Historians of a certain bent – say, theoretical – are wont to ask whether the history of humanity reveals some kind of ‘progress’.  That does not look to me to be the kind of question that will yield any useful keys to our understanding.  But when we consider our descent from the apes – if we consider that descent at all – we might ask if we have not gone backwards.  You might get a very different response from, say, a survivor of the Holocaust, or of the ‘settlement’ of Australia by white people, that ended the freedom from invasion of 70,000 years of our original inhabitants – and owners.

After all, apes do not torment each other, or set out to hurt and kill each other, or take pleasure in watching other apes suffer.  They have not produced a Stalin, Hitler or Mao – or the Gatling gun, Zyclon B, or AI.  They are locked up now for our diversion, although we have for the most part given up shooting them for kicks.

In the note on Huizinga below (from A Curated Library), I referred to his The Waning of the Middle Ages.  It is a wonderful book by a wonderful historian.  But it leaves me wondering just how much we can now understand of the way men and women thought in Europe in, say, 1300, or thereabouts.

Historians like to label periods of history – the ancient world; the middle ages; the renaissance, and the reformation, and so on.  The following events are said to signal the end of the middle ages – the discovery of America; the circumnavigation of the world; finding the solar system in the universe; the invention of printing; the discovery of gunpowder; and most importantly, reducing the power of the priestly caste, its role in governance, and its claim to be the source and ruler of all true knowledge.  Every one of those must have changed the way people saw their world – which was said to herald the ‘modern’ world.

Huizinga looks at the oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness of life in medieval Europe.  ‘The cruel excitement and coarse compassion raised by an execution formed an important item in the spiritual food of the common people.’  Life was marked by the ‘spirit of revenge’ – which it was the first object of our law to contain.  Schism led to fanatical hatred.  Vengeance grew from fidelity and fellowship – ‘it was still feudal sentiment at bottom.’  Sometimes extreme unction was not given to the person to be executed – who was then looking at the certainty of eternal damnation.  They knew nothing of those ideas ‘which have rendered the sentiment of justice timid and hesitating’.  Extravagant passion mixed with continuous insecurity.    All seemed precarious.  The night brought black holes of mystery, fear and anxiety.

We may doubt whether we can follow how people thought then, but one word does not fit – ‘civilised’.  And no amount of glorifying Michelangelo or Luther can hide that failure of humanity.

Perhaps I might refer to some observations of J M Thompson, in another work looked at in A Curated Library.

The authority of the Bible became a tyranny not unlike that of the Church…The medieval church, in common with medieval society, was fiercely intolerant – intolerant of witches, intolerant of criminals, intolerant of heretics.  It was intolerant because it was afraid; the worst crimes are due to fear.  The Reformation altered men’s ideas of religious truth more quickly than the Renaissance banished men’s fear of irreligion.

We rarely get history served up like that now, so you can read all about in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. 

But we may have something to learn about the middle ages when, as I remarked, all life seemed so precarious, so full of mystery, fear and anxiety. 

People like me born at the end of World War II had before them the sunlit uplands of Winston Churchill, and the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended of Banjo Paterson. 

But they also had the threat of annihilation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unspeakable horror and degradation of Auschwitz and Belsen.  No ape was ever as cruel as Eichmann, or the regime that sent us back beyond the primal slime – in a nation that gave the world Bach and Kant and so much else.  The prime movers of the Enlightenment later introduced us to the terrifying notion of the ‘banality of evil.’

Then nations of the West began wars against other nations and people of a different faith or colour – and they lost those wars, and the faith of their peoples. Some very stupid people actually referred to the Crusades.   It is hard to imagine a worse crime of government than leading a nation into war on false premises.

Then there was a financial crisis that had people staring at Armageddon as they found that their economic house was built upon sand.  But the gap between rich and poor just keeps getting worse and has reached its inglorious peak in the United States (and Russia).  Its government does not shepherd its flock.  It shears it. 

Democracy and capitalism are both short sighted and unable to satisfy their members, or make hard decisions for the future.  Neither is generally respected or trusted.  Where is the glue of communion that is said to hold people together?

The internet and the iPhone are destroying language, learning, and manners.  Two banners of the middle ages – courtesy and chivalry – now die on our lips.  And some say we face annihilation by monsters we created.  Which is being boosted by an eighty-year-old convicted criminal, who daily behaves worse as the stupid spoiled child that he is.  And who has access to nuclear codes that could lead to our extermination.  

And that catalogue does not refer to the role now of the paramount force in the middle ages – religion.  Who believes that religion as a whole has been good for humanity?  Over the last millennium, which faith has caused the most agony in the Holy Land? 

