Modern Lessons From Medieval History 7
Created | Updated Dec 1, 2011
Part 7. FACING THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE
So, as a generation of students faced up to the challenge of the Future,what parting lessons and thoughts did our Cambridge and Colorado academics leave with them at the end of their histories.
MODERN TIMES AS PART OF A SUCCESS STORY
Previte Orton’s study was written in 1916 very much in the hope that Humankind was ‘back on track’. An Ancient World had been destroyed by a process of ‘Decline and Fall’, but had been partly reflected in the high Middle Ages, which brought Europe out of the Dark Ages. Then the values and virtues that had made people cohere to the monarchy, nobility and the Church became decayed. But by this time a new city-centred Europe rediscovered the true spirit of the Ancient World in the Renaissance. And Dr. Orton's last chapter is a story of the dark before the dawn, not unlike the dark period from the late 1860's to 1914, which had come to a great and decisive crisis in the struggle for Civilization.
The theme of Dr. Orton's last section is “The Despotic Monarchies” in which he including the spiritual monarchy of “The Tyrannical Papacy”. These were despotisms that enforced some stability and security on an age when old ties had lost their capacity to promote a sense of sticking together. France and England, in particular, however, cohered around a new ideal of nationalism: and, for Orton, that trend towards despotism in England reached its logical conclusion with Henry VII, the first of the Tudors. “A heavy price was paid for peace and justice, but the goods were delivered by the unchivalrous Henry. England, like France, was consolidated into a despotism under a trained bureaucracy at the close of the Middle Ages”. (page 524)
Yet these despots, and even the tyrannical Papacy, were caught up in the age of discovery, employing and promoting the work of many of the ‘new men’ of a new age. They offered new powers and opportunities and the despots sought to harness their work and achievements to their own purposes. Thus, for example, the Pope compelled Michelangelo to work on the new St. Peter’s, while Henry VIII employed Sir Thomas More. And in so doing they helped to opened up the Modern age, for without the lords and masters there would be no great ‘Sistine Chapel Ceiling’, and probably no ‘Utopia’ either, since More wrote the work after a diplomatic mission to Bruges on which he came into contact with the reality of the “New World”.
So Orton’s last section deals with the exciting impact of this age of discoveries:
“As if by the stroke of a magician’s wand the routes of the world’s trade and with them the European centre of gravity were changed. The Mediterranean and its states became, so to say, a subordinate blind-alley. Henceforth commerce flowed on the ocean routes to the havens of the Atlantic coast. The new despotic nation-states which possessed them, Spain and Portugal, France and England, received thereby wealth, the privilege of colonial expansion in new lands, and the primacy of European civilization. The leadership they were acquiring by military strength and unifying government was confirmed by commerce and the arts.” (page 558)
It was a time of thought-adventure as well as geographical discovery. “The medieval theory of the world as neatly planned, once deemed invulnerable, crumbled at a touch. The revered decisions of the schoolmen and of the antique sages were over-thrown by the revelations of the seas and continents and peoples of which they never knew. It was seen that the world was vaster and more wonderful, and that its secrets and wonders were to be discovered, not by the venerable deductions from imperfect knowledge and precocious theory, but by the acquisition of new knowledge and by induction from new-found facts. The spirit of the Renaissance received its charter and presides over modern times.” (page 559)
Fifty years later that view of the Renaissance might still be held by people like the ‘scorpioni’ in the film “Tea With Mussolini”: the “English” ladies, who had adopted Florence and Tuscany with its tranquil and old ways set amongst eternal masterpieces. But recent history had given greater significance to the violence, bloodshed and disorder of Renaissance Italy. Mussolini and his Blackshirts claimed proud historical roots too, both in Ancient Rome and in Italy of the ‘condotierri’ and of tyranny.
Furthermore the vastness of the wonders and the secrets revealed by centuries of discovery, new knowledge and induction from new-found facts, had taken Humankind beyond the age of the thrill and excitement of new adventures. It had become impossible to even attempt to see things whole and stable.
During the age of discovery people had set out physically, intellectually, and artistically from the confines and inadequacies of an “old world” to find a “new world” that they might expand and grow to be part of. But there was no single "new world", merely a seemingly infinite variety of other societies, which did not necessarily see themselves as a world or part of one world, not even the heirs within what had been “Western Civilization”. For it is easy to forget that, though Sir Thomas More, Michelangelo, Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus may be described as “children of the Renaissance”, nature ordains that new life must normally be created by a union of two other lives. And it is very obvious that all of these men were very rooted in the best of the Middle Ages and drew their strength from its virtues. Subsequently Western Civilization “progressed” further and further away from those strengths and virtues, the qualities to which Medieval people aspired, and it lost any real sense of over-arching communal and collective purpose and direction, apart from the imperative to keep moving somewhere, anywhere. During the siege of Leningrad those people who stopped moving during the bitter winter just froze to death.
LIVING A DIVINE COMEDY AFTER THE OPENING OF PANDORA'S BOX
To Dr. Thomson in 1963 it was obvious that the shape of things to come had already been established long before those great men of the Renaissance and Reformation had been born. And he started his study with the life and times of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).
In Dante’s writing Thomson could find the full range of Medieval Civilization displayed and infused with the first essence what would grow through the work of Petrarch and Boccacio into the spirit of the Renaissance impelling Europe pell-mell into a new age. It was the spirit of an Italy that had lived at the heart of the world for centuries, while England and France had lived on the extremity at a watershed between the known and the unknown. And, in the light of the roots of Italy in the Ancient Civilization of the Mediterranean, Dante’s self-appointed task of assessing the souls of the dead can be seen as part of a tradition that goes right back to the deities of Ancient Egypt, when the souls of the departed were weighed by the gods. Dante was not bound and contained by the Middle Ages, nor really just by Ancient Italy.
