At Salon, Michael Lind writes, “few would disagree that the Europe of Charlemagne was more backward in its mindset, at least at the elite level, than the Rome of Augustus or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies.”
Bad move. Daniel Larison, a paleoconservative who happens to be a Ph.D candidate in History at the University of Chicago, lets loose some trebuchets of knowledge on the unsuspecting Lind.
This was an era of substantial manuscript production, and one marked by the learning of Eriugena and Photios. The Carolingian period was actually one of the more significant moments of political reunification in Europe prior to the later middle ages, but it is true that Charlemagne and his successors did not have a large administrative state apparatus at their disposal. The Iconoclastic emperors in the east were hostile to religious images, but in many other respects they cultivated learning and drew on the mathematical and scientific thought that was flourishing at that time among the ‘Abbasids.
Lind also says that the popularity of Star Wars signaled a descent from “the culture of enlightened modernism” to “the sickly culture of romantic primitivism.” Where Star Trek showed the big, powerful bureacracy as the good guys, Star Wars presented an evil empire, glorifying the ragtag group of misfits who fight it with mystical forces.
Lind has it half-wrong. Of course Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets is an unrealistically benevolent organization, a utopia dreamt up by progressive internationalists, but he should remember that at the end of the Star Wars trilogy the Republic is restored, and the universe is once again governed by a legitimate intergalactic parliamentary body. So you can’t really say that the movies put “aristocracy and tribalism” over bureaucracy.
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