Travelogue 1005 – September 19
How to Enjoy September Sun

The sun has been indulgent. We are experiencing a gentle late summer in the land of moody skies. I couldn’t resist stopping by my favourite pub on my way home one workday. The days are long enough still to catch some lingering sunshine in the early evening. I sat outside, at a table overlooking the brick lane that runs alongside a canal. You don’t see the canal itself, but the masts of the boats anchored there, the houses across the canal, the big sky opened up by the passage of the water.

At the next table sat a family of Brits, two sisters and their parents. They had spent the day touring the city and seemed underwhelmed. As far as I could tell, being underwhelmed was their default state. They kept up an impressive stream of negative chatter while I sat there. Anything or anyone that came up in conversation was efficiently cut down, and the violence was carried off in such bright tones and casual delivery that they might have been trading observations about the weather. The gossip about friends and family was particularly biting. No one emerged unscathed. Even the dead were fair game. The mother proposed some words for a note of condolence, and the others laughed at her sentimentality. One daughter reeled off the proper formula. “No reason to gush,” she said. The daughter’s favourite adjective was “boring”. Everything in life perpetually teetered on the edge of suffocating boredom. This woman was no teenager. No matter how lustrous the long hair she persistently touched and waved about; no matter how often perfect the painted nails she held up for view; no matter how restless the bobbing sneaker at the end of one long leg crossed over the other, she was securely past thirty.

The bored daughter had one redeeming moment. It was a moment of reminiscence. She veered suddenly from the excoriation of a childhood friend, whose fond memories of their times together had to be proven false and undeserved. She veered suddenly into heart-warming reminiscences of her father. The old man clearly didn’t know what to do with this outburst. He mumbled a few unemotional observations, and let it go. She wasn’t bothered and went on at length about how special those occasions were, the weekends when Mother was off on business and Father indulged his girls in all sorts of special activities and meals. I found myself liking her, despite first impressions.

It didn’t last. A Dutch friend showed up, and the conversation returned to observations about how dreary the walk to the pub had been, how disappointing. The Dutchman played along. Complaining is a Dutch sport, and they’re very good at it.

It's not fair to judge people based on their behaviour on vacation. These jaded vacationers in their yachting clothes may be saving the world at their day jobs. But who doesn’t wonder occasionally whether wealth isn’t wasted on the wealthy, touring on the tourists, education on the educated? In a life so short on privileges, how are they assigned? Shouldn’t they be apportioned to those of us who have demonstrated a talent for graciousness?

Travelogue 1004 – September 8
The Present Perfect
Part Thirteen

The transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance was a complex process, and it constitutes one of those complex historical puzzles that occupy historians generation after generation. But I’m always up for a quick and dirty summary to drive experts mad – not because I have a problem with experts, but because I think it’s instructive sometimes to paint with a broad brush. Details are accurate, and ideas not so much. They are tools for thinking. Historians should care passionately about accuracy, but it’s awfully fun to play with ideas. And as long as the ‘philosopher’ remains humble, what harm is done?

So: speaking (dangerously) in the general, we might simply say that the Renaissance began as an awakened engagement with history. Scholars rediscovered ancient roots and ancient sources and they drew inspiration from them. Alongside the excitement about ancient sources came a growing faith in the power of humans to make sense of the world. The ancients were avid scientists, after all. Quickly, Renaissance efforts to imitate the ancients (in art, philosophy, rhetoric, and science) became a movement and set of achievements completely unique. Their successes lent fuel to the fire of pride in the human mind and spirit.

Whatever we think of their optimism (and pride), this was the change in mindset that defined the subsequent five hundred years. Humanity believed in its powers. What followed led to all the great masters (in art) we know so well, to the Enlightenment, to medicine and moon shots, to modern industry and climate change. And somehow, to what seems its final ignominious demise.

If I’m right that human society can only tolerate a limited amount of complexity, then modernity was a project doomed to collapse under its own weight. The further removed citizens are from comprehending how the world around them works, the more alienated they become. The more alienated, the more they act out and the more they develop a lust for destruction. More importantly, I think humans search for alternative means of relating to and explaining the world. Inside those complex systems – systems that come to seem supernatural – humans look for a human definition of reality. What could be more natural in these conditions than the rise of psychology – and psychologism? Feelings gain primacy. With feelings comes a new emphasis on – even enforcement of – intimacy. Feelings become the basis of reliability and comprehensibility. How can you trust someone who refuses intimacy?

