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History and Evolution:
By William E. Steinman:
Part 83, Renaissance Summary:
October 25, 2004:
In the essays number 49 through 82 I discussed the Renaissance and what I called the Renaissance men. Just to be clear, we cannot set a date where this era really started or a date where it really ended. History is not the tidy. Not at all. All of this stuff overlaps tremendously and the dates of where one stops and another start is very much a matter of judgement. In a sense, the Renaissance never really ended. It simply morphed into the age of enlightenment.
As to the Enlightenment, we cannot say it ended either. As I look at it, I think it simply petered out in the general decay of Western civilization. For now, I will notice that we see fewer and fewer brilliant people as our cultures mature. We see more and more morons, buffoons, and fools in power. It is possible that a case could be made for democracy being the cause of its own demise. Mediocrity and expediency seem to be the outstanding moral codes of our culture. Wherein the Renaissance blossomed and overflowed with geniuses, the genuine genius is now an almost extinct species. The magnificent flowering of genius has dried up in the human race. I will get further into that issue later.
I'm sure that some will want to be critical that I did not
cover all of the people who helped create the renaissance. The
fact is, I did not feel I could devote much more space to this
phenomenon. I picked those who I thought were important and the
ones who best demonstrated the pattern of change that manifested
in these times.
We could take the life of any of these people and make a grand
adventure book and an outstanding feature length movie. That is
one of the reason I cannot fathom why Hollywood continues to produce
so much senseless twaddle when all this great true life material
remains unused.
In these renaissance men essays, there are some men I have ignored completely, some I have just mentioned in passing, and some I have given more visibility. The idea was to just give a sense of the scope of this outpouring of creativity we call the Renaissance. I wanted to show the mosaic of creativity and allow you to grasp the gestalt. One of the shocking thing about this renaissance is how many truly outstanding people came forth in such a short period of time, about 400 years. These were clearly superior people and in some cases superior dominants. Some for sure were also power dominants. All of them influenced the course of history.
These men of the renaissance changed the direction of all science and all art and they most certainly gave new impetus to philosophy, particularly political philosophy. This was not so with religion. Organized religion changed its stripes, its coat, and its color, but not the nature of its underlying character. It remains, to this day, a growth and change resisting regressive force with its primitive belief in superstition and magic.
Thinking of the Renaissance from our perspective we can notice the thread of genius and inquiry that began in Athens was never really shut down. It seemed to have disappeared but it was kept alive even under the Roman Empire and the evils of the dark ages. It was kept alive in the East when it seemed to die out in the West, The light was not brilliant, but the embers remained alive and were never fully extinguished. There is a thread from Socrates all the way to Thomas Jefferson, and it goes back from Socrates to the first dawning of consciousness in man. It is all connected. I believe this is a manifestation of the Life Force's drive toward higher and more complex life.
Where is it all going? That is the question I would like to answer, or at less investigate. This study of History and Evolution is part of that investigation. In this particular study, my goal is still to trace the evolution of democracy from its first beginnings in Athens to the birth of the American democracy.
Let me reiterate my understanding of some of the forces which drove that evolution. There have always been two apparently conflicting needs or drives in the human being. First, to be sure, is the need for stability and safety. This is most compelling for those who do not have these basic things. Without them, nothing else is possible. This is why men create communities and government. They give us the safe environment in which we may pursue other things.
One of the other things men usually pursue is freedom. This
is the other drive, which seems to conflict with the need for
security. It is our inherent drive toward freedom. Man yearns
to be free to be who he is, to be his own person. It is only through
the mechanism of representative democracy that these two drives
can meld and become complementary. Only representative democracy
provides the kind of stability and safety which enables the human
being to seek his true excellence and genius.
Every other form of government man has tried has eventually turned
oppressive and/or collapsed into anarchy. Only representative
democracy holds out the promise of satisfying both needs. To be
sure, the promise is just that, not a guarantee, and it is yet
to be realized.
It was only in the time of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment where these concepts of democracy began to emerge under the influence of English heros and philosophers. Here the drive for freedom and the understanding of community began blending into a palpable force for change. What came forth in the Enlightenment finally culminated in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. The promise inherent in that is also yet to be fulfilled. What we have is the promise and some cause for hope. Nothing more.
For now, this study of the evolution of democracy can continue
with a look at some of the events of English history or, more
properly, the history of Great Britain. Here is where one of the
oldest and most powerful documents of human freedom originated.
This is the English Magna Carta that was reluctantly granted
by King John at Runnymede in June 1215. It guaranteed some basic
human rights to the English people. We will get into this and
other events n the following essays.
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