Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

Medievalism

If we listen to the neurotic blather being discussed around us as "fact," we are led to believe that human society has always been in turbulence, forever seeking the perfect answer to the question of self-government. Like most proclamations that focus on the simplest, most numeric interpretation of any event, this is one is misleading, for human history can be characterized instead as a motion between stable social states and instability. One need only look as far back as the ancient Greeks, where Plato and Aristotle agreed more than they disagreed about a future system to replace democracy, which both lauded as a failure and acknowledged it would eventually ruin Athens - and it did.

The reason, they theorized, was that while each person should have access to a meritocracy, or system that promoted them according to ability so the best would rise to positions of importance, most people not only have no aptitude for government, but no reason to concern themselves daily with it, and thus, while democracy looked good on paper, in practice it meant that actors and a hidden oligarchy of investors controlled the public sphere from behind closed doors. What was needed, in their view, was a society that promoted according to merit, and here they diverged somewhat radically. Plato was in favor of a state-organized solution, while Aristotle, like Nietzsche after him, favored an aristocracy. Interestingly, the next thousand years of history found a hybrid solution that worked well for a time.

In Plato's view, there would be a ruling class to any society that took its thinkers, separated them from material cares or wealth, and honed them through a lifelong process of education and duress, such that what remained in middle age were the world-experienced but ascetic philosopher kings who would not pay attention to utilitarian concerns, or what the majority of the people thought was important, but would look toward the structure of society in order to make decisions for the health of the whole. Aristotle countered this with the idea that by nature, there were some who showed an aristocratic leaning, or an ability to lead with honor for the benefit if not contentment of the society at large, and these should be separated from bureaucratic government so that they could do what was natural.

Athens became a rich cosmopolitan city, and like Greece as a whole, lost touch with its basic functional values and replaced them with the thought system necessary for commerce, rapidly afterwards becoming of a mixed racial and thus cultural character, and thus unable to agree on any basic values, falling apart in the dissolution common to organized society: money replaced honor, greed replaced the common good, and personal conceit dominated all forms of social discourse until the organs of society collapsed. While some might mourn this as a tragedy, as the loss of many cultural artifacts including a great amount of written knowledge, surely was, it is perhaps more farsighted to view it as the natural consequence of adopting an illusory system of government.

The Indo-Europeans learned from this only slightly, as Rome was to repeat the same pattern and fall the same way, digested from within by self-interest taking precedence over the needs of civilization as a whole. When mainland Europe rose as the next great Indo-European empire, a new social system became dominant: feudalism. While our current view is that pre-Christian Europe and the Middle Ages were a primitive and gruesome time, most non-politicized research sees this era in a different light. It was the fertile groundwork of European thought that permitted the cultural advances of the next centuries, even though they eventually brought collapse, and it demonstrated in practice the best ideas of not only Plato and Aristotle, but the ancient Indo-European civilization of India before it (one guide to how clearly people of European descent are separated from their history is that most are unaware that the Sanskrit family of languages in India are ancestors of most modern European tongues).

Medieval society represents so far the most rational civilization developed in the West, at least in a long-term sense, in that it regulated itself, preserved its culture, was harmonized with nature and was in contrast to modern time exceptionally sane on the individual level; the twitching neurosis and trembling afterthought of a schizoid modern era, divided between reality and public valuation of reality in order to please the broadest number of voters/customers, was not present. It was a society not driven by a centralized economy, or a centralized government bureaucracy, as post-industrialization society is, but unified around a naturalistic adaptation of Christianity. This enabled both nations and Europe as a whole to have a consensus regarding what the goal of society was, and thus to impose upon the population sensible rules and ways of living. While modern societies offer "freedom," serving as a right to keep away governments that are viewed as best as highly fallible, the medieval era offered justice, or the thought that each was allowed as much as was right for him or her to have, and was treated fairly by local authorities.

It was a caste-driven society, which differentiates itself from class-driven societies in that caste does not regulate wealth, only specialization of profession. Clergy and knights were not prone to excess wealth, and while most took what rewards they earned lived in ascetic conditions, served as did the rest, although in their specialized capacity. These, along with scholars, formed the background of the leadership caste of European society, and from among them kings were chosen; while kings had vast wealth, and local lords by virtue of owning the land and means of production were wealthy, this did not exempt them from their duties as leaders and warriors, and their responsibility for ensuring that their citizens lived well. The second caste was that of artisans and soldiers, who specialized in doing their jobs well and were freed from the economic concerns of competition that involve more of convincing others to buy your product, and less of concentrating on doing the job to the best of one's ability. Laborers were granted enough wealth to keep them comfortable, but not so much that they could get themselves in trouble, and if an emergency arose, it was the lord's duty to fix it.

As a consequence of this lack of economic incentive, there was less time spent on jobs and job-related worry, since having a place to work and a meaningful task was a basic factor of medieval civilization; for this reason, there was no need to go seeking work constantly, or to endlessly seek more or better work. Work was a means to an end, that being survival, and the way one succeeded was simple: by being a better person. This type of thinking is anathema to modern society, because to judge the individual means to pierce the absolute category which by protecting the abstract concept of the individual, protects all individuals from such judgment. Medieval society was not designed to "protect" the worker through "freedom" and "competition," but rather to give each worker a sensible place and guaranteed income. In this way caste-specialization is more compassionate and less prone to generate conflict than class-stratification.

Medieval society was also one composed of localized entities; while kings controlled larger areas for questions of defense and response to natural disaster, for the most part, civilization was governed abureaucratically by local lords who each established a town, in it had serfs and warriors, and paid tax to the king in profit and manpower. This controlled both the power of the lords and ensured the tribe as a whole had defenders and could subsidize the learning and art that kings bankrolled. Its lack of economic motivation made this feasible, and ensured that the people lived in the same land as their ancestors, thus forming a sturdy attachment to the natural life of each place; the concept of clear-cutting forests, or strip mining, or even creating giant permanent landfills would be alien to these people. Localization meant "blood and soil" was a literal reality, as one's dwelling-land was the home of both ancestors and future descendants; it was impossible not to visualize how important its preservation was.

Further, this localization enabled a great diversity of local custom (and from it, laws): some areas could permit behaviors, such as dueling, which were not permitted elsewhere, without a single law dealing with murder having to be enacted throughout the land. Even more interestingly, since local leaders, and not some distant bureaucracy communicating only through paper, controlled the law, not every killing required a great ruckus of trial and legal process; in some cases, killers were not prosecuted, if it was determined that the dead person had provoked the attack or had been a non-contributor. Both of these factors contributed to the eugenic breeding of the population as a whole, in that the best would rise and breed in a relatively unchanging, smaller local population, and those who were misplaced or badly bred were cleansed by non-governmental means, preventing the large-scale abuses seen, for example, in Stalinist Russia.

With both a lack of centralized bureaucratic government to administer moral judgment, and consistent local populations, honor became more important than following distantly-created abstract rules: the individual knew he or she would live among these people for an entire lifespan, and leave descendants to take up the reputation achieved during that lifespan, and thus there was heavy incentive to avoid being known as one who was a non-contributor, parasite, or of other degrading behaviors. This local system created a healthier way of living than a rule-based environment, as when a rule is established, it is quickly devolved into the lowest common denominator interpretation of its meaning, as to "abide" by the rules means to achieve the minimum that others can recognize as fulfilling the rule. Medieval societies had fewer rules, almost no bureaucratic government to administer them, and was ruled more by custom and the decisions of wise elders which did not conform to rigid, abstract concepts like "rights" and "regulations" and other manifestations of the word "ought" in linear form, but were situational ethics adapted to the overall ideal of each population.

