It is a long time since I read Tuchman. I have her on my shelves and should
look again. However, in general, the 14th Century brought a close to a warm
spell that lasted some four centuries and in which, in Europe, population
grew and agriculture was greatly expanded, many great cathedrals were built
and the Norse were able to settle Greenland. During this period, the Church
initially encouraged freedom of thought, but when that freedom began to
threaten its power, the lid was slammed down. The impact of Abelard, who
was a teacher but not, I believe, a monk and other thinkers of the time was
so large that the period during which they lived, thought and taught, the
11th and 12 Centuries, is referred to as the 12th Century Enlightenment.
The period came to an end at the beginning of the 14th Century, when a cold
spell sometimes referred to as "the little ice age" began. Crop failures
led to mass famine in about 1315 and many times thereafter. The Black Death
in which one-third to one-half of the population of Europe died occurred in
mid-century and recurred several times thereafter, eg. London in 1665.
Peasant rebellions occurred -- eg. the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the
English Peasants Revolt in 1381, and the German Peasants Revolt in 1525 --
but not very much changed because of them. The lot of peasants did improve
because disease and famine led to shortages of labour, but peasantry even as
free labour was not an easy life. I would argue that, for the common
people, there really wasn't much of an improvement in living standards until
the latter part of the 19th Century and it wasn't really until the early
part of the 20th Century that really big improvements came with
democratization and unionization.
Where we go from where we are now is difficult to say. I would argue that
there is already considerable evidence that, with excessive population and
dwindling resources, we can not go on as we are. There will be change and
it won't be pleasant.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "futurework"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2008 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
> 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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