“It is customary to regard the ‘Comedy’ as the ‘summa’, the summation, of medieval life and faith. It is all of that. But there are several aspects of the work that do not fall within this category. It breathes an individualism that was completely at odds with the medieval mind. It rejects the claim of the church to rule every part of man’s life and by implication at least, denies the centricity of the sacramental powers of the Church. When popes and cardinals are consigned to Hell by a layman, a revolution in authority and doctrine is on the way.” (page 27)
Dr. Thomson’s students in Sixties’ Colorado and students in other campuses might be encouraged to consign more familiar authority figures to Hell. But those who read Thomson’s book to the end found scenes that also had a familiar and contemporary resonance. For Dr. Thomson took his story to the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648: and in many ways foretold what would happen again when the ‘West of the Rhine’ Civilization came into conflict with the remnants of the ‘East of the Rhine’ world- as it had done in two world wars, and threatened to do in a third one.
“The destruction wrought by the Thirty Year’s War has been generally termed as catastrophic, the population described as decimated. Modern historical opinion has modified this extreme judgement. Some towns suffered more than others. There was shocking famine and disease in many places. Crops were damaged and in some areas the farmers refused to plant, knowing that their crops would either be destroyed or stolen. Many handsome cities were piles of rubble. Yet large parts of the Empire escaped such depredations altogether, and some cities continued to prosper. One might hazard the guess that Germany lost a quarter to one third of her population. The work of reconstruction was quickly and energetically undertaken by the princes, and within a remarkably short time, from two to six years after the peace, Germany was again functioning almost normally”. (page 815)
The war, Thomson argued, had been caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. But perhaps this was not just because of the conflicting and honestly held differences of opinion on matters of great intangibility. Lord Acton, a liberal Roman Catholic, in his lectures on modern history, asserted that Lutheranism and the Church could have been reconciled, inspired perhaps by the way that Thomas Cranmer’s overarching grasp of Medieval and Modern theology had allowed the Church of England to encompass all good consciences. Darker thoughts, however, won the day because of the claims of the new age of despotic monarchy over the very hearts, minds and consciences of the people. Lord Acton insists that the breach in the Church had been made definitive by the secular powers.
Nevertheless, for whatever reason: “Both movements [the Protestant and Catholic Reformations] cast their shadow upon all secular thought and political life; and, once this influence was realised, the whole Pandora’s box of ambition, greed, deceit, and cynical opportunism was open.” (page 816)
Ambition, greed, deceit, and cynical opportunism have no overall agenda. They are just infections, and distortions of human purpose to base and ignoble aims: and they set part of the trend for the future that dawned with the Treaty of Westphalia. “The Thirty Years’ War was the prolongation and realization of issues but dimly seen in the preceding century. It was the tragic fulfilment of an era as well as the opening act an age of imperialism and secularism”. But it was a drama that Dr. Thomson traced back to Dr. Orton’s “Despotic Monarchies”: and especially to the potential of France to become a dominant and despotic power, for in a time of religious crisis there was some comfort in the ability of secular authorities to act "quickly and energetically".
From an English Reformation standpoint, it is interesting to note that the King of France had been treated as the Head of the Church in in his kingdom for a hundred years before the Henry VIII, tried to follow suit. Back in 1438, during the crucial period, when King Charles VII of France was finally getting the upper hand in the Hundred Years War, he called a meeting of all the French clergy at Bourges. Here the assembly passed the 'Pragmatic Sanction' that accepted most of the reforming decrees put forward by a great Church Council at Basel, declaring such a general council the supreme authority in the Church above the Pope. It also affirmed the independence of the French Church from Rome, forbade appeals to Rome, abolished ‘annates’, and placed the election of bishops in the hands of the cathedral chapters and the King.
The French monarchy was on the rise and it was a merchant-financier from Bourges, Jacqus Coeur (1395-1456), who did a great deal both in the King’s service, and personally, to promote economic growth, especially trade within the Mediterranean, where he commanded a fleet against the Turks. The rise of the French monarchy was taken up with even greater success by Charles’ son, Louis XI (1461-1483) of whom Dr. Thomson wrote: “His was a character to challenge description. Cruel, deceitful, suspicious, calculating, tyrannical, cynical, tenacious, and persuasive, he was nevertheless one of the greatest rulers in all French history. His visions of French unity, French national boundaries, French power in Europe and French stability never wavered… The later accomplishments of Henry IV and Richelieu, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, would have been unthinkable without the stern, ruthless discipline to which Louis XI, the Spider, subjected the land of France. France liked the discipline little, yet her wealth and power were directly attributable to it.” (page 265)
It was under Richelieu that France embarked on the policies that produced the Thirty Years War and therefore did so much to shape “the German mind” in the modern age: and the ambitions of Louis XIV and Napoleon were equally important in transforming England into Great Britain, uniting first with Scotland and then Ireland. Over time the two competing states of France and England/Great Britain achieved European and then world leadership by acquiring by military strength and unifying government, only to have that position challenged by the aggressive military strength and unifying government of Germany, and then the Soviet Union and the USA.