This avoided both the "relativism" and instability of pure situational judgment, and the rigid types of abstracts common to centralized ideals, without compromising the integrity of the citizen; in contrast, the citizen was not bounced between rules but expected on his or her own to uphold a degree of basic civility and communal contribution, with anything above that speaking favorably for the individual and deviations, while tolerated for the most part, over time suggesting a lesser degree of character that did not warrant punishment as much as exclusion from elective opportunities where good character was necessary. This balance was the foundation of a civilization based on personal honor, and unlike the Dewey-esque modern utilitarian format that hopes to shape all citizens to a single linear ideal (closer to "good" than "evil"), it recognized that individuals naturally have varying degrees of honor, and that the most important task is to promote the most honorable to positions of leadership inaccessible to the less-honorable. Where rules enforce compliance to the symbols representing the meaning behind the rules, honor-based systems require individual interpretation of that meaning.

The dual decentralizations of (1) lack of competition for centralized rank in economics and popularity and (2) lack of a rules-based system in favor of a cultivation of inward positive tendencies in character, aimed not to force the citizen into a governmental mold and then give the citizen rigid absolute "rights" with which to defend himself or herself against it, but targetted an integral system where there was a lack of internal polarization and competition and thus, even when not to immediate personal benefit, the individual worked within society for the benefit of the whole and defined himself or herself according to accomplishment and values. This eschews the external, linear measurement of people in terms of compliance to rules or economic opportunity, and replaces it with an internal growth of culture and individually-understood values. What it creates is a society where everyone has a place, and rises not by merit in a single task, but by merit as a person; by doing this, it encourages healthier behavior and breeds those inclined toward it.

Interestingly, this medieval-feudal society has parallels in two entities regarded widely as being unconnected. In ancient India, as the Rig Veda and Mahabarata relate, a system like this was in place, justified by a religion of transcendental idealism. In this religion, one worked for ideals more than material gains, and ideals where what it had in place of either a dualistic reality or a world of Platonic pure forms, an idea that can be seen in fragmentary form in our concepts of morality, scientific absolutes and centralized social organization: these linear measurements are seen as representations of the "pure" forms here on earth, and thus we aspire to create them. Although it possessed a pantheon of gods, ancient India was unified around what was referred to as "God" but more accurately referred to godhead, or the spiritual ground from which differentiated forms such as gods and humans sprung. It existed at the time of Jesus Christ as Buddhism and proto-modern Hinduism, and by tracing the arguments and symbolism he uses, it is likely that Christ studied at an ashram in central or northern India.

Another parallel is to National Socialism. Modern political philosophers who do not outright discount that empire as "evil" or driven by irrational belief in racial supremacy, capitalism, or warfare, are generally perplexed by its "third path" around liberalism and conservatism alike. Although the National Socialist system used capitalism to further its ends, it kept it under the control of a cultural and religious authority; however, it was also Socialist (a "classless society," according to Hitler) and the first modern government to begin a policy of environmental preservation at all levels of its operations. While it had many aspects of Socialism intact, it removed the depersonalizing effects of Communism by encouraging individual competition and excellence; further, while it clearly had a large bureaucracy, its aim was to reduce the complexity of bureaucratic process and wherever possible, create a hierarchy of local authorities to administer all problems except those requiring intervention of the head of state.

Interestingly, while it was ostensibly a Christian regime, its leader Adolf Hitler was heavily influenced by the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer, who was inspired himself by later Vedic writings such as Bhagavad-Gita ("the song of God") and the Upanishads (something like "truths one sits down to discuss"). The parallels to traditional Indo-European society, including medieval feudalism, do not end there. Its SS, the elite warrior group that was replacing the German military bureaucracy, functioned as a caste, with breeding only as approved by SS local leaders, and the impetus of its social programs was toward better breeding so that a higher grade of human being could apply good character in the stead of centralized legislation for moral and social issues. Further, although its emphasis was on excellence in all areas, it was task-oriented and not product-oriented, thus reduced the most destructive aspects of capitalism, and it withdrew itself from the internationalist capitalist banking system and governmental sphere. It is easy to see why it has perplexed most historians, since the signature of its ideas is neither exclusively left nor right, but if approached historically, it is clearly a continuation of the feudal and aristocratic traditions interrupted by utilitarian and industrial society.

