Great and terrible things

Or, "The Renaissance : A Warning From History".

A very interesting but overly-long read, despite the author's protestations that it needs to be a book. Oh, I don't doubt that a book would be worthwhile, but for the sake of getting to the main point, this can be condensed a great deal. I shall attempt to do so below.

I was attracted by the mention of COVID and in what might happen next according to history. Sometimes shock events lead to massive systemic change, sometimes they don't. But the history of how the Renaissance came to be distinguished from the Middle Ages, despite there being no clear pan-European marker to demarcate the boundary, is fascinating in itself. In fact COVID barely gets a mention, because there are more interesting and broader lessons from the history of history : namely, that the Renaissance wasn't especially golden compared to the previous era, and its astonishing achievements weren't fostered by what you might think

If we read treatises, orations, dedicatory prefaces, writings on art or courtly conduct, we see what Johan Burkhardt described a self-conscious golden age bursting with culture, art, discovery, and vying with the ancients for the title of Europe’s most glorious age. If instead we read the private letters which flew back and forth between Machiavelli and his correspondents, we see terror, invasion, plague deaths, a desperate man scrambling to even keep track of the ever-moving threats which hem his fragile homeland in from every side, as friends and family beg for frequent letters, since every patch of silence makes them fear the loved one might be dead.

In Italy, average life expectancies in the solidly Medieval 1200s were 35-40, while by the year 1500 (definitely Renaissance) life expectancy in Italian city states had dropped to 18. Kids died more in the Renaissance, adults died more, men died more, we have the numbers, but I find it telling how often people who hear these numbers try to discredit them, search for a loophole, because these facts rub against our expectations.  We didn’t want a wretched golden age. [See original article for breakdown of the numbers]

Why did life expectancy drop?  Counter-intuitively the answer is, largely, progress. 

War got worse, for one. While both the Middle Ages and Renaissance had lots of wars, Renaissance wars were larger and deadlier, involving more troops and claiming more lives, military and civilian—this wasn’t a sudden change, it was a gradual one, but it made a difference. 

Economic growth also made the life expectancy go down. Europe was becoming more interconnected, trade increasing. This let merchants grow rich, prosperity for some, but when people move around more, diseases move more too. Cities were also growing denser, more manufacturing jobs and urban employment drawing people to crowd inside tight city walls, and urban spaces always have higher mortality rates than rural.  Malaria, typhoid, dysentery, deadly influenza, measles, the classic pox, these old constants of Medieval life grew fiercer in the Renaissance, with more frequent outbreaks claiming more lives... While the 1348 pandemic was Medieval, most of the Middle Ages did not have the plague—it’s the Renaissance which has the plague every single day as an apocalyptic lived reality.

Economic growth also made non-military violence worse. In Italy especially, new avenues for economic growth (banking and mercenary work) quickly made families grow wealthy enough to raise forces far larger than the governments of their little city states, which made states powerless to stop the violence, and vulnerable to frequent, bloody coups... In the 1400s most cities in Italy saw at least four violent regime changes, some of them as many as ten or twelve, commixed with bloody civil wars and factional massacres.

While the Medieval Inquisition started in 1184, it didn’t ramp up its book burnings, censorship, and executions to a massive scale until the Spanish Inquisition in the 1470s and then the printing press and Martin Luther in the 1500s (Renaissance); similarly witchcraft persecution surges to scales unseen in the Middle Ages after the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486 (Renaissance); and the variety of ingenious tortures being used in prisons increased, rather than decreasing, over time. If you want corrupt popes, they too can be more terrible as they get richer. 

When I try to articulate the real difference between Renaissance and Medieval, I find myself thinking of the humorous story “Ever-So-Much-More-So” from Centerburg Tales (1951). A traveling peddler comes to town selling a powder called Ever-So-Much-More-So. If you sprinkle it on something, it enhances all its qualities good and bad. Sprinkle it on a comfy mattress and you get mattress paradise, but if it had a squeaky spring you’ll never sleep again for the noise. Sprinkle it on a radio and you’ll get better reception, but agonizing squeals when signal flares. Sprinkle it on the Middle Ages and you get the Renaissance. 