THE END OF HISTORY
It was a history that Sixties students all around the world had grown up with and wanted to put an end to. So in her book “No Logo” (2000) Naomi Klein described how her parents had attended the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and decided to pursue the dream summed up by Joni Mitchell in her song Woodstock- “And we dreamed we saw the bomber jet planes flying shotgun in the sky turning into butterflies above our nation” and “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”- the Garden of Eden.
Ms Klein’s parents emigrated to Canada to avoid her father getting conscripted to the war in Vietnam, but also to escape from American culture and into the Canadian wilderness. Naomi was born the following year in Canada, where the Kleins lived the ‘Hippy’ life 'back to the land', a life of country roads, VW camper-vans, camp-fires, acoustic guitars etc. And Naomi grew up resenting the whole thing in her teens feeling a sense of exile from the urban and suburban culture that seemed to be the “happening place” for people of her age.
No doubt, however, her parents too felt the sadness and exile of all of those who had felt that “it was bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven”, as Wordsworth had written of an earlier time of optimism and hope. For was not as simple as that to change the world: and successive commemorations of “Soixante Huite” in France see another generation of French ‘revolutionaries’ reflecting back on their unrealised dreams.
The task of creating a new future was not one that could be accomplished quickly, not least because even the best university staff could tell their students that they were like Professor Barker, that “ignorant man thinking, actively utilising his small store of knowledge”. As a result of five centuries of almost continual discovery of people, places and things that needed to be fitted into a “Western” understanding of the world that it could appear to be a task that “passeth human understanding, not least because for all that time those “others” had been trying to fit “Westerners” into their own view of the world- and a global rather than "Eurocentric" history.
Hence the Eurasian writer Han Suyin could put this discourse on the lips of a Nepalese Field Marshall in a novel that she wrote in 1958:
“ It is difficult to accept [everything that is in existence]…for it is the eternal problem of being which each one of us must solve for himself. What to do, when to do it, and how, in order to become ourselves. It has concerned our philosophers everywhere since man invented language to perpetuate himself in time and space. Confucious, two millenniums ago, prescribed the rules of correct and harmonious existence in all their minutiae. To the Chinese mind the issue has always been the relationship to other human beings. Perhaps that is why the group spirit, the welfare of the collective, becomes so readily their social pattern. The theme of existence for medieval Europeans was as for us, the Nepalese today, our relationship with the Divine, a spiritual exploration. The Renaissance, however, diminished and withered this intent upon God, replacing it by an immense preoccupation with the phenomena of the external world. For centuries this new aim of existence was a glorious success. Nature, the world, human beings, all became solid, condensed matter, which could be understood if analysed into their components. The mechanistic movements of life thus taken apart could be reproduced by machines, an extension of man. It made the white man sure of himself, a spiritual arrogance which alone could have assured him he was always right in subjugating others. And then suddenly the world for him became unsubstantial and precarious too, for always there was something, beyond the split atom, which clouded understanding, always shifting quicksands below the all too solid machinery. Now I think Europe, and America too, will be driven back to God, to the search for the meaning of self in living.” (pages 439-440)
Such a view quite correctly saw the global conflict of "East and West" of "Capitalism and Communism" as just part of the world-domination associated with Western Civilization and the Opec Oil Crisis was the first really tangible sign that the wider world, having shaken off the Age of Imperialism that had tied so much of it into "Western History" was going to pursue its own agendas and purposes. The idea of managing the Future that had been "sold" to the war-time and immediate post-war populations had to give way, as that Oxford tome on UK economics admitted, to a new strategy of "reactionary" policies.
In line with Dr. Huxley's evolutionary model the period of post-war construction had been favourable to a widespread acceptance of the quick and energetic leadership of the victorious Allies, notably the USA and the USSR. As in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in Germany, the role of the State in leading the struggle against the "giants" that had so blighted the life of the common people had created conditions favourable to "benevolent despotism" in order to repair the devastation and damage. But the whole economic system that had grown up since the days of Adam Smith and Boulton and Watt, a system in which it had been possible to asset strip global resources at a very low cost price, was now forced to come to terms with a new reality, as Dr. E.F. Schumacher explained in "Small is Beautiful" in 1973. The world's known finite resources would not cope with the spreading of the Western and Christian way of life to all of existing humankind, and might not be able to sustain the "Developed World", even if it managed to curb its population growth.
The days of "plain sailing" on "High Seas" were over, and were replaced by the painstaking process of "trimming the sails" and "reducing the rations" as the 'ships of state' inched forward. But perhaps a more relevant image would be that of the convoy, for the planned economy was more like that wartime naval tactic continued into peacetime when, as the "road to recovery" was as predictable as "catching up" can be, there were real economies of scale to be reaped by doing things as big as possible- Heroic Materialism in what had become an American trade-mark. Now it was the shock of the unknown, a Future which had not been trodden before; and the politics of "Liberalism" seemed more appropriate allowing he old Medieval spirit of the Merchant Adventurers, in whose tradition Christopher Columbus can be placed,to be revived. As for the "Flagship of State", as a retiring British Chancellor of the Exchequer was to state in his resignation speech, it was a time of "short-termism" while smaller and more speedy vessels explored, investigated and invested-in new realities.
But by the time that Norman Lamont made his famous speech it seemed that the dangerous "straits" had been passed and a broad "Pacific" age lay ahead. For 1989 had really signalled the end of the Cold War, and when an unprecedented coalition government was elected in the UK in 2010 a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, described himself and the new Government as "The Berlin Wall Generation" come to power 21 years after that iconic moment when Communism visibly crumbled before the eyes of people around the world watching on TV. A leading academic pronounced "the end of history".