In the light of praise for medieval society, it is important to ask the fundamental question of why it was replaced; did it fail, or was it subverted? The answer is a combination of both extremes: it was subverted, and thus it failed, although by "subverted" it is not intended to speak of a conspiracy as much as the influence of two very potent social changes, namely a popularization of Christianity and the commercial society introduced by the rise of science and industry, itself a consequence of the unification of Europe under Catholicism. Together, these two ideas suggested a utilitarian concept for society, where a centralized authority would impose a single standard on all people such that the individual was protected from others by an absolute series of laws and values known as "rights." By their very concept, rights overlap, and thus this produces a contentious, internally balkanized society where objective measurements such as money and popularity become the only means of ascent. What caused these ideas to become dominant was a fragmentation of church authority, and thus a reversion to populist forms of Christianity, which by their nature as utilitarian, then incorporated Jewish attitudes toward culture, commerce and values.

When Europe was united by Catholic rule, and could thus point to a singular authority for doctrine regarding a pragmatic translation of spiritual idealism into situational decisions, it provided an immense impetus toward growth among the Europeans, in that a source of authority beyond government kept the peace among nations. Even more importantly, Catholicism at that time nurtured European culture and supported ethnocultural separation. This was in no small part because, in adopting Christianity, Europeans subtly modified it to support more of their own values, and less of its vestigial Jewish origins; Jewish philosophers had been familiar with not only the works of Plato and Aristotle, but also with the rudiments of the Vedic worldview, and incorporated these into a belief system for which Christ was both the natural culmination and a reversion toward an earlier, more Vedic (and thus traditional to Indo-Europeans), outlook. This gave Christian dogma a schizoid character, as it struggled to determine itself between the poles of Vedic idealism and Jewish materialism; the Catholic church unified these concepts by addressing idealism in a material way, e.g. in the concept of the individual, in a "the meek shall inherit the earth" form of preference for addressing each soul as a moral agent.

However, as with all centralized authorities, the church found itself under attack from both within and without, in that because it had near absolute authority, the ability to influence it was a source of vast power. When this internal struggle (and the church's struggle against science and rising rationalism) revealed the fallibility of church doctrine, the external assault on it through revolutionaries such as protestant reformers gained full momentum. Reacting to the singular doctrine of the church, these insurgents took primary issue with that singularity, and thus introduced the idea of a personally-interpreted religion, beyond all criticism from the outside world. While this addressed the short-term problem of church fragmentation, it denied the long-term problem of what central concept (if not central authority) would replace it, and soon populist Christianity was born. In this change, Christianity swept from its Vedic pole to its Jewish, individualistic one, and began to deny the importance of reality outside of individual spiritual preferences; while most Lutherans and other Protestants were well-meaning people attempting to simply save their tradition without its corrupt, the implications of their acts created a slumbering monster.

This change effectively marked the end of the medieval period, ideologically, and brought on several hundred years of fighting that for the sake of brevity will be characterized as the individualistic masses opposing any form of hierarchical system which ranked some above others. Much as Communist and Capitalist allegiances would later divide the Indo-European nations, a split between populist religion and traditional hierarchy dominated politics for several centuries, culminating in the "Enlightenment" and its proto-liberal concepts just as the industry that, enabled by the unifying system of belief in Catholic thought, had arisen from intra-European trade and competition. What followed, including a series of bloody revolutions, destroyed the European aristocratic tradition and replaced it with utilitarian, bureaucratic governments distinguished by their focus on the individual, and as a means of achieving equality among individuals, linear external measurement systems such as materialism. Indeed, behind the facades of various religious and philosophical battles, what was occurring was a transfer of wealth from leadership to the masses as whole, enabled by economic competition we now call "free enterprise."

