Great Reaction: Vengeance in the 1400s

OK. I finally started reading the great classic by Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages. And it was because I picked up my unread copy of The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe by Pieter Spierenburg and saw references to Huizinga. Hmm, I thought; I should really read Huizinga first. So I got my unread copy of Autumn out and started to read.

The first chapter is all about how everyone was beating each other up with a culture of vengeance back in the 14th and 15th century, whether it was the kings and princes like Charles the Bold and Philip the Good and their ancestral wars or the city folk with their party colors. And then there was the intensity of life.

The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us... The great events of human life -- birth, marriage, death -- by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery.

Yes, and vengeance.

Whoever would write a history of the House of Burgundy would have to let the motif of revenge sound through their narrative like a pedal point... [B]lood revenge was the essential element that dominated the actions and fates of princes and countries...

The attachment to the prince was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct feeling of fidelity and community... [and] blazed into reckless passions during feuds and strife.... [Thus] in purely feudal times, separate and isolated feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and possessions of the other... [and] not less importantly that of honor. 

Of course, I am stringing this out because of my belief in my notion of the Great Reaction, and how the left represents a return to the old culture -- slavery, feudal hierarchy, tribalism, vengeance, and a sort of Quixotic attachment to the knight-errantry of activism.

Of course, when I first set this up, or when it came to me out of nowhere at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, it was just a notion, just supported by a hunch. But really, when you observe progressive politics, what else can you say: "fidelity" to the progressive tribe. Vengeance and envy towards "the rich" and "the corporations" the stirring up of racial emotions. And, as I say, the notion that our modern politics is civil war by other means.

This appears to me in stark terms because one of the big themes that comes out of reading George Eliot's Adam Bede in the last week is the feeling of vengeance that Adam feels towards the young master Arthur Donnithorne, who has seduced the young girl that Adam hoped to marry, and how people like the Rev. Irwine talk Adam out of it, and how the saintly Dinah Morris by her example makes vengeance seem petty and unworthy.

For the question is: what changed? What changed between the tribal, feudal culture of the late Middle Ages and the rural Commoner culture of 1800 (viewed by George Eliot from sixty years later) where in people like Adam Bede and Dinah Morris their own personal behavior was more to be judged than the insults against them? And in people like the tenant farmer Poysers honor consists in having a spotless character in the community.

And what has changed today where the progressive left epitomizes all the qualities of the Autumn of the Middle Ages with its violent politics-with-everything and its partisan with-us-or-against-us ethos?

Well, I say that the old ways are never far below the surface. That is the point of concepts like Jung's archetypes, to remind us that our rational conscious mind is but a surface effect rippling on a vast depth of instinctive, coded behavior.

Now I do not assert that we moderns are more moral than the ancients -- or indeed our progressive pals. I think that the reason that slavery, feudalism, tribalism, and vengeance have retreated somewhat is because they do not pay when compared to the alternative, the market culture. For most all of us we can live a much better and more prosperous life by attaching to the culture of the market, which is founded on the notion of trust: trust all those that behave trustworthy towards you. And the untrustworthy? Don't deal with them; don't try to teach them a lesson; just stay away.

Now I believe that our progressive friends do not live so much in the market culture. They live much more in hierarchical, party organizations, from government education to government research to political activism. And as for the arts scene! So, for them, the old ways make more sense.

You are on the tenure track at a university? You size up the politics of your department: Whose side should you be on? Which senior academic should you support? What are the right opinions that will identify your party colors and help you get in with the in-crowd?

Wanna be an activist? So which monster of oppression are you going to attack and how are you going to publicize your activist campaign? In the progressive culture getting along with everyone is not the ideal. The ideal is to find a good enemy and attack! Oh, and, as Herod said to Emperor Claudius in Robert Graves' I, Claudius: Trust No One!

On this view, the strategy of the Commoner racist-sexist-homophobes should be to try to alter the payoffs in the culture of the educated gentry to reduce the payoffs of party loyalty and discipline. And to soften the feudal attractions of the welfare state by privatizing as much as possible.

Or not. The fact is that the world has not changed since the Middle Ages because some cunning strategist planned it all out in an OODA loop. Things changed because they changed, and nobody knows why.