THE TRASH AND TRASHING THAT HISTORY LEFT BEHIND
1989 was the years that Naomi Klein went to university and she found herself part of a generation struggling with a grave crisis of that “eternal problem of being which each one of us must solve for himself. What to do, when to do it, and how, in order to become ourselves”. It was twenty years since man had walked on the Moon and space exploration had moved on to more practical considerations of just how to make use of space, now just another exploitable asset for mankind. One of those developments had been the “Star Wars” initiative that took the Cold War Arms Race on to a new level and persuaded the USSR to ‘throw in its hand’. Soon the threat of Communism and Socialism was crumbling all around the World contributing to a campus feeling that the future left no real challenges to inspire and motivate. University life was set up just to mould them so that they could just fit into some well-established groove that would determine the rest of their lives.
Ms Klein chose her "groove" a career in journalism in which she took up the tradition of the “muck-racking” journalists of the age of ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt. And in many ways the features of that earlier age of unbridled Capitalism reappeared as great corporations came to exercise increasing weight on life in America, and throughout an increasingly global economy. The fall of Communism and Socialism had brought huge new opportunities for a new generation of “carpet-baggers” to flow in to new areas where Capital could get high returns by investing in Land and Labour. There was striking continuity too in those who criticised the new age with the excoriating attacks of G.K. Chesterton on the power, practices and influence of great oil corporations in his slim study of William Cobbett in the early twenties. More than ever, Chesterton wrote, the times seemed to call for Cobbett’s message of the need for representation for “the little man”.
In Ms. Klein’s nineties USA no-one was more inconsequential than the youth of America’s urban ghettos. As environments the ghettos were in many ways even poorer than in terms of hope and aspiration than they had been in the “long hot summer” and its aftermath. The Civil Rights movement had succeeded within the context of American individualism, for Black Upwardly Mobile People had “made it” and had left the ghettos behind, leaving those communities all the poorer. With a return to a Nineteenth century culture of “winners and losers”, the gap between the rich and poor widened and therefore the gap between those of ostentatious wealth and those without it.
But for decades now the USA had been a country of Vance Packard’s waste makers. Built-in obsolescence made much better business sense than building things of lasting quality, and advertising sold the idea that success in the USA meant possessing the latest and most up to date, which meant piles of discarded trash. It was a new world order in which re-cycling the trash of the affluent world was to become a something of a global lifestyle. And, while prosperous individuals flaunted their success in designer clothes and accessories, Ms. Klein describes how young people within the ghettos created an “urban guerrilla” culture recycling rubbish to equip and decorate their homes and themselves. The age and culture of the ‘ghetto blaster’ had arrived. It was a culture that asserted the strength of small collectives and gangs, who could wear their recycled trash with pride because it was a more unique expression of them selves. Yet, ironically, Ms Klein describes how this urban guerrilla movement helped to save urban industrial America.
The reluctance of her contemporaries at university to “buy into” the American future was reflected in young consumer attitudes to the goods produced by the designers, who had come up ‘through the system’, trained to fit in to the groove of a tradition that things like design and architecture really should be “plastic arts” that could be appreciated by the cultured and discerning public. And for Ms. Klein the nature of the emerging age was made very apparent by what happened when an anniversary re-run of Woodstock was staged.
Back in 1969 pop musicians had aspired to raise their medium from mere entertainment and diversion to an art form that would help to re-shape the world. But, when a new Woodstock Festival was staged it only served to highlight the special and unique nature of the first one. In Nineties USA it would have to be staged with sponsorship from big corporations that made sure that their logos flew above the event and that, whereas the original Woodstock had been a feast of “free love” and sharing, this imitation festival was a feast of consumerism. Whereas Woodstock itself was a “happening” that great musicians just wanted to be a part of, this mock-Woodstock was a seen as a launch-pad for would-be-musicians to be launched by their agents and record-companies so that they too might become rich and famous.
Ms. Klein, watching the live TV coverage at home- for naturally someone had paid for the TV rights- saw a series of wannabe bands with people who seemed to think that protest was all about being against things and not for things. So much of the sound and the lyrics were violent and nihilistic, soulless. Then the assembled crowds turned to violence and trashed the site. In fact the whole idea of trashing became something of an American ‘rite of passage’ disseminated in cult movies that made it all seem like harmless fun-. And this fun-loving celebration of the "end of history" was exported around the word for the teenager market globally had been one of the most useful ones for people looking to make money ever since the Fifties, when teenagers as a group came to have control of the most ‘liquid’ purchasing power in their households.
So Corporate America picked up this mood of “trashing” amongst young people in affluent America. The “urban guerrilla” look seemed “cool” and what was produced by gangs and collectives in urban ghettos seemed to be vital and alive. The pop star Michael Jackson summed up the age with “Bad”. ‘Bad’ was now ‘good’ and self-taught designers were plucked out of the ghetto by great corporations which produced things for the affluent young to buy into the new culture. And designs springing from poverty and re-cycling of trash, proved eminently suitable for the increasingly interconnected world economy. They could be produced on a very large scale by what was in effect a global re-invention of England’s industrial sweat-shops. Quite minimal investment was required to set up small units in parts of the world where people in desperate poverty were happy to grasp the opportunity to work for wages that were only a fraction of Labour costs in the USA. The result was a flow of cheap and fashionable goods that really suited the US culture. It helped to make big profits. But it made for a very “infected” USA that was heavily criticized by John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Culture of Contentment” (1992).
