Hildegarde

So I was thinking, yesterday, that I know what I like, and it comes down to one thing:  I like historical periods that are on the edge of change.  I am less fond of historical periods that have tipped over into the Next Thing.

This is interesting, in a way, because in academia I chose to study one of the most stable periods in human history. 

If the High Middle Ages was anything at all, it was a time when a vast portion of the earth, all of Western Europe as we now know it, most of Eastern Europe as we now know it, England and Scotland and Ireland and Scandanavia, accepted a single and largely uncompromising idea of what a human being was and how he (or she) should be understood.

I don’t mean by this that there was no dissent in the Middle Ages, or no minorities with divergent ideas.

There were, of course, many instances of both.  If there hadn’t been, nothing would ever have changed.

And obviously a lot did.

But there’s a difference between “there’s some dissent out there” and “doubt and dissent have become part of the very fabric of society.”

In the first case, what authorities there are–and not necessarily the obvious political and religious ones–are confident in their judgments.  In the second, there’s a lot more humility, because the possibility is always before us that we may be wrong.

This is, I think, what is shared by the two more-or-less modern periods that most interest me:  British Victorian and American Fifties.

In both periods, there was a lot of outward display of assurance that was not really all there, but there was always a lot of consensus about the good and the way human beings should be treated in order to achieve it.

Shared moral assumptions were still in place, but not so rigidly that they created the kind of inflexible rules-based insanities that characterize the Reformation and the Counterreformation.

Everybody is secure enough to handle a few challenges here and there, but not so secure that they feel justified in trying to suppress those challenges.

This produces interesting and productive historial periods, but those periods are–almost by definition–unstable.  They cannot last, because they are what they are.

I suppose Robert is right, and all historical periods are in flux in some way, and doomed in the long run to be overturned for something else.

But some kinds of social structures last a very long time.  They last badly.  They develop little.  They’ll never cure polio or build the Sears Tower, but they limp along and their elites are comfortable.

The social structures of the West do not do this, at least in part because the foundational ideas of the West are not conducive to endless limping along.

Philosophy is not a futile exercise.  It tends to trickle down into consequences over time.

I also think the worst historical periods tend to be the periods just following the ones I like, when there are competing visions of the moral and the good, and no consensus in any meaningful terms, and everybody on every side of every question is trying to bully everybody else into adopting their own way.

Being a little unsure of your ground produces humility.  Being a lot unsure of your ground produces panic, and panic produces not only bullying but often something worse.

At the moment, what we’ve got is a three-pronged problem:  at one prong are the people Robert likes to call The Movement, and who mostly call themselves “Progressives,” who have a laundry list of often contradictory ideas about things like “tolerance” and “diversity” and “compassion” and “care”; at another prong are people who claim to be Conservatives and to champion Christian values, but who mostly have little or not idea of what Christianity was at any point before the one they’re living in, and therefore no idea how much they’re championing things that are neither Christian nor conservative; and at the third prong there are the people who man the vast and increasingly bureaucracies of the “helping” professions, whose goal is to impose and enforce a very narrowly defined definition of “normality” on everybody and everything, or else.

The existence of this last group in interesting in a number of ways.

Conservatives and libertarians tend to lump it in with The Movement, because it seems to share some of The Movement’s larger goals.

But the fact is, at core, the professionals are just as much opposed to the Movement as they are to the Conservatives.  They see the world in medical and therapeutic terms.  There is a proper way to behave, and if you don’t behave that way, you are sick.  They are therefore “forced” to intervene, if not for your own good, then for the good of “the children,” who are valuable mostly as a class of definitionally incompetent human beings.

The simple fact is, the professionals hate “diversity” of any kind, and they’re not willing to tolerate much.

They get their power by defining the normal and the deviant and imposing those definitions on anybody they come in contact with.

And we pay them to do it.

Their power is ever expanding, because they are not required to prove that their definitions of “normal” and “deviant” are something objectively true. 

They are automatically assumed to be practicing “science,” which in and of itself is all the justification they need. 

Anybody who protests the findings of “science” is automatically assumed to be stupid, uneducated, and probably Republican.

The trick is that there is very little about what they purvey that is actually science, or even in touch with reality.

Small boys who can’t sit still in class all day and focus on Social Studies and Arithmatic have “attention deficit disorder” or “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” a medical problem that requires medication, intervention, and often a vast array of “services” provided yet more helping professionals.

And it doesn’t matter that there is no objective criteria for diagnosing either of these “disorders,” or that practitioners have admitted as much.

The same goes for the newly expanded “autism spectrum disorders,” and the one I like best “oppositional defiant disorder.”

A rebellious teenager is no longer an example of youth’s rejection of the compromises of age, or even of a desperate desire to grow up sooner.

She’s a “patient” who needs “intervention” to “cure” her “disorder.”

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to analyzing the present state of society in the West is to assume that the professionals and the liberals are the same people, with the same goals, and the same assumptions.

There is certainly some overlap, and in both directions (liberals who do professional work while still thinking like liberals, professionals who do other kinds of work while still thinking like professionals), but I think the professionals represent something new under the sun.

And I think that this time, while the Liberals and the Conservatives are arguing about “diversity” and “inclusion,” the professionals are instituting–often as regulations and practices that have the force of law–something else altogether.

Well.

That was an odd post.