Re: [Peace-discuss] Fear renders men…stupid and miserable…

Sun Jan 3 23:31:38 CST 2010

Carl, a few remarks are appended to your discussion. I don't claim expertise in matters of the history of the middle ages. My knowledge results from wandering about France with attendant reading.  

Regards, Mort

On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:57 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> Mort--
> 
> The subject is the conventional but tendentious account of the rise of
> capitalist (aka bourgeois, liberal) society - simply assumed by the writer of
> the comment (a guy?) - sometimes called the "Whig interpretation of history."
> Chomsky has shown himself remarkably free of conventional accounts of history
> (in re e.g. the Hebrew prophets and 17th c. Rationalists), especially those that
> are employed to show the virtues of the capitalist order.  As he says, one has
> to be highly educated to believe such things (as the commentator clearly is).
> You yourself have recently posted to this list views on Christianity from
> Chomsky (an atheist) that are nevertheless far from the liberal paradigm ("The
> Legacy of 1989").

Is education bad? One also has to be educated to be critical of conventional histories. 
> 
> Whiggishness characterizes accounts from Fukuyama's "End of History" to courses
> in "Western Civilization" (about which Chomsky is fond of quoting Gandhi: "It
> would be a good idea").  And a staple of Whiggishness is that, with the coming
> of capitalism, humanity has moved from a millennium of benighted religiosity to
> five hundred years of clear scientific rationally.  (The 500 years before that
> 1500 is a bit of a problem, but since no one learns Latin any more, it can be
> safely ignored).

The era of "benighted religiosity" did not pass; it still seems to prevail here in the good old USA, and elsewhere.  But yes it has declined in Europe, especially after 1789 . 
> 
> To take your examples - those cathedrals "magnificent as art and architecture"
> (but not magnificent apparently in some other way?) were not designed "to bring

> forth the support of multitudes" as much as they were the work of those
> multitudes - communes, originally monastic, then urban; they were often the
> result of regional rivalries - the modern equivalent would be regional football
> teams.

I believe that the two functions are not incompatible. 

But you've got something there. Churches even stole relics from one another to establish their religious importance and priority and to attract pilgrims so as to bring wealth to the local (church) community. It became a business. 
> 
> They were not "icons of feudalism," because ecclesiastical institutions were
> opposed to feudalism - hence the great political struggle of the Middle Ages,
> the Investiture Controversy.  (The opposition to feudalism gave medieval
> Catholicism some of its characteristic institutions, like clerical celibacy):
> see "Sex and power in Catholicism," <www.counterpunch.org/estabrook0420.html>.

You probably know that the medieval (and later) "nobility" and the "officers" of the western Christian church, the bishops, were often in league, sending their offspring and relatives to serve in the church or to its monasteries. You probably also know of the great power and wealth of the western church. Certainly, there was often intense rivalry for that power between church and state, but the leaders of both factions often came from the upper echelons of medieval society and intermixed. Like rivalries in the family. 
> 
> Nor were they "built largely on the donations of royalty and the merchant
> class": feudalism as a polity was opposed to "royalty" (see Perry Anderson,
> Lineages of the Absolutist State) and the merchant class hardly existed before
> the collapse of the medieval mode of production in the 14th century, by which
> time the great age of cathedral building was over.
> 
> Nor did "exalted power and wealth at the expense of the vast poor and laboring
> classes" characterize the ruling class of the European Middle Ages but that of
> the next period.  

Visit Avignon's Palais des Papes sometime. It flourished in the 1300's.  Its wealth was enormous, and the Popes there reigned over extensive holdings. Whence was that  wealth accumulated? (I don't have detailed knowledge of that.)

> (As the author of the Manifesto understood.) The rise of the
> modern world (i.e., capitalism) depends on "free labor" - i.e., the confiscation
> of the right to life and the use of productive property that was general in the
> Middle Ages, and the subjection of labor to the wage contract, "the equal
> exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and
> oppression."
> 
> I'm not sure how you know that "an important motivation for ... contributions
> [to cathedral building] was to exonerate themselves of their 'sins' [sic] and to
> win a place in Heaven," but one can find statements to that effect from late
> medieval and Renaissance grandees, particularly in Italy, from about the
> fifteenth century -- once the modern age had dawned.  

What  about "indulgences"?

> Such attitudes, like the
> witch-craze, is a phenomenon of the European Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.
> (One of the best accounts remains John Bossy's Christianity in the West
> 1400-1700.)  Your evocation of judgment day in art seems to refer primarily to
> the danse macabre, a late-medieval (i.e., after the 14th century collapse) theme
> that was directed primarily against the new (post-feudal) exploiters - an
> insistence on equality before the law of God.

