Just finished Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, about the great medievalists of the 20th century. It’s uneven, but considering the range of figures he deals with it’s understandable. He can’t be an expert on the life and work of every medievalist of the 20th century. But the weak passages are outweighed by the strong ones. Particularly striking is the book’s closing. In the last few pages, Cantor predicts a “retromedieval revival” in the coming 21st century (the book is copyrighted 1991). He also predicts an inevitable end of the modern world.
Scarcely anybody believes anymore in capitalism and socialism as value systems. We endure them as ways of social existence, as instruments for physical survival, but we draw no emotional sustenance from them—except for a handful of archaic fanatics or manipulators of vested partisan interest. So we have found our inspiration and teleologies elsewhere, in cultural systems. Since medievalism much more than classicism incorporates the religious faiths of our grandparents, as well as the artistic and erotic sensibilities of our parent’s generation, and because of the richness and diversity of the medieval world, wherein anybody can find an aspect of special significance and proximity, medievalism sustains itself and flourishes as the cultural structure of a compelling value system. In the strange world of the twenty-first century, when so much of the Victorian and modernist worlds will have been swept away into obsolescence and uselessness, medievalism bids fair to increase greatly its importance in our lives.
….
Like the Roman Empire, the modern age will crumble from the crack of inordinate greatness beyond the interest of the many and the desire of the privileged few to sustain, and in the murky streets of ruined cities and meeting grounds of a billion humble habitations, our heroes and saints will show us how to begin history anew.
I would be suspicious of his assertions, if I had not already encountered them elsewhere. Phyllis Tickle’s deeply flawed but still compelling book, The Great Emergence, also argues that the modern age, having begun with the Renaissance, is now ending. Recent events seem to verify that the systems the modern world was built on are irreparably flawed, and that new political, economic, scientific, and social models will have to be devised. In fact, I recently read an article (I can’t remember where) that used the term “social capitalism.” The author concluded that capitalism and socialism have both lost credibility, and that people are now looking for a more practical hybrid system.
Cantor makes a few other predictions, too many to list here. It will be interesting to see how accurate he ultimately is. Current events make him pretty convincing so far.