The upheaval that this engendered not only ended the medieval period formally, but overthrew much of tradition and polarized European nations against one another. The political entity of the nation-state formally replaced loose tribal affiliations, and localization as a consequence was deferred in favor of strong central authority. This populist revolt not only changed Christianity, but the essential tenets of European values; the concept that every person, regardless of caste, should have the same rights and privileges to gain wealth by whatever means were possible, brought into the public sphere a lasting emphasis on egalitarian and utilitarian values. As the means of effecting these were commercial, new forms of trading and moneymaking, including usury and an influence of internationalist cosmopolitans, such as Jewish people, became predominant. These changes ended traditional society in Europe, and ushered in the conflict between masses and leadership that continues into the twentyfirst century.

Another way of viewing this is in terms of entitlement; when the central authority of traditional Europe, the church, collapsed as a leadership entity, what replaced it was a belief in equality of the working masses and thus, their being entitled to the same privileges as others. Where economy made this impossible, i.e. the inability of society to produce a Faberge egg for every citizen, substitutions were made, and this trend continues to the current time. Since society no longer based itself upon trust in government, but upon the competition between individuals, "rights" and "freedoms" were invented as ways to prevent the inevitable abuses. These two ideas together led to the formation of modern society, as industry was only happy to oblige these fortunate new markets, and for this reason, the same cultural impulse that leads to fast food, disposable lighters, the personal car and speculative capital are those that also lead to individual "preference" and entitlement issues such as race-mixing, gender polarization (feminism/gay power), and a proliferation of lifestyles based on short-term gratification.

As this state continues to the current day, unlike in medieval times, our civilization is paralyzed by the unpopularity with individuals of doing what is right for the whole. This power of the mob, when ended, will stop the reversed logic of modern time where money and power become goals in themselves (so as to guarantee "equality" for the members of the mob), and will return those measurements of authority to a sensible role as means toward achieving an end that is beneficial for the whole, on the assumption that a sane and healthy society is more important (in the long term) than personal wealth (in the short term). The main impediment to this, especially in democracy, is the reverse of utilitarianism: under utilitarian principles, a decision is good if most of the people feel satisfied with it. However, if by definition, most of the people are incapable of seeing the scope of the decision they make, and thus creating a sensible long-term system, authority is vested in those who understand it least and downfall is inevitable.

Currently we are seeing the results of that downfall. Almost a millennium past our divergence from traditional society, humanity has expanded recklessly and consumed most of its natural environment, while in our society Utopian justifications prevail over an increasingly schizoid reality: there is the public "reality" of Utopian statements about freedom and comfort, and the private reality of our destructive tendencies, our neurotic fear of lack of meaning, and most of all, of a civilization lacking any goal and thus any way to come to consensus about how to deal with its problems. Now the individual becomes an impediment: since most individuals lack the ability to see the necessity of a long-term plan, they impede any positive changes by objecting that their personal interests are not represented, which could not be further from the truth; a traditional society addresses their long-term personal interests, and not short-term fixations on the means for achieving those interests such as wealth and political power, but as these are subtle ideals, they go unnoticed by all but a few.

However, at the same time this disaster unfolds, it sows the seeds for a return to traditional society, in that daily more people recognize that increasing consumption of finite resources leads at some point to not failure of those resources, but a lack of them at a time when a poisoned and denuded ecosystem is correcting the balance. Humankind has made itself naked in the face of its environment, all to satisfy the demands for equality of the undifferentiated mob. Much as National Socialism was crushed by the greater numbers and wealth of egalitarian nations, and ancient Greece and Rome both succumbed to the caprices and illusions of democratic rule, and ancient India fell apart when its caste system was replaced with commerce, our current Western civilization is digging a grave for itself, even if that inevitability is not visible in the short-term scope of our individualized, materialistic, externalized "scientific" thinking. What will occur, as did in ancient Greece with Plato and Aristotle, is that the thinkers among us will decide to take neither the side of the masses nor of the leaders, but that of the whole, and will posit a civilization which instead of facilitating the personal demands of its peoples, will create for them a hierarchy of wisdom coupled with a functional and psychologically healthy existence not based on the competitive demands of commerce.

