For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues — the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked rats, fleas, and lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next.
Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out nocturnal marauders. Public executions drew massive crowds. And religious schisms and conflicts often turned deadly.
In other words, it was not altogether unfamiliar to the world we are becoming today.
Yet meanwhile, science advanced quietly among true elites at universities, courts, and monasteries, producing windmills, mechanical clocks, and eyeglasses. Sophisticated crossbows were manufactured in great numbers. Large, multi-sail warships were built that could cross narrow seas.
Some of history’s greatest literature — Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae — was the product of the medieval mind.
We still gaze dumbfounded at the architectural genius and beauty of the colossal cathedrals of Cologne, Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome, and Seville. The Byzantine cathedral Hagia Sophia may have risen near the beginning of the medieval period and for a millennium, nothing rivaled its majesty. All these medieval architectural masterpieces were built without computers, porta-potties, overtime, or building permits.
Yet after the collapse of the classical world (circa A.D. 500), Western civilization still needed a millennium to recover even a modicum of its lost knowledge and technology. Centuries passed before the Renaissance saw hygienic principles of sewage systems, aqueducts, and waste disposal — not to mention the medical expertise of classically trained doctors and scientists.
Yet our progressive-regressive modern West is now suddenly beginning to resemble the medieval age — with one important caveat: after centuries of so-called “progress,” we should know better.
Our mounting urban filth, dangerous streets, and resurgent diseases are juxtaposed with brilliant revolutions in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, robotics, satellite technology, spaceflight, and cancer research.
Unlike their counterparts in the medieval fiefdom, our officials know how to stop disease, crime, and filth but apparently choose not to. Their neglect grows out of a sick ideology that divides the world into the blameworthy “oppressors” and the blameless “oppressed.” The victim is always right and must be championed — at least from a distance or as long as he does not show up smelly on your doorstep.
We have just experienced a tribal invasion of millions of impoverished foreigners swarming across our southern border — until the belated resumption of border-wall construction, medieval-style, and the deployment of detested patrols who try bravely to stop them.
Western urban street crime seems to require the army to restore calm yet often grows unchecked when troops are barred from helping police.
It is technically illegal for people to camp out on public sidewalks or someone else’s property — unless they do so in such numbers that paralyzed city officials look the other way.
Defecation, urination, fornication, and drug injection are now routine spectacles for hurried sidewalk passersby. If Los Angeles or Berkeley allows its streets and sidewalks to become medieval, should we be surprised by outbreaks there of deadly medieval diseases like typhus and leptospirosis — or that our storm drains now double as sewage gutters?
Today’s mayors will not stop rats from breeding, while officials — most recently in Los Angeles, for example — consider proposals for taxpayer-funded “hygienic sexual-relief clinics” offering homeless people “private sexual relief through masturbation.”
In New York, some of the richest people in the world sidestep rancid piles of rat-infested trash. In San Francisco and Chicago, some of the world’s greatest cancer researchers check their shoe soles for human feces before entering their space-age labs.
Weirder still, the Western world has become both the most regulated and the most lawless civilization on the planet. Our state environmental detectives visit industries to ensure that their effluvia do not contain one part per billion of a particular toxic substance. And state and federal regulators, with dozens of letters after their names, examine daily microscopic traces of dangerous toxins in the bubbling pools of sewage at treatment plants.
Yet under cover of darkness, masked city workers decked out in hazmat suits, rubber boots, and gloves use high-pressure hoses to blast politically correct feces, urine, blood, and drug detritus into storm drains. These modern marvels carry the mess out to pollute supposedly pristine ocean waters — where a fisherman can be fined a small fortune for tossing an inert, empty soda can into the smelly water. In the modern West, one-billionth of Roundup is a threat to civilization; tons of feces on city sidewalks are not. The theory? The more the law-abiding are monitored to the nth degree, the more society can withstand exempting the lawless to do as they wish.
How strange is our postmodern medieval intersection between barbarity and civilization?
Western civilization mostly phased out public executions nearly a century ago. But before it congratulates itself on its distance from the medieval world, consider that the therapeutic Left now canonizes, rather than hangs, murderers. (Which is more medieval: to hang a murderer or to romanticize a known assassin?)
Luigi Mangione assassinated Brian Robert Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in a December 2024 ambush and pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from the killing this month. He has been deified by scores of young leftist women who swoon over the trust-fund scion’s good looks and politically correct violence. Indeed, admirers even produced a musical about his supposedly heroic murder of the health care executive.
Charlie Kirk was grotesquely murdered during a livestreamed public event, after which, for months on end, some on the Left celebrated his shooting and mocked those who mourned him. When Lindsay Clancy brutally strangled her three small children with an exercise band, women on the Left did not merely cite her supposedly extenuating postpartum depression but deified her as a victimized “everywoman” — with scarcely a voice for the three young lives snuffed out before they had a chance to grow up by the person who, until recently, everyone understood was supposed to care for them most: their mother.
The new secular revolutionaries know that their city upon a hill won’t work — and will crash and burn — if conservatives likewise deify the murderer of a populist Marxist podcaster. What would they do if conservatives, in tit-for-tat fashion, were to join in to gush over the handsome killer of a popular socialist activist? What if a returning combat veteran slew all his children and then developed a cult of admirers demanding his PTSD guaranteed him an exemption from the law? What if the Secret Service, on four separate occasions, had to shoot at would-be right-wing assassins of Obama?
Modern, sophisticated, humane science now has the technology to save most premature babies at 23–24 weeks. But in pre-civilizational fashion, Massachusetts — to the cheers of “enlightened” feminists — has enacted laws to allow abortion (involving the collapse of the infant’s skull and the siphoning out of its contents) right up to the moment of birth. The media hailed this license to kill a viable infant as “strengthening abortion care.”
In this brutal juxtaposition of life and death, modern and ancient, we invest millions to save one premature infant of six months, only to allot a few dollars to kill a baby as it looks out the birth canal and almost reaches a new life.
These contradictions and alternate universes of the modern medieval West are still quite different from their counterparts in the medieval world of 500–1400.
At least the medieval age believed that it was incrementally gaining knowledge to fight age-old terrors of the human and natural worlds. And such progress would eventually lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the current affluence and freedom of the West.
In contrast, our retrograde contemporary world knows how to prevent ancient diseases. We have mastered the science of sewage control and treatment. We have sought to regulate away most of the dangers posed by life-giving machines. A hundred years of penal science has established that police visibility and law enforcement deter crime.
Yet reactionary Marxism, socialist-mandated equality, and authoritarian, heaven-on-earth utopianism — going beyond even the excesses of the medieval Church — war against the progress of civilization. These ideologies arise not from fear of God or of violating ancient customs and traditions, but from smug moral narcissism — with the addendum that our atheist saints must never suffer the consequences of their destructive ideology.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