So, as a generation of students faced up to the challenge of the Future,what parting lessons and thoughts did our Cambridge and Colorado academics leave with them at the end of their histories.
MODERN TIMES AS PART OF A SUCCESS STORY
Previte Orton’s study was written in 1916 very much in the hope that Humankind was ‘back on track’. An Ancient World had been destroyed by a process of ‘Decline and Fall’, but had been partly reflected in the high Middle Ages, which brought Europe out of the Dark Ages. Then the values and virtues that had made people cohere to the monarchy, nobility and the Church became decayed. But by this time a new city-centred Europe rediscovered the true spirit of the Ancient World in the Renaissance. And Dr. Orton's last chapter is a story of the dark before the dawn, not unlike the dark period from the late 1860's to 1914, which had come to a great and decisive crisis in the struggle for Civilization.
The theme of Dr. Orton's last section is “The Despotic Monarchies” in which he including the spiritual monarchy of “The Tyrannical Papacy”. These were despotisms that enforced some stability and security on an age when old ties had lost their capacity to promote a sense of sticking together. France and England, in particular, however, cohered around a new ideal of nationalism: and, for Orton, that trend towards despotism in England reached its logical conclusion with Henry VII, the first of the Tudors. “A heavy price was paid for peace and justice, but the goods were delivered by the unchivalrous Henry. England, like France, was consolidated into a despotism under a trained bureaucracy at the close of the Middle Ages”. (page 524)
Yet these despots, and even the tyrannical Papacy, were caught up in the age of discovery, employing and promoting the work of many of the ‘new men’ of a new age. They offered new powers and opportunities and the despots sought to harness their work and achievements to their own purposes. Thus, for example, the Pope compelled Michelangelo to work on the new St. Peter’s, while Henry VIII employed Sir Thomas More. And in so doing they helped to opened up the Modern age, for without the lords and masters there would be no great ‘Sistine Chapel Ceiling’, and probably no ‘Utopia’ either, since More wrote the work after a diplomatic mission to Bruges on which he came into contact with the reality of the “New World”.
So Orton’s last section deals with the exciting impact of this age of discoveries:
“As if by the stroke of a magician’s wand the routes of the world’s trade and with them the European centre of gravity were changed. The Mediterranean and its states became, so to say, a subordinate blind-alley. Henceforth commerce flowed on the ocean routes to the havens of the Atlantic coast. The new despotic nation-states which possessed them, Spain and Portugal, France and England, received thereby wealth, the privilege of colonial expansion in new lands, and the primacy of European civilization. The leadership they were acquiring by military strength and unifying government was confirmed by commerce and the arts.” (page 558)
It was a time of thought-adventure as well as geographical discovery. “The medieval theory of the world as neatly planned, once deemed invulnerable, crumbled at a touch. The revered decisions of the schoolmen and of the antique sages were over-thrown by the revelations of the seas and continents and peoples of which they never knew. It was seen that the world was vaster and more wonderful, and that its secrets and wonders were to be discovered, not by the venerable deductions from imperfect knowledge and precocious theory, but by the acquisition of new knowledge and by induction from new-found facts. The spirit of the Renaissance received its charter and presides over modern times.” (page 559)
Fifty years later that view of the Renaissance might still be held by people like the ‘scorpioni’ in the film “Tea With Mussolini”: the “English” ladies, who had adopted Florence and Tuscany with its tranquil and old ways set amongst eternal masterpieces. But recent history had given greater significance to the violence, bloodshed and disorder of Renaissance Italy. Mussolini and his Blackshirts claimed proud historical roots too, both in Ancient Rome and in Italy of the ‘condotierri’ and of tyranny.
Furthermore the vastness of the wonders and the secrets revealed by centuries of discovery, new knowledge and induction from new-found facts, had taken Humankind beyond the age of the thrill and excitement of new adventures. It had become impossible to even attempt to see things whole and stable.
During the age of discovery people had set out physically, intellectually, and artistically from the confines and inadequacies of an “old world” to find a “new world” that they might expand and grow to be part of. But there was no single "new world", merely a seemingly infinite variety of other societies, which did not necessarily see themselves as a world or part of one world, not even the heirs within what had been “Western Civilization”. For it is easy to forget that, though Sir Thomas More, Michelangelo, Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus may be described as “children of the Renaissance”, nature ordains that new life must normally be created by a union of two other lives. And it is very obvious that all of these men were very rooted in the best of the Middle Ages and drew their strength from its virtues. Subsequently Western Civilization “progressed” further and further away from those strengths and virtues, the qualities to which Medieval people aspired, and it lost any real sense of over-arching communal and collective purpose and direction, apart from the imperative to keep moving somewhere, anywhere. During the siege of Leningrad those people who stopped moving during the bitter winter just froze to death.
LIVING A DIVINE COMEDY AFTER THE OPENING OF PANDORA'S BOX
To Dr. Thomson in 1963 it was obvious that the shape of things to come had already been established long before those great men of the Renaissance and Reformation had been born. And he started his study with the life and times of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).
In Dante’s writing Thomson could find the full range of Medieval Civilization displayed and infused with the first essence what would grow through the work of Petrarch and Boccacio into the spirit of the Renaissance impelling Europe pell-mell into a new age. It was the spirit of an Italy that had lived at the heart of the world for centuries, while England and France had lived on the extremity at a watershed between the known and the unknown. And, in the light of the roots of Italy in the Ancient Civilization of the Mediterranean, Dante’s self-appointed task of assessing the souls of the dead can be seen as part of a tradition that goes right back to the deities of Ancient Egypt, when the souls of the departed were weighed by the gods. Dante was not bound and contained by the Middle Ages, nor really just by Ancient Italy.