I'm going to digress slightly, so feel free to skip to the next quote section if you want.

I can't help but add that this range of extremes applies not just to societies but individuals as well. There was a widely-disputed paper a while back claiming that there are more male geniuses because there are also more male idiots, with something about the Y-chromosome causing more variation in attributes. I find that idea to be pretty stupid, but what's undeniable is that individuals are capable of both great and terrible things. Martin Luther was a raging anti-semite. So was Richard Wagner. Florence Nightingale was a eugenicist. Winston Churchill was a racist. Go looking for genuine heroes and you will find few indeed. Far more often though, you'll find people who committed heroic acts - and villainous ones too. Individuals and societies alike are capable of extremes, they can't be pigeonholed into neat categories.

Right now there's a lot of anger sloshing around, the current focus of which is against statues. Now, there are obviously extremes on which we can (or should) all agree : greedy, unrepentant slave traders are probably not the sort who deserve public statues, while inoffensive geologists are probably okay. But where exactly do we draw the line ? I don't mean this as a rhetorical question but an actual one : clearly the line can be drawn somewhere, but where ? What is the general principle at work here ? Presumably no-one wants to tear down historical statues of Caesar or Alexander or Napoleon, but all of these leaders committed atrocities. They were great and terrible indeed.

For my part I think statues can venerate highly specific, context-dependent accomplishments, not the whole character of an individual. They have to, for two reasons : one is that great achievements usually require a good deal of luck, and the second is that everyone is flawed and imperfect. Racism is an incredibly common flaw (but full-on hatred is not); sexism perhaps even more so. Churchill was a racist, but no-one celebrates that aspect : we celebrate defeating the Nazis. Wagner hated the Jews, but humming along to Ride of the Valkyries doesn't make one a white supremacist. We no longer celebrate Caesar's invasion of Gaul, but we can be interested in what he did. Owning a bust of Napoleon probably doesn't indicate that the owner harbours the desire to lead half a million men into the Russian winter for shits and giggles. Having a statue of Boudicca outside Parliament doesn't mean that the British government secretly wants to massacre the Italians. Well, probably... my point is that if we're going to remove statues, as we should, we ought to think very carefully about each and every case. The great figures of history are often also the terrible ones.

This neatly brings us back to the main narrative. If the Renaissance was the Middle Ages on steroids, why is it perceived as something distinct and better ? One answer is that this extreme turbulence led to extreme achievements, good at and bad. There were indeed amazing achievements in the Renaissance, it's just that the reason for them isn't what we usually think.

The radical oversimplification is that, when times get desperate, those in power pour money into art, architecture, grandeur, even science, because such things can provide legitimacy and thus aid stability. Intimidating palaces, grand oratory, epics about the great deeds of a conqueror, expensive tutors so the prince and princess have rare skills like Greek and music, even a chemical treatise whose dedication praises the Duke of Such-and-such, these were all investments in legitimacy, not fruits of peace but symptoms of a desperate time.

Culture is a form of political competition—if war is politics by other means, culture is too, but lower risk.  This too happened throughout the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance was ever-so-much-more-so in comparison, and whenever you get a combination of increasing wealth and increasing instability, that’s a recipe for increasing art and innovation, not because people are at peace and have the leisure to do art, but because they’re desperate after three consecutive civil wars and hope they can avoid a fourth one if they can shore up the regime with a display of cultural grandeur. The fruits fill our museums and libraries, but they aren’t relics of an age of prosperous peace, they’re relics of a lived experience which was, as I said, terrible but great.

The thing about golden ages—and this is precisely what Petrarch and Bruni tapped into—is that they’re incredibly useful to later regimes and peoples who want to make glorifying claims about themselves. If you present yourself, your movement, your epoch, as similar to a golden age, as the return of a golden age, as the successor to a golden age, those claims are immensely effective in making you seem important, powerful, trustworthy. Legitimate.

