Now That’s What I Call Conservatism
Oh wow. The cat is out of the bag at Blogs for Bush:
Non-Believing Europe
By Mark Noonan at 05:51 AM[…]
Liberal and leftwing historical revisionists like to present a fairy tale of how Europe was hopelessly backwards and repressed until the Renaisance and Enlightenment freed Europe from the shackles of Christianity, thus producing the Europe which gave us such wonderful things as socialism, genocide and two World Wars (well, truth be told, they leave that last bit off – but they are certain that modern Europe is in every respect better than pre-modern Europe, and they are equally certain that it was the removal of Christianity which was at the core of making this wonderful new world). The real facts of the matter are, of course, that Christianity created European civilization – grafting on a whole new worldview to the decayed stump of Greco-Roman civilization which, in turn, led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization starting in the 12th century and going right on until Enlightenment types decided that everyone but them had it all wrong.
Great Jesus on a Hoppity-hop, this certainly puts Noonan’s authoritarian leanings in perspective. It’s literally a pre-911 mindset — if by ‘911’ you mean the year before the birth of Otto The Great.
Aboue: Marke Noonyne of Bushe his Blogges
The history is a head-spinning wad of buncombe, of course, but it also helps to account for his pellucid self-certainty in the face of overwhelming reason and evidence. It used to be tempting to see Noonan’s wavings-away of reality as an example of the very ‘culture of relativism’ he rails against — as the dreaded “That’s just your opinion” argument of that pernicious kind of ’70s kid who listened too well when told that you have to follow your heart, and it’s what you feel inside that counts.
Instead, though, a better analytical concept seems to be ‘piety.’ The hallmark of a Noonan argument, as opposed to a sane-people argument, is usually a bold, clear proclamation that some idea or fact or whatever is correct, or that some other idea or fact is false and wrong. The object is rarely to convince or illuminate — to build sky-castles of logic trying to justify to others that which is already known (by Noonan) to be true — but more simply to affirm:
What Media Bias? Part 78
By Mark Noonan at 03:53 AMA lot of our liberal/left readers have accused me of living in a dream world about Iraq – their contention being that it is a disaster, and I’m just too willfully blind to admit it. My contention, on the other hand, is that the news out of Iraq which would lead one to think it is a disaster is, well, a pack of lies dressed up as news. Flopping Aces has a prime example of this. First, via an AP story:
“Oh, okay,” is what none of his critics said after reading that. “That seems reasonable,” is the opposite of what they said whilst staring aghast at their monitors.
This idea of throwing 800 years of intellectual progress into the garbage can also helps to account for his ferrous-headed invulnerability to the Enlightenment notion of ‘intellectual consistency.’ Iraq goeth ful semely, quod Noonyne, but dear God, look at Mexico:
Mexico’s Descent Into Civil War?
By Mark Noonan at 12:42 PMWe might have to build that border fence – and man it with a lot of troops – faster than we think:
[…]
There is precisely nothing the United States can do for Mexico in this case – if Mexico falls, then it will have to be Mexicans who pick up the pieces and put it back together. Our job will be to provide what humanitarian assistence we can, but also to seal our borders tight lest 20 million Mexicans try to flee the collapse of their nation.
No, really — that’s what he wrote. All these posts are from a span of roughly a day and a half, believe it or not. Tomorrow there will be more, just as nonsensical in themselves, but forgive me for beginning to imagine, now, that they combine into something suggestive of a literary plot.
And also into a question: How many more of these nuttes of winge are like Mark Noonan, but insufficiently self-knowing (or too prudent) to proclaim, as Mark does, that they disagree with teh whole idea of Western Civilization, in its long decline from the Catarrhyptine golden age of (oh good gravy) roughly 1100-1350 AD?
You know, Mark, it’s not only the military that needs recruits.
Is this Noonan any relation to she of the magical dolphins?
Anyway, whomever are his relations, he sure doesn’t know a thing about European history … there were wars all the time in Europe. And Christian Europe wasn’t such a great place to be if you were a Jew or the wrong kind of Christian (btw, one thing that really bugs me as a Jew about the “we must always remember the Holocaust” crowd is how much some of them, for various reasons, manage to forget that the Holocaust was just the end of a long line of persecutions of the Jews by Christian Europe — hasn’t anybody heard of the Crusades and what they did to Jews then?).
