The slow plugging of SJW myths in an effort to displace real knowledge

This is just sad. "Matthew Gabriele is a professor Medieval Studies in the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech and has published widely on religion and violence in the Middle Ages." He authors a piece in the Washington Post, Five Myths About the Middle Ages. This isn't history, this is a soft-headed postmodernist, critical theory attempt to rewrite history to serve the social justice warrior view of the world, drawing moral equivalents where there are none.

As always, just enough reality seeps in to lend the piece some modicum of credence but were this written by a freshman in a Middle Ages history class thirty years ago, it likely would have been tossed out as so much gibbering. That it now is published in a national paper is simply a sad indictment of the decline in our credential intellectuals who have lost the path of civilization and civic discourse.

What is the problem with debunking myths? Nothing unless the debunking is the replacement of one set of nuanced assumptions with another set of untrue myths. Let's look at Gabriele's anti-historical declarations one at a time.

MYTH NO. 1: Christianity and Islam were constantly in conflict. Gabriele claims,

Then, throughout the Middle Ages, from Iberia to North Africa to the Middle East, Christians and Muslims behaved like the neighbors they were.

This whole section of debunking is simply modern myth-making in the service of social justice equivalencing. From the 700s Islamic forces occupied southwestern Europe (Iberia) and then southeastern Europe (the Balkans, including Constantinople and Greece). Subjugation of one people by another does not make them neighbors. This guy is a professor?

Until the Islamic forces were ejected some seven hundred and a thousand years later, there was constant tension, skirmishing, warfare, bloodshed and tragedy. Sure, there were intermittent periods of cessation, accommodation, truces, etc. but no one would claim that because there were occasional days without battle that there wasn't a Vietnam War.

There is a glimmer of reality providing cover for Gabriele's nonsense. One might make the case that there was something close to a fusion in Sicily between the Italian populations, the Greek populations and the Arab populations. Tentative, tenuous and occasionally very productive. But episodic and rare exceptions do not undermine the truth - For nearly a thousand years, Europeans and Arabs were in continuous conflict owing to the occupation of major portions of Europe by Arab invaders.

MYTH NO. 2: Everyone deferred to religious authority. Here Gabriele is more deceiving than he is wrong. He sets up a straw man nobody is defending.

But not everyone spent all their time thinking about God, and some were critical of religious authority.

That's right. But religion played a much larger role in life than today. In fact it is probably near-impossible for us, as modern, largely secular, Westerners to understand the role of theocracy in the Middle Ages. No, not everyone deferred to religious authority but most everyone did and to a far greater degree than today. Religious institutions had real power and to claim that was a myth is simply wrong.

MYTH NO. 3: Europeans in the Middle Ages were white and Christian.
Oh, dear. Critical theorist alert. Race is a social construct nonsense ahead.

In fact, although nowhere near as diverse as any modern metropolis, medieval Europe pulsed with difference, both racial and religious.

The fact that Europe pulsed with religious and ethnic diversity does not mean that it was not white and Christian. Europeans, as all people everywhere, were highly attuned to out-group mentality by ethnicity and by religion. There were not British people, there were Welsh and Irish and English and Scots and vive la difference. And there were not simply Scots but lowland and highland Scots not to mention the Shetlanders and Orcadians. The capacity for distinctions between and among out-groups based on ethnicity, religion, customs, class, etc. is almost endless. In fact much like modern social justice warriors and their ever fining identity distinctions.

But the fact that there were lowland Scots and highland Scots and Shetlanders and Orcadians does not mean that they weren't all white. The fact that there were dozens if not hundreds of conflicting variations of Christianity does not mean that they weren't all Christian.

If Gabriele is claiming that a 1% minority of non-Christian populations means Europe wasn't Christian, then he is right. If Gabriele is claiming that a less than 1% racial minority (Arabs, Berbers, occasional Africans or Asians) constitutes a non-white Europe, then he is right.

But of course, that is not what people mean. Europe was white and it was Christian. In his obeisance to the ideological convictions of social justice (critical theory), Gabriele misses several opportunities to make a better case. That Europe was virtually entirely white is inescapable. But Europe was by no means entirely Christian. Paganism remained a strong and large presence well into the near modern era.

Gabriele is simply wrong here, hostage to his SJW fevers.

MYTH NO. 4: Everyone thought the Earth was flat.

OK, fine, Gabriele is broadly right here though largely irrelevant. In the pre-modern era, the status of the earth as flat or round was not a hotly contested issue among the populace but that there was a uniform view of the world as flat is dismissable. That idea is simply the means of moderns to condescend to ancients.

MYTH NO. 5 These were the ‘Dark Ages.’

I concede half marks here. Gabriele says:

Many interpret the Middle Ages as a period when intellectual inquiry went dormant and the dominance of religion either stopped the progress of mankind or actively worked against those few brave souls trying to lift humanity up.

He's right. There is a tendency to associate the collapse of Rome as a lapse into stasis and contraction. That was largely the case. But over the thousand years from 500 and 1000, there was movement and motion and, eve, some progress. But the flows were large, erratic, and usually self-cancelling. Productivity and progress is made and then you lose a third of your population to the plague. Some local thug brings together a respectable conglomeration of a nation-like entity and then is struck down by a fever and things fall apart, the center will not hold. These were Dark Ages but not pitch black - there were glimmers and some glacial progression in aggregate, on average.


So all Gabriele is doing is pitching a modern set of ideologically inspired myths to replace the more fact-based "myths" which are largely true and to which we are largely accustomed. He is a polluter of cognitive waters to serve a dissembling end. Ugh.