Episode #022 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

The term “renaissance” means rebirth, but in order for anything to be reborn, there first needed to be a death. And that death doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. We see instances in our everyday lives where there are figurative renaissances, where nothing really bad happens when that death occurs. For example, you could go on a new diet and lose 100 pounds and feel like you’re personally experiencing a renaissance. The only death there is the death of your old, unhealthy lifestyle—nothing really bad there. You could, for example, end a long period of corruption in your local government, where you fire a few people down at city hall, and your city experiences a renaissance. You know, the potholes are finally getting filled; the lines at the DMV are only three hours long now. But what died in order to usher in The Renaissance? Well, the answer is between 30 and 60% of the entire population of Europe. What died was an entire way of life.

We say Renaissance in modern times, and there’s a pretty positive connotation associated with it. Because of that, it would be very easy for us to think about it in a black-and-white way. It would be very easy for us to just look at the Renaissance as the catalyst between modern times and the Middle Ages and declare that the Renaissance was the good time period to live in, and the Middle Ages was the bad time period to live in, simple as that. It would be really easy to just look at the West during the Middle Ages, see that it’s called the Dark Ages—that pretty much says it there. It’s called the Dark Ages. That sounds terrible. Who wants to live in the Dark Ages? That sounds much worse in every possible category than the Renaissance.

Well, this is a common misconception that I want to make sure we don’t fall into, because it’s certainly not that simple. And it comes down to a great question, one that has been heavily discussed by the greatest philosophers of all time and one that every one of us needs to ask ourselves. How do you define human progress? Well, most of us listening to this podcast live in pretty extraordinary times. Less than ever before in the history of humanity, people don’t die of preventable diseases. There’s less war. There’s more representation for the average citizen. There’s a lower infant mortality rate. People get more value from the money that they make. The list goes on. Barring about 5 countries or so, the average citizen of every country today is much better off than they were 100 years ago and were better off 100 years ago than they were a century before that.

Now, despite all this, at least in America, there are higher numbers of people on antidepressants, anxiety medication, mood stabilizers. What metric do we use to measure human progress? Is progress defined by how scientifically advanced we are? Is progress defined by how many people have jobs? Perhaps you think that progress is defined by some sort of happiness index where progress means an increase in the percentage of overall happy people.

There are people that say that although America obviously is much more scientifically advanced and medically advanced that society as a whole has actually regressed from times when we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes. They point to studies where people go to places like Siberia or Papua New Guinea where people still live as our ancestors supposedly did. And they find that those people have a much lower rate of mental illness, and the average member of the tribe is much happier than the average member of the modern American tribe.

The point of this is that the progress of humanity can be measured in many different ways. The Dark Ages were not pure darkness in every area of human life. To think of it that way is a huge oversimplification. The term the “Dark Ages” is referring to a period in Western Europe of intellectual stagnation and regression. The Dark Ages defines how Western Europe evolved intellectually during the Middle Ages. But just because there was intellectual regression doesn’t mean that there was regression when it came to every facet of the average person’s life at the time. In fact, most historians don’t like terms like “Dark Ages” or “Renaissance” because to talk about the history of humanity in terms of only intellectual progress is just not accurate, because intellectual progress or regress is carried out by only a handful of people. 95% of people living at the time had nothing to do with what thought was going to be prevalent in the coming years.

To think of progress only in terms of the thought of the time period is really a mistake. So, if you think that progress is the progression of human thought, then the Dark Ages was a terrible time to live, yeah. But if you take other factors into consideration, it starts looking like the not-so-Dark Ages. In fact, there’s actually an entire segment of the Middle Ages known as the High Middle Ages. That’s how good it was. There were all sorts of advancements. There were several steps forward in agriculture. They built those beautiful Gothic cathedrals that you see.

But more than ever, and probably the most important thing, is that there was a feeling of unification in Western Europe because they were all connected by one thing—the Church, Christianity. So, when we talk about the death of an entire way of life, when we talk about the series of events that took us from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance, please understand that these events didn’t mark the darkest period of a period of darkness. They marked the end of a period of prosperity in many ways. The people were happy, and they didn’t think that they were living at the end of a curve.

And much like the Warring States period in early China and then the beginning of the Hellenistic age in the Mediterranean, this change from a period of prosperity to a period of widespread political unrest led to what we now know as the Renaissance. Once again, it’s only through lifting more weight or increasing the intensity of your workout that you get stronger as an individual. And just like that, it’s only through adversity and political unrest that humanity really rises to the occasion intellectually and makes progress.