Ortega y Gasset made an excellent point about the cause of WWI (and by extention about WWII):
The fact is this: from the time European history begins in the VIth Century up to the year 1800- that is, through the course of twelve centuries- Europe does not succeed in reaching a total population greater than 180 million inhabitants. Now, from 1800 to 1914- little more than a century- the population of Europe mounts from 180 to 460 millions!
Ortega y Gasset reached different conclusion about the chain of causation, but the simplest hypothesis given this data is that the reason WWI and WWII were so destructive is that there were so many people to kill and so much to destroy.
I wonder how the Mark Steyn’s of the world, not to mention the Quiverfull types, would react to realizing this?
Here’s my best guess. Mark Noonan knows, I mean really KNOWS that this is a load of smelly, three-day-old, rotting tripe. But he sees it all slipping away. The “clash of civilizations”, the great big war where we use all this cool strategic hardware, maybe even nukes, to kill litterally millions of those awful scary brown muslims. And now, Iraq’s a nightmare, the dems won the election, rumsfelds’ gone, people are talking about, of all fucking things, diplomacy and Mark’s heart is breaking even as his erection is deflating. So he has this forum, and he’s not sure how much influence he has, but by gawd if he has any at all he’s going to use it to push the world just a little closer to the massive, industrial-scale killing of his fevered dreams…
mikey
So let me get this right, should Mexico devolve into a civil war, what we need to do is gtf out of the way so they can work it out for themselves, send some wheat and band-aids, and shoot anyone trying to flee. There’s nothing constructive that, say, a military presence or assistance might accomplish.
Iraq, on the other hand…
It’s a really weird interpretation of history, kindof a throwback to the way a Marxist would interpret history, in an overbroad generalizing kind of way that simply plows under any inconvenient facts. But as I said in a previous thread, the right is the the new Albanian Left. So form now on I will just use the short form Albanian to refer to these Noonan types. It’s so backwards and obsurantist, its Albanian. The Albanian right.
Anyway its obvious he hasn’t read anything important, certainly no primary sources, except perhaps the bible. If he had he would know that the Enlightenment was less a rupture with Christianity than a fulfillment or an extension of European Christian culture. He would also have a better understanding of why some thinkers such as Voltaire were anti-clerical. The degeneracy of the Renaissance Papacy and the corruption of the French clergy in th 17th century simply does not register. His whole thing is a denial of history, history as fiction, as ideological plaything, a useful tool to help him prove his right wing points.
Is he a Bob Jones University graduate? How does someone become so detached from Western Civilization?
Jane Jacobs Dark Age ahead seems more plausble to me with such cultural illiterates running around.
WOW. I never thought anyone could be crazier/more fascist than Dan Riehl or Hinderaker. Wow, wow, wow. That is simply astonishing.
Jane Jacobs Dark Age ahead seems more plausble to me with such cultural illiterates running around.
The name ‘Jane Jacobs’ makes me swoon with love… There are never many thinkers like her, in any age.
“How many more of these people are like Mark Noonan, only insufficiently self-knowing (or too prudent) to proclaim, as Mark does, that they disagree with the whole idea of Western Civilization, in its long decline from the Catarrhyptine golden age of (oh good gravy) roughly 1100-1350 AD?”
1100? Oh, sure, some of you effete East Coast poseurs may favor those godless modern times with your illegal-alien-attracting agriculture and your tax-encouraging arithmatic and your homosexual-influenced tapestries.
Real, decent people stick with prehistory. Life was nasty, brutish, and short, and by God, we liked it that way. And let’s face it, speaking of God, He’s great and all, but he sort of defected to the Democrat Party in the New Testament, didn’t he? Spare me the class warfare about needles and camels, Jesus, son of Jose and Maria. Give me that old-time religion any time — OLD time, when a smite was a smite and cities knew that if they allowed a gay pride parade they could wind up as a pile of brimstone.
“Liberal and leftwing historical revisionists”?
I guess Mark is referring to Edward Gibbon–that notorious 1770s-vintage lefty–who blamed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire on Christianity.
Or maybe he’s talking about Jacob Burckhardt, that Swiss dude who glorified the Renaissance at the expense of the Middle Ages and whose work has been reprinted as a Liberty Classic, part of the conservative “canon”.
Or maybe he’s talking about Petrarch, who actually coined the term Dark Ages and who considered all of Western history after the fall of Rome to be a reign of barbarism. But then Petrarch was some sort of Eyetalian, wasn’t he? All that praise of Cicero proves that he hated our freedom.
Gee Mark, go to school much?
