When historians try to explain "why the Renaissance happened" they put themselves at a disadvantage; the question is rather "why didn't it happen earlier", and the answer is, the Church. But here anti-medievalism, which was born of the Renaissance and is still going strong, leads us astray with images of blinkered, dogmatic, foolish clergymen frantically suppressing any sign of free thought among their victims - as if they could impose a reign of pious terror for near a millennium. In fact, the Middle Ages would have been better off with such a contemptible clergy - indeed, it was partly the emergence of such a clergy that brought the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The problem with the Medieval clergy is that they were "the smartest men in the room". If you were a commoner, and far above the average in intelligence, you would join the priesthood; it was your shot at wealth and power, and the only one you'd get. Your brain wasn't doing you much good behind the plow, but writing treatises in Latin gave you a real chance to show your superiority.
By taking the cleverest part of the population and making parasites of them, turning their intellects to the justification of their status rather than any useful subject, the Church stunted (but by no means eliminated) progress in technology, development in philosophy and in the sciences, and the vitality of art.
On the other side of the Eurasian continent, China set about doing the same thing. The most intelligent men would take the civil service examination, and score well, and get the best government jobs. They would run the bureaucracy, write a great deal of poetry and invent nothing useful, think nothing original, and discover nothing remarkable.
But in Europe, the Church ran into problems - the failure of the Crusades, discontent over ecclesial corruption, but worst of all the Black Death. The priests and religious tended to the sick, and administered extreme unction to the dying, and therefore died themselves at a very high rate. The death toll among the clergy is not known with any accuracy, but probably most of Europe's Catholic priests and religious died in the Black Death. The gaps in the ranks were filled with men of much lower quality, which further lowered the esteem of the Church.
It was because of this - that a clever man no longer had the Church standing up before him, the clear and sure path to success for a man who had all his declensions and conjugations lined up, and always a quote from St. Paul or St. Augustine or St. Aristotle, whatever might be needed - that the Renaissance happened. Indeed some of the great figures of the Renaissance sought a career in the Church, but got little from it; Erasmus became a priest, but he could never become an Aquinas - that is, make a career of writing arcane books for the benefit of other Schoolmen. He had to write for the public to make a name for himself, and he had to write sincerely, rather than make whatever argument would impress the hierarchy.
Thus, what some historians have made out as the great virtue of the Medieval Church - that it gave a place for commoners of ability - is in fact, the only serious thing you can say against it, as the Church was fairly benign in other respects.
It is interesting that today, we have created something in America quite analogous to the Catholic priesthood and the Chinese mandarin class. It is called the financial services industry.
50 years ago, if you were a brilliant young physics grad chances were fair, I think, that your eventual job would involve - well, physics of some sort. Nowadays, some stat arb desk at a hedge fund is looking for brilliant physicists to fine-tune the algorithm on its HFT's - or something similarly useless and absurd, but obscenely lucrative. Wall Street has long been a giant albatross around America's neck, but previously the bankers understood that you hardly needed much brains for the sort of business they were running, and the very brightest of our nation belonged in some kind of useful enterprise. But since the 1980's they seem to have lost the big picture.
Still, a country doesn't run on its 99.999th percentile math geniuses alone - nor have they all been hired by Goldman Sachs yet. The point is that finance has become a gaping black hole that sucks in all sorts of Americans who might otherwise do something useful for our society. The most profitable industry in this country, today, consists of people selling each other money; it's like a satire of capitalism.
But even if we avoid a complete economic collapse, I don't think the priesthood of finance can have the same stifling effect as the Catholic clergy and the Chinese civil service. Those institutions stifled because they survived, and they survived because they were reasonable and humane; the moral teacher of the one was Jesus Christ, and of the other Confucius.
The moral teacher of our banking class is Ayn Rand, and as we are already seeing, there is little danger that their rule will seem reasonable and bearable.
This is very perceptive; meritocracy fails to deliver because, for the most able, displaying merit becomes more important than contributing anything useful. This came up in the context of science when I was considering Bruce Charlton's writings.
ReplyDeleteBut the alternative to meritocracy is privilege: how do you reconcile that with the possibility of the world being run for the benefit of the many, as you wished for in your previous post? Indeed, is there any example in history of rule for the benefit of the many, except inasmuch as it is convenient to the few?