By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, July 08, 2021
‘Renaissance” is one of those words with almost
exclusively positive connotations, like “democracy” and “equality.”
And if “renaissance” is a word that gives us warm
fuzzies, it is because the original Renaissance was associated with a great
many things we cherish — or at least pretend to cherish.
One of those (purportedly) cherished things is reading
books. Before the development of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in
the 15th century, books in the Western world had been mostly handwritten. Books
were extraordinarily expensive, which meant that access to them was largely
restricted to religious institutions and to a few very wealthy individuals. The
availability of relatively inexpensive books changed reading — it changed who
read and how they read. But it changed writing even more profoundly. The
interests of readers and writers moved beyond the ecclesiastical institutions
and royal courts into the commercial towns, where members of the newly affluent
merchant patriciate demanded a new literature that spoke to their own lives in
their own languages. Burgher writers such as Thomas More became the leading
public intellectuals of their time. Although writing letters intended for
publication is a practice that dates back to Cicero and beyond, writing for
publication took on a different character once there were presses.
As literature moved out of the courts and monasteries, so
did education. The education of the laity was a key component of the
Renaissance. As with literature, there was a change in who was educated and a
more profound change in the content of education. Greek and Latin remained the
hallmarks of a gentleman’s education, but the newly empowered commoners also
took up studies of acute interest in the emerging European nation-states,
including national history, administration, and science. And as the laity grew
in its intellectual confidence and enjoyed free access to Scripture, lay
scholars naturally took on a greater role in theology, too. The life of the
soul would be democratized as thoroughly as the life of the mind.
This happened against a backdrop of flourishing city
life. The nobility out there in their country redoubts might have outranked the
city merchants socially, but from Augsburg to Bruges to London, educated
commoners soon matched the cultural and political power of the aristocracy —
and often surpassed the aristocracy financially. They became great patrons of
art, literature, and learning. And because they took an active role in
commercial life, they often were able to provide their sovereigns with advice
and services more valuable than what the barons had to offer, for all their
horses and suits of armor.
Business was booming, especially for the money-movers. We
think of the Medici and the other Italian bankers, but Germany’s Fuggers
followed much the same path — from textiles to high finance. Financial
innovations made complex, long-distance trading operations more practical and
more profitable, scientific advances expanded mining and metalworking, and the
Atlantic trading routes surpassed those of the Mediterranean. In and around the
cities, serfs who had been tied to the land began to have some choice of
occupation as feudalism declined and something more closely resembling
capitalism emerged.
That is the Renaissance we celebrate: literacy and
learning, reason, the end of ecclesiastical tyranny, culture, trade, city life,
human flourishing — choice.
And what did the Renaissance bring in politics?
Despotism.
The Renaissance was the great age of absolute monarchy.
Scholars still argue about how genuinely absolutist the absolute monarchies of
the time were, but as a matter of principle and as a matter of fact the princes
of Renaissance Europe began to wield an exclusive power far beyond that of
medieval kings, whose thrones were only one center of power in a world with
other important ones, including the nobility at home and the Holy See in Rome.
The new class of educated commoners (Thomas More, again,
as well as his rival, Thomas Cromwell) provided a corpus of competent
administrators and tax-collectors that helped princes come up with new ways to
control, extort, and fleece their peoples, with the throne supplanting the
local aristocracy with twice the rapacity and half the sense of responsibility.
The printing press was almost immediately weaponized as an instrument of
propaganda. The new Atlantic trade saw booming commerce in silver and spices —
and slaves. Ecclesiastical power declined but the monarchs stepped in to fill
the void, with figures such as Henry VIII taking on a new role as the head
of national churches that were adjuncts to the newly
emerging national consciousnesses. Denmark’s Kongeloven insisted
that the king must be confessed to be the “most perfect and supreme person on
the Earth by all his subjects, standing above all human laws and having no
judge above his person, neither in spiritual nor temporal matters, except God
alone,” a sentiment that is practically North Korean in its absolutism,
excepting the concession to God.
From Henry VII’s practice of entangling friends and
rivals both with financial ties to his regime, to Henry VIII’s loyalty oaths
and ready abuse of treason charges, to Elizabeth I’s surveillance state, in the
Tudors we can see the emergence of a style of tyranny almost as modern and
familiar as that of Mobutu Sese Seko or Francisco Franco. All of that
liberalism in culture, education, and economy did not produce liberalism in the
state — it produced absolutism.
That case study might help us to understand developments
in (to take the extreme example) China, which in recent years has experienced
some of the blessings associated with the Renaissance: an opening to trade and
entrepreneurship, the ascendancy of an urban commercial elite, access to
powerful new modes of communication, significant advances in the techniques of
state administration, and a gush of hot new capital — each of which has been,
to some extent, turned into an instrument of surveillance or control by the
sovereign.
(Similar patterns might be detected, to a much more
limited extent, in the United States and Europe.)
We live in a world that is today richer, freer, more
democratic, more integrated, and more dynamic than it was 40 years ago — and
more brutal, more invasive, and more unstable, too. We talk about “progress”
vs. “turning back the clock,” or about being “on the right side of history” vs.
the wrong, but, contra Barack Obama, history is not an arc — it is a
vortex, and there is no escaping it.
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