Such mind numbing stupidity makes my head hurt
1) Socialism — tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Matthew 19:24
I don’t know about you but that definitely doesn’t sound like trickle down economic theory to me
2) Genocide: Has he never heard of the phrase “And they made it a desert and called it peace?” Totally not invented by the enlightenment. He might also be interested in knowing what happened at the Storming of Jerusalem
3) World Wars. Umm, the crusades dude? The hundred years war? Nope, Europe was nice and peaceful from the fall of the Roman Empire up until those pesky enlightenment thinkers started mucking everything up.
So, if I follow this correctly, we take wingnut advice and “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” and peace and progress follows as surely as night follows day.
The first officially Christian nation was Armenia (301 AD). And yet Nooner’s famed Christian age of peace and progress doesn’t start until 1200. Sure, it takes a millennium to get to all that peace and progress, but heck that is the inexorable law of history.
Guess that puts GWB’s recent “there is no graceful exit from Iraq” comments in their proper timetable.
Spare me the class warfare about needles and camels, Jesus, son of Jose and Maria. Give me that old-time religion any time — OLD time, when a smite was a smite and cities knew that if they allowed a gay pride parade they could wind up as a pile of brimstone.
Alright, that made me laugh. “when a smite was a smite”
But if a citiy allowed a gay pride parade, wouldn’t they have ended up a pile of salt?
…Christianity created European civilization – grafting on a whole new worldview to the decayed stump of Greco-Roman civilization which, in turn, led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization starting in the 12th century…
Well, real history has a pronounced liberal bias.
Bonus points for any winger linking to this dreck after having bewailed Muslim nations as being “pre-Enlightenment” “primitive” or “medieval”.
Triple word score bonus points if someone can find Mark Noonan himself contradicting his “Enlightenment Baaaad” post.
Real history, like the biosphere, has a tendency to make conservatives look like blithering idiots.
It ain’t hard…
Shorter Mark Noonan: Me fail English? That’s unpossible!
Man, that is some high-grade stupidity right there. That’s “Black Adder” stupid: as stupid as an extremely stupid thing competing in a stupid contest on the stupidest day of its life. My favorite bit? His counter to the “lefty liberal reinterpretation of history” that taints all mainstream scholarly views of Western History is backed up by…absolutely nothing. He makes no cites or quotes no serious historians to back his claim, that I could see. Fucking beautiful.
I’ve seen this argument in the last few days or so. One of the dumber trolls on P.Z. Myers’ site – which attracts some true lulus – used it the other day and got stomped by the regulars. This actually brings to mind a recurring philosophical disagreement concerning certain ideas put forth by folks like Robert Anton Wilson and those thieves that put out that wretched What The Bleep Do We Know booshwa. We both agree that, yes, it’s an interesting idea that consciousness might affect reality in a Jungian sense, but it makes more sense to me to remember something our old pappaw told both of us as young lads. “Boys,” he’d say as we all sat on his knee*, “Do something, don’t just sit there wishin’ the rest of the world gave a shit what you think.”
You can’t change reality with your mind and you can’t change history just coz you say so. Reality doesn’t give a damn.
*Poppaw had a long knee.
Shorter (Next Week) Noonan: “Hammurabi was a fucking pinko. We need to get back to our roots.”
BTW, Gavin, “Pre-911 mindset” was awesome.
Shorter (In Two Weeks) Noonan: “Where Justinian Went Wrong.�
I read the first entry and could read no more. The “Renaisance” (which he can’t even spell correctly) gave us socialism and genocide?
Are there any decent universities out there any more? I haven’t been to school in a while, but idiots like this are the reason I stopped going to bars. I tended to end up in brawls with morons such as Noonan, as I could not let stupidity stand.
But it obviously stands, proudly, and that’s why Bush is our Prez.
Christ on a cracker, I have a hard time believing we were once a positive world presence. Or maybe we weren’t.
Time for a Rolling Rock.
Shorter (In Three Weeks) Noonan: “Fucking Australopithecines ruined everything.�
Well, I’m a medievalist, and I wish I could laugh at Noonan’s nonsense. People have pretty much called it, though. It’s generally accepted that the 12th c. Renaissance also inaugurates antisemitism. Sure, there’s anti-Judaism prior to that (see: the Church Fathers, the Visigothic Code, Agobard of Lyons), but it really takes people like Adamar of Chabanes (admittedly 11th c.), Peter the Venerable, Thomas of Monmouth, and keep going to really get antisemitism proper to take off. And so, at the very ‘birth’ of European civilization (you know, just ignoring the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissances), you get pogroms. Which leads, no doubt, to the leftist critique of the Enlightenment. I mean, sweet Jeebus, this guy’s a twit.