As I follow it, the mathematically inevitable conclusion is that most people regard most religions as unfounded – except for the one that pure chance landed them in.  And that is not much comfort for the rest.

‘Precarious’ is then a term that we have to come to grips with again.  ‘Progress?’  What on earth is progress?  In what way has what we haughtily call the West moved forward in my lifetime?  Do many have other than a bleak view of the future that awaits or confronts our grandchildren?

And all this assumes that thousands are dying because of the planet getting hotter, and millions are starving to death – but this is all some kind of hoax.

MEN AND IDEAS

Johan Huizinga

Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960; translated by J S Holmes and H van Marle.  Rebound in red and white fancy paper with matching slip.

The Dutch have long enjoyed a reputation for tolerance and for being a refuge for dissident intellectuals – like Descartes and Spinoza.  Johan Huizinga is a model of the European intellectual.  He has a lot in common with Pieter Geyl (whom we looked at in the second volume).  Both were Dutch historians arrested and held by the Germans.  Both were gracious and humane scholars with an open European world view. 

In The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga spoke of the ‘vehement pathos of medieval life’ and the ‘extreme excitability of the medieval soul’.  Incidents were ‘by the sacredness of the sacrament raised to the rank of mysteries’.

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace.  Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of the winter were more real evils.  Honours and riches were honoured with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery.  We, at the present day [1925], can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed…. The modern reader of newspapers can no longer conceive the violence of impression caused by the spoken word on an ignorant mind lacking mental food.

Monkeys abounded as pets.  Beggars were everywhere, many disfigured – in fact or fiction.  The legless dragged themselves around by wooden stumps.  The Church put a woman in the Godhead, and persecuted all her daughters on earth as the source of evil, according to a myth that everyone had to believe.  The Church also said that the Mother of God was a virgin, and the cult of the Virgin arose out of the failure of the Church to come to grips with the facts of life – we like sex, and were meant to, because otherwise the human race would just fade and pass away.  Doctors, as some were called, did not know what they were doing, but were admired.  Everyone loathed lawyers, and very few trusted any monk or friar.

Let us see how the commentary of this remarkable historian is so relevant to us right now.

…. the general evolution of the dominant groups – the democratisation of society – constitutes a danger.  Professional scholarship can never be more than for a few: it is aristocratic.  Literature (and with it popular scholarship) is for the many, must be for the many.  Modern culture must be democratic if it is to be at all.  …. The ultimate problem remains like a ghost, ever present and unlaid: Is it possible to extend a higher civilisation to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point?  Is not every civilisation bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the masses?

That question may have been unfashionable, but the crash of all decency and fineness around populists like Trump makes it very urgent.

What about that other accursed ‘–ism’, nationalism?

Whether the relationship was large or small, the basis for the emotion embodied in ‘natio’ was the same everywhere: the primitive in-group that felt passionately united as soon as the others, outsiders in whatever way, seemed to threaten them or to rival them.  This feeling usually manifested itself as hostility and rarely as concord.  The closer the contacts the fiercer the hate. 

Does not what Huizinga called this ‘great ethnic antithesis’ underlie the rise of people like Farage, Hansen and Trump?

The Crusades, far from uniting the faith that was divided by language dissent and allegiance, reinforced the national enmities of Latin Christendom by bringing those peoples together again and again in martial equipment, battle array and a more or less sanctified rivalry…. A Frenchman remarkably observed that the French tend to behave themselves intractably among foreigners if they are not kept well in hand.

And as France, Russia and Germany showed, a revolution just makes things worse.

Then came the Revolution, when the mouth still called out for the universal good of virtue and love of mankind, but the mailed fist struck for the fatherland and the nation, and the heart was with the fist.  The factors ‘patrie’ and ‘nation’ had never before had such an intense influence as in the years from 1789 to 1796.  That fact merely confirms that nature constantly proves stronger than theory.  …. But as soon as one sets out to formulate the rights of man, the state appears to be required as the framework for his society.  (Emphasis added.)

That process reached frightful apotheoses under Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Franco and Mao.  But the author goes on:

Since Montesquieu, it had become a doctrine that liberty was born in the forests of Tacitus’ Germania, and that England’s political institutions had developed from that soil of that Old Germanic freedom.  France too had accepted the doctrine.

So had F W Maitland, but are we talking of doctrine or myth?  Whatever the answer may be to that question, this book seethes with insights like these.  This is not just learning or scholarship – this is wisdom of a kind that we so rarely see now.