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.
Look at the link to the Round Towers.
Then click here:
http://www.moviewavs.com/Movies/Apollo_13.html
“Apollo 13 Flight Controllers, listen up. We need a go, no-go for launch.”
: “Booster.”
: “Go.”
: “Retro.”
: “Go.”
: “FIDO.”
: “We’re go, flight.”
: “Guidance.”
: “Guidance, go.
: “Surgeon.”
: “Go flight.”
: “E Comm.”
: “Go flight.”
: “GNC.”
: “We’re go.”
: “TELMU.”
: “Go.”
: “Control.”
: “Go flight.”
: ” Procedures?”
: “Go.”
: “Enco.”
: “Go.”
: “F.A.O.”
: “We are go.”
: “Network.”
: “Go!”
: “Recovery.”
: “Go.”
: “Capcom.”
: “We’re go, flight.”
: “Launch Control, this is Houston. We are Go for Launch…”
Wiley definetly hasn’t read Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization”. No Sh*t true!
Re technology saving us..yeah sure, so is human cloning, Sword of Damocles nuclear weapons, bio agents in the hands of fanatics, etc. On the other hand vaccinations and treatment for untreatable diseases, etc. For each advance there is a counter advance. The Jetsons ain’t real.
IMO, we had to fight for every advance we have had as western civilization. The advances we have made haven’t been free..otherwise the technical innovations we have today could have happened in the Arab World since 800 AD (yes AD- sorry), on the shores of Lake Victoria or in the Amazon basin. Advances happened in the west because freedom FROM tyranny flourished, therefore enabling technological breakthroughs.
Hard to invent things when you’re borne to serfdom or into slavery….
Which is exactly where we are returning to IF we lose the ongoing Clash of Civilizations presently called the GWOT. Yes. It’s true. You can go backwards if you lose the will to fight for what is worth fighting for- ask any Roman.
B2
I wonder if Wiley is perhaps touching on the Islamic “closing of the gates of ijtihad” in or around the 10th century.
“Ijtihad,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijtihad
Around that time philosophy and the sciences stagnated throughout the Islamic world, and there are some claims that Islam didn’t begin its own reformation until the 18th century, give or take.
Also, didn’t said monks begin copying the Bible in earnest so non-religious types could eventually understand, and begin to question, what was being preached to them in church? Did that contribute to literacy rates climbing?
That’s an interesting link on its own merits, jpr, but it might be a stretch to consider that the target Wiley was aiming at. It’s much more common in our culture for folks to take aim at the more familiar than the alien. Po-mo deconstructionalism, etc.
Insofar as Islam itself is concerned, I don’t know what the word “reformation” means against that context. Perhaps a “re-awakening” instead?
B2 – I knew you’d read that book. I just knew it
CPT J – I can see it. Never would have on my own, but I can see it.
Yeah, re-awakening is probably a better term to use.
“Non Sequitur” is one of my try-to-reads in our comic section out here, along with “Mr. Boffo” (not sure if he’s syndicated out by you).
Agree with B2. If you don’t know how to or why you fight, it’s hard to know what’s worth preserving.
The illiterate Vikings burned many Irish Round Towers, pillaging and looking for plunder that THEY understood [gold, tapestries, etc]. The monks’ treasured illuminated texts were probably just so much firestarter in their eyes. The science and learning of the ancients had value only to those who could decode them. Oh the Vikings figured out quickly it was profitable to hold the books and the monks for ransom, even if they couldn’t duplicate anything themselves. But the monks adapted and outlasted their tormentors. They won the assymetrical fight over centuries as the kinetic Norsemen finally chilled out.
Until our time, when the Viking exploration spirit was harnessed to the monk’s learning in another tower, the Saturn V.
One wonders if scattered blogs aren’t the Round Towers of learning and freedom that will withstand the next barbarian cycle.
…and the bunch of monkish Irishmen reading them would tend to prove that point.
Monkish? He must be talking about you two guys. I left the monastery in 1982 and never looked back
Well then, pass the mead. I’m not going stay up nights reading parchments without the proper liquid preparations.
/and ask the Vikings to keep it down. We’re trying to study in here
#7
and a fair number of us who have acquired or are in the process thereof, a monk’s tonsure through no dedicated effort of our own…
-SJS
This is why I like your blog so much. Cool pictures, fun sea stories and the occasional incisive commentary on political/cultural matters. Great post.
Mr. Miller is combining secular humanistic smugness with historical ignorance. The resulting work product is predictable, and sad on all the levels that you covered.
Oh, and monkish isn’t the precise word that springs to mind when I think about the handful of milblogs that I read.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote once, “Religion and Civilization are incompatible”. Perhaps that was where Wiley got the idea.
Actually, I think the cartoon poses an interesting hypothesis. What if Mohammed had never been born? Think how much pain and suffering the current time could have been spared had he not taken a certain segment of humanity down that particular spiritual rathole.
Since I am a big fan of alternative history (or as they prefer to call it counter-factual) I think its an interesting premise.
And it is just a cartoon……………
Shipmates,
Well, I think that the incisive view of Western v. Islamic culture can be described as the west learning from it’s mistakes.
Western civilization, as we consider it, is fraught with evil deeds and terrible times. And yet, it time and again has shown the capacity, as if it were almost a sentient being, to stop, consider it’s actions, and then work to rectify it’s mistakes.
The west has grown morally and intellectualy in stages, progressing from near-chaos to feudalism to rennaissance to enlightment to republicanism and democracy.
Islam has remained mired in the 8th century. It seeks to destroy that which it cannot bring down to it’s level, that and those which will not “submit”.
It just seems such a shame, such an incredible waste of potential, to see more than a billion of our fellow humans reduced to submission to a repressive and intolerant way of life. What great things might they have accomplished, what wonders might they have created, what benefits to mankind around the world might have been, had not their civilization been still-born by their Prophet.
Respects,
“It just seems such a shame, such an incredible waste of potential, to see more than a billion of our fellow humans reduced to submission to a repressive and intolerant way of life. What great things might they have accomplished, what wonders might they have created, what benefits to mankind around the world might have been, had not their civilization been still-born by their Prophet.”
And still might, thanks to the one-on-one mass encounter we are now painfully having with the Muslim world. When the Ummah of Submission meets the Ummah of Freedom something changes in the minds of both. What that change is we cannot fully forsee. It won’t look like the West, but it will still have our mark. They may yet learn to value the individual. We may yet regain the focused pride and dignity we once had as a culture. How much suffering that will take is the only question.
I was going to suggest that someone recommend Cahill’s book as well, but others beat me to it (heavy sigh).
“What if Mohammed had never been born?”
Harry Turtledove actually has a number of short stories that he has written of an alt. history where Mohammed was a simple Christian monk. As I recall, he become famous for the hymns he composed…