I’d love to fail him.
There were apparently no wars in Europe before the enlightenment. Hmm.
But if a citiy allowed a gay pride parade, wouldn’t they have ended up a pile of salt?
I think that’s only if you look back at it. Ergo, no looking back. Ergo, no studying history. It all makes sense now.
He makes no cites or quotes no serious historians to back his claim, that I could see.
See, that’s Enlightenment thinking right there. Use facts or citations to back a rational argument? He’s already rejected that. His whole point is to abandon rationality, logic, intellectual rigor, scientific method, and all that lefty librul stuff.
I quit paying any attention to Mark Noonan a long, long time ago. The man is certifiable.
Shorter (In Three Weeks) Noonan: “Draco the Bleeding-Heart Liberal.�
Marke Noonyne of Bushe his Blogges
That’s exactly why I can’t stop coming here. Gavin, you da bomb.
[I revised a bit, btw.]
Uh, there’s maybe something I’m missing here, but did all you Americans spring from the ground in 1492 speaking English?
Last time I looked, we had something of a shared cultural heritage.
Has anybody ever told the wingnuts?
Wait until he finds out about Mara Salvatrucha in Central America, the guerrillas and paramilitaries in Colombia, and the regionalist movement in eastern Bolivia. He’ll have Imminent Destruction, Terror, and Mayhem South of the Rio Grande stories for weeks.
[Revised again, finally finished]
[Sorry to keep doing that!]
Oh, and on that genocide thingie…..
Could somebody please, please, please send Noonan a copy of the Book of Joshua? Considering that Ye Olde Chriftian Europe’s roots are firmly in the Old Testament and all?
I heard Mexico is a failed state and a breeding ground for terrorists, and a guy named Whoopsydaisy told me that they’re trying to buy nuclear weapons from Canada. Send in the Marines!
sorry to interrupt, but it seems that editorandpublisher has started YWIII (youtube war three).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1PEyzk4ADU
to the barricades!
nuttes of winge
bwahahahaah. That made my afternoon.
…which, in turn, led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization starting in the 12th century and going right on until Enlightenment types decided that everyone but them had it all wrong.
Original post title: Thomas Jefferson Was Such a DICK
I haven’t seen the phrase “Enlightenment types” used so derisively since that infamous August 1718 issue of National Review.
Like Karl the GM I’m also a professional medievalist, and I can confirm that yes, Noonan is full of crap. The idea that Christianity created Europe is incredibly simplistic; it’s more correct to say that the institutions of medieval Europe, of which Christianity was a crucial but not the only part, laid the groundwork for the institutions of modern Europe. And no, few scholars actually regard medieval Europe as “hopelessly backwards and repressed”; it was incredibly vibrant and creative for its time and place — which is neither now nor here.
Christians with links to Dominionist movements hate the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment thinking placed rationality in the privileged seat held by faith up until that point. The only way these types will ever get their perfect Christian state is if they can replace rationalist thought once again with faith-based thinking.
Not saying Noonan’s got Dominionist ties…..but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He seems the type. I’m too lazy to dig into it right now, though.
But yeah, one of the flanks in the current culture war is a full scale frontal assault on the Enlightenment. It’s part of what makes these dipsticks so dangerous – I like the things I’ve gotten from the Enlightenment. Like, say, antibiotics. And electricity. And (seeing as I’m a woman) some degree of civil rights.
Gah…I’ll try not to get started on this…I could go on for way too long if I do.
Jeebus, I’ve been saying for a while now that these bastards were anti-Enlightenment, but I’d never seen such a naked statement of it…
Since pre-Enlightenment Europe was such a peachy time and place, is there any way we could send him back to, oh, I dunno, any time in the half-century prior to the Treaty of Westphalia? He’s got a woody for the slaughter wrought upon the Ottomans and that whole Gates of Vienna thing, but maybe we could arrange for him to experience the flip side of all that and let someone unleash the Mother Courage Experience on his scrawny ass.
led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization starting in the 12th century and going right on until Enlightenment types decided that everyone but them had it all wrong.
so, um, I am wrong in recollecting that the “massive flowering” of Christian civilization in Europe were numerous branches of Christianity breaking off from the Roman Catholic Church? And wasn’t the contention of those same people that “everyone but them had it all wrong”? And wasn’t there actually a lot of fighting and stuff about this?
