My feeling of the true reason for the Renaissance and continued technical progress that ensued, was the competition between elites of european powers from the moment they became nation-states. Before that, all Europe was a homogeneous pack of brute lords vaguely kept in check by latin-speaking clerics.
Then during the XXth century there was competition with communism, the hardly new alternative economic system. And now it is busted, there is little inside competition: the elite is globalized, and will institute a new global feudalism. But they will try to maintain some innovation, at least for the military: they have external challengers in the emerging nations, possibly ressource nationalists (not sure these will last), and they clearly don't feel good with muslim nations, may be that's why they start new crusades. Pierre
I really need to research what 19th Century English liberals thought about "the end state of capitalism". Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
One theory that has been advanced is that the devastation caused by the Black Death in Florence (and elsewhere in Europe) resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th century Italy. Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been speculated that the familiarity with death that this brought thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife.[19] It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art.[20] However, this does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred specifically in Italy in the 14th century. The Black Death was a pandemic that affected all of Europe in the ways described, not only Italy.
I think it's more likely that discovering that the Church didn't have a monopoly on thought or philosophical authority created a huge shock.
One of the things that seems to have changed is the move from small-scale warlords and petty monarchs to collective rather than individual city-state patriotism.
Italian city states somehow sublimated some of the war urge and turned it into a cultural status game. Wars didn't stop, but having a local set of pet artists and intellectuals became an alternative focus for competition.
It would be an interesting thing to try to make it happen again. If power devolves to more local representations, it might - although it's going to be hard to remove the Church of the Economy's monopoly on thought without an external influence, or an outright implosion.
Look at Wikipedia's 14th century timeline (a Eurocentric selection as I don't really understand the significance of the events from other continents):
The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age Beginning of the Ottoman Empire, early expansion into the Balkans The Avignon papacy transfers the seat of the Popes from Italy to France The Great Famine of 1315-1317 kills millions of people in Europe The Hundred Years' War begins when Edward III of England lays claim to the French throne in 1337. Black Death kills almost half of the population of Europe. (1347 - 1351) The heresy of Lollardy rises in England The Great Schism of the West begins in 1378, eventually leading to 3 simultaneous popes. An account of Buddha's life, translated earlier into Greek by St John of Damascus and widely circulated to Christians as the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, became so popular that Buddha (under the name Josaphat) was made a Catholic saint. Reunification of Poland under Ladislaus I of Poland Peasants' Revolt in England The poet Petrarch coins the term Dark Ages to describe the preceding 900 years in Europe, beginning with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410 through to the renewal embodied in the Renaissance. The Scots win the Scottish Wars of Independence. Union of Krewo between Poland and Lithuania. The English word "abacus" used to describe the calculating device from China. Wang Dayuan, the first Chinese to sail into the Mediterranean while visiting Egypt and North Africa from 1334-1339.
Could you tell us more about him? Or point to an english resource? Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
as for wang dayuan, he claims to have actually visited all the places that he lists in the daoyi zhilue [geography of island barbarians], but his accounts of many places appear to crib from earlier geographies, so it's hard to tell if he personally went there (in a manner similar to marco polo, actually), but clearly he had access to people that did. lots of merchants going back and forth between china and southeast asia and india, probably less getting all the way into the mediterranean.
it's hard right now because of tectonic friction between paradigms, more heat than light being produced....reminds me of fran's comment on a thread lately about the left being mostly against stuff, not for anything.
as for the 'church of the economy', it's a ponzi scheme,as has been detailed here many times, not least by contrast with new models like LLP's, and will fall under its own weight, taking those too near to it's teats, and leving by default what you suggest, a decentralised, more local representation of power.
great comment, tbg, as usual. ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
My feeling of the true reason for the Renaissance and continued technical progress that ensued, was the competition between elites of european powers from the moment they became nation-states. Before that, all Europe was a homogeneous pack of brute lords vaguely kept in check by latin-speaking clerics. Then during the XXth century there was competition with communism, the hardly new alternative economic system.
Then during the XXth century there was competition with communism, the hardly new alternative economic system.
And also competition with the Nazis, who were technologically adept, even if they had no other redeeming features.
Cold War progress would have been impossible without German technology - either directly through co-option of people like Von Braun, indirectly through the pre-war exodus to the US, as a direct response to real challenges like Enigma, or to perceived challenges like the largely-mythical Nazi bomb.
WWII made a terrible mess of Europe, but without it we might still be using bakelite phones and large thermionic calculating machines.
I agree that without a sophisticated external threat, progress is stagnating. Cold War spending was more or less directly responsible for PCs, the Internet, for satellite links, and for other innovations that are taken for granted now. But the US culture of R&D that began in embryonic form after WWII and flourished in the 50s and early 60s has been almost dismantled now.
Military research has taken repeated detours to wacky-land and seems to have drifted away from seedcorn theoretical investigations into building bigger, and - most of all - more expensive hardware, largely for the sake of it, and irrespective of real strategic effectiveness.
The US military has turned itself into a very expensive, mobile and globally deployable Maginot line.
Germany (and the German-speaking countries) was leading the world in so many scientific and technical fields in the decades up to the 1930's that I used to joke "if it hadn't been for Hitler we'd all be speaking German now". Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
But if Weimar hadn't fallen apart, the Germans might well have bought the entire British Empire - much like China is buying the US now.
Between the wars 'Made in Germany' had some of the same meaning in the UK that 'Made in China' has for the US today. Only with more of an innovative edge.
