The Canterbury Tales: Applying Chaucers Criticism to Modern Society :: Sociology

The Canterbury Tales Applying Chaucers Criticism to Modern Society It is not hard to apply Chaucers description of the greedy doctor to todays medical system, nor is it rugged to find modern-day people with equivalent personalities to those of some(prenominal) of Chaucers other characters. However, it is the institutions of his time as tumefy as their flaws and hypocrisies that Chaucer is most critical of he uses the personalities of his characters primarily to play up those flaws. The two institutions that he is most critical of have lost much, if not all, of their influence in many instances, the Church has only slight hold on the lives and attitudes of the people as a whole, and the strict feudal system has entirely disappeared. Few institutions today are as clearly visible and universally authoritative as those two forces were in the Middle Ages, so, if Chaucer were writing his tales today, he would most likely turn to the hypocritical attitudes of the general populace and t he idiosyncracies of our daily lives. He gives whatsoever emphasis to these in the Tales (for example, he mentions the prioresss ladylike compassion for even the smallest creature in the Prologue, but has her tell an anti-Semitic tale later), but, in todays American culture, he would be most likely to criticize businessmen, middle-class advances, and the demand formust instantaneous gratification. One of the things Chaucer would be most likely to point out about many big- businessmen would be the hypocrisy of their supposed love of sports. To truly love sports implies a similar love of sportsmanship, fairness, and equality competition. In a marketplace where angiotensin-converting enzyme technology company takes anothers product, reverse-engineers it (to avoid infringing on copyrights and patents), then sells it as its own, where is the sportsmanship? When that second company is already larger and has wider market contacts and greater marketing budgets, there is excessively no fairness. As for equality in the workplace and job-market, with age, gender and racial discrimination, that is difficult to find, too. The reason Chaucer would criticize the businessmen on the top as well as the institution itself would be because, since they are in positions of power, they can change things. Some try to others more often dont. Another case is that of the middle-class parent who protests the deterioration of school standards, decries the loss of national morals, and ironically neglects his or her own child.