AS IF FEUDALISM NEEDS DEFENDING:

I pushed Michael Warren Davis' new book, The Reactionary Mind (Regnery Publishing), on a friend of mine, a noted Catholic and academic leader. I told him a good part of the book was a defense of feudalism. I thought he'd like that. Instead, he said, "Well, recent scholarship shows that feudalism did not exist. So, he's wrong about that." 

Okay, fine. "You really ought to read it." 

Finally, one evening he texted me, "I am up to page 25 and really enjoying it." Two hours later, close to midnight, he texted, "I am at page 96, and I cannot put it down." 

The following day at Mass, he said, "I want to sell all I own and buy a farm in New Hampshire." Davis had spoken to my friend's long-faded inner-distributist, a distributism my friend left when he had his fourth child and private school tuitions loomed. He said, "Just wait till Davis has his fourth."   

As is evident, Davis' new and first book is dangerous. And utterly fun. 

For instance, I am totally fine with anyone unloading on the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment deserves it, and Davis gives it to the Enlightenment right in the chops. But the Renaissance? Every sixth grader knows the Renaissance is sacrosanct; but man, Davis goes hammer and tongs after the Renaissance. Davis writes:

The Renaissance was subversive by its very nature, asserting the culture of the pagan, classical world against the medieval Christian order. The question, then, is: Why this revolt against the Middle Ages? Those who launched and perpetuated the Renaissance found the medieval worldview bleak, pessimistic and limiting. If life was nothing but a vale of tears, and man himself merely a sinner, then no real happiness could be found in this world, and all we could do was submit to the authorities, say our prayers, and hope we make it to heaven.

Of course, the medieval worldview wasn't gloomy pessimism but hard-nosed realism; man is a sinner.

Davis compares Titian's Venus of Urbino to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Botticelli's Venus is "nude, yes, but her face is kind. Her eyes shine with a sort of innocent curiosity. There's nothing of the haughty, cruel, alluring gaze of the Urbino." Davis writes, "I won't deny that the Venus of Urbino is attractive. I'm sure Titian's model turned a few heads in sixteenth-century Venice. But ask a forty-year-old man who the most beautiful woman in the world is. If he describes a sixteen-year-old girl with milky skin and curly golden hair, we'd probably call him a pervert. We certainly wouldn't call him a humanist." 

The difference, Davis argues, is that Botticelli was under the influence of someone we are supposed to hate: Savonarola, who espoused an aesthetic not of the burgeoning Renaissance but the Middle Ages, and he burned perfectly fine art. Davis loves him. I never felt one way or the other about Savonarola, but I'm with Davis now. [...]

Davis writes all this with great humor and charm. For instance, he occasionally calls himself a "Young Earth Creationist," but he doesn't really mean it. What he means is he doesn't really know or really care about the age of the earth. And so what? "The truth is that I haven't the faintest idea whether the universe was created in seven days or seventy billion years. I've devoted no serious time or thought to the question because it doesn't interest me. From what I know of astronomy and physics--that is, nothing at all--the Young Earth Creationist account is as plausible as any other."

In praising the Puritans who "strove to live by the law of love," he says, "(g)ranted, burning old women at the stake was a funny way of showing they loved them. But then I am not a Puritan." 

He describes Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet as "a bigger man than all the dandy poets in all the decadent courts of Europe." Davis is a monarchist but not an absolute one. He detests the soft and effeminate Court of the Bourbons with their orgies and little yapping dogs. 

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