A serious case of the mirror and the lamp
(The allusion, dear readers, is to Middlemarch and Eliot's brilliant metaphor of the candle that makes random scratches on the surface of a mirror appear to run in concentric circles.)
I am still finding myself going WTF over one of the papers I heard recently, which was positing a deeply embedded binarism in Western Civ since, well, at least the Romans (or maybe it was the Ancient Greeks) and why this meant that monolithic World States were the utopian dreams of a fantasising imagination.
Yr hedjog can see lots of problems with the concept of a monolithic World State (Let's Do The All More Complicated Bop one more time) but I doubt that these are reducible to 'two contending forces will inevitably emerge'.
I meantersay, only *TWO*????
But my main objection was to the Bad History being used to ground this argument. I do not know much about medieval and early modern history (undergraduate courses many years gone by, why, practically back in those days when it was cutting-edge contemporary.)
Okay, yes, the Holy Roman Emperor/Pope thing was big in ye medievals, but, you know, I don't think everybody lined up behind one or the other except for personal strategic motives in particular circs.
It be many years since I did anything pertaining to the history of religious orders in the Middle Ages, but perhaps somebody could confirm that a) there were more orders of friars than just Franciscan and Dominican and b) if you must posit a binary, surely that betwixt this exciting new let's go out into the community movement and your more trad monasticism is the one the smart money might be on?
Plus, my knowledge of modern European political systems is not what it might be, but my general sense is that quite a swathe of states in the EC have representative bodies composed of a plethora of parties and that government is always going to be about forming coalitions. (Will concede that I am possibly basing this on a tour of Dutch Parliament in The Hague with perhaps TMI about current system in the swish contemporary areas when we actually wanted to look at the old bits.)
Clearly I am still working out the cramp in my hands from sitting on them! Because I did not feel it was an occasion to get up, pull out my codfish and go 'That's not right; that's not even wrong; it's practically delusional'.
Speaker contended that this presentation might be controversial, but I think WTF =/= controversial, don't you?
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