The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

In the 20th century the medievalists always cut a slightly absurd figure as their ideology seemed incongruous in the face of the then modern world as it was with its strong nation states,industrialism ,secularism and ideology of progress.Now in the 21st century articles on what has been dubbed the new middle ages are quite frequent.The  rise of China the old middle kingdom and the resurgence of Islam has produced a world that resembles the late middle ages in many ways. Science fiction novels in the 20th century frequently depicted future worlds which combined high technology with feudal social structures.Nowadays the idea of a technological society in which large chunks of the population are semi-literate and semi numerate has been realized.The wealth that the population is surrounded by seems to appear as if by magic divorced from human effort and manufactured in distant continents which they would be hard put to identify on a map.As in the middle ages the clerisy which still has some   actual  some understanding of the world and how it functions make up only a small proportion of the population.