Sheilagh Ogilvie: evaluation

Transcript context

…How do you model that? Why are those the people who oppose it? Is it rebelliousness? Or they don’t trust authority? I don’t think it can be not trusting authority because they certainly believe in their own authority. The religious right, the Jansenist Catholics in France, certainly were not [laughs] anti-authoritarian. I was talking to a colleague who was writing a book about the economics of religion while I was writing my book, and it was during COVID. We were talking about how religion is a platform, if you like. It’s like Amazon in the sense that you get a bunch of different services from it. One reason why people sign up to anti-variolation or anti-vax sentiment is that they want other things which their particular religious platform is offering. It might be offering spiritual consolation, it might be offering charitable relief, it might be offering social networking. In order to get the linked goods within that religious platform, you have to sign up to the epistemological craziness of the anti-scientific views. That was one reason historically, and I think that’s still in operation. Historically, there was another reason, which was the medical guilds — the equivalent of the American Medical Association, only much, much worse, back in early modern Europedid not like the idea of this new thing, this new technology that they had not approved and that was also going to challenge their business model and take away their fees from treating smallpox patients. In France and in Spain, it was the medical guilds, together with the Catholic Church, that lobbied the state to make variolation illegal. It was this unholy alliance between the medical associations and religion. Fortunately, modern medical associations are not as bad as medical guilds. There may be some ways in which they’re similar, but in that respect, they’re not. There are renegade medics who go on the internet and say, “I’m a trained medic, and I can tell you vaccination is bad.” But in general, medical associations aren’t like that anymore. You mentioned the guilds. One of the things you’re best known for is your two books on the guilds [The European Guilds, Institutions and European Trade] and your articles. What’s the best argument you can make on behalf of Medieval and Renaissance guilds? Is there anything you can say for them?…

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