History will show that one of the founding members of the American Taliban got his start writing for Blogs for Bush and GOP Bloggers. That is, unless some proverbial bright tinsel distracts Noonan for the next couple of years.
The inexorable inscience of the American right writ small.
Gah…I’ll try not to get started on this…I could go on for way too long if I do.
Oh, let ‘er rip. I spent a long time thinking about Noonan today, and it would help clean out my poor, abused cortex…
The object is rarely to convince or illuminate — to build sky-castles of logic trying to justify to others that which is already known (by Noonan) to be true — but more simply to affirm:
“Affirm?” Is that something like, “swear?”
The fact is that Mark Noonan holds the Renaissance to blame for the bad experience he had at a Renaissance Fayre. Turned down brutally by the serving wench at Ye Stunned Mullet Spiced-Ale Shoppe.
All this time, I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that there was a Clash of Civilisations going on, with the Islamists being the bad guys on account of their opposition to Enlightenment Values. But now, it seems, we are at war with Enlightenment values; we have always been at war with Enlightenment values. Clearly I am missing something. Does this mean that the Islamists are the good guys?
The sun really does revolve around George Dubya Bush (and by extension, this planet). Damn that Copernicus!
Herr Dok. In the mid seventies, wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out how to live in the world, every year I could work at RenFair. Gawd, that was fun. You needed your own costume and your own weapons (but the rules around bared steel were harsh), but it was a place out of time, and let me just say, after you all left, the parties ran all night, and were unlike anything I’ve ever experienced…
mikey
Um, Gary? Gary, are you here? Hey, I think we found your Dustbin of History. Mark Noonan’s been eating out of it. Thought you’d wanna know.
All is revealed in his bio-bit on the Boogs for Bush site. He begins, aping in some deficient way the opening lines of so many great novels, “Born absurdly…” The rest is history.
I think we found your Dustbin of History. Mark Noonan’s been eating out of it.
That does it — it’s officially Beer O’clock.
Oh, so the Enlightenment caused the two World Wars! Now we know why the Nazis used to carry around pictures of Voltaire.
Somebody tell Noonan that the Renaissance Festival is fun, but it has as much relationship to the real middle ages as a Trekkie convention has to the Space Shuttle.
Smiling Mort puts this round to bed.
Well played, sir; well played.
The real facts of the matter are, of course, that Christianity created European civilization –
Has anyone seen Mark Noonan and Gary Ruppert together?
grafting on a whole new worldview to the decayed stump of Greco-Roman civilization which, in turn, led to a massive flowering of distinctly Christian civilization
He so totally stole that metaphor from James A. Michener, The Source… the Judeo-Christian tradition as an ancient olive tree, weather-beaten and riddled with decay but continually sending forth new green shoots of vitality, blah blah…
I read the first entry and could read no more. The “Renaisance� (which he can’t even spell correctly) gave us socialism and genocide?
Classic Strauss.
The Enlightenment led to the death of God (meaning authority, natural respect for hierarcy, etc..). The death of God naturally leads to nihilism and materialism (genocide and socialism).
Not that Strauss actually believed in any of the supernatural horseshit, but it was very, very, necessary that folk like this fool do. Lest they start getting putting their own little thinking caps on and screwing around with the people who know what they are doing.
Is this Noonan any relation to she of the magical dolphins?
Perhaps ‘Noonan’ in the original Gaelic means something like ‘One who loudly refuses to permit vulgar reality to obtrude upon their beautiful phantasies.’ My people bred an arseload of those romantics, due in no little part to the invention of uisebheagh, or ‘water of life’ (/snark). Unfortunately, when we read the amazingly wrongheaded cruft that Marcus Ohreallius and his ilk churn out, we’re the ones who end up with a pounding headache and a nasty taste in our mouths…
I soooo need the preview button to return from the dead!
I’m with RobW. “Aboue: Marke Noonyne of Bushe his Blogges” is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve seen a kitten riding a dachshund.
WF
Maybe I’ll pretend this is the pixil version of hand calligraphy.
Shyte! Mye appologyes to all, for I give up.
Anne Laurie, you just keep slingin the words, ASCII will set us all free, and let the style formatting fall where it may.
mikey
Gavin, stop photoshopping all your posts! It makes ’em show up about 15 times in my feed reader!
