From the Age of Faith

to

the Age of Government

Curt Mudgeon

September 2008

I caught last week on the TCM channel a part of Bergman’s masterpiece, The Seventh Seal.  Its stark, haunting cinematography places man’s timeless quest for God and the meaning of life in medieval Sweden during the Black Death epidemic.  One of its most striking scenes takes place in a village where local folks, soldiers, and knights have a good time eating, drinking, and merrily watching the antics of an open-air travelling theatre.  Suddenly, a wretched procession of supplicants appears, people walking on their knees, on crutches, carrying big, heavy wooden crosses, being flogged, and lamenting in the midst of the thick smoke of censers carried by monks.  The monks sing the Gregorian chant Dies Irae.  The group stops, and a monk tells the frightened people that they are “Doomed! Doomed! Doomed!” and that the Black Death is God’s punishment for their sins.  These apocalyptic images powerfully encapsulate whatever we might imagine about the Middle Ages, the Black Death, and its human context.  

The Middle Ages was the Age of Faith.  The “life of man” still was close to “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes described the natural state of mankind.  Scourges like the Black Death seemed so arbitrary, so senselessly cruel, and made life so hopeless that the only solace from this hopelessness had to be found in religion.  Only a belief in God’s mysterious ways could make people accept that there was a sense to life.  For all the impressions of the period as dominated by obscurantism, the Age of Faith, by promoting literacy, philosophy, the arts, and the sciences, was the quantum leap into civilisation that produced the printing press, great epic tales, artistic crafts, and gothic cathedrals, masterpieces of beauty and engineering.  It also carried the seeds of the coming Renaissance.  Believers and sceptics alike owe much to the Catholic Church, which, for all its warts, vagaries, and excesses, then shaped Western Civilisation for the better.

While watching the movie, I thought that the words of doom uttered by the monk evoked admonitions with which we are quite familiar:  “Global Warming!  Climate Change! Atone for your sins, as you have destroyed the planet and the habitats of all living things! … ” On the fringe, reactions to the fear merchants’ reproaches have included a more or less mystical gallimaufry of pseudo-science, astrology, ecology, politics, and highly individual interpretations of spirituality from round the world—yet generally excluding Christianity.  Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis was quickly highjacked and turned into some naïve cult of the goddess Gaia of Greek mythology by neo-pagans who congregate at places like Stonehenge to hum in concert, with the hope that the “energy” so “liberated” put some sense into their senseless lives.  It is the same people who claim to long for the idyllic way of life—as they think it was—that their ancestors knew a few centuries ago.  While such reactions to the gloom-and-doom prophecies may be rather amusing, they reveal a level of gullibility and ignorance that would not have been out of place in the Middle Ages—New Age meets Middle Ages.

Another response, that one more common, to the preachers of a climatic Armageddon is less amusing.  Actually, it is quite worrisome, as too many people, in fear, do not turn to religion, traditional or kooky.  Instead, they turn to government, because they let themselves be sold by politicians a bill of goods based on unconfirmed hypotheses that (1) global warming is man-made, (2) under current conditions it is not a transient phenomenon and will worsen, (3) its effects will very soon trigger wide-ranging disasters, conquest, war, famine, and death, and (4) only a mobilisation of the whole country around objectives set by an all-knowing government—or the UN—can save the world.  Welcome to the Age of Government, where individualism is a capital sin, and people are cogs in a statist machinery.

The word “mobilisation” or any paraphrase thereof brings to mind two images, one of imminent war, and the other of the mass movements of the 1920s and 1930s.  History tells that every time a politician calls for a mobilisation outside a clear context of war, one must carefully look at the purpose of that mobilisation, because it is probably fraudulent and about to cause much trouble, and serious trouble at that.  In the USSR, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, everyone was mobilised in the service of the state against enemies real or fabricated.  Workers, peasants, and shopkeepers were engaged as soldiers in a war.  In the Nürnberg Nazi rallies, workers paraded holding shovels or spades in a military right-shoulder stance.  Like their Russian comrades, they were soldiers in a war against capitalism, international finance, and anyone designated by their government as an enemy of the state.  They were mobilised, ready and willing to obey any of their leaders’ orders.  A mobilisation is always supposed to have grand motives, which are hammered into people’s minds by a steady flow of propaganda.  To effect a mobilisation around the global-warming cause, “progressive” educators have been indoctrinating schoolchildren with Al Gore’s propaganda flick “An Inconvenient Truth.” This follows on the heels of nearly forty years of relentless inculcation with a quasi-mystical brand of bubble-gum ecology where man is the egregious sinner and has no legitimate place.

Looking at it now, for our medieval ancestors to seek refuge in religion is understandable.  Faced with an obvious and immediate pestilence that they did not understand and could not fight, they had to turn to the omnipotent power, which, they believed, ruled the universe.  By contrast, trusting in prophet Al Gore’s philippics and to give him or a stand-in extraordinary powers for fear of a phenomenon about which he can do nothing is sheer imbecility.  And dangerous imbecility, mind you. 

What moves people like Gore and his friends?  History gives us the answer.  It is a mix of arrogance, ignorance, self-righteousness, and a self-centred view of the world, which is common to dictators and would-be dictators.  And do not think that “ignorance” excludes scientists.  Some scientists believe that socialism and statism are fine economic systems if properly implemented.  They use their status, not science, to advance their political objectives, and it just happens that the spectre of global warming serves their purposes.   In that respect, they are no different from politicians.  It remains that the current save-the-planet movements too often ignore or deny that politics cannot trump the natural laws inherent in humanity—however ill-defined they may be—and that transgressions may have catastrophic consequences.  Al Gore, who has managed to hoodwink a sizeable part of a public poorly educated in science, is an irresponsible statist who wants to micromanage our economy and our lives to fit his fatuous, dime-store vision of the world.   He and his likes are dangerous.  His claims that economic measures taken to solve an inexistent crisis will not do any harm and will even “create” jobs are false.  The loss of liberties, the erosion of economic vitality, and the larger government footprint on all activities are ills from which a nation does not easily recover.  As to “creating” jobs, this is not always in itself a desirable feature, as breaking windows is an activity that can easily achieve that result.

Yet, we seem ineluctably to move at an ever-faster clip into the Age of Government.  About a month ahead of Election Day, the two main presidential candidates do not differ much in their propensities for the expansion of government size and powers.  They have not taken the lessons of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac scandals, and have pushed for more government involvement in the mess at the expense of the taxpayer.  They both “believe” in the threat of a man-made global warming, and favour the application of “cap and trade” schemes to carbon dioxide emissions.  Such approaches which essentially amount to rationing and taxing energy are certainly not the “free market” solutions that their partisans, including Gore, claim they are.  

This is why, as a conservative,  I am not that crazy about candidate John McCain, who makes it a habit to be duped every time he “reaches across the aisle” to get in bed with those socialists who call themselves “Democrats” and like Big Government.  I hope that Governor Palin, who seems to have good judgment and can live without Joseph Lieberman, will instil in McCain’s mind a bit of common sense.   I think Mrs Palin is smart, and I just hope that Washington will not dumb her down.

Ah, yes, there is the other candidate, who says he likes his country but actually wants to change it into something like … France.  Well, if he cannot see the contradiction …