“It is customary to regard the ‘Comedy’ as the ‘summa’, the summation, of medieval life and faith. It is all of that. But there are several aspects of the work that do not fall within this category. It breathes an individualism that was completely at odds with the medieval mind. It rejects the claim of the church to rule every part of man’s life and by implication at least, denies the centricity of the sacramental powers of the Church. When popes and cardinals are consigned to Hell by a layman, a revolution in authority and doctrine is on the way.” (page 27)
Dr. Thomson’s students in Sixties’ Colorado and students in other campuses might be encouraged to consign more familiar authority figures to Hell. But those who read Thomson’s book to the end found scenes that also had a familiar and contemporary resonance. For Dr. Thomson took his story to the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648: and in many ways foretold what would happen again when the ‘West of the Rhine’ Civilization came into conflict with the remnants of the ‘East of the Rhine’ world- as it had done in two world wars, and threatened to do in a third one.
“The destruction wrought by the Thirty Year’s War has been generally termed as catastrophic, the population described as decimated. Modern historical opinion has modified this extreme judgement. Some towns suffered more than others. There was shocking famine and disease in many places. Crops were damaged and in some areas the farmers refused to plant, knowing that their crops would either be destroyed or stolen. Many handsome cities were piles of rubble. Yet large parts of the Empire escaped such depredations altogether, and some cities continued to prosper. One might hazard the guess that Germany lost a quarter to one third of her population. The work of reconstruction was quickly and energetically undertaken by the princes, and within a remarkably short time, from two to six years after the peace, Germany was again functioning almost normally”. (page 815)
The war, Thomson argued, had been caused by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. But perhaps this was not just because of the conflicting and honestly held differences of opinion on matters of great intangibility. Lord Acton, a liberal Roman Catholic, in his lectures on modern history, asserted that Lutheranism and the Church could have been reconciled, inspired perhaps by the way that Thomas Cranmer’s overarching grasp of Medieval and Modern theology had allowed the Church of England to encompass all good consciences. Darker thoughts, however, won the day because of the claims of the new age of despotic monarchy over the very hearts, minds and consciences of the people. Lord Acton insists that the breach in the Church had been made definitive by the secular powers.
Nevertheless, for whatever reason: “Both movements [the Protestant and Catholic Reformations] cast their shadow upon all secular thought and political life; and, once this influence was realised, the whole Pandora’s box of ambition, greed, deceit, and cynical opportunism was open.” (page 816)
Ambition, greed, deceit, and cynical opportunism have no overall agenda. They are just infections, and distortions of human purpose to base and ignoble aims: and they set part of the trend for the future that dawned with the Treaty of Westphalia. “The Thirty Years’ War was the prolongation and realization of issues but dimly seen in the preceding century. It was the tragic fulfilment of an era as well as the opening act an age of imperialism and secularism”. But it was a drama that Dr. Thomson traced back to Dr. Orton’s “Despotic Monarchies”: and especially to the potential of France to become a dominant and despotic power, for in a time of religious crisis there was some comfort in the ability of secular authorities to act "quickly and energetically".
From an English Reformation standpoint, it is interesting to note that the King of France had been treated as the Head of the Church in in his kingdom for a hundred years before the Henry VIII, tried to follow suit. Back in 1438, during the crucial period, when King Charles VII of France was finally getting the upper hand in the Hundred Years War, he called a meeting of all the French clergy at Bourges. Here the assembly passed the 'Pragmatic Sanction' that accepted most of the reforming decrees put forward by a great Church Council at Basel, declaring such a general council the supreme authority in the Church above the Pope. It also affirmed the independence of the French Church from Rome, forbade appeals to Rome, abolished ‘annates’, and placed the election of bishops in the hands of the cathedral chapters and the King.
The French monarchy was on the rise and it was a merchant-financier from Bourges, Jacqus Coeur (1395-1456), who did a great deal both in the King’s service, and personally, to promote economic growth, especially trade within the Mediterranean, where he commanded a fleet against the Turks. The rise of the French monarchy was taken up with even greater success by Charles’ son, Louis XI (1461-1483) of whom Dr. Thomson wrote: “His was a character to challenge description. Cruel, deceitful, suspicious, calculating, tyrannical, cynical, tenacious, and persuasive, he was nevertheless one of the greatest rulers in all French history. His visions of French unity, French national boundaries, French power in Europe and French stability never wavered… The later accomplishments of Henry IV and Richelieu, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, would have been unthinkable without the stern, ruthless discipline to which Louis XI, the Spider, subjected the land of France. France liked the discipline little, yet her wealth and power were directly attributable to it.” (page 265)
It was under Richelieu that France embarked on the policies that produced the Thirty Years War and therefore did so much to shape “the German mind” in the modern age: and the ambitions of Louis XIV and Napoleon were equally important in transforming England into Great Britain, uniting first with Scotland and then Ireland. Over time the two competing states of France and England/Great Britain achieved European and then world leadership by acquiring by military strength and unifying government, only to have that position challenged by the aggressive military strength and unifying government of Germany, and then the Soviet Union and the USA.