A SadNo! post should be a shiny nickel deep down inside the dustbin of history.
And useless edits constitute currency defacement.
Mikey: Do you still have your leather mug? Huzzah!
So the 30 years war was okay by him? A full scale religous war that devestated Germany leaving it a moslty smoking ruin – this he is okay with. And the Rights of Man not so much.
Putz.
Sorry Ye Putz.
All I know is you guys make me weep with joy. Weep, I tell you.
Gavin, stop photoshopping all your posts! It makes ‘em show up about 15 times in my feed reader!
A SadNo! post should be a shiny nickel deep down inside the dustbin of history.
And useless edits constitute currency defacement.
But…that’s how I roll!
Thank you, I’ve been waiting for a reason to use this quote by, I think,physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and these Blogs for Bush posts provide it in spades:
“This isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong.”
Speaking of rolling, Gavin…
In the mid seventies, wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out how to live in the world, every year I could work at RenFair. Gawd, that was fun. You needed your own costume and your own weapons (but the rules around bared steel were harsh), but it was a place out of time, and let me just say, after you all left, the parties ran all night, and were unlike anything I’ve ever experienced…
mikey
Ye goddes… Long-suppressed memories flooding back now, though myne faires wyre in the ’80s…
With apologies to Kid Rock: Ain’t no party like a RenFair party, cuz a RenFair party don’t stop!
Seriously, folks. You should really see what happens after the tourists leave and the gates close.
Herr Doktor Bimler said,
All this time, I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that there was a Clash of Civilisations going on, with the Islamists being the bad guys on account of their opposition to Enlightenment Values.
Dok, I just posted a shorter version of this comment over there at Bushe his Blogges; sorry to plagiarize, but this point was just too good. Let’s see if it gets past their moderation. Somehow I doubt it.
You think he’d want to try spin some sort of christianity laid the ground work for Western Democracy, or something but instead he seems to jump right in and claim the Dark Ages. Huh.
“WOW. I never thought anyone could be crazier/more fascist than Dan Riehl or Hinderaker. Wow, wow, wow. That is simply astonishing. ”
Fascism?! What are you some kind of progressive? No, this old school, divine right of kings, prima nocturne, shit. Feudalism, bitches?!
But…that’s how I roll!
He’s tryna catch you ridin’ photoshoppy.
Haha. You should put spinners and neons on the ol’ logo then, Gav. Maybe some low-low hydrolics, for when you goes pimpin’ on the Ghetto Side of the blogosphere, poppin’ caps in the asses of the ‘nuts with your photoshizzle, all crunked up.
Or am I taking this to far?
Oh, Mark Noonan makes me long for those halcyon days of the Black Death and the 100 Year’s War, and the slaughter of the Albigensians! Yes, those were the days; the days where men were serfs and only the clergy could write, and only they could read the Bible which was printed only in Latin. When everyone knew the sun revolved around the earth, and that if you sailed too far east in the Atlantic, you’d fall off the edge of the world.
Yes, those were the days, before those pesky Renaissance men came and ruined it all!
Because when they call them the Dark Ages, they mean that in the best possible way.
Now we know why the Nazis used to carry around pictures of Voltaire.
… not to mention why their (Wehrmacht’s) belt buckles had “Gott mit uns” (God with us) inscribed on them.
[…] Original post by Gavin M. Tags: Christian Dating […]
Has Peggys’ little boy ever even seen a history book, let alone read one?
Forgive me if this is all too well-known, but speaking of civil strife, Mark Noonan is the author of this little bit of infamy:
The “indictment” of Tom Delay is entirely bogus – from what I’ve read, Tom Delay didn’t know about the perfectly legal transaction he is accused of conspiring to make. We have now left entirely the field of normal political conflict and entered a twilight world where fantasy is presented as fact and the only standard of conduct is “will it work?”. This is not the actions of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority – it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and seize all power for itself…it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made…
I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge – you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received. If you can’t defeat Tom Delay in the electoral field, then you will simply have to accept him as Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives – and you’d better start accepting political reality before things get really bad.
The benighted Noonans et al used to be consigned to the darkest corner of the bar along with the pay phone and the wet-naps. Intermittently, sunspots or changes in the earth’s magnetic field would arouse them from hermetic stupor to geyser spouts of nonsense aimed at no one in particular . Now they have the Internet, to our delight.
