Going, Going, Gone

In 1924 Eileen Power published Medieval People which was destined to become a classic of social history. In its chapters are described the lives of six representative characters from 800 A.D. to the sixteenth century. The only famous person in the bunch is Marco Polo. The others are a Frankish peasant, a prioress, a middle-class Parisian housewife, and two British merchants. There is also an introductory chapter that was added to the book in 1963 and was originally written in 1938. I am now rereading Power’s book that is also available online by Project Gutenberg.

The preliminary chapter is titled The Precursors. There are three of them, Romans who witnessed the decline and fall of their civilization. Power drew the obvious comparisons between Rome’s fall at the hands of Germanic barbarians and the German barbarians who were threatening civilization in 1938. However, Power’s focus is historical as she asks the age-old questions:

Such was the general picture of the great ruin of civilization amidst which the Romans of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries lived. What then did it feel like to live at a time when civilization was going down before the forces of barbarism? Did people realize what was happening? Did the gloom of the Dark Ages cast its shadow before? It so happens that we can answer these questions very clearly if we fix our eyes on one particular part of the Empire, the famous and highly civilized province of Gaul. We can catch the decline at three points because in three consecutive centuries, Gallo-Roman writers have left us a picture of their life and times. In the fourth century we have Ausonius, in the fifth Sidonius Apollinarius, in the sixth
Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus, a stranger from Italy, who made his home in Poitiers. They show us Auvergne and the Bordelais in the evening light. The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth centuries—­going, going, gone!

The first two Power’s discusses are the most interesting both Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinarius were educated, wealthy men. Ausonius lived a charmed live; he was able to comfortably evade what was happening around him and enjoy his still remaining wealth while chatting over dinner with his friends and neighbors. He died in 395 AD just before the German hordes attacked in strength.

Sidonius Apollinaris had a more difficult time with history. He was born in 430 AD when things were getting interesting. Apollinaris fought in defense of his region of Gaul but to no avail, there was nobody in Rome to send help. The Emperor of the moment sold Apollinaris out for an illusionary peace.

While some such as Apollinaris fought to preserve what was left of civilization, there were others who wanted to come to terms with an implacable enemy. This is where Power’s thesis is not just applicable to 1938 but to today as will. She quotes Church Father Paulus Orosius who could be writing for the BBC today:

There is the familiar figure of Orosius, defending the barbarians with the argument that when the Roman empire was founded it was founded in blood and conquest and can ill afford to throw stones at the barbarians; and after all the barbarians are not so bad. "If the unhappy people they have despoiled will content themselves with the little that is left them, their conquerors will cherish them as friends and brothers."

Her conclusions are depressingly apropos for the contemporary West’s massive evasion of the nature of Jihad and Islam. She makes two points that have also been repeatedly made by Victor Davis Hanson. Of course, Hanson has suffered vilification by all right-thinking people for making these arguments. No doubt Power had in mind the notorious Oxford Oath when she wrote this chapter just as Hanson is intimately familiar with the same sort of thing: academic/intellectual “pacifism” in the service on their nation’s enemies. Both point out the West’s self absorbed elites enervated by historically unprecedented wealth:

Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son. Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them?... The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.”

But still more responsible for their unawareness was the educational system in which they were reared. Ausonius and Sidonius and their friends were highly educated men and Gaul was famous for its schools and universities. The education which these gave consisted in the study of grammar and rhetoric, which was necessary alike for the civil service and for polite society; and it would be difficult to imagine an education more entirely out of touch with contemporary life, or less suited to inculcate the qualities which might have enabled men to deal with it. The fatal study of rhetoric, its links with reality long since severed, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form rather than on matter. The things they learned in their schools had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was the same, whereas everything was different.

Of course, today’s academics don’t have any excuses. Some are doing much more than just ignoring the barbarians outside and inside the gates. They are actively working for the demise of their hate object: America. It is leftist academics who are responsible for the abomination of the theocratic murderer Khatami giving a speech at the University of Virginia which was founded by Thomas Jefferson. Academia is much more than just out-of-touch.

Crossposted at The Dougout