Medieval Times

An interesting article in which the European writer Paul Belien argues that the real core of European civilization, the values and structures of the Middle Ages, persist more vitally in the free and decentralized political system and more devoted religious culture of the United States. He writes:

In the 17th and 18th centuries North America was colonised by freedom loving people who brought the political institutions and traditions from Europe to a new continent across the sea. Many of them had left Europe because they wanted the freedom to live according to their own conscience instead of the conscience of the centralist absolutist rulers of the new age that was sweeping across Europe from the 16th century onwards. Their traditions were rooted in the decentralised traditions of the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Europe’s Middle Ages had been characterised by an absence of central power, while man was bound to multiple legal systems: the legal order of his city, that of the land, that of his guild, that of the church. There was not one monopolistic ruler, as in China or in the Muslim world, but many, which guaranteed greater freedom for the individual. The philosophy of Aquinas, moreover, was centered on the individual. God had called man to be free from sin, but in order to be free from sin he had to be virtuous, and in order for virtue to have any value it had to be voluntary, implying that the virtuous man had to be free in every aspect of his life including, as Aquinas’ followers later pointed out, his economic activities.

Hence the paradox came about that the civil society developing in the new continent was in a sense older than the new Modern Age of the absolutist monarchs governing Europe. When the Americans rebelled in 1776 they rebelled against absolutism in order to keep their old freedoms. Theirs was a conservative revolution. Europe had its own series of revolutions from 1789 onwards, but these were revolutions of a different sort. They toppled the ruling absolutists to replace them by absolutists of an even extremer form: totalitarians. These were not satisfied with controlling their subjects’ political and economic lives but also wished to control their minds and souls, i.e. to become their god.

I made a similar observation about the liberties of the Middle Ages in a blog entry some time ago: “The Dark Ages weren’t so dark. The alleged despotism of medieval Europe is largely propaganda, and confusion about the reality of Europe from, say, 700 to 1700 does much to support the aggrandizing structure of the modern, centralized state. Just as the US Constitution operates by pitting ‘faction against faction,’ the medieval structure worked through the tension between kings, nobles, the Church, and the guilds. No one group had all the power, and thus groups and individuals in danger had people with power to whom they could turn. ” Belein, however, makes an observation that is unique and rather interesting. Namely, that America was acting as a time capsule of sorts, evolving along medieval lines while the rest of Europe descended into more modern and unitary nation-states ruled by the more modern “absolute” monarchies. Our stability is analogous to the way colonial languages remain fairly static when they are cut off from the mother tongue, such as the fairly archaic usages of Quebecois Frenchor the ways American English, contrary to popular belief, are more similar in many ways in pronunciation to English in the 1700s than modern British English. In its language and its culture, America remained rooted in the past, with the benefit of being strengthened by modern technology, organizational techniques, and arms-length commercial intercourse with the rest of the world.

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