While not wishing to defend the nuttiness of Mr. Noonan, the depiction of the middle ages by the propagandists of the renaissance and enlightenment was polemic and often fallacious. For instance, the “ius primae noctis” which so often forms part of enlightenment and post-entlightenment discourse on the middle ages had no base in fact. Renaissance polemics against the middle ages structurally actually were a bit like Noonan’s, only their “golden age” was the time of Greeks and Romans with their slave-based economy, at times genocidal wars etc. which at times went a long way to deny their own medieval roots or that there was anything good about the middle ages (maybe something useful like the horse-collar and other medieval inventions that transformed agriculture were too mundane for Petrarch and co.) and even areas where the middle ages outdid antiquity, such as architecture were maligned as “barbaric” (hence the propaganda term “Gothic”).
The ironic thing is that the very concept of progress seems to be medieval (apparently invented by Joachim of Fiore), as up until then history was described as a constant decline from a past golden age or as going through a series of recurring cycles or at best as static (the “Roma aeterna” idea of the Roman Empire).
Everything’s gone down hill since the gay atheist treasonous appeasers let Copernicus and Galileo off with a slap on the limp wrist …
It’s the Muslims fault for keeping all those Greek and Roman books in hiding even after we burned the entire library of Alexandria and declared Mission Accomplished.
It’s the Indians fault for inventing zero and creating a mathematical symbol of my value to early 21st century civilization.
If you’re going to take Noonan to task for his ignorance of history, perhaps you should demonstrate that you all know more about it. It is a bit funny to see quite a few posters here relying on the good old myths and caricatures about the middle ages (oh, those crazy medieval people, they thought you would fall off the edge of the world if you sailed too far! (BTW, lovely slip-up about sailing too far EAST on the Atlantic!) and talk as if labeling an era as the “dark ages” actually makes them dark. (Besides that there seems to be a bit of straw-man arguments, because at least in the quoted part I don’t see where Noonan denied that there were wars (or pandemics) in the middle ages). Fact is, the middle ages were a great deal more complex and more “modern” than most people are accustomed to and comfortably like to think since the Renaissance. The break between the Renaissance and what came before was not as radical as both the propagandists of the Renaissance and Mr. Noonan like to think, in many ways it (and to some extent also the Englightenment) continued and built on the medieval legacy.
Guess the habits are too deeply ingrained – in common usage the term “medieval” is loaded, when you call something medieval it is nearly always meant in a negative way; in general, something medieval is seen as not as good as something that goes back to antiquity (example of the former: universities, example of the latter: chattel slavery in which slaves are treated as objects).
BTW, playing devil’s advocate for a minute: if the middle ages can be blamed for Galileo’s problems, is Enlightenment to blame for the much more serious problems non-adherents of Lysenkoism ran into under Stalin?
The Albigensians had it coming, with all their… Albigensing around like that.
Oh, Mark Noonan makes me long for those halcyon days of the Black Death and the 100 Year’s War, and the slaughter of the Albigensians! Yes, those were the days; the days where men were serfs and only the clergy could write, and only they could read the Bible which was printed only in Latin. When everyone knew the sun revolved around the earth, and that if you sailed too far east in the Atlantic, you’d fall off the edge of the world.
First, Menshevik, thanks. You’ll see there’s a few professional medievalists in this thread. I’m one of them. So, 1) serfdom isn’t something that endemic throughout the middle ages. So far as I know–and this is way outside my field of specialty–you have slaves, and you have free peasants, up until, say, the 11th c. And you have serfs for a while, but in some places, that lasts only a couple of centuries. In other places, notoriously Russia, you don’t have serfs at all prior to, what, the 17th or 18th c. So, yeah, it’s a great deal more complicated, and, at any rate, there’s not a great deal of difference–in terms of freedom of movement, in terms of freedom of labor, in terms of quality of life–between a serf and people working in a pre-union factory, whether we’re in England c. 1800 or China or South Carolina c. now; 2) a great many people other than clerics could write. Chaucer, for instance. Literacy becomes an important skill for secular elites and their employees in the 12th c., but you really should say reading rather than writing, since writing is something you hire someone else to do, at least if you have the money to do that. You have to think literacy, in other words, in a different way than we do now; 3) translations of the Bible into vernacular languages begin with translations into Old English in pre-Conquest England. There’s a break of a hundred years or so, and then we start to see a huge amount of biblical material translated into French in the 12th and 13th centuries, both on the Continent and in England. You probably know the translations into Middle English in the late 14th/early 15th centuries best, but only because those Lollard translators had an ideological program of democratizing information: which explains why they were chased into exile, silenced, or burned at the stake; 4) the sun around the Earth thing, you’ll remember, continues to be an error well into the “modern” era (which is an era, you’ll know, rife with religious conflict: someone mentioned the 30 years war, above, and the French massacres of the Huguenots); 5) people knew the earth was round in the MA.