To unify this system, these thinkers will probably choose some form of religion as centralizing order, and regardless of its denomination, it will embrace the traditional Indo-European Vedic concept of idealism, where the order of the whole in harmony with nature matters more than the comfort and survival of the individual. This will unite the left, whose foremost thinkers espouse an integral view of humankind and nature (the "Gaia" hypothesis), and the right, whose family values and traditional emphasis value a healthy environment and stable society, so that families can exist without excessive fear, competition, doubt or neurosis. While the left will still primarily be submissive to the imagined will of the broadest segments of society, and the right aristocratic, or unduly sensitive to the needs of those who rule by force of will, their gap resembles that of Plato and Aristotle who, despite approaching the situation from different assumptions, arrived at conclusions more similar than different. When the future of doom without change becomes inevitably clear, those who can see that far into the future will join in doing what is sensible by setting aside the formalisms of their individual partisanship.

The major obstacle to this kind of realization is what T.S. Eliot called "a whimper and not a bang," namely the demise of civilizations through the gentle process of reversion to third-world standards as internal infrastructure and learning collapses. In such a fall, there is no sudden irrefutable realization of failure, but only a steady downgrading until expectations match those of other collapsed civilizations, such as those in Rome, India, Greece and the Americas. When one sees history in this fashion, the fate of nations is no more complicated than that of small groups of explorers, such as those in Greenland: if the group cannot come to a consensus as to a goal bigger than that of individual desires, such a goal being a logical prerequisite for civilization in the first place, it will fall apart due to infighting and leave people leading lives of reduced expectations but greater independence from any kind of societal obligation. Such is the case in the third world, where a lack of infrastructure means that the individual is entirely on its own to accumulate enough wealth to rise above the self-consumptive mob.

Today there is need for a new "third path," and perhaps the only thing that could possibly be new is to find a current form of traditional Indo-European civilization, which existed in roughly similar forms during the healthiest years of Europe and the ancients. It would be optimal to achieve this state of mind before widespread failure pits the hungry mob against those few gentle thinkers who would have it otherwise.

To spur people toward this realization, it makes sense to analyze how medieval civilization befitted its members that current civilization does not. Laborers were given enough that they had comfortable lives and a support network for emergencies, but were restricted from having excess wealth, with which, lacking long-term sense, they could get themselves into trouble. Shopkeepers had a stable society in which to do business, and thus while they lacked wild profits from speculation, what they had instead made a steady living likely and required flamboyant incompetence for failure. Similarly, artisans were spared having to pander to mass tastes, and could focus on doing what they enjoyed, namely their specific trade; warriors (including what we now call "police") were given just causes, a comfortable living and an honest role in supporting a civilization in which it was worth believing. Similarly, thinkers were given room for thought, freedom from reprisal for offending mass tastes, and an ascetic living which kept them out of trouble.

Our society has not always been as turbulent, and as lacking in permanent answers, as the current one; before we made an appeal to a Platonic world of fact independent from the individual human, we were in touch with reality outside of social constructs, and built in that reality a civilization based around the long-term needs of the whole. The conditions that spurred this creation are eternal, as the political and social demands of organizing a society do not change with technology or sociological trends, and apply just as much today as they did in the age of knights and princesses, serfs and monks, clerics and journeymen. If we set aside our illusory "facts" about the medieval period, we can see that it addressed our long term needs, and individual psychology, in a stable and logical way that modern society does not. If we can realize this in time, we may see that in the medieval social structure lies not only our past, but our best possible future.

Craig Smith (02/15/05)