How much of what went on in the middle ages and early modern periods do we look back on
with abhorrence and a certain amount of perplexity? The Inquisition, burning witches at the stake,
self-flagellation - how could people do such things? We wonder.
But take a step back, look about and you see many of these practices still flourishing
today, though they go by different names.
Here are just some of them.
Let’s start with excommunication. Excommunication meant so much more than being banned from
taking communion. It involved you being shunned, shamed, spiritually condemned, even banished.
Only through some kind of heavy penance, often a very public, lengthy and humiliating contrition,
could you and your reputation be redeemed.
Excommunication became a powerful political weapon, dished out to enemies of the faith,
debilitating their legitimacy, eventually just for sins as minor uttering the wrong
opinion.
What is no-platforming, what is Cancel Culture, if not excommunication? Qualified, competent
professionals are hounded out of their jobs, and publicly shamed just for uttering the
wrong opinion, often simply for a misjudged choice of words. Even just the wrong pronouns.
There are so many examples.
The nobel-prize winning biochemist and molecular physiologist, Tim Hunt, met with an online
shaming campaign following a quip made in a speech in Japan. His attempted joke ran
- “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in
the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise
them, they cry.” The risk with jokes is that people take them seriously. By the time
Hunt got home, he had had all his professorships cancelled and a brilliant career was destroyed.
For a bad joke.
The comedian Kevin Harte was supposed to host the Oscars in 2018. But LGBTQ activists dug
up some remarks - perhaps intended to be jokes - made 8 years earlier and had him sacked.
He apologized but his apology was deemed insufficiently contrite.
The BBC unceremoniously sacked Danny Baker, consistently their most entertaining radio
personality for three decades, for a joke on Twitter that was deliberately misconstrued
by his enemies.
In my own little career, I once hosted The Virgin podcast. We had had two guests on talking
about climate change. To hear the other side of the argument I invited James Delingpole.
A blogger in Australia didn’t like his views. He persuaded the Guardian to run his piece
- why is Richard Branson giving a platform to a climate change denier, and soon after
I was out of a job.
As often as not the employer wants a quiet life, so he bows to activist pressure and
sacks the target of the witch hunt..
Cancel culture is excommunication.
Today’s religions are not the many sects of Christiantiy that once perforated Europe,
but climate change, education, the NHS, gay rights, trans rights, the European Union,
multiculturalism, even Coronavirus and lock-down have become sacrosanct.
Intellectuals of the right and left, from Polly Toynbee to Nigel Lawson, have described
the NHS as Britain’s religion. It has replaced the Virgin Mary as the divine matriarch.
Why this worship? I suggest it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th century, when
the state began to replace the church as the main provider of education, welfare and healthcare.
After 1945 it was just a matter of time before the welfare state achieved altar status.
Articulate any kind of wrongthink and you risk the baying mob lynching you on social
media and elsewhere for your heresy. You are put in today’s equivalent of the stocks
while people jeer at you and humiliate you, and your career is burnt at the stake.
Smear someone with labels like far right, transphobe, homophobe or, most effective of
all, racist, and if the label sticks, that person is effectively excommunicated. It doesn’t
matter if it means misreporting, quoting out of context, or straw man arguments, any kind
of intellectual dishonesty, the important thing is to get the smear to stick. Anyone
who defends the witch is assumed to be another witch, so only the very brave step up.
Innocence is no defence. Nor was it the witch trials of mediaeval times, held before kangaroo
courts of the local clergy
12th-century France saw the beginnings of the Inquisition - to combat heresy and dissent.
The judges were the priests. First the Inquisition targeted Cathars and Waldensians. The movement
spread. In Spain Jews and Moslems were singled out for treatment, as its leaders sought to
impose Catholic doctrine.
Who are today’s inquisitors, today’s priests? Social Justice warriors, climate change activists,
Guardian journalists, organisations such as Antifa and the Everyday Sexism Project - there
is no shortage of woke police. Any type of victimhood can get you priest status. One
of my daughters, brainwashed by social media, leads the charge in my family.
Priests and kings, lords and ladies would all make great shows of their piety, faith
and devotion. Virtue signalling, we call it today. Your behaviour, your actions and your
conduct is less important than your belief system.
This new practice has emerged where we must bend the knee. When the American footballer
Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the US National Anthem, it was a powerful and voluntary
gesture, but kneeling has morphed into something else, a tool of subjugation, something you
are shamed into. Bending the knee is no longer about the importance of black or any other
lives, it is a tool of left-wing control, under the pretext of fighting racism. Rest
assured, those in prominent public positions are being monitored. If they try to avoid
bending, the online lynch mobs will form and excommunication will follow.
