Consciousness of Sheep
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It is impossible for almost all modern humans to understand the psychological shock of the fourteenth century Black Death. Surrounded as we are by a plethora of media outlets, perhaps our biggest problem is distinguishing between myriad impossible narratives about our future and the handful which actually conform to the laws of thermodynamics. To a medieval peasant in Rural England or France though, there was no media. There was what we might call “common knowledge” – the unchanging ideas about how best to live life, when to plant seeds, how to raise animals, how to harness a plough, etc – learned from bitter trial and error and handed down from father to son. As to the wider world, what little knowledge there was came from a local priest’s understanding of a bible written in a foreign language. And whatever else peasants may have gleaned from this source, the one certainty was that their place within the established order – and, indeed, the established order itself – was fixed and immutable. Indeed, the hierarchy of men – kings, dukes, counts and manorial lords – mirrored a church hierarchy – cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests – which was itself an approximation of the heavenly structure of archangels, angels and seraphim.
Then, within just a couple of years, the entire structure was torn asunder. Some 25 million Europeans – roughly one in every three – lay dead, many left to rot for want of an undertaker to bury them. No class was spared. Counts and peasants, priests and bishops all succumbed. And the only explanation – because it was the sole world view – was that they were being punished by God for a great sin of which they were wholly unaware. But when they turned to the church for advice and guidance, none was forthcoming. Indeed, the church itself was clearly included and so must also have been guilty of great sin.
When it was over, the old order sought to, as it were, “build back better” – to re-establish the old ways despite the reality that the energy and resources which had supported the old order were no longer present. Peasants were left cultivating land over which there was no longer a landlord, while elsewhere landlords’ lands went uncultivated for lack of peasants. Parishes went years and even decades without a parish priest. And often when a priest did arrive, he was a raw recruit who lacked even the basics of Latin or theology. In many instances, the laity had more knowledge of the Bible than the priest himself.
The practical outcome of the recovery was the shift from a feudal system based on duties and rights to an embryonic market system based on land ownership and wage labour. There was no immediate revolution in the sense of some new class rising up to overthrow the previous ruling class. Rather, landlords left without peasants simply switched to offering wages in order to attract workers to farm the fields, mill the grain and to man the forge and the stable. In some regions, landlords also learned that rearing sheep for their wool and their meat brought in a far bigger income than operating an old-fashioned mixed farm from which the labourers took a large part of the harvest to feed themselves. And so the land was cleared of people, and roaming beggars strained the old parish welfare systems.
Throughout this chaos, people looked to the church and found it wanting. Not only did it fail to provide an explanation of God’s plan, but God’s representatives here on Earth were among the greatest sinners of all. As Barbara Tuchman writes of the Renaissance Popes whose activities fuelled the Protestant Reformation:
The abuses of these six popes was not born full blown from the high Renaissance. Rather they were a crown of folly upon habits of papal government that had developed over the previous 150 years deriving from the exile of the Papacy in Avignon through most of the fourteenth century. The attempted return to Rome resulted in 1378 in a Schism, with one Pope in Rome and one in Avignon, and with the successors of each, for over half a century, claiming to be the true Pope. Thereafter each country’s or kingdom’s obedience to one claimant or the other was determined by political interests, thus thoroughly politicising the Holy See. Dependence on lay rulers was a fatal legacy of the Schism because rival Popes found it necessary to make up for divided power by all kinds of bargains, concessions and alliances with kings and princes. Because income too was divided, the schism commercialised as well as politicised the Papacy, making revenue its primary concern. From this time, the sale of everything spiritual or material in the grant of the Church, from absolution and salvation to episcopates and abbeys, swelled into a perpetual commerce, attractive for what it offered yet repellent for what it made of religion…
“Was there a feasible alternative? The religious alternative in the form of response to the persistent cry for reform was difficult to achieve, owing to the vested interest of the entire hierarchy in corruption. But it was feasible. Warning voices were loud and constant and complaints of papal derelictions explicit. Inept and corrupt regimes like those of the terminal Romanovs or the Kuomintang cannot generally be reformed short of total upheaval or dissolution. In the case of the Renaissance Papacy, reform initiated at the top by a head of the Church with concern for his office, and pursued with vigour and tenacity by like-minded successors, could have cleansed the most detestable practices, answered the cry for worthiness in the Church and its priests and attempted to fill the need of spiritual reassurance, possibly averting the ultimate secession…
