'In the Middle Ages, they had the rack," lamented Oscar Wilde. "Now they have the press." He saw no difference between the ritual humiliations performed in the mass media and the old custom of pelting some dissident in stocks erected on a village green.
Has our modern technology, in the very act of liberating us from much hard labour, also facilitated the return of a medieval mind-set? Or does that technology only prompt such fears when pressed into service by those with a medieval world view?
The murderers who drove jet planes into New York skyscrapers on 9/11 used their considerable technical expertise to kill thousands of innocent civilians.
Any user of the internet can now witness the beheading by Islamic militants of a hostage taken from a "western" community. Whereas once a people addicted to executions as a spectator sport had to gather around a public platform in order to feed their sadistic urges, now they can do so on a personal lap-top in their own home.
A cynic might say that these developments occur whenever those with a primitive "eastern" philosophy gain access to the awesome powers of "western" technology. But I wonder whether the Iraqi or Lebanese schoolchildren, whose skins have been seared by "revenge" bombings, would quite agree with that.
They might rather see in Bush's militias and in the Israeli army assault a new version of the old Crusades.
For an addiction to vengeance and to the infliction of pain has returned to western society too. Each night on prime-time summer television, farting yobs and silicone-enhanced sirens lounge around on reality shows, hoping to achieve sudden celebrity by their willingness to submit to the more distinct probability of downright humiliation.
Audiences of these shows are encouraged to develop animosity towards the participants, all but one of whom will be serially evicted. As in the somewhat more upmarket version of this torture game known as The Weakest Link, the focus at the moment of rejection is upon the misery of a single, luckless idiot and on the precise nature of his or her failings. In talent shows or beauty contests from a kinder, gentler era of television history, one person won the major prize, while many shared and thereby softened the moment of failure between them; but now the serial, solitary nature of the abjection is the turn-on. Even in the bad old 19th century, evictions were seen as hateful affairs, which might (if mishandled) provoke wars in places as far apart as Ireland or India - but now they are a form of mass entertainment.
Medieval people lacked a developed sense of privacy or of a nuanced individuality. It was only during the Renaissance that people began to savour the positive potentials of solitude, seek a room of their own or study their own reflections in mirrors. But the world of Big Brother has no use for such notions. On it, people copulate, grunt, squabble, shave their bodies or claw one another, all in the glare of publicity.
Tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines promote this roll-back of privacy by punishing those personalities who refuse to divulge intimate details of their lives. Any actress of talent who declines to "pose" can be sure that some snooping photographer will capture her bare breasts on a secluded beach for a glossy journal.
The paintings of Pieter Bruegel contain some of the best renditions we have of the crowded late-medieval workplace. In one of them, you can see a man and woman copulating - and, just a few feet away, a boy of about six years of age is pointing at them and laughing at the sight.
From the 1500s onwards, children were protected from the knowledge of such scenes by the creation of separate rooms in family houses. They were sheltered even more by the growth of a print culture, which it took the child many years of schooling to master before he or she had access to full adult codes (including the "facts of life"). Now, however, any six-year-old can witness the banal sexual athletics of Paris Hilton at the pressing of a computer button.
The more services, companies, beaches and schools we privatise in our post-modern mediocracy, the more unattainable real privacy - supposedly one of the benefits of civilisation - actually becomes.
Constantly bombarded by sounds and images from without, many young people today find it harder and harder to maintain silence and listen to their innermost selves.
In a culture which has traded the classical idea of fame for mere celebrity, it seems as if many of the gains made by the Renaissance are in danger of being lost.