The recent spate of statue destruction shows that iconoclasm - the belief that icons, images
and monuments should be destroyed for religious or political reasons - is alive and well too.
In the Middle Ages Jewish texts were especially targeted by the iconoclasts. Thank goodness
today all such anti-semitic sentiment has been eradicated. Not!
I’m walking through a cemetery packed with gravestones from the 18th and 19th century.
I’ve no doubt almost all of these should be taken down.
Nor has serfdom gone away. The medieval serf had to half his working week tilling his lord’s
land in exchange for his lord’s protection and the right to work his own land. In the
twenty-first century, the state takes half of the ordinary citizen’s labour in exchange
for its protection and the right to keep the rest.
Today’s conditions are nothing like as harsh as they were then. We have more freedom of
expression and movement. Modern technology and living standards far exceed their medieval
equivalents. But the proportion of our time we must spend working to pay our obligations
is the same
What about self-flagellation - flogging oneself to inflict pain and drive out evil? Certain
sects loved it. I’m not sure, today, if we call this going to the gym. Perhaps it
is this culture of self-loathing and apology - acknowledging your white privilege and apologising
for the sins of your forefathers.
Then there’s the unequal distribution of wealth - of land in particular - that’s
improved hasn’t it? Back in the Middle Ages the land of Britain was predominantly owned
by the crown, the church and the barons. Today is no different. 70% of Britain’s land is
owned by fewer than 6,000 people - the crown, the state, and a few corporations and aristocrats.
There 65 million people in the UK and 60 million acres of land – that should be an acre each.
Never mind.
Jacob Fugger, who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, is calculated to have been one
of the richest men in history. By his death his wealth amounted to 2% of European GDP.
That’s over 5 times as much as Warren Buffet and three times as much as Jeff Bezos or Bill
Gates. How did he make his money? Mining, banking, but perhaps above all - selling indulgences.
He struck a deal with the pope so the latter could raise the money to rebuild St Peter’s
Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. Fugger took 50% and Pope Leo X the other 50%. It sounds
rather like one of those public-private partnerships. This “indulgence peddler … carried Bibles,
crosses, and a large wooden box with a picture of Satan on top. His indulgences “cancelled
every sin.” He even offered a “progressive fee schedule,” with royalty paying 25 florins
and everyday laborers just one. Selling indulgences was big business. It still is. Today we have
carbon credits and our charity industry with an annual income of £50bn is roughly 2% of
UKD GDP. And according to author David Craig in his book The Great Charity Scandal, the
industry pockets at least 50% of donations.
There was no shortage of prophets of doom, declaring the end is nigh. Nostredamus was
the most famous. Whether it was Project Fear in the lead up to the EU vote, climate change
experts or those permabears who see nothing but looming financial catastrophe, they are
in even greater supply today.
Obscurantism was the practice of presenting information in a deliberately imprecise and
abstruse manner, to forestall further any inquiry and understanding. Ever heard a central
banker speak? Alan Greenspan found his own name for obscurantism - he called it purposeful
obfuscation.
Even Church Latin itself was obscurantist. The bible was not translated into the local
vernacular until the 1500s. The clergy fought the idea the bible be translated vernacular
for centuries. Why? Until then only those who understood Latin could understand its
meaning. It gave priests a monopoly. Priests would interpret the sacred text and the word
of god in ways that suited their own interests, or the interests of the Church they worked
for. Today’s experts - whether in climate change, sociology, virology or NHS Covid 19
apps - do exactly the same thing.
The new technology that was the printing press, the medieval equivalent of the internet, and
Martin Luther’s exposure of the corruption of the indulgences industry helped inspire
the Great Peasants’ Revolt in Central Europe and the overthrow of Catholic hegemony. Is
not a similar insurrection in place today? A silent, ill-equipped, uncoordinated majority,
aware of what is going on, but unable to stop it, hoping that voting for Trump, or Brexit,
or some other way of giving the establishment two fingers will stop it. But it won’t.
There’re so many more parallels. I could mention how the ritual delusion of voting,
weird diets, Cardinals refusing to look through telescopes - it wasn’t until 1992 that the
Catholic church admitted Galileo was right. 1992! They still said the Inquistition that
found Galieleo guilty of heresy had acted in good faith. Sacrilege and blasphemy has
become hate speech. . Blockades and sieges have become sanctions. Alchemy has become
quantitative easing and modern monetary theory, cryptocurrency mining even. Censorship has
become, well, censorship.
Where does it all end? Another Peasants Revolt or Great Peasants War. Here’s the bad news
- and I don’t mean to sound like Nostredamus - on both occasions the peasants lost. Badly.
Even though they were in the right. I fear we will lose this culture war. Even though
we are in the right.
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