The green movement offers the best analog to the new Medievalism. Like medieval Catholicism, green orthodoxy foresees impending doom caused by human activity, blaming any severe weather entirely on Gaia rather than Jehovah. Like the Medieval Church, the green movement is lavishly funded by the wealthy, who, like medieval aristocrats, urge austerity and humbleness on the masses but themselves live large and use private jets. Buying modern indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices allows them to save the planet in style.
Like medieval prophecies of imminent apocalypse, which were either exaggerated or just plain wrong, much of the climate change prognostications have not, so far, proven enormously accurate. Yet reasoned discourse is not what drives the groups that organized around Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Thunberg is a reprisal of the youthful fanaticism of medieval sanctus puer—the "holy children"—who rampaged through Europe in the 13th century, or Mao's Red Guards, unleashed during the Chinese Communists' Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Their followers, too, were motivated by religious fanaticism.
You know you're dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent. A similar rush for conformity can be seen in discussions over other central issues, like the pandemic, or "systemic racism." Operating under the auspices of this new Medievalism, social media firms have felt free to censor and demonetize dissenters on these subject, for example about the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory. A recent conference of leading virologists—not nutcase Covid deniers or scammers—was censored on YouTube for spreading what designated opinionators deemed inappropriate and misleading information. Similarly, those who dare oppose the fashionable and socially destructive theories about "systemic racism" face censorship and even removal from their jobs.
As we have our share of hysterics on this board.
Thank you.
Like medieval prophecies of imminent apocalypse, which were either exaggerated or just plain wrong, much of the climate change prognostications have not, so far, proven enormously accurate. Yet reasoned discourse is not what drives the groups that organized around Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Thunberg is a reprisal of the youthful fanaticism of medieval sanctus puer—the "holy children"—who rampaged through Europe in the 13th century, or Mao's Red Guards, unleashed during the Chinese Communists' Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Their followers, too, were motivated by religious fanaticism.
You know you're dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent. A similar rush for conformity can be seen in discussions over other central issues, like the pandemic, or "systemic racism." Operating under the auspices of this new Medievalism, social media firms have felt free to censor and demonetize dissenters on these subject, for example about the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory. A recent conference of leading virologists—not nutcase Covid deniers or scammers—was censored on YouTube for spreading what designated opinionators deemed inappropriate and misleading information. Similarly, those who dare oppose the fashionable and socially destructive theories about "systemic racism" face censorship and even removal from their jobs.
As we have our share of hysterics on this board.
Thank you.
