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Entry: The Wines of Provence and the Armies of Allah Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_wines_of_provence_and_the_armies_of_allah#1538 Post contents: Another gem by Mr Zmirak. You rock, you Holy Fool! There's an eerie coincidence here, because just a few hours ago, BEFORE I saw this, I was re-reading the exact passage by "the sniffy Whig historian Edward Gibbon" in which he "faulted the Christian Church for the empire’s collapse". (Chesterton said, "coincidences are spiritual puns.") I won't quote the lengthy passage here, but for any interested readers, it's in Chapter 28 of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall". Hm, another coincidence to consider, is how Gibbon's very Whiggish "Decline and Fall" was published in the same year as Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", and the same year as American Independence. Now that the Modern Age is over and we need to reconstruct and carry on our civilisation out of its partial ruins - lest the ruins become permanently ruinous - maybe it's high time to contemplate the limitations of the creeds of Gibbons, Smith and yes Jefferson too, and how they are not quite sufficient to guide us through the postmodern (small "p") age in which our civilisation is once again in mortal peril. America's most vulnerable point, the chink in America's mental and spiritual armour, is its condition as an almost exclusively Modern Age nation. On that note - on America's vulnerability as a nation conditioned by just one historical age among many - cf what Owen Barfield called "chronological snobbery." Here's an intro to that concept, from the Barfield website: "Chronological snobbery is the presumption, fueled by the modern conception of progress, that all thinking, all art, and all science of an earlier time are inherently inferior, indeed childlike or even imbecilic, compared to that of the present. Under the rule of chronological snobbery, the West has convinced itself that "intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century"" http://davidlavery.net/Barfield/ Now, THAT is how REAL conservatives think, or ought to. ;-) Anyway. Yes it's very true that the "Dark Ages" weren't so dark. Just one bit of recent evidence, is the Sutton Hoo treasure (England, circa 630 AD), whose artifacts included items evidencing trade between England and the Mediterranean in the 600s. Furthermore - an even more tantalising clue to what the cosmpolitan world was like in the 600s - there are very close parallels between the legend of the English monk Caedmon and the Chinese Buddhist monk Hui Neng, who (if indeed they were two different people) were near contemporaries of around the 7th century. It SEEMS that their stories (if indeed they were two people) mixed and became conflated through the trade routes from England all the way to China, within just one generation of cosmopolitan commerce from Britain to the Sea of Japan. And one more observation I can't resist suggesting, as one more retort to any and all believers in economism among us: materialist aspirations did not resurrect Western civilisation in the great renaissance of the 12th century (that was the REAL rebirth of the West; the later Renaissance was just an elaboration on the Great Thaw of the 1100s.) Nope, "the market" in and of itself did not resurrect the West. Christianity did. Spiritual aspirations did. The great age of Cathedral-building (circa 1100s) was economically insane, by any abstract analysis. The Gothic Cathedrals, and the cosmopolitan Christian civilisation which gave rise to them (and was raised by them) were NOT created by any amassed interests in "private property" - they were built from spiritual aspirations, and they raised up the economy and technology on their coat-tails. I think it was Saint-Exupery who said, "If you want men to build good boats, first teach them how to love the sea." Karl Marx believed in the opposite, so stupidly. Sent at: 2008 10 13