Sooner or later, feelings will ‘trump’ reason. In the face of all the evidence, Republicans feel cheated by the 2020 election. The feeling is the measure in our post-truth, neo-medieval world. A refusal of feeling will amount to blasphemy one day. That can mean refusal to respond to a feeling, but even the refusal to have a feeling. Ponder for a moment the images we had during COVID lockdowns of random maskless warriors shouting and spitting at meek maskers in supermarkets. Resorting to calm reasoning is a threat. It violates the agreement that many seem to think we have made to be intimate and emotional.

Rounding things off, this new enforced intimacy and immediacy is what I observed in language development: in the foreshortening of time, in the blunting of instruments for hypothesis, in the reduction of options for formality, and so on.

I’ve called this emerging world view ‘medieval’ only because I saw certain parallels during contemplations about literature and art. The new intimacy culture and the old medieval culture share a penchant for formulaic narrative, for caricature and typing in characterization, and for conformity and motif. It’s the diminishment of the unique and rational. In small ways, of course.

I’ve made generalizations, and generalizations are infamously hard to defend. I wouldn’t try. Truth is in the detail, and I’m not aiming for truth. I’m playing. I’m attempting to turn observations into ideas. Ideas are mirrors, like Greif’s observations about joggers that I referenced at the start of my latest dog’s leg in thought. I blushed to think I was the sweaty guy in the author’s story, presuming that civic space was exercise space. Ideas are real.

Travelogue 1003 – September 5
The Present Perfect
Part Twelve

It’s human to simplify the times of our ancestors, either to glorify or to disparage. The Middle Ages have been one era much maligned by the people who came after. It’s been rehabilitated somewhat by scholarship begun in the nineteenth century, when things medieval became fashionable, but some of the damage to its reputation has proven to be irreparable. It has remained the ‘Dark Ages’ in many people’s minds. In reality, it’s only dark through the prism of other times, just as our own age may well be considered the dark ages by times more sensitive to the environment.

One thing that I believe can fairly be said about the Middle Ages, one thing that might seem less than flattering, is that it was one of the more static periods for Europe’s peoples. They were less mobile and more insulated than ever. Reading Caesar’s accounts of Gaul, one is struck by how much the peoples of Europe were on the move. And, indeed, they always have been. The commerce of goods and ideas never drops to absolute zero in history. That’s true of the Middle Ages. But the Middle Ages were a time when people were tied to the land. Social and physical mobility were very limited. Education and literacy were limited. Commerce slowed. Generations matured and passed within narrow confines.

I’ve said that modern humanity is alienated from its world. You couldn’t count on any one of us knowing the name of the flower in the neighbour’s garden, knowing the name of their representative in Congress, or knowing the name of a random nation on the map. Further, there’s a growing contingent of people who would reject the bases of authority that might inform them about the things they don’t know. They know they can google the name of a flower, but the scientific tradition that developed the classifications is suspect. So, rather than Google being a search engine, finding pre-existing information, it becomes a source and creator of knowledge.

Similarly, the medieval peasant was far removed from sources of knowledge about their world. The peasant would have known the names of the things they saw around them. It was folk knowledge. For all greater things, their sources of knowledge were limited. Most people were illiterate, and books were difficult to come by in any case. Church rites were in Latin, and most people didn’t understand Latin. Knowledge was mediated. The primary source of knowledge in most communities was probably the priest.

Knowledge of our world is critical for psychological security. We need to feel the sources of our knowledge are credible. The mechanisms for determining that credibility are therefore foundational for our world view. In the Middle Ages, religion provided knowledge for most people. That’s a rock-solid source. I sense it provided a lot of security. If that’s true, why do I see parallels between the medieval and the contemporary, when our time is far from comfortable and secure in its world view? The answer, I think, lies in understanding the intervening times, the five hundred years of intellectual development that separate the two ages.