THE END OF HISTORY
It was a history that Sixties students all around the world had grown up with and wanted to put an end to. So in her book “No Logo” (2000) Naomi Klein described how her parents had attended the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and decided to pursue the dream summed up by Joni Mitchell in her song Woodstock- “And we dreamed we saw the bomber jet planes flying shotgun in the sky turning into butterflies above our nation” and “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”- the Garden of Eden.
Ms Klein’s parents emigrated to Canada to avoid her father getting conscripted to the war in Vietnam, but also to escape from American culture and into the Canadian wilderness. Naomi was born the following year in Canada, where the Kleins lived the ‘Hippy’ life 'back to the land', a life of country roads, VW camper-vans, camp-fires, acoustic guitars etc. And Naomi grew up resenting the whole thing in her teens feeling a sense of exile from the urban and suburban culture that seemed to be the “happening place” for people of her age.
No doubt, however, her parents too felt the sadness and exile of all of those who had felt that “it was bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven”, as Wordsworth had written of an earlier time of optimism and hope. For was not as simple as that to change the world: and successive commemorations of “Soixante Huite” in France see another generation of French ‘revolutionaries’ reflecting back on their unrealised dreams.
The task of creating a new future was not one that could be accomplished quickly, not least because even the best university staff could tell their students that they were like Professor Barker, that “ignorant man thinking, actively utilising his small store of knowledge”. As a result of five centuries of almost continual discovery of people, places and things that needed to be fitted into a “Western” understanding of the world that it could appear to be a task that “passeth human understanding, not least because for all that time those “others” had been trying to fit “Westerners” into their own view of the world- and a global rather than "Eurocentric" history.
Hence the Eurasian writer Han Suyin could put this discourse on the lips of a Nepalese Field Marshall in a novel that she wrote in 1958:
“ It is difficult to accept [everything that is in existence]…for it is the eternal problem of being which each one of us must solve for himself. What to do, when to do it, and how, in order to become ourselves. It has concerned our philosophers everywhere since man invented language to perpetuate himself in time and space. Confucious, two millenniums ago, prescribed the rules of correct and harmonious existence in all their minutiae. To the Chinese mind the issue has always been the relationship to other human beings. Perhaps that is why the group spirit, the welfare of the collective, becomes so readily their social pattern. The theme of existence for medieval Europeans was as for us, the Nepalese today, our relationship with the Divine, a spiritual exploration. The Renaissance, however, diminished and withered this intent upon God, replacing it by an immense preoccupation with the phenomena of the external world. For centuries this new aim of existence was a glorious success. Nature, the world, human beings, all became solid, condensed matter, which could be understood if analysed into their components. The mechanistic movements of life thus taken apart could be reproduced by machines, an extension of man. It made the white man sure of himself, a spiritual arrogance which alone could have assured him he was always right in subjugating others. And then suddenly the world for him became unsubstantial and precarious too, for always there was something, beyond the split atom, which clouded understanding, always shifting quicksands below the all too solid machinery. Now I think Europe, and America too, will be driven back to God, to the search for the meaning of self in living.” (pages 439-440)
Such a view quite correctly saw the global conflict of "East and West" of "Capitalism and Communism" as just part of the world-domination associated with Western Civilization and the Opec Oil Crisis was the first really tangible sign that the wider world, having shaken off the Age of Imperialism that had tied so much of it into "Western History" was going to pursue its own agendas and purposes. The idea of managing the Future that had been "sold" to the war-time and immediate post-war populations had to give way, as that Oxford tome on UK economics admitted, to a new strategy of "reactionary" policies.
In line with Dr. Huxley's evolutionary model the period of post-war construction had been favourable to a widespread acceptance of the quick and energetic leadership of the victorious Allies, notably the USA and the USSR. As in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in Germany, the role of the State in leading the struggle against the "giants" that had so blighted the life of the common people had created conditions favourable to "benevolent despotism" in order to repair the devastation and damage. But the whole economic system that had grown up since the days of Adam Smith and Boulton and Watt, a system in which it had been possible to asset strip global resources at a very low cost price, was now forced to come to terms with a new reality, as Dr. E.F. Schumacher explained in "Small is Beautiful" in 1973. The world's known finite resources would not cope with the spreading of the Western and Christian way of life to all of existing humankind, and might not be able to sustain the "Developed World", even if it managed to curb its population growth.
The days of "plain sailing" on "High Seas" were over, and were replaced by the painstaking process of "trimming the sails" and "reducing the rations" as the 'ships of state' inched forward. But perhaps a more relevant image would be that of the convoy, for the planned economy was more like that wartime naval tactic continued into peacetime when, as the "road to recovery" was as predictable as "catching up" can be, there were real economies of scale to be reaped by doing things as big as possible- Heroic Materialism in what had become an American trade-mark. Now it was the shock of the unknown, a Future which had not been trodden before; and the politics of "Liberalism" seemed more appropriate allowing he old Medieval spirit of the Merchant Adventurers, in whose tradition Christopher Columbus can be placed,to be revived. As for the "Flagship of State", as a retiring British Chancellor of the Exchequer was to state in his resignation speech, it was a time of "short-termism" while smaller and more speedy vessels explored, investigated and invested-in new realities.
But by the time that Norman Lamont made his famous speech it seemed that the dangerous "straits" had been passed and a broad "Pacific" age lay ahead. For 1989 had really signalled the end of the Cold War, and when an unprecedented coalition government was elected in the UK in 2010 a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, described himself and the new Government as "The Berlin Wall Generation" come to power 21 years after that iconic moment when Communism visibly crumbled before the eyes of people around the world watching on TV. A leading academic pronounced "the end of history".
