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by
Victor Davis Hanson
September 03, 2026
from
TheEpochTimes Website
Article also
HERE
People walk past a pile of garbage
bags
in the
Manhattan borough of New York
on March 20,
2024.
Charly
Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images
For most people, the story of the medieval world was
one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic
outbreaks of deadly plagues - the dividends of unclean urban
conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked
rats, fleas, and lice.
Most of each day was spent simply trying to
survive until the next.
Castles and walls dotted the landscape to
protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders.
City gates were usually closed at dusk to
keep out nocturnal marauders.
Public executions drew massive crowds.
And religious schisms and conflicts often
turned deadly.
In other words, it was not altogether unfamiliar
to the world we are becoming today...
Yet meanwhile,
science advanced quietly among true elites at
universities, courts, and monasteries, producing windmills,
mechanical clocks, and eyeglasses.
Sophisticated crossbows were manufactured in
great numbers.
Large, multi-sail warships were built that
could cross narrow seas.
Some of history's greatest literature,
...was the product of the medieval mind.
We still gaze dumbfounded at the architectural genius and beauty of
the colossal cathedrals of Cologne, Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome,
and Seville.
The Byzantine cathedral Hagia Sophia may have
risen near the beginning of the medieval period and for a
millennium, nothing rivaled its majesty. All these medieval
architectural masterpieces were built without computers, porta-potties,
overtime, or building permits.
Yet after the collapse of the classical world (circa A.D. 500),
Western civilization still needed a millennium to recover even a
modicum of its lost knowledge and technology.
Centuries passed before the Renaissance
saw hygienic principles of sewage systems, aqueducts, and waste
disposal - not to mention the medical expertise of classically
trained doctors and scientists.
Modern
Medievalism
Yet our progressive-regressive modern West is now
suddenly beginning to resemble the medieval age - with one important
caveat:
after centuries of so-called "progress," we
should know better.
Our mounting urban filth, dangerous streets, and
resurgent diseases are juxtaposed with brilliant revolutions in,
artificial intelligence, bioengineering,
robotics, satellite technology, spaceflight, and cancer
research...
Unlike their counterparts in the medieval
fiefdom, our officials know how to stop disease, crime, and filth
but apparently choose not to.
Their neglect grows out of a sick ideology that
divides the world into the blameworthy "oppressors" and the
blameless "oppressed." The victim is always right and must be
championed - at least from a distance or as long as he does not show
up smelly on your doorstep.
We have just experienced a tribal invasion of millions of
impoverished foreigners swarming across our southern border
- until the belated resumption of border-wall construction,
medieval-style, and the deployment of detested patrols who try
bravely to stop them.
Western urban street crime seems to require the army to restore calm
yet often grows unchecked when troops are barred from helping
police.
It is technically illegal for people to camp out on public sidewalks
or someone else's property - unless they do so in such numbers that
paralyzed city officials look the other way...
Defecation, urination, fornication, and drug
injection are now routine spectacles for hurried sidewalk
passersby...
If Los Angeles or Berkeley
allows its streets and sidewalks to become medieval, should we be
surprised by outbreaks there of deadly medieval diseases like typhus
and leptospirosis - or that our storm drains now double as sewage
gutters?
Today's mayors will not stop rats from breeding,
while officials - most recently in Los Angeles, for example -
consider proposals for taxpayer-funded "hygienic
sexual-relief clinics" offering homeless people "private
sexual relief through masturbation."
The speaker went on
saying
"some research
suggests that sexual release
can help reduce
stress" and "improve mood,"
as he pointed out the
conditions of being homeless.
David Buchan for Ca
Post
Source
In New York, some of the richest people in the world
sidestep rancid piles of rat-infested trash.
In San Francisco and Chicago,
some of the world's greatest cancer researchers check their shoe
soles for human feces before entering their space-age labs.
Weirder still, the Western world has become both the most regulated
and the most lawless civilization on the planet.
