Just yesterday, I finished reading a history of the Middle Ages. The book ended with these wise words:
In the last century of the medieval era, the peoples of Europe had to cope with an unprecedented combination of plague, war, schism, and economic decline, all occurring simultaneously and all interacting with one another. In the face of these disasters, medieval men did not lose their nerve. They did not succumb to a “death wish.” Instead, they kept working at their problems, solved them as best they could, and in doing so, brought into existence the institutions of the early modern world. Thus the “time of troubles” of the late Middle Ages did not lead to a disintegration of Western civilzation but to a new era of expansion and achievement. Unlike the population of ancient Rome, the peoples of medieval Europe conducted themselves with enough sense and courage to avert the threat of a new Dark Age. That was the greatest achievement of medieval civilization. [page 575, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475, Third Edition, Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1978]
It’s clear we’re going through troubled times so far as our political and economic systems go. Our financial systems have become bloated looting operations, in league with the politicians and bureaucrats of the powerful nation-states. The dominant power in the world, the U.S., was never so pure as naive Americans believe and has now lost all sense of moral decency in its behavior overseas. As bad as it is to conduct criminal wars as a national policy and to use taxpayer money to rescue financial crooks when they lose their custom-tailored shirts, I think we have still deeper problems. See Hints of Unity, Coherence, and Completeness for a recent overview of my claims about our fundamental problems and what we can do to move forward.
The obvious question is: will we conduct ourselves “with enough sense and courage to avert the threat of a new Dark Age”? There are good signs, some of which can be seen just by Googling for phrases such as “sustainable communities” or “resilient communities”. `Communities’ is the key word. We don’t need to populate the hills and deserts with heavily-armed sociopaths preaching an incoherent and immoral sort of radical individualism. We need local communities to start restoring some balance to our dependency relationships. We also need larger-scale communities, religious and political, because we’re finding ourselves in a complex world with a huge human population. We face problems which need to be dealt with inside of very large communities, though those giant communities themselves will provide only a setting and not any viable solutions.
We need to work hard to develop our “sense and courage.” And we should also approach our tasks of building with humility and with a respect for the real world. We should allow new communities to develop as they will though we should direct them to moral and humane purposes. As individuals and as communities, we will do our duties by responding to opportunities and problems courageously and with good sense, not by seeking to impose our will upon the recalcitrant stuff and the powerful forces of this world, this story being told by God.