The Medieval Mindset (2017)
This article is everything wrong with privileged moderns looking back on the past.<p>The world and the humans within it hasn&#x27;t changed at all, barring costumes and jewelry.<p>The biggest fallacy in this article isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s <i>wrong</i> per se; it&#x27;s that the thesis distilled is &quot;a member of the current intelligenstia criticizing the hoi polloi of the past&quot; when the hoi polloi of their own current era are just as ignorant and the intelligentsia is just as fallible.<p>I really wanted to deconstruct the entire article, but I&#x27;ve spent way too much time on this as it is.<p><i>&gt;Here&#x27;s an early modern example, right when the world seemed to start to make sense. It might seem insane to us that George Spencer, a troublesome one-eye old servant in Connecticut, was tried and executed in 1642 for the crime of bestiality after a one-eyed pig was born in his village. It might also seem insane that both the pig and his own retracted confession were called as the two witnesses required to convict him. But by the standards of the community and the times, the only insane person was that godless trouble-making pig-fucker, George Spencer.</i><p>Let&#x27;s look at some secondary sources regarding this case:<p><i>&gt;&quot;The early court records teem with incidents of irreligion, drunkenness, profanity, lechery, and worse. In one of the most extreme cases, George Spencer was charged at New Haven with &#x27;prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God&#x27; culminating in his bestiality with a pig. An anxious committee of ministers asked him &#x27;whether he did use to pray to God. He answered, he had not since he came to New England, which was between four or five years ago&#x27;. Spencer admitted that he had scoffed at the Lord&#x27;s day, calling it Lady&#x27;s day, but denied all the rest. However, he could not gainsay the record of his bad character, or the evidence of a monstrous piglet, to which he allegedly showed a telling paternal resemblance.&quot; 1</i><p>One can almost imagine the #LeafletStorm released in the days before his arrest:<p><i>&quot;George Spencer Calls The Lord&#x27;s Day The &quot;Ladyes Day&quot;: Gets Schooled On Godliness&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;George Spencer: Genius, or dude who&#x27;s gone too far this time?&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;George Spencer&#x27;s Brand of &#x27;Freethinking&#x27; Has a Long, Awful History&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;George Spencer Needs To See Some Of These Epic #IfTheLordWasALady Leaflets To See How Ridiculous His Remark Really Was&quot;</i><p>And then you have this:<p><i>&gt;&quot;One of the magistrates reminded him of the scriptural text: &quot;He thatt hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sans shall &gt; finde mercie.&quot; Spencer confessed, clearly misunderstanding the magistrate&#x27;s use of the word &quot;mercy.&quot; The judge was thinking of the next world, Spencer of this one. Before the trial, Spencer confessed the act eleven separate times and permitted a paper asking for mercy to be put up in church. At his trial, he refused to confess, apparently on the advice of a man who had told him that without it he could not be convicted. Faced with the many persons to whom he had confessed, he admitted that their testimony was true but denied having had intercourse with the sow. The court found him guilty because the &quot;everlasting equity&quot; of the Bible demanded the verdict.&quot; 2</i><p>So from these sources we can establish that:<p>1. The case of George Spencer is an outlier as considered by historians of the era.<p>2. George Spencer is essentially a neckbeard of the New Atheist type, circa 17th century America.<p>3. George Spencer admits that he is an irreligious, uncleanly man with a bad reputation, and that he admitted his guilt to these people, but that truly, he did not have sexual relations with that pig, even if the resemblance <i>is</i> uncanny.<p>4. The &quot;proper&quot; classes thought and had thought that he was clearly an ungodly person. Periodde. By troth, why are we even having this conversation? It&#x27;s 1642 Anno Domini. #BurnAHeretic<p>5. His legal advisors insinuated that if he pled guilty, he could get a plea bargain.<p>6. Apparently, someone whom he trusted more advised him pre-trial that this was ill-advised--although whether it was &quot;they&#x27;re still going to hang thee if thou confess&quot; or &quot;the constable hath lyttle but shite in his hands without thine confession, brethren&quot; remains ambiguous.