Our state environmental detectives visit
industries to ensure that their effluvia do not contain one part
per billion of a particular toxic substance.
And state and federal regulators, with dozens
of letters after their names, examine daily microscopic traces
of dangerous toxins in the bubbling pools of sewage at treatment
plants.
Yet under cover of darkness, masked city workers
decked out in hazmat suits, rubber boots, and gloves use
high-pressure hoses to blast politically correct feces, urine,
blood, and drug detritus into storm drains.
These modern marvels carry the mess out to
pollute supposedly pristine ocean waters - where a fisherman can be
fined a small fortune for tossing an inert, empty soda can into the
smelly water.
In the modern West,
one-billionth of Roundup is a threat to
civilization.
Tons of feces on city sidewalks are not...
The theory?
The more the law-abiding are monitored to the
nth degree, the more society can withstand exempting the lawless
to do as they wish.
How strange is our postmodern medieval
intersection between barbarity and civilization?
The Oppressive Oppressed
In California, a century of traffic science and
public-safety research had established strict licensing rules for
truck drivers navigating fully loaded 80,000-pound, double-trailer
behemoths amid tiny subcompacts on our busy freeways.
Our legal system has insisted that drivers of such interstate semis
must be highly skilled and certified before stepping into the
potentially dangerous T. Rex of a big rig.
They must be 21, possess a valid California
driver's license, pass a Department of Transportation physical,
and undergo background and drug screening - all before scoring
80 percent on a required 50-question technical exam, followed by
a thorough two-hour, in-person test of their driving skills.
Sounds great - in theory... But not in fact.
For fear that someone, somewhere, somehow at some
time might be inconvenienced by these rules to protect the public,
nearly 20,000 illegal aliens obtained commercial driver's licenses
from a compliant state of California without even proving
rudimentary knowledge of English.
They were free to exploit loopholes, leverage
exemptions, and avoid background checks.
The result?
Our new leftist apparat empowered thousands of incompetent
drivers. Many cannot distinguish a yield sign from a stop sign, and
most cannot read a word of English. They drive as they please -
racing, swerving, and veering, with a 40-ton trailer wagging behind
them.
They now own our Wild West freeways so that
our elite can feel morally superior to the mere lab-rat drivers
on whom they experiment.
The architects of these laws are often
chauffeured in large limousines, SUVs, and motorcades or prefer to
fly in private jets.
Western civilization mostly phased out public executions nearly a
century ago. But before it congratulates itself on its distance from
the medieval world, consider that the therapeutic Left now
canonizes, rather than hangs, murderers. (Which is more medieval: to
hang a murderer or to romanticize a known assassin?)
Luigi Mangione assassinated
Brian Robert Thompson, the CEO
of UnitedHealthcare, in a December 2024 ambush and pleaded
guilty to federal charges stemming from the killing this month.
He has been deified by scores of young
leftist women who swoon over the trust-fund scion's good looks
and politically correct violence.
Indeed, admirers even produced a musical about
his supposedly heroic murder of the health care executive.
Charlie Kirk was grotesquely
murdered during a livestreamed public event, after which, for months
on end, some on the Left celebrated his shooting and mocked those
who mourned him.
When
Lindsay Clancy brutally
strangled her three small children with an exercise band, women on
the Left did not merely cite her supposedly extenuating postpartum
depression but deified her as a victimized "everywoman" - with
scarcely a voice for the three young lives snuffed out before they
had a chance to grow up by the person who, until recently, everyone
understood was supposed to care for them most:
their mother...
The new secular revolutionaries
know that their city upon a hill won't work - and will crash and
burn - if conservatives likewise deify the murderer of a populist
Marxist podcaster.
What would they do if conservatives, in
tit-for-tat fashion, were to join in to gush over the handsome
killer of a popular socialist activist?
What if a returning combat veteran slew all
his children and then developed a cult of admirers demanding his
PTSD guaranteed him an exemption from the law?