Not so. Celebrated tympanum(s?) were sculpted in Romanesque churches well before (11th, 12th centuries) the late middle ages (e.g., Conques, Moissac, Arles, etc.).  They were not depictions of danses macabres. 
> 
> As you say, "This is not at all to say that religion [by which you seem to mean
> medieval Christianity] has only been an agency of fear."  But that's the burden
> of the commentator's crude caricature - which has nothing to do with the Middle
> Ages but a great deal to do with ahistorical anti-Catholicism - the
> anti-semitism of the intellectual, as has been said. The motive for a statement
> has nothing necessarily to do with its truth, but in this case the commentator
> simply doesn't know what s/he's talking about.

I think you are being overly sensitive here. 

> 
> Regards, CGE
> 
> 
> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>> Carl,
>> Your first paragraph below strikes me as disparagement without substance, buttressed only with some here irrevelent favorite thoughts from Chomsky, who, I'm not sure would agree with either the tenor or truth of what you say
>> about the issue at hand.
>> I have visited a great many of the old cathedrals and churches in Europe, Romanesque and Gothic, especially in France. One cannot be unimpressed with their magnificence as art and architecture, with their attractive power to bring forth the support of the multitudes, low and high. But I've always had
>> a guilty feeling in visiting and admiring them, being conscious that they were icons of feudalism, built largely on the donations of royalty and the merchant class, who gained their exalted power and wealth at the expense of the vast poor and laboring classes.  And it is clear that an important motivation for their contributions was to exonerate themselves of their "sins" and to win a place in Heaven. Evidence for this is overwhelming. The other side of the coin is that Hell was a great fear, a motivator. That the judgement day could be terrible and terrifying is sculpted in innumerable portrayals of the last judgement at entrances to these medieval edifices, and
>> elsewhere. That (western) religion has seemed to prosper in fearful and terrible times, and has profited by inculcating fear seems to me undeniable.
>> This is not at all to say that religion has only been an agency of fear.
>> So in conclusion, I think the guy who wrote the comment I copied has made an
>> insightful observation.
>> On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> Although the commentator's penultimate paragraph is accurate, her/his account of the "Middle Ages," common as it is, is as intellectually respectable (if not so sophisticated) as a belief in phlogiston.  This sort
>>> of ignorance is pervasive among the college-educated political class of the US; as Chomsky says, you have to be highly educated to believe stuff like that. A proper corrective would be to read some actual history - or even basic works like the Communist Manifesto.
>>> It's certainly true that fear has been a political motivator particularly in the US.  A society founded on two of the greatest crimes in human history - the extinction of the native Americans and the enslavement of native Africans - has a lot to be afraid of, perhaps principally its own conscience, if not the revenge of the victims. But the fear of just retribution expands in the last fifty years as America's victims come to include much of the world.
>>> In their supreme cynicism, that fear has been mobilized by the American elite. The post-WWII domestic policy of the USG is encapsulated in the advice of Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg to President Truman, that he "scare the hell out of the American people," in order to get his imperialist policies accepted - policies necessitated by the fact that only
>>> WWII had cured the Depression, and the end of the war seemed to mean the return of the Depression.
>>> Luckily for our rulers, the new bete noire, terrorism, was conjured within
>>> a decade of the disappearance of its predecessor, communism.  --CGE
>>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>>> Fear is what makes our world turn…  GGreenwald's piece, [http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/02] is followed by several perceptive comments. I cite one of them below ... Here is a comment I found interesting:
>>>> The fear mechanism is an old one. In the middle ages the best artists of
>>>> the time were hired to depict it. The murals in European churches show
>>>> the wonderfully imagined horrors and tortures of hell. You can understand
>>>> why a populace would be willing to submit to the rituals and tithing of
>>>> the church and to support a group of parasitic clergy living in gold
>>>> plated luxury in order to avoid those torments. The people would be
>>>> willing to go out on Crusades to prove their devotion and to bring
>>>> salvation to the heathens. The practices of the aristocracy, the practices that caused poverty, faded into the background.
>>>> For a while the paradigm shifted away from worshipping a church and
>>>> submitting to the powerful. It shifted toward rationalism and personal
>>>> responsibility.
>>>> We have regressed to a people quivering before authority. "Terror" is the
>>>> devil on earth. Terrorism is marvelously imagined, magnified, created, publicized and depicted in great vivid detail by the most skilled story tellers available. It is used to get us to submit to the rituals and spending required to control it. Out of our sometimes meager incomes, we will support a consortium of wealthy weapons producers in order to protect ourselves. Manufactured fear infantilizes us and distracts us from the business of life, from education, jobs and health. We follow anyone like children, joining Crusades, hoping for the illusion of safety.
>>>> In both cases, the imagination is far more destructive than the reality.
> 
> 	###
> 
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