A New Renaissance

You can have one if you choose to

Officers and other civic guardsmen deciding if we should have a Dark Age or a Renaissance.

At the end of last week, I put up a poll, asking people to consider whether we might be headed into a new “Dark Age” or a new “Renaissance”. To refresh your memory, here were the results.

On Monday I wrote about a New Dark age, how it looks like we could be entering one and what that might mean.

Now let’s talk about a potential Renaissance. Could we be headed for such a period, or does that only happen on the other side of a Dark Age, and what would a new renaissance even be?

Let’s dive in

The term “Renaissance” means “rebirth” in French, and as our history books tell us, it began in Italy in the 14th century and spread through Europe. This led to a cultural, intellectual and economic reawakening that led to advances in the arts, sciences, literature, politics, economics and other disciplines.

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and others reinvigorated the art world. In the world of science, da Vinci, Galileo and Copernicus challenged and changed long established norms. Literature exploded in this time period with authors in Europe writing in their native languages and not only Latin; as had been customary, opening up stories and knowledge to millions more people across the continent.

Some trace the beginning of the Renaissance to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which eventually brought new outside influences to Italy, and begat the rise of wealthy merchant families who supported the arts, culture and education.

Parallels and not so parallels

We are inclined to see patterns in things where there may not be patterns. It helps us make sense of the world to see a story playing out and equate it to something we have seen before. There have been a lot of think-pieces in recent years about how the West and especially the United States looks a lot like Rome at the end of the Roman Empire. Gross inequality, a decadent society and leadership largely unconcerned with the troubles of those they claim to lead.

People see a decline coming, or already started in the West and point to Rome as the analog.

Sure there is some rhyming in that history, but I think that is an oversimplification. Many societies failed and many civilizations fell before Rome, and many societies failed and many civilizations fell after Rome. That pattern will continue. But the decline of the West will not be for the exact same reasons as those in Rome.

As Rome was falling, other civilizations were on the rise or had already risen. Societies in South America, China, African and elsewhere didn’t even know what Rome was as they were charting their own path. What happened in Rome affected them not at all.

Today, much of the damage we are doing to ourselves is global in nature because we haven’t taken care of the environment around us. If income inequality, decadence and poor leadership in the United States and the West are all solved tomorrow, we as a planet would still suffer from crop shortages, extreme weather, mass migration, increased flooding, increased spread of tropical diseases, and an all around harder life as the natural systems of the world break down.

This time, for the first time, the collapse of civilization will be truly global. It will not be evenly distributed, with those in the Global South likely suffering more than those in the Global North due the the resources those in the Global North will be able to throw at the problem.

But make no mistake, a world in collapse will bring plenty of hardship for those in the Global North. Markets will fail, crops will fail, the many systems that we depend on and take for granted will fail. Think of all the systems that you, dear reader from the Global North, depend on in an average week. Think of water, sanitation, sewage, local public transportation, children’s education, university education, air travel, business logistics, immigration, agriculture, food inspection, mail delivery, satellite communication, food shipment, food storage, water treatment, flood preparedness, extreme weather preparedness, mass immigration preparedness, fishing, forestry, energy creation, electricity distribution, disaster response, banking, insurance, your local government keeping the records that prove you own your land, the legal system that backs up that claim, the rule of law, etc.

In the world we are walking into, more and more of those systems will fail. Just imagine if one of them failed for a week. Now imagine that system stays offline, and another one fails next month. Then the paces of those failures quickened, and those failures cascaded, maybe not over months, but years. How would you cope?

Collapse will not happen overnight, but it will happen slowly, and some of those systems, and others will be taken offline, first intermittently, and then permanently for many people, if not most people. In a total collapse, all of those systems fail and we go back to depending on ourselves and our local communities for everything we need.

Will we get to total collapse in our lifetimes?

I don’t know.

But with the trajectory we are on now, it seems certain that some of them will.

This is where the renaissance comes in … if you let it.

If a renaissance is a “rebirth”, then there is definitely space for a renaissance in our near future if we choose it.

Degrowth is the answer.

The status quo will lead us into a dark age. We will still have gross inequality - just now on a global scale - in a world on fire with the lords and serfs of old, even if we don’t use those terms anymore. Life will increasingly become “nasty, brutish, and short” for more and more people around the globe.

But we can choose a path that focuses not on growth of material wealth and consumption, but growth of community, wellness, education, the arts, philosophy and all of the best things we remember coming from the Renaissance. That path will be difficult as well, but it is better to take that path with others focused on rebirth, than hunkering down for a new dark age because we believe that is the only choice we have.