The culture war over the Middle Ages

July 14, 2022

"The left thinks it was too white while the Catholic New Right sees much to admire."

The culture war over the Middle Ages - The Spectator World.pdf

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We are facing a war on the nuclear family, traditional marriage and natural rights, all of which are anathema to the woke, progressive left.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the attached article.

There is a war afoot, here in late civilization, over the meaning and legacy of the Middle Ages. Two distinct fronts have emerged from either side of our political spectrum. On the left, in the academy, medievalism is being diversified out of existence, its defining Western characteristics relegating it to a smaller place in a global mosaic. On the right, a certain breed of new conservative is reclaiming the Middle Ages as a keystone period in which order and reason ruled, instead of the swivel-headed “scientism” of pure observation brought on by the Enlightenment.

The ground upon which this battle is joined is the traditional Anglosphere understanding of the medieval period, roughly the fifth to fifteenth centuries ad, a period most commonly thought of as the “Dark Ages.” That moniker has always been a bit of an anti-Catholic fib, meant to start the clock of meaningful modernity at the hour of the Reformation. But recent works, such as Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s The Bright Ages, show that the thousand-year bridge from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance is packed full of advances in almost every single human discipline, from building, to governing, to war, as well to learning, literature and philosophy.

So, why does the left wish to obfuscate the Middle Ages’s unique contributions, and what is it that the (mostly) Catholic wing of the New Right seeks to celebrate and regain? The thumbnail answer to the first question is that the history of the medieval period is very white and very male. This year’s Manhattan Institute Hayek Prize winner, Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, argued in his acceptance lecture that early medieval prohibitions on polygamy and incest created a unique civilization of monogamy and nuclear families that gave the West a distinct bent toward individualism and natural rights. That primacy of the nuclear family is very much in modern progressive crosshairs.

The left is trying to re-write history, to remove the roots of civilization and prosperity built on the foundation of the nuclear family and natural rights. As this author has built a similar case in multiple, previous posts, it is nice to see an even more comprehensive analysis of how the progressive left wants to make their case by denying history.

Colonization and conquest have characterized "civilization" for thousands of years. The Old Testament is a good example of how even the religious foundations of Judaism and Catholicism have grown up in a world of armies, enslavement, and wealth acquisition by brute force (rather than by the creation of wealth), in a world characterized by widespread poverty, famine, disease and destruction human and Mother nature. Only with the development of the nuclear family, the enlightenment and the scientific method did we start the very long and arduous process that eventually led to the wave of human prosperity that finally took off early in the nineteenth century and produced two hundred years of sustained economic growth and prosperity.

Not that this was a smooth road or even a monotonic progression. Despite advances in science in technology, plagues and disease often raised their ugly heads, and much of technology was devoted to the military, to methods that furthered the conquest and appropriation of wealth. Over time, wealth was measured less by the number of people enslaved and more by the amount of material goods a king or a country acquired. And women and children were viewed less as property and more as the basis for furthering human life, prosperity and social stability.

The banal canard (repetition merited), "It takes a village," underscores this progressive fascination with destroying the nuclear family. Rather than a village, it takes a family to raise children, to create wealth, and to sustain society. The village follows and prospers if families prosper and, conversely, today's urban centers flounder as families flounder. This reaffirms a fundamental point of mine: The primary cause of poverty in developed countries is sex outside of marriage; in developing countries, it is sex within marriage. In other words, today's prosperous nations are plagued by the seeming collapse of lifetime marriage and two-parent, heterosexual families, replaced by a dizzying spectrum of alternative lifestyle chpices that may maximize the expression of personal freedom but which does not bode well for successive generations.