Progressive World Review

According to David Brooks’ column today, what our political campaigns need is a good dose of medieval superstition.  Apparently we are too focused on reality and that has somehow taken all the fun out of electing our leaders,

But on my desk for much of this period I have kept a short essay, which I stare at longingly from time to time. It’s an essay about how people in the Middle Ages viewed the night sky, and it’s about a mentality so totally removed from the campaign mentality that it’s like a refreshing dip in a cool and cleansing pool.

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

This speaks volumes about Brooks’ outlook, particularly as someone who enjoys an elitist detachment from the realities faced by working men and women not only in this country but around the world.  It also says much for Brooks’ appreciation of the principles that the Founding Fathers used to create this country.

The Middle Ages, also known as the Dark Ages, were brutally tough times to live in.  It was a period characterized by ignorance, superstition, fear and back-breaking work with little reward.  It was a time when common everyday working people had no control over their lives and the aristocratic class that ruled them saw them as dirty, ignorant people that were completely beneath them.  It’s ironic that not only does Brooks romanticize this age but actually uses this period as a comparison to a modern election, given that the people living back then couldn’t even vote.

This country was founded in the ideals of the Enlightenment, an age that threw off the superstition of the Dark Ages and celebrated reason as its foundation.  No longer were some people considered to be inherently better than others.  That we’re all created equal and the pursuit of happiness is for everyone, not just a privileged few.

Brooks continues his trip down fantasy lane with this observation from C. S. Lewis,

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I love a good story, The Lord of the Rings is one of my all time favorites.  I’ve read Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia many times, both to myself and my children, in spite of the fact that his books are dripping with a religion that I have no use for.  But I can also wonder at the universe as well, exactly the way it is, without the superstition and fantasy.  Rather than disenchanting, the vastness of the universe is awe inspiring and that the sun is a “huge flaming ball of gas” never ceases to amaze me.

While Brooks is essentially correct in his summation of modern political campaigns,

Campaigns are all about message management, polls and tactics. The communication is swift, Blackberry-sized and prosaic. As you cover it, you feel yourself enclosed in its tunnel. Entire mental faculties go unused.

It doesn’t have anything to do with a “disenchant[ing]” modern view.  Modern politics deals far more with fantasy than it does with hard facts, the kind of facts that actually affect people’s lives.  What Brooks is saying is: politics is all about impersonal, scientific like data rather than some magical heartwarming fantasy.  But if that were really the case then politics and the campaigns it produces would be far more useful than it really is.  In other words, we need more reality in our political discussion not less.

What I find so disturbing about Brooks’ screed, other than his general lack of appreciation for reality or his lack of appreciation to the founding principles of this land, is his willingness to find romance in what in reality was a dark, desperate period of incredible hardship for so many people, much in the same way he, and his ilk, romanticize war with all of its destruction and the despair that it brings.

–Paul Wilden

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