Now, I mentioned critiques of the Enlightenment, above. Noonan, knowing nothing, likely doesn’t know anything about critical theory, so he doesn’t know deeder about the Frankfurt School, but there have been critiques of the Enlightenment from the left at least since the 1920s, right?
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You know what’s funny and sad to me? Noonan’s an Irish name, right? Why the f would an Irishman long for the 12th c.? Is he crazy? It’s sort of like an Irishman falling in love with Cromwell or Churchill.
If you’re going to take Noonan to task for his ignorance of history, perhaps you should demonstrate that you all know more about it.
I only wish that I had conceived of Noonan when I wrote Praise of Folly. That is all I shall say on that subject, beeyotch.
2006 – Her swealt Noonanus from him selfum ofsticod.
I learned everything I know about European history from Eddie Izzard and I still know more than this guy. Sheesh…
the propagandists of the Renaissance
how do I get that gig?
Well, I actually was going to dig into the Noonan oeuvre to see what sort of Dominionist connections I could find, but in an act of astonishing Christian charity and compassion, my motherboard self-immolated before I could start, saving me from looking at any of his logorrhea. For real….I’m on a friend’s computer right now. Hopefully mine’ll be up and running by Monday.
It’s really this infamous article that makes me peg Noonan as a Dominionist sympathizer. it’s a pretty classic page from their playbook.
Evolution is, oddly enough, probably the the most significant frontline battle in the culture wars. In fact, if you make an analogy where the forces of secular rationalism are Stalin’s Russia and the forces of Christian theocracy are Hitler’s Germany, then the battle over evolution is the equivqalent of the occupation of the Ruhr. It seems like a small enough thing – unless you’ve been paying attention to what your enemy has planned. If you’ve been paying attention, it’s the start of something much bigger, much worse.
The deal with evolution is that it provides us with a secular, materialist account of the origins of humanity (not the origins of life, mind: the origins of humanity). In doing this, it usurps TWO of the domains traditionally reserved for religion – it tells a “creation story”, and it uses reason and empirical inquiry to do so. This puts it in direct, unavoidable confrontation with literalist understandings of the Bible. And in doing so, it cuts directly at the heart of literalist morality and authority – by giving us a reasonable alternative.
The people who want to see this country completely goverened by the tenets laid out in a literalist reading of the Bible cannot allow such a competing mythology to go unchallenged. And that’s exactly how they see it, too: as a series of competing metanarratives (It’s funny how the Biblical literalists seem to be so inspired by the freewheelingly liberal poststructuralists, but there you go).
To these guys, any time there is a conflict between basing a decision on reason and basing a decision on faith, you’re in a situation where you are confronting two alternate and equally valid views of the world: one inspired by God, and one inspired by the fallen, sinful world. Don’t ask me how they reconcile stuff like the germ theory of disease or anything, because I haven’t figured it out myself.
The clearest place where this insanity gets laid out that I know of is in something called the Wedge Document. They don’t even bother to hide what they’re up to, clearly stating that they want to “replace materialistic explanations [in science] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”. Ironically enough, this brings us right back around to our good friends at the Discovery Institute, as the Wedge Document was produced by them.
Sheesh. That’s enough for right now, I think. I need a drink after that.
Jillian, not to short-change a great post, but I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t point out the single funniest chunk of wordage I’ve ever read here — and of course it’s funniest because it was written by you:
that makes me peg Noonan
Oh, lord.
I think I’m going to go scrub my brain with bleach and then drink way, way, way too much.
‘scuse me.
I’m no expert (actually, I am in a way) but I’d say just drinking ought to do it. Skip the bleach.
Frankly, I was expecting some mention of the Spanish Inquisition.
Ah, portly, so you’re the one. Are you by any chance sitting in the comfy chair?
Catarrhyptine is a beautiful word.
Google claims it exists only on this page. We need to expand its seductions.
Biggest dating portal in the world, come meet women tonight!…
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[…] with a man who says that Enlightenment notions of universal rights and intrinsic human worth ruined the perfect Christian civilization of 12th-century Europe, but it’s been something of a subtext to our brutal, years-long mockery of Mark that we kind […]