What if the Secret Service, on four separate
occasions, had to shoot at would-be right-wing assassins of
Obama?
Modern, sophisticated, humane science now has the
technology to save most premature babies at 23–24 weeks.
But in pre-civilizational fashion,
Massachusetts - to the cheers of "enlightened" feminists -
has enacted laws to allow abortion (involving the collapse of the
infant's skull and the siphoning out of its contents) right up to
the moment of birth.
The media hailed this license to kill a viable
infant as "strengthening abortion care."
In this brutal juxtaposition of life and death, modern and
ancient, we invest millions to save one premature infant of six
months, only to allot a few dollars to kill a baby as it looks out
the birth canal and almost reaches a new life.
Chic Barbarity
These contradictions and alternate universes of the modern
medieval West are still quite different from their
counterparts in the medieval world of 500–1400.
At least,
the medieval age believed that it was
incrementally gaining knowledge to fight age-old terrors of the
human and natural worlds. And such progress would eventually
lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, and the current affluence and freedom of the West.
In contrast, our retrograde contemporary
world knows how to prevent ancient diseases.
We have mastered the science of sewage
control and treatment.
We have sought to regulate away most of the
dangers posed by life-giving machines.
A hundred years of penal science has
established that police visibility and law enforcement deter
crime.
Yet reactionary Marxism, socialist-mandated
equality, and authoritarian, heaven-on-earth utopianism - going
beyond even the excesses of the medieval Church - war against the
progress of civilization.
These ideologies arise not from fear of 'God'
or of violating ancient customs and traditions, but from smug
moral narcissism - with the addendum that our atheist saints must
never suffer the consequences of their destructive ideology.
After all, there are no homeless people on the lawns of the
humanitarian Malibu celebrities, but plenty of security for the
very progressives who defunded the police in crime-ridden cities.
Martha's Vineyard humanitarians blasted ICE as Gestapo
thugs, even as they readied care packages for illegal aliens
dropped off at their community center - but only after they had
ordered buses to transfer the "Other" far away.
Redistributionist and socialist
Hasan Piker - channeling
medieval pogroms - warns Jews that their future is bleak in America,
then whizzes off in his $200,000 EV Porsche Taycan Turbo S people's
wagon.
So again,
what is this plague of modern medievalism?
It is a disease of the 21st-century
West, where hundreds of millions have transcended the age-old
struggle to live one more day and now enjoy the unchecked freedom
and affluence of
democratic market capitalism.
In a world where we deem it our birthright to die in our sleep at
90, we do not worry about who struggles to produce our food, build
our homes, provide our fuel, or conquer our diseases.
We care only that they do so on demand...
And thus, on autopilot, we are free to get tatted
and pierced, remain glued to our iPhones, and perhaps even
consider transitioning as we worry about cosmic things - like the
need to celebrate the murderer or torch a police precinct.
Regressive Progressives
So the progressives, socialists, and Marxists
gave us universal "caring."
They birthed a puritanical holiness, a
narcissistic sanctimoniousness that decrees the rape victim of an
illegal alien acceptable collateral damage - allowable to ensure
that the illegal alien remains free to enter the country unaudited
and unquestioned.
The poor typhus-bearing rats that scurry along the public sidewalk
shall not be denied their breeding grounds among the sanctified but
soiled and infectious blankets of the homeless.
The modern medievalist demands that the 30-year veteran of our wars
be drummed out of the military as an enemy of the people for
refusing the
experimental mRNA vaccine - but
not the COVID-infected, unvaccinated illegal alien who, amid
lockdowns, strolls across the Rio Grande without a word from our
secular saints.
Virtue-signaling concern for the nihilist - at someone else's
expense - is the new national creed.
And the "victim" and racist killer
Decarlos Brown - now deemed
"too incompetent to stand trial" - readying his knife to slice open
the throat of the innocent, doomed, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska,
in the seat ahead of him, is the poster child of our modern
medievalism...
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