“Reform was the universal preoccupation of the age, expressed in literature, sermons, pamphlets, songs and political assemblies. The cry of those in every age alienated by the worldly footing of the Church and yearning for a purer worship of God, it had become widespread and general since the twelfth century. It was the cry Saint Francis had heard in a vision in the church of San Damiano, ‘My house is in ruins. Restore it!’ It was dissatisfaction with materialism and unfit clergy, with pervasive corruption and money-grubbing at every level from the Papal Curia to the village parish – hence the cry for reform of ‘head and members.’ Dispensations were forged for sale, donations for crusade swallowed up by the Curia, indulgences peddled in common commerce so that the people, complained the Chancellor of Oxford in 1450, no longer cared what evils they did because they could buy remission of the penalty for sin for sixpence or win it ‘as a stake in a game of tennis.’…
“Meanwhile a new faith, nationalism, and a new challenge in the rise of national churches was already undercutting Roman rule. Under the political pressure and deals made necessary by the Schism, the power of appointment, the essential source of papal power and revenue – which the papacy had usurped from the local clergy, where it originally belonged – was gradually surrendered to the lay sovereigns or exercised at their dictation or in their interests…”
Tuchman was undoubtedly wrong about the Church’s potential to reform itself out of danger. The forces arrayed against it, and the depths of its own grift made it impossible for individual men, no matter how talented, to save it from its fate. The same voices which cautioned against excess and advised reform, had been available to the Romanovs, the Capets and the Stuarts before them. But each was a prisoner of circumstance, unable to break free of the racketeering and corruption which eventually sealed their fates. Voices of reason were there in droves in the years leading up to the loss of the Thirteen Colonies. But England’s ruling elite was no more prepared to treat Americans as equals than the Renaissance Popes had been to give up debauchery and fornication. To concede the reforms urged by American moderates would have meant reversing the flow of the elite’s wealth from the colonies to the Motherland. None with the power of decision were prepared to countenance such a thing.
Two forces alluded to by Tuchman combined to bring about a Reformation. The rise of national monarchies claiming divine right without the need for the Papacy’s blessing, made divorce of some kind inevitable. But far more powerful was the impact of the printing press through which anyone who could read – or could find someone to read to them – was suddenly faced with a vista of potential futures before them.
Again, it is almost impossible for modern people, bombarded with information all-day every-day, to fully understand the democratic force unleashed by the translation of the Bible into the languages of the people. The simple reform of church services to oblige priests to face the congregation and to conduct the service in a common language, even as members of the laity read lessons, opened the church – and the ruling order more generally – to question, criticism and challenge. So too, did the rediscovery of the classics and the development of rational thinking which would eventually – with the aid of American calories and stimulants – give birth to an Enlightenment and the modern world.
In an earlier age, the Papacy had been able to enjoy its lavish lifestyle without causing undue harm to those social classes which supported it. But the economic dislocation and the emerging money-based national economies created a situation in which further excesses could only be maintained at the expense of those who the Church claimed to care for. Writing about a different age, Gurri Martin puts it thus:
“The elites who control the institutions have never really trusted the public, which they considered animalistic and prone to bouts of destructiveness. In effect, they sought to neuter the public by herding it into a mass and attaching it to established hierarchies…
“What has changed, then, is the public’s distrust for authority… An exasperated public has countered by notching up the vehemence of criticism and the frequency of its interventions. At times, in some places, the public has abandoned all hope in modern society and lapsed into a permanent state of negation and protest…”
Previously, when faced with criticism, ruling elites had called upon the services of the court jester to provide the balm of humour to calm public outrage. But there was nothing funny about the information war unleashed by the printing press. Both Catholics and Protestants delivered the most outrageous libels and slanders against their opponents, even as the ruling elites turned to censorship and inquisition to try to put the genie back into the bottle. But it was too late. Alleged Jews, heretics and alleged witches were denounced and burned at the stake. So too were homosexuals – which is where the term “faggot” originates. Each side accused the other of carrying out the devil’s work. And the argument became ever louder and bitter, until in 1618 one of the most bloody and inhumane wars broke out. And by the time it was over, thirty years later, more than eight million Europeans lay dead. By then, Britain – which had escaped the first salvos of the war – had been plunged into a civil war which was both between Catholics and Protestants, and between the people and the Crown over who was the legitimate power in the land. The year after the European war ended, the people of England went on to teach the world how to go about regicide – a lesson the French and the Russian people would go on to take to heart.
