It’s Not Just the Taliban: We in the West Are Embracing Medievalism, Too
https://www.newsweek.com/its-not-just-taliban-we-west-are-embracing-medievalism-too-opinion-1623102
Excerpt:
...But while we in the West look at the Taliban with horror, a similar kind of fanaticism is taking hold here at home. And while we don’t use whips and American-appropriated weapons to enforce our new Medievalism, the social costs of allowing it to metastasize are enormous.
...But the West, too, has fallen prey to encroaching illiberalism. America’s intellectual, political, and corporate establishment may not share the ideology of ill-educated Central Asian religious fanatics, but they echo the Taliban by embracing an increasingly medieval dogmatism and—crucial—an ideology that similarly scorns reason and debate. As historian J. B. Bury put it in 1913, the Middle Ages were a time when “a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground.”
Specifically, the West—like Afghanistan—is falling prey to a new form of clericalism. In Middle Ages, the clerical class—what the French called the First Estate— enforced the orthodoxy of the day from the Pope and the Bishops. Today, this discipline is undertaken by university faculties, media outlets, and, most egregiously, social media oligarchs. Once celebrated as forums for debate and open inquiry, our universities function today largely as defenders of orthodoxy.
In this, they are like their medieval and Communist counterparts. In medieval universities, dissenters, like Jews and Muslims, were rare, and barely tolerated. Similar conformity haunts our elite schools, where according to one study the proportion of liberals to conservatives ran as high as 70 to one, and at elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reached 120 to one.
But the similarities don’t end there. In addition to living with droughts, famines, ever-colder weather and political unrest, the masses and even the elites in the Middle Ages lived in terror of eternal damnation. More or less everyone believed that the Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent; the period saw a surge of millennialist movements that took it upon themselves to enforce this orthodoxy against dissenters and religious minorities like Jews.
It’s hard not to see that fear mirrored in today’s liberal hysterias, whether over racism, climate change or pestilence. Hysteria has become “the business model of the neoliberal age” as one writer aptly put it. In this environment, even supposed devotees of “science” often adopt attitudes which resemble Inquisitors more than empiricists, marginalizing dissenters and even threatening them with jail, dispossession, humiliation, or just public obliteration.
The green movement offers the best analog to the new Medievalism. Like medieval Catholicism, green orthodoxy foresees impending doom caused by human activity, blaming any severe weather entirely on Gaia rather than Jehovah. Like the Medieval Church, the green movement is lavishly funded by the wealthy, who, like medieval aristocrats, urge austerity and humbleness on the masses but themselves live large and use private jets. Buying modern indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices allows them to save the planet in style.
Like medieval prophecies of imminent apocalypse, which were either exaggerated or just plain wrong, much of the climate change prognostications have not, so far, proven enormously accurate. Yet reasoned discourse is not what drives the groups that organized around Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Thunberg is a reprisal of the youthful fanaticism of medieval sanctus puer—the “holy children”—who rampaged through Europe in the 13th century, or Mao’s Red Guards, unleashed during the Chinese Communists’ Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Their followers, too, were motivated by religious fanaticism.
In this constricted intellectual environment, even the best credentialed academic climate experts such as Roger Pielke, Judith Curry and Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore are demonized and marginalized for deviating from what Curry has described as an overly “monolithic” approach to climate change.
You know you’re dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent. A similar rush for conformity can be seen in discussions over other central issues, like the pandemic, or “systemic racism.” Operating under the auspices of this new Medievalism, social media firms have felt free to censor and demonetize dissenters on these subject, for example about the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory. A recent conference of leading virologists—not nutcase Covid deniers or scammers—was censored on YouTube for spreading what designated opinionators deemed inappropriate and misleading information. Similarly, those who dare oppose the fashionable and socially destructive theories about “systemic racism” face censorship and even removal from their jobs.
There is still a big difference between the Taliban and the green movement; the digital gulag is not like the early model, and it’s better to be ignored or censored than beaten or beheaded. There is an important and unmistakable line separating state-sponsored religious violence like the Taliban’s from socially enforced forms of censure....The fact that intolerance for unfashionable views is much greater among young people is a frightening sign.
The price for resurgent intolerance and enforced conformity will likely be growing intellectual, demographic, and economic stagnation, emblems of Medievalism that lasted in some places for almost a millennia. Today’s feudalists have as little use for liberal values as did their archaic doppelgangers.
Sadly, the shapers of the 21st Century may prove more Medieval than modern. The famous arc is bending but towards autocracy and unreason. It’s time to push back.
Please post that as a forum thread!
Dang, you certainly to put out some great stuff. Perhaps you even wrote this yourself. I cannot discern, but I will presume it to be so. Magnificent writing here. I cannot wait to reread in order that I may absorb it all more better.
It all just makes so much sense to me.
Thanks for contributing. You have certainly made your mark on these threads over the last several months. I am appreciative.
The Masked Ball of Cowardice
How fear of admitting error in trusting China’s coronavirus propaganda is driving Western societies into a doom spiral
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
Excerpt:
…Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of press conferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.
