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The article is written on a false premise. Each new era shakes the social foundations of the previous one, and life for the average person doesn't get better im
by bluetomcat 6y ago
The article is written on a false premise. Each new era shakes the social foundations of the previous one, and life for the average person doesn't get better immediately. What we, in our distant collective memory remember is the great thinkers and the revolutionaries who laid the foundations for a new order. If you took a sociological perspective for the situation back in the day, you would see a divided society, violence and uncertainty.
- ivanhoe 6y agoTrue, but the great thinkers and revolutionaries (and artists, architects, etc) don't just happen to flourish in one age on random, they're the result and a part of a massive change in society that provides the right environment in the right moment for a "golden age" to happen. Gutenberg's invention of press was probably one of the biggest triggers of civilization change since the invention of farming, all of the sudden knowledge and information became available and started to flow freely between millions of common people, and between different countries which was super important as traveling was hard and slow and unsafe back then. It was like the Internet of that time.
- Pyramus 6y agoNot disagreeing with your conclusion, but wasn't one of the takeaways of the article that there are no "eras"? "Eras" are arbitrary delineations when in fact change is incremental. Doesn't part 2) of the essay explain how "golden era" was "invented" by scholars post-hoc, and later coined "renaissance"?