by Victor Davis Hanson
The West has mastered the technology of civilization but embraced the politics of barbarism, creating a modern medieval world where progress and regression coexist.
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.
Modern Medievalism
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?
The Oppressive Oppressed
In California, a century of traffic science and public-safety
research had established strict licensing rules for truck drivers
navigating fully loaded 80,000-pound, double-trailer behemoths amid tiny
subcompacts on our busy freeways.
Our legal system has insisted that drivers of such interstate semis
must be highly skilled and certified before stepping into the
potentially dangerous T. Rex of a big rig. They must be 21, possess a
valid California driver’s license, pass a Department of Transportation
physical, and undergo background and drug screening—all before scoring
80 percent on a required 50-question technical exam, followed by a
thorough two-hour, in-person test of their driving skills. Sounds
great—in theory.
But not in fact. For fear that someone, somewhere, somehow at some
time might be inconvenienced by these rules to protect the public,
nearly 20,000 illegal aliens obtained commercial driver’s licenses from a
compliant state of California without even proving rudimentary
knowledge of English. They were free to exploit loopholes, leverage
exemptions, and avoid background checks.
The result?
Our new leftist apparat empowered thousands of incompetent drivers.
Many cannot distinguish a yield sign from a stop sign, and most cannot
read a word of English. They drive as they please—racing, swerving, and
veering, with a 40-ton trailer wagging behind them.
They now own our Wild West freeways so that our elite can feel
morally superior to the mere lab-rat drivers on whom they experiment.
The architects of these laws are often chauffeured in large limousines,
SUVs, and motorcades or prefer to fly in private jets.
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.
Chic Barbarity
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.
After all, there are no homeless people on the lawns of the
humanitarian Malibu celebrities, but plenty of security for the very
progressives who defunded the police in crime-ridden cities.
Martha’s Vineyard humanitarians blasted ICE as Gestapo thugs, even as
they readied care packages for illegal aliens dropped off at their
community center—but only after they had ordered buses to transfer the
“Other” far away.
Redistributionist gasbag and socialist Hasan Piker—channeling
medieval pogroms—warns Jews that their future is bleak in America, then
whizzes off in his $200,000 EV Porsche Taycan Turbo S people’s wagon.
So again, what is this plague of modern medievalism?
It is a disease of the 21st-century West, where hundreds of millions
have transcended the age-old struggle to live one more day and now enjoy
the unchecked freedom and affluence of democratic market capitalism.
In a world where we deem it our birthright to die in our sleep at 90,
we do not worry about who struggles to produce our food, build our
homes, provide our fuel, or conquer our diseases. We care only that they
do so on demand. And thus, on autopilot, we are free to get tatted and
pierced, remain glued to our iPhones, and perhaps even consider
transitioning as we worry about cosmic things—like the need to celebrate
the murderer or torch a police precinct.
Regressive Progressives
So the progressives, socialists, and Marxists gave us universal
“caring.” They birthed a puritanical holiness, a narcissistic
sanctimoniousness that decrees the rape victim of an illegal alien
acceptable collateral damage—allowable to ensure that the illegal alien
remains free to enter the country unaudited and unquestioned.
The poor typhus-bearing rats that scurry along the public sidewalk
shall not be denied their breeding grounds among the sanctified but
soiled and infectious blankets of the homeless.
The modern medievalist demands that the 30-year veteran of our wars
be drummed out of the military as an enemy of the people for refusing
the experimental mRNA vaccine—but not the COVID-infected, unvaccinated
illegal alien who, amid lockdowns, strolls across the Rio Grande without
a word from our secular saints.
Virtue-signaling concern for the nihilist—at someone else’s expense—is the new national creed.
And the “victim” and racist killer Decarlos Brown—now deemed “too
incompetent to stand trial”—readying his knife to slice open the throat
of the innocent, doomed, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, in the seat ahead
of him, is the poster child of our modern medievalism.
Photo: Los Angeles, CA - September 12: A
homeless encampment on a closed off lot on S Manhattan Pl. in Koreatown
on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA. (Carlin Stiehl / Los
Angeles Times)
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/01/progressive-regression-and-the-new-medievalism/
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