When was the best time in History that you could have lived in? With all the problems facing us now, like climate change, rising xenophobia, faltering economies-it’s natural for the mind to wander to other times and other places , where they had it good, in ways that we just can’t seem to manage.
It’s easy to idealise bits of the past when you didn’t have to live there and use the toilets. It’s also easy to make mistakes. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” declared Wordsworth, while on a tour of Revolutionary France. He just got out with his life, as did many other deluded middle class intellectuals. And even the Nazis tried to drum up a cultural vibe, what with Leni Reifenstahl and all that modernist architecture. That duly said, it is possible to pick out certain periods when the humans really did seem to be doing better for a while. Like a football team putting together a run of successful results. We will try to identify those times using the following criteria, if you will forgive us, gentle readers.
There has to be peace, or general political stability, over a wide area. We”ll illustrate this with a counter example: Beethoven and Schubert wrote some pretty good music during the Napoleonic wars, but you wouldn’t have wanted to have lived through those wars would you?
Learning is advancing, preferably big time : despite all the wars and coruuption, Big Stuff was happening in Renaissance Italy- arts, sciences, architecture, you name it. By that criterion. all those Cardinals and Condottieri have to be in with a shout
Trade must boom According to the great Professor Davis, this is the great sine qua non of civilisation
The staging must be right The backdrop of islands and temples etc gives the Classical Greeks an enormous leg-up before they even take the pitch. Whereas Lancashire in the Industrial revolution? You mainly died at thirty, after a lifetime of bracing hard work. Although it probably felt like much longer.
There must be a long running cultural movement No one sat down one day and declared “OK chaps, it’s the Bronze Age and humanity stands on the edge of a bright new frontier. Put away all those stone tools and mammoth skins, and let’s start living in cities!” The periods we refer to must be embedded in a long movement of progress and general moving forward.
And all too often they come at the end of it. The swinging sixties ended in strikes and inflation. The Renaissance city states were leaned upon, terminally, by much bigger places like France and Spain. The long peace of Rome degenerated into the Crisis of the Third Century. But we are nothing if not triers here. And so our first try in the next blog of the series will be China in the Tang dynasty 618-907 AD, using the western calendar. Let’s see if they were really, really, like, cool?
#renaisance #history #china #greeks #learning #science #society
Learning, Science and Society 