in spiked this week

Patrick West
Did modernity spring from the Middle Ages?
TV’s Medieval Season reminds us that, from the Middle Ages to the Daily Mail Age, the battle between Reason and Superstition never ends.


"I knew BBC4’s Inside The Medieval Mind was going to be interesting when the Daily Mail preview pronounced that the programme would ‘remind us of the danger of modern scientific arrogance’.

The Mail has long been a propagator of anti-scientific and anti-modern hysterical polemics, providing its witless readers with an endless diet of health panics and stories about how we are all going to die thanks to telephone masts, GM crops, food additives, an excess of vitamin tablets, or what-have-you. It may be referred to as the ‘Bible of Middle England’, but the Mail should more accurately be called the ‘Bible of Middle Ages England’, such is its unrelenting and hypocritical opposition to scientific progress: show me a typical Mail reader whose life has been saved by a surgeon or a doctor – those ‘arrogant’ professionals who ‘meddle with nature’ – and I’ll show you a hypocrite..."

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4993/

in spiked this week

Patrick West

Back to the Dark Age

From celebrating the earth-loving Celts to the myth of Robin Hood as a merry old cove with loads of mates: medievalism is on the march.


"Medievalism is an affectation of Western societies in the process of transition, specifically for those uneasy about the direction in which this transformation is taking them. Since the certitudes of modernity began to collapse in the 1970s, and as we entered an age of postmodernity in the 1980s, medievalism has become increasingly fashionable. Meanwhile ‘modernity’ itself has become a dirty word along with ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’, words one seldom sees written without those snide, contemptuous inverted commas..."