{"id":77877,"date":"2026-11-05T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T06:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=77877"},"modified":"2026-11-04T09:54:39","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T14:54:39","slug":"qotd-the-re-medievalization-of-modern-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-the-re-medievalization-of-modern-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The re-medievalization of modern culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>All of this, I think, is of a piece: We’re re-medievalizing. Obviously the Powers That Be want us to be bug-eating serfs, but it’s more than that. As C.S. Lewis points out in his book The Discarded Image<\/em><\/a>, medieval culture was extremely bookish. They didn’t have very many books (though they had way more than you probably think they did, unless you’re a specialist), but they used every part of the ones they had … even the contradictory parts. Especially<\/em> the contradictory parts. They just couldn’t bear to throw out any part of any text, so if Book A contradicted Book B, they came up with some marvelous synthesis that “explained” them both. Medieval scholars were Hegelians avant la lettre<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Naturally their first impulse when confronted with any new situation was to look backwards. There were genuine innovations in the Middle Ages, of course there were, but the habit of looking backward was so strong that they had to cloak even radically new ideas in ancient garb.<\/p>\n

We’re seeing a fake-and-gay repeat of that same cultural impulse here in Clown World. Our FNG “intelligentsia” takes pop culture absurdly seriously … but there’s no such thing as new pop culture. The marketing boys talk about it as “proven intellectual property” or whatever, but it’s clear that they’re deathly afraid of innovation. Like the worst medieval hacks (and Lewis shows us some IIRC), they just produce increasingly threadbare iterations of the same basic things from ages past.<\/p>\n

I used to think this was because SJWs can’t create, they can only destroy, but I’m coming to believe that really is a bug, not a feature. Oh, they’re happy enough to shit on your childhood memories \u2014 your anger is like ambrosia to them \u2014 but that’s not the main reason they’re doing it. No, the main reason is, they simply can do no other. Locked as they are in their version of what Lewis calls “the Model”, they have to spend their days trying to systematize things that can’t be systematized, reconcile contradictions that are, in fact, contradictions<\/em>, and thus irreconcilable.<\/p>\n

Looking back on my college teaching career, for instance, I can’t think of a single instance of a kid wearing a band t-shirt for any band more recent than the turn of the century. When I was in college, back at the dawn of the Clinton Era (1988-2003), kids wore band and concert shirts of bands that actually were current … but it was taking off even then. I hung my Rage Against the Machine concert tee next to my vintage Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon” shirt, and thought nothing of it. But still: I had the RATM tee, I really did get it at a concert, etc.<\/p>\n

When I quit teaching, half the kids in my classes were wearing that same RATM shirt, along with tees from Nirvana, Guns and Roses, and so on. And as I’ve written before, they’re not wearing them ironically, not even Alanis-level. They really are rocking out to Metallica, GNR, and so forth. And I never \u2014 not once \u2014 saw a shirt from any current act. Maybe they’re listening<\/em> to the latest boy band, or Lizzo, or whatever \u2014 or maybe not \u2014 but they sure as hell aren’t advertising it.<\/p>\n

Moreover, there’s a huge pop culture industry devoted to the hermeneutics of antique pop culture. E.g. this<\/a>, about Eminem’s movie from 20 years ago. Read ’em and weep, if you want, but the point is, that’s just bizarre. Eminem is my<\/em> contemporary (he was born in 1972). 8 Mile<\/em> was released in 2002. The world is so vastly different now that it would make sense to regard it as a cultural artifact … but it’s not. They’re treating it as if it’s a vital statement about our culture now<\/em>, in a similar (but of course fake and gay) way medieval people regarded The Dream of Scipio<\/em><\/a> as a vital statement about medieval culture, despite having been written several decades BC.<\/p>\n

It says something about our longing for permanent values here in Clown World, where anything that crossed your Twitter timeline 5 minutes ago is ancient history … but it’s above my pay grade this morning.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Friday Miscellania”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-11-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All of this, I think, is of a piece: We’re re-medievalizing. Obviously the Powers That Be want us to be bug-eating serfs, but it’s more than that. As C.S. Lewis points out in his book The Discarded Image, medieval culture was extremely bookish. They didn’t have very many books (though they had way more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,62,7,28,41],"tags":[1403,703,200,1462,764],"class_list":["post-77877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","tag-1990s","tag-middleages","tag-music","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-kg5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77877"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105731,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77877\/revisions\/105731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}