<p>7. The court, having their orderly show-trial upset, says <i>fuck it</i>, claims that George Spencer is clearly guilty because of something he said in the past, and the pig is a self-evident witness, and why the fuck not? No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit.<p>None of these strike me as particularly particular to an era. People have been crucifying others with the force of social pressure since recorded history began. The only difference is the scenery.<p><i>&gt;We live in an enlightened era. Our mental toolboxes are full to bursting with evidence-based reasoning, with precedent, with doubt, and with logic. We hold many truths to be self evident. We stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and we think this plain of shoulders is ground level.</i><p>Hint: <i>Every</i> class of intelligentsia throughout time thinks its own set of platitudes, dogmas, and evidence-derived conclusions are immaculate and inviolate. It&#x27;s like a twisted form of Conway&#x27;s Law 3 for ideology.<p><i>&gt;Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked. Today we value a person by the money they have, but to the medieval mind, it was the money you spent and how you spent it that elevated your status. The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth. The nobles ate extraordinary dishes and wore imported silk, and the rising merchants strove to imitate them. The peasants might be annoyed by the idleness and corruption of the nobility, but few ever expressed wonder at the cost of their everyday behavior, only at cost wasted on pointless wars or lost causes. A crown of diamonds could silence any peasant in awe. To the First and Second Estates, earning money by labour or personal action was degrading; gifts were common and welcomed.</i><p>So let&#x27;s break out two of the most egregious assumptions:<p>1. Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period.<p>2. All peasants are identical and identically stupid. They have no capacity for rational thought. If you put shiny in front of them, they will be entranced like Lennie Small.<p>The first is ludricrous, as the existence of the entire field of consumerism theory proves (an invention solely of the 20th century).<p>The second is equally as ludricrous and ironically, embraces mythological feudal castes as reality.<p><i>&gt;Patrick says &quot;the ruling class are living like Kardashians&quot; and he&#x27;s exactly right. The Kardashians seem to be reviled because  they are talentless, unproductive, and ignorant - all flaws to a modern viewer, all virtues to a medieval one. We prize our working celebrities and revile our idle ones; if you want to think medieval, flip that idea on its head.</i><p>Uh, people <i>revile</i> people like the Kardashians? <i>What?</i> Their reality TV show has been running for more than <i>ten years</i>. Before that, it was Paris Hilton. Before that, it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The great masses of people (you know, the generally termed talentless, unproductive, and ignorant) in all eras love vicariously revelling in decadence.<p><i>&gt; Even today, people who meet a celebrity or a monarch express wonder at the oddest and most mundane details, as if some part of them had expected the object of such idolization to be more-than-mortal. Also, men and women were made of completely different substances. The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical. Justice is a modern conceit. All relationships are horizontal and unsymmetrical.</i><p>I have but one retort to this: <i>When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?</i> 4<p>History is a long series of contentions, victories, and defeats by conflicting parties with their own self-evident and self-motivated truths--No people, no culture, no time is homogeneous, except to the extent that they are homogeneously heterogeneous.<p>My favorite counter-point to the implicit idea that people &quot;in the past&quot; were unthinking proto-humans unlike us is the entirely mundane ancient bathroom graffiti of Pompeii 5 that wouldn&#x27;t be out of place in any public restroom anywhere.<p>-<p>1 Cressy, David. Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century<p>2 Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. University of Georgia Press.<p>3 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conway's_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conway's_law</a><p>4 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Ball_(priest)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;John_Ball_(priest)</a><p>5 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pompeiana.org&#x2F;Resources&#x2F;Ancient&#x2F;Graffiti from Pompeii.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pompeiana.org&#x2F;Resources&#x2F;Ancient&#x2F;Graffiti from%2...</a>