To live during the High Middle Ages was to live during a time when Europe was so prosperous it was actually overpopulated. When people were living at the time, they were using almost every extra acre of land as farmland just to be able to feed everybody. But then something happened that changed the entire course of humanity. This may be the most important single event in the history of human thought. And it’s funny, it really didn’t have anything to do with thought at all. No one knows exactly how it started or exactly where it came from. This event and the series of events that follows it would forever change the world, and it’s known as the Black Death.

Now, the current narrative is that it originated somewhere in the planes of Asia. It then traveled along the silk road and eventually found its way to Crimea, where it embedded itself in fleas that then traveled on the backs of rats on merchant ships to the ports in Western Europe. This pandemic disease is like Finding Nemo. It’s actually pretty impressive. Now, people often mistakenly think of the Black Death as just the bubonic plague, but it was actually more than that. Bubonic was just one form that the plague presented itself in. But you also had to worry about the pneumonic plague. Like pneumonia, it would destroy your lungs from the inside out. Then, if that wasn’t good enough for you, you also had to worry about the septicemic plague, which led to something called disseminated intravascular coagulation, which, let’s just say, you didn’t want that to happen to you.

When it was all said and done, historians estimate that around 400,000,000 people were killed by the Black Death—like I said before, between 30 and 60% of the entire population of Europe. This is the account of one person describing it: “The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began in both men and women with certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit. They grew to the size of a small apple or an egg, more or less, and were vulgarly called tumors. In a short space of time these tumors spread from the two parts named all over the body. Soon after this the symptoms changed and black and purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body, sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of death, just as the original tumor had been and still remained.”

Now, just imagine how it must have felt to look around you and see 30 to 60% of everyone dying of that with no end in sight. Keep in mind, these people weren’t just killed; they died hopelessly. Once you saw the telltale signs—the black marks start appearing or swelling around the body—once you saw that, you had a week to live. They had no idea what caused it or how to treat it. It seriously must have felt like the world was coming to an end. And just imagine how it must have felt being a Christian during this time period. I mean, people today have a hard enough time reconciling the most recent school shooting with the existence of a God. Just imagine how people must have felt watching this disease spreading to everyone all around them.

The lives of people in Western Europe changed dramatically. And it’s terrifying to hear the accounts of people living at the time and what these people were going through. It sounds like a nightmare. In fact, here’s one of them: “All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried… At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shoveled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of dirt, just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”

They had to bury people in such close proximity to each other that they actually compared it to the process of making lasagna. In fact, this limited proximity was a huge problem. One very important part of dying as a religious person during this time period was being buried in consecrated ground. And so many people were dying that they actually ran out of acceptable burial places. So, what they did is they started stacking people on top of each other. It’s actually kind of funny because we employ that same strategy today with skyscrapers. We stack more office building in the same very valuable downtown space of a city. Well, these people had to bury dead bodies in the same manner. These people had to build a reverse skyscraper of dead bodies to fit all of the dead people they had. That more than anything illustrates just how horrific this time period was.

Now, as you can probably imagine, as the world around them started to drastically change like this, the people and their strategy for life started to change. One such change is described here: “Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety.” What the quote is saying is that people started acting in more of an every-man-for-himself way of thinking. People saw the horrific way that these people were dying. And they just started staying away from everyone that was sick so that they could hopefully survive themself.

One way that they stayed away from everybody was to just stop showing up to work. It makes sense. Why would you go to work if some random person might cough on you, and suddenly you have a week to live? When you think that at any point you could drop dead of this terrible disease, why think long term anymore? They started thinking individualistically. Well, the problem with that is that as a society we need people to go to work. The paycheck and stability is typically enough of an incentive to get people to go to work. But really, the rest of society relies on everyone else to do something productive with their time that also helps them.

And really, that’s the beauty of society, right? I feel like I hear somebody every once in a while say, “You know what, I don’t need anybody. I’m fine all by myself. I’m just fine on my own.” Well, unless that person’s living in a shack on the top of a mountain somewhere, squirrel hunting all day, they’re really fooling themselves. This is one of the things that makes society work. We rely on others to do their part so that we can benefit from it. And that makes doing our part easier, and they benefit from it. This relationship makes us all better off. And if somebody thinks they’re exempt from this process, they are sadly mistaken.

For example, just eating breakfast one morning, you might have fruit that was grown and harvested locally, a spoon that was made in Taiwan, a cup that was made by people in China, oatmeal grown and packaged in the state of Kansas, and orange juice from Florida. Society is a group effort. And if one day the people in Florida just stop making orange juice, we would have some real issues. And that goes for every facet of society.