It is in the nature of ruling elites to be corrupt. It is also in the nature of information revolutions that corruption is exposed. And so, it is also in the nature of elites to wish to control the flow of information. In this, the Church which rose out of the ashes of the western Roman Empire had the advantage of an illiterate population and an absence of competing worldviews. Even after the invention of the printing press, some combination of censorship and repression might have prevented revolt save for the widespread economic dislocation which created the rumbling bellies that lie at the heart of all revolutions. Even then, were it not for the emergence of the absolutist monarchies as an alternative elite to the Papacy, revolt might well have been put down.
Fast forward to our own time and we see a similar – and potentially as lethal – situation emerging. The Papacy has been replaced by a corporatist technocracy, which claims legitimacy via the PhD. Until recently, the demos – the people – were afforded the role of a pantomime audience; allowed to cheer the heroes and jeer the villains that a controlled, corporate mass media paraded before them. Within this system, politicians, bought and owned by the corporations which finance their campaigns and donate to their parties, are allowed to be mocked by comics and satirists – the modern manifestation of the court jester – and even replaced by politicians who wear a different colour rosette. So long as nobody contests the corporate technocracy itself.
In the post-war period, when the system was established, it is unlikely that grift and corruption was much different than it is today. Eisenhower had begun work on his January 17, 1961 “Military-Industrial Complex” speech as early as 1959, in which he warned Americans that:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Often forgotten these days, Eisenhower also warned about the danger of technocracy:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Beware, Eisenhower might have said, those who encourage you to blindly “trust the science…”
Grift and corruption was there in spades by the time Nixon left the White House in disgrace in August 1974. But while the Watergate affair had sent shockwaves through the managerial classes, the average American simply shrugged and carried on. Only when the economy took a serious downturn on Jimmy Carter’s watch did Americans vote for a more radical politics in the shape of a second-rate actor from California… That was the beginning of the technocracy’s neoliberal system.
What changed for us today was not an increase in elite malfeasance, but the emergence of a new means of decentralised communication which has risen to challenge not just the old news hierarchies which are accustomed to deciding on our behalf what is and what is not news, but to the technocracy itself. As Gurri Martin explains:
“Famous landmarks of the old regime, like the daily newspaper and the political party, have begun to disintegrate under the pressure of this slow-motion collision. Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability. Some of them will emerge permanently distorted by the stress. Others will just disappear. Many attributes of the new dispensation, like a vastly larger sphere for public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order…
“The incumbent structure is hierarchy, and it represents established and accredited authority —government first and foremost, but also corporations, universities, the whole roster of institutions from the industrial age. Hierarchy has ruled the world since the human race attained meaningful numbers. The industrial mind just made it bigger, steeper, and more efficient. From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak, it has exhibited predictable patterns of behavior: top-down, centralizing, painfully deliberate in action, process-obsessed, mesmerized by grand strategies and five-year plans, respectful of rank and order but contemptuous of the outsider, the amateur.
“Against this citadel of the status quo, the Fifth Wave has raised the network: that is, the public in revolt, those despised amateurs now connected to one another by means of digital devices. Nothing within the bounds of human nature could be less like a hierarchy. Where the latter is slow and plodding, networked action is lightning quick but unsteady in purpose. Where hierarchy has evolved a hard exoskeleton to keep every part in place, the network is loose and pliable—it can swell into millions or dissipate in an instant.”
The people are no longer a pantomime audience, fated to act like clapping seals at the behest of the play’s narrator. Instead, everyone within the audience now claims the right to be heard as an equal to everyone else. And so, we witness the absurdity of your racist Facebook friend who has effortlessly transitioned from being a renowned legal authority on US jurisprudence, to a world-leading virologist, and has emerged as a specialist in geopolitics in the course of just 30 months.
The technocracy’s attempt to nullify the unwanted affects of the new media are as clumsy as the inquisitions and ex-communications of the Renaissance Popes. Censorship, shadow-bans, de-platforming, narrative-shaping (aka fact-checking) and the unleashing of the social media hate mob serve only to expose the hypocrisy and degeneracy of the technocracy itself. Particularly when – as happens all too often these days – the narrative shapers are proved wrong, while the censored “fake news” turns out to be true.
This though, gives rise to a problem which goes back at least as far as Socrates. As Martin explains:
“I borrowed Walter Lippmann’s definition of the public because I found it honest and unpretentious: ‘The public, as I see it, is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.’ The philosophical assumptions underlying these words were typical for Lippmann, who possessed an almost mystical faith in experts and elites—the ‘actors’ he mentioned…
“Lippmann’s pessimism rested on two shrewd observations and a questionable assumption. He observed, presciently, that even in the industrial age public opinion influenced matters of policy and government. Always the elitist, he believed that the public ‘will not possess an insider’s knowledge of events,’ and ‘can watch only for coarse signs indicating where their sympathies ought to turn.’ Because the public was clueless, the political weight of its opinion was likely to be misguided or manipulated by cunning insiders.”
The concern here is that democracy itself may be the casualty of the existential struggle between the technocratic hierarchy and the anarchic social media network. Just because a technocrat has a PhD does not mean that she is not acting from self-interest. But in the same manner, just because a social media influencer has a million followers does not make them a saint. As Robert Pirsig observed:
“From what Phaedrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious organisation. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other at all.
There’s an adage that, ‘nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the presence of a saint in the parish.’ … The saint’s Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable, but the bishop’s got a whole calendar of static ceremonies to attend to; fund-raising projects to push forward, bills to pay, parishioners to meet. That saint’s going to up-end everything if he isn’t handled diplomatically. And even then he may do something wildly unpredictable that upsets everybody. What a quandary! It can take the bishops years, decades, even centuries to put down the hell that a saint can raise in a single day…”
The technocracy may need the public legitimacy that it garners from the social media mob, but the next movement to go viral may end up bringing down the hierarchy itself. In truth, the technocracy doesn’t – as the fake left seems to believe – desire support and approval for its narrative, but the complete silence of its subjects.
What makes the mix especially explosive at this point in time is that, just as in the fifteenth century, the economic dislocation, gross inequality and declining prosperity for the majority of the population has left the mob less inclined to turn a blind eye to the grift and corruption of the technocracy. From the unwise and relatively trivial Downing Street parties to the billions of pounds doled out to friends of the Tory Party during the pandemic, and the trillions of dollars handed out to the corporations and Godzillionaires under the guise of quantitative easing and “infrastructure spending,” the poorer those at the bottom become, the greater their hatred and contempt for those at the top.
We can only wonder whether a future historian will echo Barbara Tuchman in suggesting that if only wiser voices were heeded, the technocracy might not have gone the way of the Romanovs and the Ceaușescus. Then as now, for better or worse, a new nationalism looks set to harness the public’s anger and bring about the technocracy’s end. And that is probably the best outcome we can look forward to, since the opposite is some form of quasi-religious war in which the supporters of globalism and nationalism accuse each other of carrying out the devil’s work, as a prelude to the inevitable witch burnings later on.
I leave it to my readers to consider which political tribe looks most likely to be the first to engage in our version of ex-communications, inquisitions and witch burnings…
As you made it to the end…
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