We Never Left the Dark Ages
People like to talk about progress as if history were a staircase. Hegel built a whole philosophy on that: each century a step, each step a triumph, civilization climbing upward with the smug confidence of someone who never bothers to check the ground beneath them.
Then you read Rabelais and feel the staircase shift under your feet.
He wrote in the early 1500s, but he sounds like a man watching our news cycle from a bar stool, laughing into his sleeve.
Rabelais was not ahead of his time. He was outside of it. Gargantua is not a novel. It is demolition. A giant’s-eye view of the world, crushing everything humans pretend to take seriously: schools, institutions, war, doctors, monks, kings, and the idea that we are getting better at any of it.
People call him medieval, but his sensibility is entirely postmodern.
He breaks form, mocks authority, plays with signs, shreds grand narratives. Five centuries before Derrida, he was slipping banana peels under meaning. Before Foucault, he was dissecting power as farce. Before Lyotard, he was already bagging and tagging the big fairytales we tell ourselves about progress.
He understood something the modern world refuses to admit:
we never left the Middle Ages.
We only upgraded the plumbing.
Look at Gargantua’s education. Two models, two promises. The old school drills children into obedient machines. The new humanist school claims to liberate them. Half a millennium later, we still fight the same battle. Screens instead of scrolls, but the same treadmill. The same faith that better education will save society, as if the problem were a shortage of information rather than a surplus of illusion.
Rabelais already knew the joke.
The giants get bigger.
The intellects get smaller.
The institutions remain bloated, pompous, convinced they matter.
Every reformer returns with the same complaint. The system is broken.
Every age believes it invented decline.
Gargantua spends half his life unlearning the nonsense his first teachers pumped into him. That is not satire. That is biography. Most adults spend their best years scraping off the damage done during childhood, only to pass on the same damage later with cleaner vocabulary.
You do not need a medieval monk to see the loop.
Modern life provides its own monastic orders.
Bureaucrats. Technocrats. Influencers. Social Workers. Therapists. Activists.
Different robes. Same rituals. Same conviction that their role is essential.
Rabelais saw the machinery long before it had a name.
He saw how power hides behind seriousness and seriousness hides behind jargon.
He saw how institutions claim to elevate the human condition while grinding ordinary people into obedient shapes.
He knew laughter is the only solvent strong enough to cut through the rot.
People sometimes read Gargantua as a story about excess. But the real excess is not the giant’s appetite. It is society’s appetite for delusion. The belief that life should make sense. That authority deserves respect. That learning guarantees wisdom. That progress is a straight line.
Rabelais slices these illusions with the calm precision of a surgeon who has seen too many bodies on the table.
There is a moment where Gargantua looks at war, the supposedly noble craft of kings, and sees it for what it is: a stupid, avoidable tragedy dressed in the costume of glory. Centuries later, we watch the same tragedies unfold with new flags stitched over the same stupidity.
No progress.
Just better slogans.
And you know every one of them.
And next comes the hardest punchline: Rabelais sketches the medieval world as a treadmill disguised as a ladder. A place where institutions promise salvation, learning, enlightenment, improvement, while quietly grinding people down to standard shapes. Monasteries promise transcendence and deliver bureaucracy. Universities promise wisdom and produce parrots. The Church promises heaven and enforces conformity.
What has changed?
Trade the monk’s hood for a lanyard and a corporate badge and you meet the same man.
Trade scholastic Latin for managerial or tech jargon and you hear the same noise.
Trade medieval penance for modern self-help routines and the same treadmill keeps running exactly as before.
Maybe Rabelais saw the whole loop coming.
That is why Gargantua’s education is a comedy of machinery. Elaborate programs designed to civilize him, refine him, straighten him into a perfect gentleman. The result is paralysis. A boy trained into a statue. Only when he steps outside the system, literally walks away, does he begin to live. The joke is that the new curriculum, the reformed one, is just as absurd as the old one, only louder and more confident. Progress as costume change.
This is the center of it all.
Every generation builds a new machine for producing better humans.
Every generation discovers the gears still grind.
We mistake movement for progress.
The treadmill never changed.
Only the scenery did.
Rabelais feels postmodern because he unmasks authority through laughter. He inflates institutions to grotesque size so we can see the seams. He shows how every official structure depends on people pretending it is not ridiculous. Gargantua is a giant, but the systems built to shape him are larger fictions, fragile, overblown, terrified of exposure. That was postmodernism before postmodernism had a Wikipedia entry.
Nothing essential has changed.
More data, more screens, more slogans.
The treadmill is still the same length it was in the sixteenth century, humming under our feet.
Real progress would mean stepping off it.
And that, now as then, is the one thing society quietly agrees must never happen.
The world has always been a joke trying to keep a straight face.
Rabelais just wrote it down first.