Well, back in these times, the thing that society most relies on and one of the biggest money-making industries back then was agriculture. Now, if you combine between 30 and 60% of the entire population dying with this now large group of people that had this newfound sense of apathy about their role in society and going to work and thinking long term, the people in charge of these agricultural productions—the people that pay peasants to work the fields and make them money—they were having a really hard time fielding enough people to get the work done. So, then the faithful law of supply and demand starts to take over. Peasants became increasingly more valuable as more and more of them died. The supply of peasants couldn’t keep up with the demand of work that needed to get done to feed society.

Now, when a company today can’t get enough people to willingly do a job for a certain salary, they’re forced to raise the salary to try to entice people to come in and do that job. Well, the exact same thing happened in Western Europe during the fall of the Middle Ages. Though it was completely illegal at the time, the desperate times allowed for peasants to shop around with other landowners to try to make a better wage. These subjugated people were finally seeing what it was like to be a free citizen with a skill set that people valued. What started as merely a pandemic disease that led to a population crisis quickly turned into an economic crisis as well, because the owners of these fields couldn’t afford to pay for the rising cost of their work force. This threatened a complete collapse of the agriculture of the region.

So, what the governments did to try to combat this was impose a wage freeze. Now, we can relate to this in modern times. Have you ever worked somewhere where somebody gets fired or somebody quits, and regardless of whether they’re there or not there, the same amount of work needs to get done the next day? So, you just need to pick up the slack and work harder with no increase in pay. Well, these peasants were dealing with that, times a thousand. And then imagine if the government made it a law that you couldn’t get paid any more than you do now? This wage freeze in coalition with several other small regulations and the massive tax increase on citizens to fight the Hundred Years’ War with France led to peasants banding together and attempting to overthrow their governments.

So, what started as a population crisis quickly turned into an economic crisis that then turned into a political crisis. Why are all these events significant to philosophy? Because this was a paradigm shift on the largest scale. People began to question the very foundation of the society that they had lived in for over a thousand years. And these multiple crises are very similar to a couple of examples that we’ve already seen. During the Warring States period in China, people like Confucius and Lao Tzu looked to the past at times when things were better to help find the direction of the future of their society. I mean, people of their time looked to the past and then developed what we now know as the Hundred Schools of Thought. During the Hellenistic age—the death of Alexander and the political chaos of the Mediterranean—philosophers looked to the past to times when things were better to help build a future that hopefully wasn’t like what they were currently living through.

Well, just like in those two examples, the people of the late Middle Ages looked at their society that was seemingly coming to an end and looked to the past for times when things were better. They wanted a new beginning. They wanted a rebirth, a renaissance. This bacterial plague had just spread across Europe and killed hundreds of millions of people, and now an intellectual plague was spreading across Europe in response to it. The mentality of many thinkers of the time is summed up well by this guy here. “I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”

This is a quote by a philosopher who beautifully encapsulates a way of thinking that was spreading at the time. His name was Erasmus. He actually wrote his most influential work right during the years leading up to the Protestant Reformation. He was a humanist. Now, humanism is actually an incredibly vague term. It’s not like stoicism or Pyrrhonism. It’s nowhere near that specific. It’s a broad category that many different outlooks are a part of, but the similarity between all of them is that they look at things through the lens of what it is to be a human as typically opposed to what it means to be a byproduct of a supernatural being. Humanism during this time was much less than what it would eventually become, but it emphasized moving away from the scholastic approach that had dominated for so long and moving towards the teachings of earlier Greeks and Romans.

We’re going to talk about the Reformation in much more historical context next time. By the way, if today’s episode seems more like a history lesson than a philosophy lesson, it’s because it is. Trust me, though. The biggest mistake people make when teaching philosophy is just to have one name of a philosopher after another and zero context. The whole subject just becomes one giant blur of names and ideas with no real way to link the information together. We need to understand what it meant to be a human being during that time period to understand why there are such giant shifts in the way that people see existence.

The important part to understand now is that Erasmus symbolizes this new intellectual plague that’s moving across Europe. What we have to understand is that during the times of Erasmus, religion was not synonymous with faith as is typically seen nowadays. In fact, for the last several centuries, as we’ve talked about for the last several episodes, people like Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna—these people applied their massive brains to the task of fusing together faith and reason. They tried to create a synthesis between faith and reason which, for a time, were seen as complete opposites. Faith during their time meant Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and reason being Plato and Aristotle. They had a lot of success. And so, religion and theology at the time were seen as this weird conglomeration of faith and reason.

