least equally potent in shaping human history. As an entity, we can
> think of it as something like a computer virus - as something which
> does not take the shape of an organism, but which is transmittable
> from person to person nevertheless.
>
> What does this intellectual virus do? Just as biophysical viruses
> sicken the body, it sickens and immobilizes the mind. It numbs and
> dulls human potential, and plunges people into states of pessimism,
> meanness and despair.
>
> The impact of this virus varies from civilization to civilization,
> and from era to era. The Aztecs have recently been mentioned on
> this list. Some years ago I did some reading on the Aztecs, and one
> of the things I recall is that, for many years before the coming of
> Cortez, the Aztecs were in a state of deep pessimism. They felt
> their world to be ending. I believe it had something to do with
> their calendar, a human invention which they invested with cosmic
> powers. When Cortez finally came along, they were immobilized to
> the point of not being able to do anything about him and his small
> army. However, the facts of smallpox and rebellion by peoples the
> Aztecs had subjugated did not help.
>
> Another example of the virus comes from the 11th to 14th Century
> Europe. Led by activist thinkers such as Peter Abelard, and fed by
> the accessibility of Arabic and Classical material, the 11th
> Century witnessed an increasing secularization of the Christian
> world, and an explosion of initiatives toward a more rational
> theology, which laid the foundations for the development of
> science. Heretical liberally-religious groups such as the
> Waldensians and Cathers sprang up and found fertile ground among
> intellectuals who had been long dominated by oppressive
> Catholicism. It was not long, however, before the virus set in. The
> very foundations of the Church were threatened. The Church moved to
> suppress the liberalizing influences in whatever way seemed
> necessary. People such as Abelard were isolated. Heretics were
> burned at the stake. Finally, in 1277, the Pope issued a statement
> on where the church stood on the matter of faith versus reason. If
> you wanted openness and reason, you could not have it in the Church
> and the Church was very much in control.
>
> Now, some will argue that there was no virus at all, that all that
> happened was that the dominant power structure, the Catholic
> Church, had been challenged and had retaliated. But that was not
> all that there was to it. The drama played itself out over two
> Centuries, and it would appear that for much of that time the
> Church had been tolerant of what was going on, and even
> encouraging. Anselm of Canterbury, 1030-1109, who lived at the
> beginning of the so-called "Twelfth Century Awakening", was an
> early rationalist. Peter Abelard, 1079-1142, was condoned by the
> Church for a considerable part of his life as a teacher. But what
> gradually happened was something of a slow "gathering of dark
> forces", to use a Tolkien-like image.
>
> The growing virus of the intellect was aided and abetted by natural
> disasters and real biophysical viruses which reinforced the
> vengeful power of God. Between 1315-1317 Europe was devastated by a
> "hideous famine". Adverse trends in climate which had begun in the
> 13th Century culminated in appalling weather conditions which led
> to an "medieval economic depression" which continued to have
> effects to the beginning of the Renaissance. And, of course, 1347
> brought the Black Death.
>
> What does all this have to do with the world of today? Some years
> ago, Barbara Tuchman held the world of the 14th Century up to us,
> proposing that in it we would see a distant mirror image of
> ourselves. We tend to forget her lesson. The 14th Century saw the
> closing down of an earlier two-century period of enlightenment; the
> 20th Century may be witnessing the closing down of the one which
> has now run for some two centuries, beginning, I would propose,
> with the American and French Revolutions.
>
> Though it saw war and mass exterminations, this period also
> witnessed the growth of democratic institutions, the spread of
> "universals" (education, health, social security), the humanization
> of capital, the growing power of labour, and rising standards of
> living. However, this may have begun to end sometime during the
> past fifty years. The past few decades, since World War II, have
> been a period of economic florescence and gradual decline. The
> 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, were the perhaps the most prosperous
> years of human history. It was not only the advanced world which
> prospered and grew, but the underdeveloped world witnessed the
> Green Revolution and industrialization which showed every promise
> of bettering human life. Since then, productivity has fallen,
> unemployment has grown, and poverty has again become part of the
> accepted commonplace. The Green Revolution, based on chemical
> fertilizers and pesticides, has turned out to be green more in
> illusion than in fact, and industrialization in the NICs is raising
> the prospect of massive environmental damage.
>
> So, these are real problems. What do they have to do with my virus?
> I would suggest the following: along with the deterioration of the
> economy, the falling productivity of capital (except, it would
> seem, the productivity of finance capital), the mounting debts of
> governments, and growing unemployment, has come a pessimistic
> meanness - a gathering, once again, of the Tolkien-like "dark
> forces". It is hard to tell how this began, but someone, some
> group, somewhere may have started it and it has since spread to
> become the dominant thought mode of our civilization. During the
> 1950s, we placed our faith in education and growth, and during the
> 1960s in flower-power and the rebuilding of society along more
> humane lines. Since then, we have been running for cover, striving,
> as John Ralston Saul has so ably pointed out, to hide within
> corporate groups and exclude others by speaking specialized
> languages that are not even understood by ourselves.
>
> Whether or not there really is a virus behind all of this does not
> matter. My point is that, as in the 14th Century, we have once
> again become a society of despair. Like the Aztecs waiting for, and
> dreading, the return of Quetzalcoatl, we are immobilized. Our
> governments, unable to do anything positive, are doing every
> negative thing they can - cutting, hacking and lacerating all in
> the name of satisfying our dour lust for leanness and meanness. A
> whole culture of consultants, like an austere medieval priesthood,
> has grown up around re-engineering and lean production - squeezing
> more work out of those lucky enough to retain their jobs and
> getting rid of ("terminating") all others.
>
> How do we get out of this? Must we again endure two centuries of
> purging and self- flagellation before a new renaissance? Or can we
> come to recognize that many problems are of our own making and
> refuse to become victims of the virus of despair? How, in place of
> universal pessimism and lost hope, do we promote the idea that we
> can regain control? I believe that the answers cannot come from
> society, or, as some appear to believe, from a technology such as
> the internet. They must come from ourselves, each and every one of
> us. It would seem that the most important thing is to become
> skeptical of everything, including popular scapegoats and remedies.
>
> Is it really the TNCs, computers and robotics that are shafting us?
> If so, what countervailing powers do we have? If not, find the real
> causes. Perhaps it is ourselves, burying our heads in the sand and
> getting our asses kicked. Is it government? Well, in democracies,
> those who govern are accessible, and if they are not, storm the
> barriers and make them so. They are our servants, not our masters.
>
> But perhaps it really is ourselves. We don't like to think that it
> is, so we look around for others to blame for having done this to
> us, or perhaps for a virus. Having quoted him once, I will quote my
> old friend Pogo Possum again because he may be right: "We have seen
> the enemy and he is us."
>
> Ed Weick
>
>
>
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