Is America the last holdout of the Middle Ages?

Europe, still under the thrall of the absolutist-style politics that first developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after the passing of the Middle Ages, does not have real democracy and freedom, writes Paul Belien at Brussels Journal, while America does. So far, the argument is a familiar one. But then Belien makes an odd leap. Not only does America embody the real freedom and love of freedom that Europe lacks, he argues, but this American order is in reality a medieval order. It was to flee absolutist statism that the colonists first came to America. There they preserved the decentralized type of society and political system that had existed in the Middle Ages, in which there is not one center of power, but a plurality of centers of power each vying with the others, thus making liberty possible.

So, is America, which is normally thought of as the ultimate liberal society, in fact the ultimate medieval society? As I said, it’s an odd thought. As someone who is greatly drawn to the Middle Ages and the medieval artifacts and remains of northern Europe,—the Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon church in a farmer’s field in the Cotswolds, the Galarus Oratorio on the Kerry peninsula, various saints’s places in Ireland—and who has felt how utterly America, a recently settled, Protestant country, lacks the deep dimension of history and religion that can still be experienced in Europe, I have to chuckle at the notion of America as a bastion of medievalism. But Belien is not speaking of medieval Christianity, he is speaking of medieval liberty, and in that sense I suppose there is something to what he is saying.

In any case, he concludes that if Europeans are to save themselves, “We need to bring America’s values to Europe. These values are our own lost heritage. To survive as Europeans we have to become Americans. It is time to save ourselves by establishing a Society for American Values in Europe.”

I fear that Belien, living on that suicidal statist dhimmi continent, is over-idealizing America. Yes, we are not as far gone as the Europeans, we have many elements of political and spiritual health that they lack. But overall we are moving in the same direction as they. Indeed, even as Belien is urging Europeans to become Americans, half of America wants America to become Europe.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 09, 2006 03:14 PM | Send