From our perspective, we tend to look back at medieval times and scoff. It was an age of ignorance, fear, superstition, disease and violence, wasn’t it? I’m not going to try and argue that view is wrong but instead argue that our times are no better.
Does anyone doubt today that we are sinking into a mire of degeneration, moral turpitude, fear-mongering, economic chaos, violence and hatred? What have we got to be so smug about?
To make my point and deepen our understanding, I’m going to lean quite heavily on a marvellous book I read many years ago: The Distant Mirror, by a wonderful American scholar, Barbara Tuchman. Subtitle: The Calamitous 14th Century.
In it she drew parallels between the 14th century Europe and the 20th century. The similarities floored me!
At the time of her writing we had: the AIDS fake pandemic; the 14th century had the Black Death. We have a new fake pandemic, if you want to make the switch.
There was violence on the streets, very dangerous times, which is very true of the 20th century, from WW1, fascism, endless wars and finally extreme terrorism; in the 14th century, bands of robbers had a free hand. Today we have the Mafia, Tongs, drug cartels, thugs and muggers.
War was endless and seemed to go on forever. The great One Hundred Years War was the worst…”an epic of brutality and bravery checkered by disgrace.” Yet in Tuchman’s time we had the Vietnam War, which was industrial-scale brutality.
Religion was losing its grip and there was great loss of faith, despair and bewilderment, which is as true today as it was then.
There was a major food supply crisis, famine after famine that century. Crops were threatened and repeatedly ruined. Climate change was a disaster (O, yes!)
Political assassinations. Hardship. Fear of the end of the world… Her list goes on and on!
Tuchman compares human ills with the ride of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse of St. John (usually interpreted today as Death, Famine, War, and Conquest) and had this to say: “a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant…
“Economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners…”
“History never repeats itself,” said the great French writer Voltaire, “Man always does.”
And here we are—2023 and losing ground fast. People are talking about the strong possibility of a world war; the climate will engulf us (that’s if some asteroid doesn’t get us first); we’ve outstripped the food supply; world governments are incompetent at best, criminally psychopath in the main; men are fast becoming not-men and women are turning into animals, the worst of it is that children are being dragged into it before they are old enough to really understand gender, never mind transgender and sexual proclivities.
They call it WOKE; I think STUPOR would be a better term. A drug stupor, held in place by drugs, obscene foods and medicines.
Tuchman actually extends the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse to seven: plague, war, taxes, brigandage (I don’t think she was thinking of multi-national cartels under the same label, but I do), bad government, insurrection and schism of the Church. Good call.
Regards that last, this is before the Protestant Reformation but was a time when Popes tried to impose their absolute authority over secular life (and failed), to such a degree that for a time there were two competing popes: the one in Rome and a second pope (the “real pope” of the time), in the French city of Avignon.
In 2021 Vivien and I were at the popes palace in Avignon
And rising apocalyptically above all was the specter of The Black Death, rampant in 1348 – 1350. It killed at least a third of the world’s population between India and Iceland. It recurred four more times in the 14th century. So nobody really KNOWS, for sure, how many died.
Doesn’t that beg the question: How many ACTUALLY died of COVID? We know the figures are grossly falsified, notably in the USA, where supposedly 5 times as many people died as in the world on average!
And of course there were the Crusades; holy and moral wars against foreigners… Killing is good, if it’s THEM, not US! The crusades remind me so much of modern American imperialism, fighting for “democracy” in other countries and forcing them to adopt a way of life they did not want and did not ask for (so much for democracy, then).
Hey ho, they say that truth is the first casualty in any war!
The Media
Today’s “Black Death” is the diseased social interaction: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other social media (a strange name from something so wholly and disgustingly UNsocial).
We are now subject to mob rule. If they find you and there is something to criticize you’ll be abused by millions, instead of just a handful of people. They are the self-appointed police of all that’s right and proper. They themselves are, of course, a**holes of the first order.
But then hypocrisy comes naturally to all critics.
Then was have decaying television in most homes. It’s no longer quality entertainment, documentary and drama. Now it’s more endless advertizing (10 minutes out of every hour) and “reality TV”, so-called. I do not know why; it could hardly be less real. It’s just people behaving very badly, in my opinion.
It’s great for the media companies; it costs them very little. They just switch on the cameras and watch people degenerate in language and behavior. It matters not whether they are the “real housewives” of somewhere, or naked in the wild, trying to survive while their naught bits are blurred out!
Why am I saying all this and ranting so much?
Those of you who have been with me a while will know that I have a HUGE definition of health; not just the WHO usual trope “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
I think, if you are broke, you are unhealthy; if you have no loving relationship, you are unhealthy; if your government is bad, you are unhealthy; if there is violence in your neighborhood, you are unhealthy; if there is no God or equivalent in your firmament, you are unhealthy…
And in the end, we are all unhealthy by my definition, because we are all subject to what I call “global stress”, stress that affects everyone: dictatorships or equivalent, economic ruin, famine, volcanic night, terrorism, world wars, pandemics (real ones) and either a new ice age or global warming (take your pick!)
These days, of course, we have developed our own menaces! We have chemical toxins, EMFs, noise pollution (I find noise VERY stressful)… and the ultimate health hazard: TIME. Everything is gathering pace. We are moving faster and faster to whatever doom awaits us.
But wait a minute! Can’t we take some comfort, as Barbara Tuchman did, from the grief and woes of the past? They got through it. The world shifted. A new and wonderful age began soon after (the brilliant Renaissance). Perhaps we’ll get through this too. The human spirit is indomitable.
Thank you, Ms. Tuchman, for the comforting idea.
To Your Good Health,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
