Barbarians at the Gate

Tonight, on American Idol…..

I am about half-way through Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade.

It is a fascinating book.

Fascinating because it deals with a period in history of which I know almost nothing.

The Early Middle Ages have always been a kind of placeholder – The Roman Empire collapses and Europe falls into a thousand years of the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. End of story.

In high school histories (at least when I went to high school) we were always taught that the ‘barbarians’ (like the Goths or the Vandals) had invaded Rome and taken the Empire to the ground. Like the painting above, Alaric and the Sack of Rome.

The barbarians, it turns out, were inside the Empire all the time.  The Romans, in a word, did it to themselves, and almost willingly.

In shorthand, that is true, but the nagging question is always, how does it happen? How does it happen that the Roman Empire, a successful, commercial, secular, productive, highly functioning society becomes the Europe of the Dark Ages? The Roman world is a place most of us would have felt extremely comfortable in.  The Dark Ages, not so.

What happened?

I was reminded of this when I read Charles M. Blow’s column on a speech by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  Speaking at a luncheon, O’Connor remarked:

“Only 1 in 7 Americans knows that John Roberts is chief justice of the Supreme Court, but two-thirds can name at least one judge of ‘American Idol,’”

I am sure this is true.

For many years I taught at New York University, and I found that my students were very bright and very badly educated. In fact, they knew almost nothing, but worse, when that was pointed out to them, they were unconcerned.  “I can always google it”, they said when asked when the American Civil War was or who Napoleon was.

They just didn’t care.

And in many ways, they were right. Because those kinds of facts were absolutely immaterial to their day to day lives or their work.  It didn’t matter. Their lack of knowledge had absolutely no impact on them what-so-ever.

This morning I read a blog by Claire Bell, who writes for Memeburn.com, a wonderful journalism site out of South Africa.

Her piece catalogues her inability to get any kind of decent paying journalism job. They just don’t exist anymore. Writes Bell:

It’s a scandal for the profession that in this so-called information age, the people who have the skills – and it takes skills – to gather information, and interpret it for the world in a digestible, entertaining and objective manner, have been shunted to the lowest rung on the ladder. Journalists are supposed to be in the business of writing about exploitation, not exploiting each other. Until we find a new, sustainable economic model, the world is in danger of drowning in celebrity gossip while the fat cats rape and pillage the earth – and no one can afford to report about it.

This on the heels of USA Today announcing that they are going to start out-sourcing their content to Demand Content, a kind of journalism sweat-shop.

What particularly struck me in Bell’s piece was her closing line:

Like monks and priests, we’ll end up dependent on the charity of strangers.

Well, for years, I have talked about Gutenberg and the impact of the printing press and how journalists would indeed parallel monks and priests, but now, after reading Bauer’s book, I cannot help but wonder if we are not on the other end of the time line.  Perhaps it is not the Renaissance that we are entering, but rather the Dark Ages.

The last Dark Ages was dominated by fear, ignorance and religious obsession.  Perhaps this one will be dominated by simply ignorance and celebrity obsession. Madonna instead of the Madonna, so to speak.

The thing about the Romans was that the Dark Ages did not arrive one day when the barbarians were at the gate, as depicted in the painting above.  Ironically, the Romans did it to themselves, slowly, incremental step by incremental step over a period of several hundred years.

Perhaps it would have come out differently if someone had had the courage and vision to stand before the Senate and the people of Rome and say, ‘hey, wait a minute, we’re making a big mistake here debasing our own society’.

Maybe

Perhaps our own society would be well served by someone also standing before the Senate or the people and saying, ‘hey, wait a minute, we’re making a big mistake here….”

But undoubtedly the response would be a resounding… ‘Borrrrrring!’

On with the show!