THE TRASH AND TRASHING THAT HISTORY LEFT BEHIND
1989 was the years that Naomi Klein went to university and she found herself part of a generation struggling with a grave crisis of that “eternal problem of being which each one of us must solve for himself. What to do, when to do it, and how, in order to become ourselves”. It was twenty years since man had walked on the Moon and space exploration had moved on to more practical considerations of just how to make use of space, now just another exploitable asset for mankind. One of those developments had been the “Star Wars” initiative that took the Cold War Arms Race on to a new level and persuaded the USSR to ‘throw in its hand’. Soon the threat of Communism and Socialism was crumbling all around the World contributing to a campus feeling that the future left no real challenges to inspire and motivate. University life was set up just to mould them so that they could just fit into some well-established groove that would determine the rest of their lives.
Ms Klein chose her "groove" a career in journalism in which she took up the tradition of the “muck-racking” journalists of the age of ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt. And in many ways the features of that earlier age of unbridled Capitalism reappeared as great corporations came to exercise increasing weight on life in America, and throughout an increasingly global economy. The fall of Communism and Socialism had brought huge new opportunities for a new generation of “carpet-baggers” to flow in to new areas where Capital could get high returns by investing in Land and Labour. There was striking continuity too in those who criticised the new age with the excoriating attacks of G.K. Chesterton on the power, practices and influence of great oil corporations in his slim study of William Cobbett in the early twenties. More than ever, Chesterton wrote, the times seemed to call for Cobbett’s message of the need for representation for “the little man”.
In Ms. Klein’s nineties USA no-one was more inconsequential than the youth of America’s urban ghettos. As environments the ghettos were in many ways even poorer than in terms of hope and aspiration than they had been in the “long hot summer” and its aftermath. The Civil Rights movement had succeeded within the context of American individualism, for Black Upwardly Mobile People had “made it” and had left the ghettos behind, leaving those communities all the poorer. With a return to a Nineteenth century culture of “winners and losers”, the gap between the rich and poor widened and therefore the gap between those of ostentatious wealth and those without it.
But for decades now the USA had been a country of Vance Packard’s waste makers. Built-in obsolescence made much better business sense than building things of lasting quality, and advertising sold the idea that success in the USA meant possessing the latest and most up to date, which meant piles of discarded trash. It was a new world order in which re-cycling the trash of the affluent world was to become a something of a global lifestyle. And, while prosperous individuals flaunted their success in designer clothes and accessories, Ms. Klein describes how young people within the ghettos created an “urban guerrilla” culture recycling rubbish to equip and decorate their homes and themselves. The age and culture of the ‘ghetto blaster’ had arrived. It was a culture that asserted the strength of small collectives and gangs, who could wear their recycled trash with pride because it was a more unique expression of them selves. Yet, ironically, Ms Klein describes how this urban guerrilla movement helped to save urban industrial America.
The reluctance of her contemporaries at university to “buy into” the American future was reflected in young consumer attitudes to the goods produced by the designers, who had come up ‘through the system’, trained to fit in to the groove of a tradition that things like design and architecture really should be “plastic arts” that could be appreciated by the cultured and discerning public. And for Ms. Klein the nature of the emerging age was made very apparent by what happened when an anniversary re-run of Woodstock was staged.
Back in 1969 pop musicians had aspired to raise their medium from mere entertainment and diversion to an art form that would help to re-shape the world. But, when a new Woodstock Festival was staged it only served to highlight the special and unique nature of the first one. In Nineties USA it would have to be staged with sponsorship from big corporations that made sure that their logos flew above the event and that, whereas the original Woodstock had been a feast of “free love” and sharing, this imitation festival was a feast of consumerism. Whereas Woodstock itself was a “happening” that great musicians just wanted to be a part of, this mock-Woodstock was a seen as a launch-pad for would-be-musicians to be launched by their agents and record-companies so that they too might become rich and famous.
Ms. Klein, watching the live TV coverage at home- for naturally someone had paid for the TV rights- saw a series of wannabe bands with people who seemed to think that protest was all about being against things and not for things. So much of the sound and the lyrics were violent and nihilistic, soulless. Then the assembled crowds turned to violence and trashed the site. In fact the whole idea of trashing became something of an American ‘rite of passage’ disseminated in cult movies that made it all seem like harmless fun-. And this fun-loving celebration of the "end of history" was exported around the word for the teenager market globally had been one of the most useful ones for people looking to make money ever since the Fifties, when teenagers as a group came to have control of the most ‘liquid’ purchasing power in their households.
So Corporate America picked up this mood of “trashing” amongst young people in affluent America. The “urban guerrilla” look seemed “cool” and what was produced by gangs and collectives in urban ghettos seemed to be vital and alive. The pop star Michael Jackson summed up the age with “Bad”. ‘Bad’ was now ‘good’ and self-taught designers were plucked out of the ghetto by great corporations which produced things for the affluent young to buy into the new culture. And designs springing from poverty and re-cycling of trash, proved eminently suitable for the increasingly interconnected world economy. They could be produced on a very large scale by what was in effect a global re-invention of England’s industrial sweat-shops. Quite minimal investment was required to set up small units in parts of the world where people in desperate poverty were happy to grasp the opportunity to work for wages that were only a fraction of Labour costs in the USA. The result was a flow of cheap and fashionable goods that really suited the US culture. It helped to make big profits. But it made for a very “infected” USA that was heavily criticized by John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Culture of Contentment” (1992).
