The Reformation Will Not Be Centralized
Hello again, brothers and sisters. Here we stand. We can do no other. 📜
Today is a day of various celebrations for our interesting corner of the metaverse. On All Hallows’ Eve in 1517 a perpetually out-of-sorts Augustinian slammed a collection of grievances to his local public communications platform, an act of paper warfare that would inaugurate over a century of chaotic doctrinal and political bloodshed. The Reformation is a period in history often overlooked by popular conception seeing the Classical Age and the Enlightenment as bookends to a murky interregnum of superstition. However, not only is this view quite out of step with what we know about the Ages we call Middle, but it also prevents us from seeing just how much the events of the Reformation shaped the world we now inhabit. The Reformation was a whirlwind of overlapping historical forces that produced no unmixed result. The explosion of violence that it unleashed was far from the intention of Luther or his disciples, but can now be seen as almost inevitable given the intertwining religious and political worlds that then existed. Seen through the precise microscope of history, it can seem to us that the Late Middle Ages was a destabilized atomic reaction waiting for the controls to be removed. But we need to remember that such things only appear inevitable from our vantage. From within the moment, the revolution always seems impossible.
To reason through our present moment by analogy, let’s look at another (albeit less important from my viewpoint) moment of cultural and technological shift. October 31 is also now celebrated as Bitcoin Whitepaper Day, when the original documentation explaining the code and function of Bitcoin was published online in 2008 by a pseudonymous author. While we are far too close to determine what the precise effects may be, it seems quite possible that decentralized and peer-to-peer computing and financial exchange may well have a widespread and uncontrollable impact on the national status quo. Suffice it to say that the technology is not likely to go away any time soon. As technology once again outruns the imagination of our collective governance, we would be wise to consider how our ancestors charted such uncertain waters.
Asserted: The Pendulum is Swinging
The Reformation encompassed a seismic shift of the religious life of a continent out of the realm and control of the state and into the private lives of the individual. It would be difficult to overstate how traumatizing this movement would have been for people at every level of the social order. From sovereigns used to the power to collaborate with the centralized Church in management of all religious expression, to the simple smallholder being told that they no longer need to approach God through mediating layers of religious authority, the change was bewildering and caused societal anxiety. The Reformation instantiated the idea of each human as a free moral entity before God and utilized the decentralizing power of technology, specifically the moveable-type printing press, to place the engine of this idea beyond the reach of the State and the Church establishments.
Our current moment is not entirely dissimilar. If the Reformation spelled the end to the Middle Ages and their strict temporal and spiritual hierarchy, Reformation 2.0 may very well spell the demise of the Enlightenment project. This may include (but not be limited to) the concept of a hermetically sealed public zone where governance occurs on broadly Liberal Democratic Pluralistic outlines. The monopoly of State-level entities to control the tools of financialization and governance may soon go the way of State-level entities controlling the Mass. It may mean changes to society and individual life that we cannot yet even name. But it seems clear enough to me at this time that religion, in all forms both sacred and secular, is moving back into the personal and public life of society. The way forward winds through the destabilizing path of radical individualization. Spun into myriad tiny bubbles of pure self, we are again coalescing and drawing together. The new organizations may be unrecognizable, but probably not to historical eyes.
Asserted: Difficult to Imagine is not Impossible
If you had told a German farmer that he was no longer responsible for his spiritual wellbeing to the dictates of his parish priest or his local lord, he would have thought you to be mentally similar to a person who predicted the fall of the sun from the sky. And not because he was a superstitious idiot, either. He would have been a good student of both the religious and temporal causes that led to the hierarchies he inhabited. He could have pointed you to real-world structures that depended on those hierarchies for their existence. Surely nothing could possibly topple such power? And he would have been quite right. Until he wasn’t.
Wild predictions of national destabilization all sound equally insane until a Great Depression or a World War makes the most ambitious prediction seem trifling and timid. And there are certainly endless historical quibbles that ought to be made with a determinist view of past events like the Reformation. But the fact still remains that often, destabilizing technological change prefigures by decades the societal change that it ends up wreaking on the world. As detailed by authors we have examined in our past Selections, the established order can shuffle along outwardly for decades which harboring the fatal seeds of its morbidity. It is possible that we now inhabit a world in which human activity is increasingly uncompellable by the modern state. I must hasten to add that I do not view this as an unalloyed good, any more than the Reformation was the beginning of an age of uncomplicated jubilee. The prospect of a postmodern Peasant’s War is not to be jeered at. But neither is the unknown potential of a newly balkanized metaverse, myriads of digital monasteries creating havens in the chaos.
Resolved: Decide Where You’ll Make Your Stand
In our day of politics-as-religion it would be all too easy to attempt to pigeonhole these observations as the dearest wishes of a progressive Marxist or a religious nationalist or some sort of anarchist radical. I can only offer my assurance that my viewpoint is decidedly supra-political, or apolitical, or metapolitical. Or however you would like to describe the position of someone who for all intents and purposes believes modernist politics to be a tool of the past to fight the wars of the past. I am attempting to define, for myself firstly, the swirling zeitgeist that seems to be producing a new reality for us to inhabit for the remainder of the century. We sway on the brink of a world in which it will be feasible for individuals to wield tools reserved for nations in previous periods of history. The results will undoubtedly be disorienting, painful, and frightening. But there is just a chance that, like the first Reformation, we could enter a world in which the individual and their respective community are better able to thrive because of new tools to care for themselves, spiritually and physically. No promises of utopia. No feverish dreams of unending wealth. Just the opportunity for a few to take catastrophic first-mover risks that will protect generations who will follow them. A chance to offer sacrificial leadership for those who can keep their eyes fixed on invisible realms. If given the chance to organize your own kingdom, what would your guiding principles be? What map would you draw to populate your new world?
Beware placing your hope in the supposedly unbreakable power of the grandest institutions of man. Many towers that rear their haughty head to the heavens have a door at their base. A nail and a paper might be enough to displace the powers of your age if the Spirit only gave you the right words.
WGMI 😎
There is no need for you to develop an armed insurrection. Christ himself has already begun an insurrection with his mouth. ~ Martin Luther
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever… ~ Daniel 2:44
Loved this, this connecting thread between two statements nailed on the door of a leviathan, marking a "past due" statement, maybe it may be the beginning of history, for each and every person.
Very interesting. I agree that when you're living through a slow revolution you can't see it. I see it in terms of catastrophe theory, in which the state of something changes in a way that is completely different, like heated up water starts bubbling at the last minute. There's a tipping point in effect.
The end section of your post reminded me of Ozymandias, by Shelley:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair