Posted at 7:38 PM PST
Howdy, Pardners…
“Even more than in antiquity the mercantile bourgeoisie turned its wealth, energy, and ability to political advantage. In most cities it eliminated the poor from assemblies or offices. It oppressed the manual worker and the peasant, monopolized the profits of commerce, taxed the community heavily, and spent much of the revenue in internal strife, or in external wars to capture markets and destroy competitors. It tried to suppress artisan associations, and refused them the right to strike, under penalty of exile or death. Its regulation of prices and wages aimed to its own good, to the serious detriment of the working class. As in the French Revolution, the defeat of the feudal lords was a victory chiefly for the business class.” - - Will Durant, ‘The Age of Faith’, 1950
Mr. Durant was talking about the erosion of Western European feudalism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries… the prelude to The Renaissance. It’s interesting to compare the time he was talking about with the days we live in now. Are we too moving toward a Renaissance? Or are we merely hurtling toward another Dark Ages? Only history will tell.
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Will Durant (later joined by his fifteen year-old wife, Ariel Durant) was a philosopher and historian who produced what today’s historians and sociologists call “Middle Brow Literature”. Ya see…
… back in the first half of the twentieth century, social status wasn’t conferred only upon those who made cool YouTube videos. An understanding of history, philosophy, politics, and literature was expected of anyone who claimed to be from the upper-middle-classes or anyone who aspired to become part of the upper-middle-class. Knowledge was bling. Thus, a whole new market of readers was created, and a large group of academics and writers rushed to cater to that “middle-brow” market.
Will Durant didn’t write for academics, but instead for those who were expected to have some higher degree of literacy than the average blue-collar worker. The upper-middle-class. Not high-brow. Not low-brow. But middle-brow.
And it’s interesting that while writing the history of philosophy and the world, Will Durant became one of America’s premier historians and philosophers. Go figure. His pragmatic and forgiving worldview and his historical technique changed the way the world looked at history.
I’m in my second reading of Durant’s “Age of Faith”. I read it (and the rest of Durant’s works) when I was in my twenties. I was blown away then, and I’m blown away now.
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But the lesson today isn’t about Will Durant or social stratification during the first half of the twentieth century.
The lesson is about learning. If we don’t know where we’ve been, then we certainly have no idea about where we are now. No matter how many times we watch the same world drama unfold before us, we fail to remember that we’ve seen it all before. History doesn’t repeat itself. History is just a recording of us making the same mistakes over and over again.
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There was a time when moving up in social/economic class required the tiresome work of building a solid resume of intellectual bling. These days, the hard work of acquiring knowledge has been replaced with an easy aggregation of trivial pop-culture. Our intellectual curiosity satiated by Beck, Maher, Hannity, and Olbermann. Send in the fucking clowns.
So which is it? Dark Ages or Renaissance?
I’m betting on the Dark Ages. I’m doing so, because if we were heading toward some sort of Renaissance, we’d see a measurable increase in literacy and the capability, on the largest part of the population, to think outside of emotion and superstition. I don’t see that. Instead, I see a least two generations of Americans who don’t know what the French Revolution was, what feudalism was, or when the American Civil War was fought.
So what’s the fucking use? I mean, if Sarah Palin is the very best that can be produced by the Loyal Opposition, the Dark Ages are on their way. In fact, I believe that you can see the Dark Ages from her house.
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There are stupid questions. A question becomes stupid when it is asked by someone who should know the answer. It’s embarrassingly stupid.
Any questions?
Have a day.
Riley
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