I know I am not alone in my feelings of disillusionment over how things have ended up with the most recent (2024) presidential election. I know several people who are pretty distraught and confused about “how this happened.” I have seen many, many “think pieces” and articles that try to untangle the web of how we landed where we did. There is plenty of “blame” to go around, and all of us out here in left field are pointing fingers all over the place, including lots of “the left’s” favorite tactic: a circular firing squad.
The last time Donald Trump was elected—it still feels kind of awful to even say that phrase—I wrote a bit about my questions and concerns. Many of them are still with me. I also put some ideas down at the end of 2021, when we had finally started to crawl our way out of the COVID isolation and mayhem. Much of what I said, there, was connected to the feelings of discomfort and discombobulation I felt at the beginning of (and throughout) the Trump era.1
Islam in Spain
At the beginning of this year, having just gotten back from my four-month sabbatical in Northern Spain, I was extra interested in all things Spanish. I was reading some of Ted Gioia’s writing at An Honest Broker and was intrigued by something he mentioned about the development and spread of musical ideas in Medieval Europe.
Essentially, he highlighted the city or Córdoba and its central role position as something of a “capital” of Medieval Europe. To oversimplify his idea: we can thank Islam and the influence of Moorish culture for the development of the ballad and the music traditionally associated with the troubadours and trouvères of Medieval France; something very similar had been going on in Córdoba for a hundred years or more before it caught on north of the Pyrenees. This musical-artistic tradition wasn’t so much “invented” by French poets and musicians like Guillaume de Machaut or Phillipe de Vitry; they absorbed much of the central idea from their Muslim neighbors to the south. This was all part of a larger point that Gioia makes in his book Music: A Subversive History, which is that artistic innovation tends to happen in places where cultures and people “collide;” its not a coincidence that so many musical innovations happen in prominent port cities and among those otherwise regarded as the “riff raff” of society (think of New Orleans, Liverpool, or … Córdoba).
Anyway, in his article he mentioned a book that scratched a whole lot of my post-living-in-Spain itches. The book is titled The Ornament Of The World. It’s something like a love note to how great Córdoba was during its “Golden Age.” I was able to track down a copy of The Ornament Of The World from my local library and I read through it pretty quickly.2
In looking for this book, I also found another: The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval. It is, more or less, a rebuttal to The Ornament Of The World. I didn’t devour The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise quite as rabidly as I did the first book. Perhaps this is a testament to its “goodness” as a book. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise is definitely meant for a more “scholarly” audience, whereas The Ornament Of The World is an easier read for a general audience. It also made some good points, and, as with many things, I suppose the “truth” lies somewhere in between these two “takes” on the story.
All of that setup was to arrive here: reading these books got me to rethink a bit about societal permanency (which is a word combination/concept I just made up … or at least one I haven’t heard or read before). Today, we know Spain as a unified country that occupies most of the Iberian peninsula, but it wasn’t always this way.3 There was a very long period wherein Spain was a disjointed group of a few different factions, some with very different religions and cultures. The one we’re talking about, here, is the period between roughly 750 and 1500 when a sizable chunk of Spain was part of the “Muslim world.” To, again, oversimplify things a bit, Spanish culture and religion during the 1100s had as much or more in common with that of Baghdad as it did with Paris or Rome. The Umayyads set up a caliphate, a “capital of the Muslim world,” in Spain in the 8th century.4
It would have been completely normal, it would have seemed as if it had always been thus, for someone living in Iberia to think of “Spain” as a Muslim country. They likely thought this was the way things were “supposed to be.” If you look at Islam’s dominance in Spain, you can see that it held on as the official state-sponsored religion until as late as 1492 in some corners of the country.5 This means that a kid growing up in Granada in 1300 inherited a life where Islam was the dominant religion and Arabic was the lingua franca. These things had been in place for more than 500 years, so they almost certainly felt like they were “the norm” and this was how things were “supposed to be.” It’s a bit hard to imagine that world, at least for me, as it is so different from what things are like, now. And, most importantly, the “what-it’s-like-now” situation is only about 500 years old.
The Ancient Greeks and Democracy
Another example of what I am trying to express might be the Greeks’ experiments with democracy a few thousand years ago. Supposedly, most of “the West’s” ideas about democracy come from this batch of philosophers and writers in Ancient Greece; these wise guys came up with the ideas upon which most of modern Western society is now based. And, supposedly, it’s the best system we’ve ever come up with as a species. I think it’s probably safe to say that most of us would agree that it’s a pretty good central idea; everyone should have “a say” in how they are governed.
But, for all of the greatness of this idea, we don’t have an incredibly long track record of successfully implementing it. The Ancient Greeks—the social context from which we got the idea—were only able to make this system of social organization last about a few hundred years at most.6 So, even the first (and best?) pre-American version of this ideal social structure was pretty short-lived and was, ultimately, some version of a failure.
I am pretty sure that the Greeks thought they had solved the problem of “How To Run A Society,” and yet, their utopia (if you can call it that) only lasted a few generations. Those in the middle of it, though, probably thought, things were finally as they should be, and they would remain that way in perpetuity.
So?
I am not sure what any of this really means, except that I am finding some solace in the temporary-ness of so much that feels inescapable at the moment.
There are a lot of things that feel like they’re changing right now. Many of these things are things so many of us have taken for “granted,” as things that just are supposed to be this way (and seemingly always have been). But, I have started to notice how “shaky” so much of this is. We thought things worked this way, but maybe it we’ve just been in a transition period toward something drastically different for a while; maybe in a few hundred years people will look back and see this moment as part of a larger, century-long transition to what will then seem like “the way things should be.”
I honestly think we are witnessing the beginnings of a fundamental, drastic shift in “the world as we know it.” I think we are witnessing the beginning of the fall of the United States as we have known it for 200+ years. I’d like to think that the post-Enlightenment values we’ve inherited, values like reason and intellectual inquiry over superstition and dogma, values like respect for human dignity and our common “humanity,” will remain important to whatever comes next, but I can’t really say for certain where this is all leading. We like to believe that history “bends toward justice,” but we’ve seen it go in all sorts of weird directions, and I am not sure any of us really know what’s coming.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
1 I still think the things that “shook” me the most about all of that—COVID and Trump—are how fundamentally so many people seemed to change. There were so many people I looked up to when I was younger, people who I thought were good, honest, decent people; people who cared about right and wrong and were thoughtful in how they interacted with the world so as to maximize their positive impact. I watched so many of these people turn into absolute monsters. They spewed horrific insults; they believed wild, unfounded things, things that painted the world in an entirely different light than what they had once presented. All of this made me feel like there was no explanation for any of these save some sort of cult-like programming.
2 For some reason, I am a very fickle reader. Some books take me ages to finish; others take a few days. I guess it has something to do with how interesting I find the writing or the individual writers’ skill or something … I can’t always figure out which books are going to grab me and which won’t.
3 I know this is one of those “of course” kinds of points. Just hang tight for a few more sentences and I’ll come around to making a better point … I think.
4 There were also other “capitals” of Islam in Baghdad, Damascus, and Persia (among other places) throughout the Middle Ages and European Renaissance.
5 Of course, the period directly after this was particularly dogmatic and even bloody. What we now call the “Inquisition” was a direct effort to Christianize the entire peninsula at the tip of a sword.
6 And, some would say they never had a true democracy, given that only some people were allowed to participate.