The Age of Incompetence: Chapter XXII

The return of the Medieval world

Civilization, a much abused word, stands for a matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights. It is a matter of imponderables, of delight in things of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feelings. Where imponderables are the things of first importance, there is the height of civilization."
- Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

PLZEN Sergi Magnitsky, a 37-year-old Russian lawyer died in a Moscow jail cell November 16. If you're keeping score of how many innocent lawyers or journalists have been murdered in Russian streets or inside some jail in the last decade since the coming to power of fomer KGB man Vladimire Putin I cannot help you. I've lost count.

Magnitsky made the mistake of representing a British investment firm attempting to overturn a tax fraud case levied against it by the Russian government, which essentially wiped out all their assets and turned them over to the police. At that point the British company, Hermitage Fund, instructed its lawyers to leave the country. Magnitsky stayed behind and attempted to revolve the case in a court of law - which is today an oxymoron in Russia as there is neither any law or courts; everything is predetermined.

Magnitsky, was then charged with tax fraud for it follows anyone represent a foreign firm against the Russian state must be guilty as well. Welcome back Joseph Stalin.

The British CEO of Hermitage commented, "What happened to Magnitsky was medieval."

The word medieval arrested me. For it seems the fate of Sergi Magnitsky, the retrogression of Russia back into Stalin era barbarism, and the general lawlessness of Western capitalism has created a world where although we have at our fingertips electronic machines that can flash more information on a screen in seconds than the

Edith Hamilton

entire Bible contains, we are living in a world that feels medieval.

Medieval is connected to the darks ages. Medieval means in our minds an age when darkness triumphed over light, where superstition trumped facts, where illiteracy was a normal state of mankind. Medieval meant a world where kings ruled with the help of a thin layer of nobles or knights. everyone else clung to life at the grim bottom. There was no law, of course. There were only edicts from the top.

That human beings ever lived in such a state seems beyond comprehension by the modern world. But take a look around at the world we live in today and you will find all the trappings of a medieval world. Life has become incredibly cheap. Not just in China or Russia or the Congo.

Take a look at America because that is where its citizens have for so long proudly claimed that life there is valued as no where else in the world. Yet a person dies every 12 minutes in America merely because they are too poor to afford health insurance and today so-called adults are debating in the halls of the U.S. Senate whether every citizen should have basic health care or just those with enough money. Medieval?

If illiteracy was a natural state of man in the dark ages, then again I point to America. They proudly boast they publish and sell more books every year than any other country. Yet when tested on anything that reveals literacy, such as geography or history, their population ranks at or near the bottom of every industrial country. Medieval?

If the dark ages were an age where superstition triumphed over knowledge then again I point to America where there are more people believing in superstition than anywhere else on earth. For example they have so-called churches where members handle rattlesnakes to prove their faith. This is the home where Jim Jones once took a tribe of true believers to the promised land in South America and then gave them poison cool aide to drink as their test of faith. In America there is no religion too whacky not to attract a following.

There is a book I would make it required reading for any high school student to read before they are given a high school diploma and turned loose on the world. It is called The Green Way by Edith Hamilton. In simple readable prose it explains how the Greeks became the first democracy in the world. It explains how they became the world's greatest thinkers and were never equaled. It tells how they became the world's greatest athletes for the glory of wearing a crown of thistle.

It tells us what civilization is really about: Civilization, a much abused word, stands for a matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights. It is a matter of imponderables, of delight in things of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feelings. Where imponderables are the things of first importance, there is the height of civilization."

But of course that book is not required reading and in fact most American high schools no longer ever have required books to be read in English classes.

Today's teenagers are so averse to reading in preference to computers that

teachers are delighted when they read any book and so today's teachers allow students to choose their own reading list.

How many times have you heard a teacher today say, "That book isn't one that I would have chosen for my required reading but I am so happy to see a student read I no longer care what they read."

The theory was put forward that even reading junk food of the mind would somehow produce a healthy mind and the theory that only good books produce a healthy mind was junked.

Today we see where that false theory has lead us. Produce enough illiterate minds filled with junk food and you will invariably produce a nation of illiterates and that in turn will produce a sick society.

For just as preachers from Jim Jones on have exploited the masses through television so have American politicians exploited the masses through television. Thus the lines between actors and politicians became blurred so that a Ronald Reagan could preach tax cuts could cure all of society's ills in the same way a preacher could sell snake oil to cure arthritis.

There is but a short step from drinking poisoned cool aide from the hand of a Jim Jones to a country that been bankrupted as America is from believing in voodoo economics.

It is hard to say if the medieval peasant living under the boot of some noble felt despair in the way millions of Americans feel despair today without hope of having again a decent job and the security their parents once lived with. For Americans of my age once knew what having a decent job and security was.