‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’: An unpublished fragment

I once wrote a long essay in which I said that we are living in a new Middle Ages. But by that I meant an era of transition, of political, cultural, and technological transformation between the end of a worldwide empire and the rise of a new political balance — a very pluralistic period in which the whole deck of historical cards is shuffled and no nostalgia for the past is allowed. My Middle Ages were a realistic period of nostalgia for the future. But the Middle Ages, we have seen, can also be taken as a model for a Tradition that assumes, by definition, to always be right. These Middle Ages are forged by the Merchants of the Absolute, and we must challenge them, under the standard of a New Critique of Impure Reason. What our so-called post-modern era has in common with the Middle Ages is its encyclopedic voracity and flexibility. Okay. And it is legitimate to privilege the cathedral of Strassbourg, celebrated by Goethe, over the boring geometries of the Renaissance. But we cannot forget that Galileo was right, and no dream can convince us that he was wrong. Thus, long life to the Middle Ages and to the dreaming of them, provided that it is not the dream of reason. We have already generated too many monsters.