One thing that is pretty apparent from an ongoing debate with some leftists at the U of C law blog is that when push comes to shove the left will justify its contempt for tradition and faith in progress by proferring a very skewed account of western history since the middle ages that ignores the massive violence–as in order of magnitude larger–that has flowed from the ideologies of the modern age.
Instead, much of their view depends upon a very negative view of European history before the advent of the secular enlightenment era; the left will cite slavery, wars, and other forms of oppression as somehow being the direct expression of the core values of preceding Christian societies. What is not discussed are the important ways that Christianity modified the even more unjust pagan practices of predecessor societies, including their practice of total war, slavery, polygamy, state interference in religious conscience, etc.
The leftist account of history also ignores the ways that some of the evils we associate with the modern world–religious wars for example–are better described as a product of modernism with its handmaiden, the completely “sovereign” state. The 17th Century revolution in political affairs made the state stronger and the individual weaker. This occurred even though its advocates often argued in favor of these changes under the rubric of empowering the individual. The modern state accomplished this “empowerment” by destroying the rights and privileges of intermediary institutions like localities, the Church, and the guilds. Without these institutions in place, lone individuals had little ability to resist further enchroachments by the state. In the middle ages, as in the United States Constitutional model, faction counterbalanced faction. Commoners, the Church, guilds, nobles, landholders, and monarchs all took part in the drama. The privileges of these different constituencies were abolished in the modern state, including the revolutionary regime in France, but also its Napoleonic successor.
The view that our collective western history is simply a rap sheet of terrible crimes seems to miss something important in the sweep and complexity of history. Undoubtedly there were evils in Christendom, just as there are today. But there were many accomplishments that are taken for granted today, but were totally unknown in the pre-Christian world. In other words, the baseline of evaluating the values of the Middle Ages should not be our modern mixture of secular, Christian, and traditional structures, but the preceding high pagan civilization of Rome and the low pagan civilizations of the Germanic and Slavic Tribes.
And the comparisons must be apples to apples. Too often, the historical middle ages, with all of their imperfections, are compared with certain positive attributes of modern times, and even then only when those practices are viewed positively. Easy divorce, democracy, and other aspects of modern, radical individualism have been costly too, and their costs must be compared with the costs of the balance of the preceding regime.
Further, there are also certain unique evils–world wars, genocide–that are distinctly a product of the modern ideologies that came from the vaunted enlightenment. These distinct evils must be put into the calculus too when you are dealing with those that aim to ground their radical ideologies in a kind of Cliff Notes history of the last 1,000 years.
While I can’t expect to persuade anyone of complicated historical matters like the moral values (or not) of the middles ages in this discussion, I do think the importance of this issue needs to be recognized by conservatives in the US. They are all too often are silenced by the facile criticisms of the pre-modern era and earlier American history. Tradition includes slavery, therefore tradition is never valuable. Worse, conservatives sometimes imagine themselves to be the real champions of enlightenment modernism, quoting Jefferson and Paine and others on the left-wing of the American Revolution, forgetting that the “Revolution” also had more sober figures, its Hamiltons, Washingtons, Dickensons, and Randolphs.
I think this book by M. Stanton Evans and this one by the supremely educated Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihntoo are good places to start to see the weaknesses in the ideological liberal view of history, as is this article, The Renaissance Myth, and this book by a French historian, entitled Those Terrible Middle Ages.
Without the myth of the terrible middle ages, the supposed backwardness of the natural sciences before the enlightenment, and the alleged progress of the last 300 years, leftism would have far less support. Unfortunately, inculcation in the liberal myth of history starts early and continues throughout most people’s higher education. One hopes that a glimmer of skepticism might arise from individuals’ limited knowledge of primary sources. Can the world that produced Shakespeare, Gothic Cathedrals, Magna Charta, the jury trial, Michelangelo, and Gregorian Chant be as retrograde as we’re told?
Where are the conspiracy theorists when you need them? I wonder this, because the most extreme forms of credulity seem to appear when leftists peddle their simplified views on pre-modern history.
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