Pessimists often compare today’s troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison.
The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement — along with endemic insecurity, superstition, and two, rather than three, classes.
The great medieval universities — at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford — continued to make strides in science. They were not unlike the medical and engineering schools at Harvard and Stanford. But they were not centers of free thinking.
Instead, medieval speech codes were designed to ensure that no one questioned the authority of church doctrine. Culturally or politically incorrect literature of the classical past, from Aristophanes to Petronius, was censored as either subversive or hurtful.
Career-wise, it was suicidal for, say, a medieval professor of science at the University of Padua to doubt the orthodoxy that the sun revolved around the earth.
Similarly, at Berkeley or Princeton, few now dare to commit the heresy of expressing uncertainty about whether man-caused global warming poses an immediate, existential threat to human civilization.
Today, a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth. The shrinking middle classes struggle to service trillions of dollars in consumer and student debt to big banks — in the manner of medieval peasants.
In the medieval world, impoverished serfs pledged loyalty to barons in exchange for their food and housing on the manor. In the modern world, progressive government is the bastion that distributes entitlements on the expectation that the masses show their political fealty at election time.
In medieval Europe, widespread literacy disappeared. Superstition reigned in place of reason.
Despite spending some $11,000 per student each year, are we all that much different? In many polls, more than a quarter of Americans believe in astrology. A quarter think aliens have visited Earth. More than 40 percent can’t name their own vice president. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have no idea what the Cold War was about.
The ruling cliques of the medieval court were full of insider knaves and scoundrels, plots and intrigue. Compare the current scandals, lies, and hypocrisies of our Beltway cloister in Washington.
Closeted scholiasts wrote esoteric treatises that no one read. These works were sort of like the incomprehensible “theory” articles of university humanities professors who are up for tenure.
To talk to the masses, the Latin-speaking elite spoke localized slang that would centuries later become English, French, and German — the medieval version of our electronic grunts and made-up words on Twitter and e-mail that are forming a new popular language.