Well, the interesting thing about Erasmus is that he doesn’t fall into either of these categories that great thinkers usually fell into. He falls into a really weird middle place on the spectrum. So, as the Reformation began, the Church and the leadership of the Church were seen as increasingly corrupt and evil. But how could that happen? They’re the leadership of the Church. They’re supposed to be the moral authority. Well, Erasmus thought that the mixing of philosophy with religion wasn’t a noble pursuit like they’d thought for the last thousand years. He actually thought this merging of the two was the reason why everything was going so wrong.

And it makes sense if we look at it from his perspective. He looked around him. He saw all the stuff that was going on at the top, and was like, “Okay, guys, come on. What does all this stuff really have to do with God?” He saw all kinds of stuff. There were many pardons that priests got for committing crimes that were completely irresponsible. He saw all kinds of ridiculous rituals, one of which is where the spiritual leaders were somehow able to look at you and get together and crunch all the numbers and figure out exactly how long your soul is going to be in purgatory versus somebody else’s soul. He saw all kinds of trivial disputes between Christian leadership where they argue about small issues that don’t really matter to Erasmus, like the nature of the relationship between each aspect of the Trinity. He saw that as just a waste of time. He was opposed to the entire intellectual tradition of scholasticism as a whole. He was a humanist.

Well, all these things are byproducts of this relationship between philosophy and religion. And to Erasmus, these people had entirely missed the point. People are focusing on all these unrelated things, these overintellectualized things, when really the whole time, to Erasmus, the true point was just to love one another. It was very simple. Instead of all these weird rituals where you access God through some anointed medium like a priest or a bishop, you don’t need any of that. All that is a corrupted variant of what you should really try to do which is form a more individual relationship with God.

He sums it up here: “What hate required these things at your hands? In vain they will make their idle pleas: one that he has lived only on fish, one that he has never changed his sacred hood, this one that he has lost his voice by continual singing of holy anthems, and one that he has forgotten how to speak in his strict obedience to the vow of silence. Our savior will interrupt their excuses and say, ‘Whoa unto you, scribes and Pharisees, I know you not. I left you but one precept of loving one another, and that I do not hear anyone plead he has faithfully discharged.’”

What he’s talking about there is all of these various arbitrary sacrifices that human beings have declared are what God really wants us to be doing. These humans had tangled everything up, to Erasmus. He gives the example of the guy who sang worship songs so much that he lost his voice or somebody that is so committed to his vow of silence that he actually forgot how to speak. These people have missed the point. Theology and philosophy had missed the point. True spirituality is something that’s very personal between God and the individual. And this is the reason why Erasmus is representative of this intellectual plague going around, this individualistic approach that was growing in popularity.

When we talk about the Protestant Reformation next time, we’ll be able to talk further about this relationship between the individual and the Church authority. But when it comes to calling out the people that have corrupted his religion, Erasmus pulls no punches. “They think to satisfy that Master they pretend to serve, our Lord and Savior, with their great state and magnificence, with the ceremonies of installments, with the titles of reverence and holiness, and with exercising their episcopal function only in blessing and cursing. … Their only weapons ought to be those of the Spirit; and of these indeed they are mighty liberal, their interdicts, their suspensions, their denunciations, their aggravations, their greater and less excommunications, and their roaring bulls, that fright whomever they are thundered against; and these most holy fathers never issued them more frequently than against those, who, at the instigation of the devil, and not having the fear of God before their eyes, do feloniously and maliciously attempt to lessen and impair St. Peter’s patrimony…”

Yes, Erasmus had a huge problem with the Church leadership and what religion had become, but he had an even bigger problem with philosophers: most importantly, these people that sit around and tell everybody that the goal of life and the thing that’s going to make you the happiest is to sit around and reason about things and try to get to the bottom of the nature of things, try to figure out what the truth is. These people say that to live in ignorance is to live in misery. We, of course, know what he’s referring to. We’ve heard that line of reasoning many times in this show. Well, Erasmus couldn’t disagree with it more.

He says it here. “Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception, and ignorance. But it isn’t—it is human. I don’t see why they call it a misery when you’re all born, formed, and fashioned in this pattern, and it’s the common lot of mankind. There is no misery about remaining true to type…” What he’s saying is, look, how can you say that you’re miserable as a human if you live in ignorance of the truth? We are born in ignorance of these things. When we’re grown up, we don’t magically, all of a sudden, know everything that there is to know. Living in ignorance is part of what it means to be a human being. And as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. We as humans are happiest when we live in ignorance, and all this knowledge these people seek really only serves to complicate things and make their life worse than it already was.

The key to happiness, to Erasmus, is something that’s actually laid out in the Bible. “The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.”