“If only we could go back to The Good Old Days!” cry so many. But were the Good Old Days as good as people claim? To help you make up your mind, here’s a quick, easy-to reference guide to the last 600 years. Apologies if it seems a tad Euro-centric, but they’ve only given us this many words-and there’s some of them gone already.
15th Century 1400-1499 It must have seemed so, like, cool, especially if you came at the end of it. What with the Renaissance in full swing, America discovered and all that New Learning just pouring off Gutenburg‘s new press! Throw in Della Francesca painting the walls, and the cool sounds of Guillaume de Fay echoing off them, the parties must have seemed absolutely fabulous. However there was quite a lot of serious killing about(e.g. The Hundred Years War) and as for the toilets……..
16th Century 1500-1599 What happens when you combine Gutenburg’s Information Revolution with a really original thinker like Martin Luther(1517)? The result was a series of bitter, intractable conflicts that essentially lasted until 1648 (see below) There were plenty of other terrible wars going on throughout the “Fighting Sixteenth” , and some really nasty genocides and enslavements of the indigenous populations in South America. Although to be fair, the Spanish claimed they didn’t really mean to, it was all down to disease. On the up side there were scientists like Tycho Brahe, while Magellan and others truly made it one globe. Top Painters Leonardo Da Vinci, Rafael. Cool sounds: Palestrina. The toilets were still pretty awful.
17th Century 1600-1699 On the face of it, not too good, as wars and plagues ravaged everyone, everywhere. And the fashions look just daft. As luck had had it, the end of the Thirty Years’ War finally persuaded Catholics and Protestants that maybe, just maybe, there might be better ways forward. But the century was decorated with thinkers of stupefying quality-Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Kepler. And when your writing team included such luminaries Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Milton, a good time was guaranteed for all. Cool sounds included Monteverdi and Purcell, although the toilet breaks in their concerts must still have been a bit dodgy.
18th Century 1700-1800 To praise the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution is like shooting large fish in a very small barrel. With thinkers and above all doers like Locke, Smith, Voltaire, Watt and Priestly, it’s all too easy to see this as the key turning point. Food was top too; all that roast beef and claret tasted pretty good, if you could afford it. And there’s the rub; some pretty nasty things were going on as the Atlantic Slave Trade really got into its stride, and European Immigration into Australia led to some pretty thorough genocide of its indigenous inhabitants. Cool Sounds: JS Bach, WA Mozart. Cool Painters: Gainsborough, Stubbs
19th Century 1800-1899 Despite quite a lot of grand-scale wars and killing (think Napoleon and American Civil) it was actually the age in which slavery and serfdom went into decline. However, if you want to understand why China still fears and distrusts the West, look at the history of the Opium Wars, which have left a permanent scar in history. On the up side, thinkers like Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell were as important as anyone who has ever lived. The century dripped in writers and artists: to name JMW Turner, Dostoevsky, Hugo and Gericault is to be unfair to at least 100 other names. Cool sounds: Beethoven. And at last-the plumbing was getting better!
20th Century 1900-1999 First eight or so decades were just awful, with a rogues gallery that included Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tong, and Mussolini as well as a host of smaller but no less evil characters such as Franco and Pol Pot. Although for us, the Japanese rape of Nanking (1937) scaped the bottom of an already low barrel. But with the fall of the twin horrors of Imperialism and Communism, the wind looked set fair for the last 10 years; or so it seemed. We can’t recommend any artists, as most of their work seems largely pretentious or at least second rate. Maybe we don’t understand it. However, achievements in things like cosmology, biology and information science make this century at least as significant as the eighteenth and fifteenth rolled together. And among the cool sounds you could have danced the night away to Vaughn Williams, Shostakovitch and The Bay City Rollers (who they?-ed) Toilet facilities: definitely on the up. Coda: this century actually included a TV Show called The Good old Days. But it was awful. Truly awful.
21st Century, 2000-today After 36 months of profound and universal peace, the reaction of the American Government to the Trade Centre Attack in 2001 led to one of the greatest blunders in History. Once Iraq got invaded, every psychopath and megalomaniac around the world felt entitled to do the same. Which led to a downward spiral of war, terrorism, invasion and aggression which has lasted to this day. The Information Revolution of the Internet, at least as significant as Gutenburg’s, probably hasn’t helped as every jackass now has access to endless streams of data they can nether understand nor process. On the upside; people have at least begun to notice global warming and other forms of pollution, though it may be already too late to do anything about it. How ironic if the last great genocide is done by everyone to everyone! As for art: once again, what are all those people trying to actually do? Will someone explain it to us? Philip Glass and John Adams may yet provide a few worthwhile cool sounds, we admit. As for the toilets-well, you may understand why we have no wish to visit the International Space Station.
A Happy Christmas to all readers.
Learning, Science and Society 