The Renaissance was a messy pivot, where peoples' relationship with the future changed. They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, th

The Renaissance was a messy pivot, where peoples' relationship with the future changed. They started looking backward in order to move forward. Before that, the dominant logic was rooted in the authority of tradition. Basically, "This is how it's always been done, so this is how we'll keep doing it." The idea was that the past had already figured things out. But people's relationship with the past shifted. People began entertaining the idea that, actually, maybe we could do better - that new ideas might solve problems the old ones couldn't. For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works. He thought the ancients had something we'd lost, and by digging it back up, we could think more clearly. But it wasn't in deference or tradition, it was through a the lens which new consequences became possible. You see the same thing with Brunelleschi, who looked at Roman ruins and said, "Cool, now let's use this to invent perspective and change how we visualize space forever." Even Machiavelli, when interacting with the works of Livy and Tacitus, wasn't trying to restore a Roman republic, he was trying to figure out how power really works in the modern state. The Renaissance was looking backward on the surface, but what made it revolutionary was how it looked back. It didn’t simply copy like the ancients had done since forever, it reinterpreted. That reinterpretation cracked open the door to modernity and the idea that the future didn't have to be like that past, but rather that it's a set of contingencies and possibilities.