The world has been fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that transforms the world into China. But if the national security community has noticed this bizarre development, they haven’t said so. Instead, their preoccupation has remained largely unchanged since February 2020. Insiders have confirmed that by spring 2020 the national security community was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was a supervirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, explaining why many supported lockdowns. Yet the key pieces of information that gave rise to the lab leak theory were the videos of Wuhan residents suddenly falling dead, the contrived tale of heroic whistleblower Li Wenliang, and Xi Jinping’s apparent success locking down Wuhan, the city with the lab in it.
One national security official after another has claimed to know the virus came from the Wuhan lab, even as the underlying intelligence information has changed little. If these officials are as confident as they claim to be, great !It does not change the fact that Covid’s average infection fatality rate (IFR) across all age groups is under 0.24%. It’s long past time to address the more concerning question to which the rest of the public has long since moved on: why governments across the world have copied and continue to copy China’s anti-democratic, totalitarian measures in response to COVID-19.
…Of the 210 pages of FOIAed emails that led to the publication of the German strategy paper, 118 pages were blacked out entirely. The emails contain frequent discussion of China, but nearly all of these references are redacted. The stated reason: “May have adverse effects on international relations.”
One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history.
…Based on WHO guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators en masse, killing thousands before a grassroots campaign stopped the practice. Based on the WHO’s guidance on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives, as confirmed by The New York Times.
…What’s transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative. The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments. Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP’s narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP’s policies. Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.
…The snowball effect of this little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimized a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies. Within months, they’d begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth communists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate China.
It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment for failing to prevent the world’s march toward totalitarianism. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today. From the courts to intelligence agencies to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretenses, and whether those policies actually work.
Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and denial of the insanity of trusting scientists and billionaires who treat information from China as real.
…The truth is that even as scientists and politicians support lockdown mandates, few really believe in them. This can be said with certainty based on their own actions. It’s hard to find scientists and politicians who haven’t been caught breaking their own COVID rules. But none of them, even heads of state, feel they have the power to speak up against lockdown measures without inconveniencing their careers. And anyway, these policymakers seem to think, these rules must not be a very big deal, given how easily they can break them.
The public was led to believe that lockdowns were grounded in rigorous “science,” and that by following them, they were “following science,” when in fact the only analysis had been “China claimed they eliminated the virus this way, so we can too.” The metrics preferred by media outlets have shifted constantly—from mortality to hospitalizations to “cases”—to rationalize public anxiety. With few exceptions, this failure to “crush” the virus has been attributed, absurdly, to lockdowns’ leniency, rather than to their evidently fraudulent scientific origins.
The truth is that the origin of lockdown “science” cannot be factually discussed without the Chinese government looking very bad—something media investors are reluctant to allow. It’s even harder to explain phenomena like the fake videos of residents dropping dead during Wuhan’s lockdown, which went viral all over global websites blocked in China, without implying some degree of foul play by the CCP. So instead, overcompensating for Beijing, media outlets portrayed China as not only a responsible international stakeholder, but an admirable one whose example should be followed.
Unfortunately, for the millions of workers and small business owners whose life’s work has been destroyed; the millions of children who have been robbed of years of education and terrorized into believing they’re vectors for disease; the hundreds of millions in the developing world whose governments can’t feed them with debt; and the parents who don’t want to raise their children in a world where long-cherished rights can be indefinitely tossed aside, none of these explanations and motivations are remotely adequate.
…The flip side of the phony lockdown and masking “success” narratives is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses. According to the most widely cited study on COVID-19’s IFR by age, the average IFR for those under 40 years old is around 0.01%. But in surveys conducted regularly by the University of Southern California, on average, Americans under 40 have consistently estimated their chance of dying if they contract the virus to be around 10%, a 1,000-fold overestimation.
…Having absorbed disinformation into policy, the formidable machinery of Western institutions has, perversely, helped promulgate a totalitarian hygiene regime around the world, and turned against those standing up for western values that politicians appear too spineless to defend. Police brutality is on the rise as law-enforcement personnel face protesters rightfully angry at the ongoing suspension of human rights through policies rationalized only by the exaggerated fears the policies themselves create, and which therefore have no endpoint. Whether COVID cases go up, down, or sideways, the solution offered by lockdown scientists and public health officials—the WHO being only the worst offender—is always the same: Be more like China. Every policy they’ve imported has been as deeply illiberal as it is ineffective, and many are disturbingly willing to suggest permanent changes to our civilization rather than admit error.
As the experiments of Stanley Milgram proved, people can be convinced to commit atrocities when ordered to do so by scientific authorities. From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.
For political watchers, it’s been baffling to watch leaders muddle through the most inexplicable geopolitical debacle since the Thirty Years’ War. It is equally terrifying to know that a policy catastrophe of this scale is possible in the 21st century. But judging by his regime’s activities and the story of how all this began, at least one world leader was well aware of this potential.
For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.