“I’m going to go medieval on you!”
As specific a threat as one might hurl, it also inspires many images which may or may not function to build your fearsome manner or make you look like a Luddite.
What is the first thing to come to mind when looking at the Middle Ages? As university students, maybe the first conclusion is the lack of mass education. While monastic orders and some nobles were literate, most people still read symbols and followed religion and politics based solely on faith, a terrifying proposition in modern eyes.
Along the lines of ignorance, you also cannot discount chivalry and genocide. While the two are not readily comparable, the subjugation of women via their distressed pedestals and the mindless slaughter of infidels on business from the Pope essentially are rooted in the same idea: to be white, male and Christian was, at the time, the be-all, end-all goal. Which pretty much excluded 80 or so percent of the world from relevance or power.
A recent obsession with the Crusades in myth and reality has broadened my scope of reference in more modern conflicts, and while it is established fact that the modern conflicts in the Middle East are continuations of the long-running ideological blood-feud, it also is important to keep in perspective the idea that Europeans started the thing in the first place.
Ten years on, Americans look back at 9/11 as a linchpin moment in our national consciousness, something tenuous which has endless meaning for every different person. Now imagine 1,000 years of such hostility, and attempt to put yourself in the shoes of a person who experiences cultural disorientation for an entire lifetime as one in a succession of endless strife and aggression with absent motives.
This in mind, now what do you think of when you get the idea of “going medieval?”
It’s not my intention to compare the modern Middle East with the Middle Ages, nor am I attempting to make blanket generalizations about entire groups of people. However, the foreign policy which we have pursued in the last decade has established the American president as a successor to the Pope of the Middle Ages through the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. His decisions do not stop at our borders and international satellite states. In this regard, 9/11 as a motivator for world policing is not so different from the attacks on Constantinople, and Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem that spurred the First and Third Crusades also bears an eerie resemblance.
In all fairness, the president’s is not an enviable position in making such decisions. Most of us can remember the recriminations and thoughts of vengeance, both organized and vigilante, which seemed so prevalent in news, political discourse and Top 40 country songs. To that degree, former President Bush acted on a lot of peoples’ stated positions, and momentarily the War on Terror had momentum and popularity.
The legacy on his administration and the beating our national reputation has taken since, on the other hand, bears the same visage as Johnson’s and Nixon’s after Vietnam, only now with the added caveat of massive national debt largely incurred in these military operations. Again, a mirror image of post-Crusades Europe.
To tell a person you will “go Medieval” on them, then, is a strangely redundant phrase. While we have grown leaps and bounds in appearance, from healthcare and education to ubiquitous technological growth, motivations and beliefs have not strayed far from the medieval mode.
We are given in this country a guaranteed free education for 13 years, yet many people fail to finish their schooling and resort to “education” by luminaries on television news groups from both sides of the aisle and similarly-qualified, invisible mentors on the Internet. While I won’t argue people’s faith still bears the mark of abject ignorance, the ways in which religion is utilized by the fringe, both in positive and negative light, is indubitably like that of those following the line paraphrased in “Kingdom of Heaven” — “to kill an infidel is not a sin, it is the path to heaven.”
I could make abstract comparisons all day, but the point is this: The attitude of resorting to less civilized tactics as a threat seems idle as we are still in a sort of suspended animation which we have had since the dawn of human consciousness.
Altruism and selfishness have their times of relevance, but the former should be superior when making decisions affecting anyone besides oneself. We still make a point, however, to say “me and mine first” and use it as an excuse for any number of atrocities. If that’s not going medieval, I don’t know what is.
— Jake Lane is a senior in creative writing. He can be reached at [email protected].