Any place (past or present) that calls itself a new Jerusalem, new Rome, or new Athens is doing this, usually accompanied by a narrative about how the original has been ruined by something: “Greece today is stifled by [insert flaw here: conquest, superstition, socialism, lack of socialism, a backwards Church, whatever], but the true spirit of Plato, Socrates and the Examined Life flourish in [Whateverplace]!” The same is true of claiming Renaissance.  If you can make a claim about what made the Renaissance a golden age, and claim that you are the true successor of that feature of the Renaissance, then you can claim the Renaissance as a whole.  This is made easier by the fact that “the Renaissance” is incredibly vague.

After the Renaissance, in the period vaguely from 1700 to 1850, everyone in Europe agreed the Renaissance had been a golden age of art, music, and literature specifically.  Any nation that wanted to be seen as powerful had to have a national gallery showing off Renaissance (mainly Italian) art treasures... Renaissance art treasures were protected and preserved more than Medieval ones—if you’re valorizing the Renaissance you’re usually criticizing the Middle Ages in contrast. The Renaissance became a self-fulfilling source base: go to a museum today and you see much more splendid Renaissance art than Medieval.

So a survivorship bias that makes the "Renaissance = good, Medieval = bad" a self-fulfilling story. But did the Black Death have any transformative effects at all ? It would seem not, since no transformation occurred. Oh, there was evolution, yes, but that was driven by deeper factors than a transitory disease. There was no one "X factor" that "caused" the Renaissance - the author lists capitalism, secularism, nationalism and proto-democracy as all having been claimed as possible factors, when in reality there is no clear difference between the Renaissance and medieval eras at all.

To this day, every time someone proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance—even if it’s a well-researched and plausible suggestion—it immediately gets appropriated by a wave of people & powers who want to claim they are the torch-bearers of that great light that makes the human spirit modern. And every time someone invokes a Renaissance X-Factor, the corresponding myth of the bad Middle Ages becomes newly useful as a way to smear rivals and enemies.  As a result, for 160 years and counting, an endless stream of people, kingdoms, political parties, art movements, tech firms, banks, all sorts of powers have gained legitimacy by retelling the myth of the bad Middle Ages and golden Renaissance, with their preferred X-Factor glittering at its heart.

You see the problems with the question now: the Black Death didn’t cause the Renaissance, not by itself, and the Renaissance was not a golden age, at least not the kind that you would want to live in, or to see your children live in. But I do think that both Black Death and Renaissance are useful for us to look at now, not as a window on what will happen if we sit back and let the gears of history grind, but as a window on how vital action is.

What the Black Death really caused was change. It caused regime changes, instability letting some monarchies or oligarchies rise, or fall. It caused policy and legal changes, some oppressive, some liberating. And it caused economic changes, some regions or markets collapsing, and others growing.

Is there anything we can learn from the plague to inform us about COVID 19 ? Yes, but it certainly doesn't herald a golden age or an apocalypse.

That’s what we’ll see with COVID: collapse and growth, busts for one industry, booms for another, sudden wealth collecting in some hands, while elsewhere whole communities collapse, like Flint Michigan, and Viking Greenland, and the many disasters in human history which made survivors abandon homes and villages, and move elsewhere.  A lot of families and communities will lose their livelihoods, their homes, their everythings, and face the devastating need to start again.  And as that happens, we’ll see different places enact different laws and policies to deal with it, just like after the Black Death.  Some places/regimes/policies will increase wealth and freedom, while others will reduce it, and the complicated world will go on being complicated. 

That’s why I say we should aim to do better than the Renaissance. Because we can. We have so much they didn’t. We know so much.

The stakes are higher.  Unlike in 1348 we have a lot of knowledge, answers, options, concepts we could try like safety nets, or UBI, or radical free markets, many very different things.  Which means that acting now, demanding now, voting, pushing, proposing change, we’re shaping policies that will affect our big historical trajectory more than normal—a great chance to address and finally change systemic inequalities, or to let them entrench.  There is no predetermined outcome of pandemic; pandemic is a hallway leading to a room where something big is going to be decided—human beings decide.

Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages

"If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?" Versions of this question have been going around as people, trying to understand the present crisis, reach for history's most famous pandemic.