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| Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back To The Dark Ages |
| 2026-09-05 |
| [ZERO] Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world. Maybe we're progressive regressives, and I don't mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period. Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it's characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn't defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Dante's "Inferno," St. Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica." And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sofia was created, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses was a product of the medieval period, even if, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched. Now let's switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |