Non sequitur

By lex, on November 20th, 2006

I suppose that it’s too much too hope for rationality in a cartoonist – even one who, like Wiley Miller, after all only draws fantasies as a form of “trenchant social satire.” He wrings his bread from penning cartoon panels which, if his attempts succeed, may motivate the odd Sunday morning smile, maybe even a chuckle. In the highest form of the art he might plant a seed of thoughtful reflection on the human condition. He’s broadly syndicated and has received numerous awards, so from a commercial sense anyway, he has to consider his work something of a success.

But his Sunday cartoon caused me to think less about the world as it is and more about the deficiencies in the cartoonist’s education or imagination. Shown here, the strip has a young girl using a time-machine in order to “travel back to the dark ages to stop the religious fanaticism that delayed science and technology by 1000 years.” She returns in an instant to a paradisiacal world of impressive technological advances re-made through her efforts.

It’s an interesting complaint and an even more interesting conclusion. The “dark ages” are somewhat poorly descriptive from a chronological standpoint – each generation of writers fro Plutarch to the Romantics considered the age before their own “dark”, but in general (non-academic) use the term is generally meant to capture that period shortly after the fall of the Roman civilization until a few hundred years before the renaissance, i.e. ~476-1100 CE, a time more properly labeled the “middle ages.” The pejorative weight attached to the term in popular culture stems from the writings of rationalists during the Enlightenment, who considered the era “priest-ridden” – which is only partly true, and pestilential – which it certainly was. However poorly descriptive it is in time and reality, the term is geographically precise – since both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphate were in the midst of their own “golden age,” the dark ages refers to post-Roman Western Europe.

The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods were not created out of thin air, they rested on a re-discovery of science, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy from antiquity. And that’s where Wiley’s thrust hits wide, because just about every scrap of useful knowledge preserved from that time was jealously guarded by, wait for it: Monks. These were the only real scholars or historians of the period and often the only literate people in society. Many of them were Irish, and lived in the round towers still visible throughout Eire – towers with entrances well above ground level such that the ladders used to climb into them could be pulled inside when barbarians swept through. In many cases, it was a time that was “priest hidden” rather than priest-ridden and rather than setting technology back by a thousand years, these “religious fanatics” quite literally saved civilization.

And it was that rescued civilization – and the unifying concept of Western identity it came to represent – that successfully resisted repeated onslaughts from the Islamic Ottoman empire from the late middle ages up until the 1700′s, while simultaneously laying the foundation for the Age of Reason. For my own part, I question the cartoonist’s presumption that the vacuum left by “dark ages” religious thought would have remained very long unfilled. I also wonder whether the resultant capping of European cathedrals with Islamic crescents would have resulted in a greater level of technological achievement in our lives today. In my heart of hearts, I have to admit that I rather doubt it – I think it more likely that the little girl returns to her father in a burkha, and he chastises her for leaving the house without a male relative.

Finally – because this cartoon jangled me in all kinds of ways – I wonder whether the technological paradise depicted by Wiley has a soul. It’s a strange question I know: No one has ever accused me of being a Luddite – I do love me some gadgets – not to mention those advances in medical science that I hope may one day overcome the damages accruing to my frame from an enthusiastically mis-spent youth. But don’t you also wonder at the cartoonist’s unblinking assumption that if we only had another 1000 years of so worth of technology in our hands that we’d be better people? If I had a criticism of our culture it would be about the heartless consumerism and grasping acquisitiveness that sometimes seems to underly it.

I wonder: Can we really build and buy our way to happiness?

Yeah, I know: A silly thing to get fashed about, it was only a cartoon. But still.

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