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Recently I read a couple of Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death novels, which are set in the late 12th century during the reign of England’s Henry II, who is best, if unfairly, remembered for the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, his “meddlesome” Archbishop of Canterbury. King Henry is less remembered for his more important accomplishments, including the modernization, for the 1100s, of England’s medieval justice system. For example, he instituted jury trials to replace trial by combat at a time when, on the European continent, trial by inquisition and torture were still the norm.
It should be remembered that the 12th century marked England’s emergence from the darkest of the Dark Ages into what is commonly called the High Middle Ages (11th to 13th centuries) and thus two to three centuries before the Renaissance, the acknowledged rebirth of classical learning and precursor to the modern ascendancy of rationality over superstition leading to the next period, the Enlightenment. In the 1170s, when Franklin set her first novel, the Enlightenment was a long way ahead and even the rudiments of science were at war with medieval superstition and primitive religiosity.
As I read Franklin’s interesting, well-research tales, I was struck by the similarities of that period to our own. American democracy was born in the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, a period that reached its height in the 1700s. America’s founding generation—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—were all products of the Enlightenment and so infused our fledgling democracy in the 1770s with ideals and principles grounded in humanism and scientific reason.
We should not mistake today’s radical “conservatives” as desiring to conserve this foundation. Indeed, the conservative party in modern American politics has all but disappeared because it has been co-opted in large measure by a radically reactionary faction that seeks not to turn back the clock to America’s democratic roots but, rather, to take this nation back, both figuratively and literally, to the Dark Ages, to superstition and errant, simpleminded religiosity.
Adherents of this reactionary, proto-fascist (to use a term I learned first from Henry Giroux) worldview espouse Christianist ideology to lure the unsuspecting and the uncritical in the same manner that radical Islamists lure the unsuspecting to their reactionary cause. Recall George W. Bush’s application of the laden word crusade to the Iraq War before his handlers and propagandists hushed it up. Neither -ist ideology resembles Christianity nor Islam in any true religious sense; they are political ideologies cloaked in religious garb. Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann offer prime examples of this faction’s proponents.
Similarly, political ideologues of this ilk are not trying to restore, but to destroy, American democracy by advocating a return not to the Enlightenment principles of our founding era but to the medievalism that preceded it by several centuries. Rick Perry’s recent statements about the need to rewrite our Constitution are examples of this movement.
Today’s cultural and political struggles between democratic reason and superstitious radicalism in the United States bear uncanny similarity to those that marked 12th century England. If thinking men and women are not informed and proactive on behalf of enlightened American democracy, we will be dragged into an American Dark Ages, a prospect that is not as remote as many might like to believe.
