A Darker View of the Renaissance | Hacker News Reader

A Darker View of the Renaissance

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41 pointsThevet59 comments

There's a line I ran across from the movie The Third Man where the character Harry Lime says:

> In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man

And then Italy had Roman Catholics, Spanish, Austrian, and French occupations, fascists, a civil war, neofascists...

While Switzerland has become quite good at making clocks.

I have always found this a nearly unassailable argument in favour of the swiss model.

Yeah it's really strong. The only viable assault is that its premise ("Switzerland had 500 years of peace") isn't true (as siblings have noted).

Italy is also a lot bigger.

A line of great rhetorical effect but not necessarily great logical worth.

First of all if he is correct that the Swiss had 500 years of democracy and peace then it follows that they produced a working democratic model which at the time was pretty remarkable. However being Harry Lime it is no surprise that he is not correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Switzerland

Second of all I don't know what population size of Switzerland and Italy was during the Renaissance but nowadays Italy is about 7 times bigger, so let's assume they had approximately the same difference. Italy of course also has more land area etc. etc. Given these differences I might expect some more impressive people to be drawn from the larger, richer population. And there is of course another differentiator of wealth which is that Italy at the time was the center of European religion, meaning that a lot of wealth was naturally drawn there.

Finally Switzerland, although small, has like every nation had notable personalities as well https://www.houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/7-sw...

on edit: when I say Harry Lime is not correct I mean that Switzerland did not have 500 years of peace and democracy.

Nor did the Swiss invent the cuckoo clock - more likely Bavarian.

It has been traditionally manifactured in the Schwarzwald area in Baden-Württemberg.

If we take 1500 as the anchor date.

Italy 2.2 million vs 745 hundred thousand Swiss. Venice is 1.5m, Florance is 750,000 although not part of Italy at this point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populat...

So not quite as big a population difference as today, also at the time those cities were centers of trade, hence centers of money and all that entails. Great places to attract the clever and talented.

The quote is nice but anachronistic. The Swiss were feared mercenaries during the Renaissance and worked for the papal forces. The Swiss Guards at the Vatican are a legacy of this history that is visible today. It seems they were first hired by Julius II, who was successor to Alexander VI aka the Borgia Pope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard

That's interesting I wonder if the neutral position it takes now is based on that mercenaries role. Don't take sides but profit.

The preferred light anti-aircraft guns used by both sides in WW II were built under license, one from a Swiss company, one by a Swedish company.

Swiss neutrality was a decision of the Great Powers, not the Swiss.

> Switzerland has the oldest policy of military neutrality in the world; [1] it has not participated in a foreign war since its neutrality was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1815.

> Although the European powers (Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden) agreed at the Congress of Vienna in May 1815 that Switzerland should be neutral, final ratification was delayed until after Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated so that some coalition forces could invade France via Swiss territory.

...

> The dating of neutrality to 1516 is disputed by modern historians. Prior to 1895, no historian referenced the Battle of Marignano as the beginning of neutrality. The later backdating has to be seen in light of threats by several major powers in 1889 to rescind the neutrality granted to Switzerland in 1815. A publication by Paul Schweizer, titled Geschichte der schweizerischen Neutralität attempted to show that Swiss neutrality wasn't granted by other nations, but a decision they took themselves and thus couldn't be rescinded by others. The later publication of the same name by Edgar Bonjour, published between 1946 and 1975, expanded on this thesis.

https://wikimili.com/en/Swiss_neutrality

During the Renaissance most soldiers in Italy were mercenaries. The use of citizens at large scale for soldiers dates to the French Revolution. Macchiavelli incidentally was a proponent of this idea but it did not go very far in his day, which was the early 1500s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev%C3%A9e_en_masse

The line is not supposed to be taken at face value, and certainly not as a history lesson. In the movie Harry Lime was a criminal selling fake penicillin on the black market thereby killing many people including children (he acknowledges as much, as far as I can remember). The quote is just him trying to justify this to his old friend who is horrified to discover his scheme.

This is like when people take "you cant handle the truth" or "greed is good" or "to thine own self be true" at face value, completely ignoring the context around the lines.

In any case it is a non sequitur. Losts of places throughout history had murder and bloodshed without producing the Italian Renaissance. (And Switzerland did not actually have peace for 500 years anyway although they did stay neutral during the world wars.). But Lime was not a historian, just a cynical criminal trying to justify stealing penicillin.

It is a great line though.

From the Wikipedia page:

> Greene wrote in a letter, "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence."

So a throw away line in every sense of the word :)

Can you do one for the "Hard times create strong men..." quote next? I feel like that one gets tossed around a lot.

If you've got time to read 6 posts, there's a very in-depth response to that quote starting here: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

This reminded me a quote from Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker guide to the Galaxy:

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

I would have chosen to live in Switzerland instead on Italy.

I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...

A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:

> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”

> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.

> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.

> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.

I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given climate change for example, was the industrial revolution a mistake? If it was an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment era, then was that a mistake? Too early to tell, but if we end up destroying ourselves I guess the answer would have to be "yes", but it's a hard pill to swallow.

I'll take climate change for modern medicine and technology. I think any anti-enlightment thinkers are really need to understand what life was like before that.

The concern is that climate change will also remove modern medicine and technology (and food, and water) for a huge number of people.

That's kind of a rough calculation when you look at how many people there were in 1950 and why so many more are alive today.

Pick your path of suffering or something.

Which I guess is why the other poster winds the clock back before the industrial revolution.

That's been happening for a while, but mostly as a techno-utopian reskin of last century's racist and fascist ideologies[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

And the “Intellectual Dark Web”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web

Given the 1C increase in global average temps, should we go back to subsistence farming and 1/10th of the population? I wonder if you went back in time and asked your ancestors that question. I believe, after you explained to them how you spend most of your day browsing with a magic rectangle, sit in cush air conditioned environments, have access to full motion and interactive media and entertainment, can order nearly anything you like delivered to your door within 48 hours, can travel across continents in mere hours without risking death of dysentery or getting your wagon train raided by bandits, etc. they would ask you what the catch is. 1C hotter? No really...what's the catch?

But the catch is not well put, it’s not going to be just 1C hotter which in my oppinion is off, but the erosion of the coastlines, the near total melting of polar glaciers round, massive rise in sea levels, mass extinctions of many species, chaos and war amongst the remaining people for the diminishing resources, etcetera. All these for technology and comfort at the hands of humans with enormous costs for everything else. And the potential extinction of our own species in a much shorter/accelerated timespan.

I don't know if you've seen the latest, but Greenland just had record ice gain during the middle of the ordinary melt season, after an already substantially strong year (and 3 out of the last 4 years have seen substantial gains): http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ we are thousands of years away from polar melting, if ever.

We have less war than they did prior to the industrial revolution. Prior to industrial revolution we didn't even have the resources to care about extinctions and they were happening anyways.

And yet it's glaciers have receded over the past 40 years (and the distance covered is a very deceptive view of total amount of ice lost and you'll find the same everywhere else.

1°C can mean a ton for coral reefs or algae bloom. 1°C can mean a lot for methane retention in permafrost. 1°C has a lot of knock on effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF7M-KzjrXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEieWJghRNY

I don't think extinctions were happening at the same scale since the industrial revolution and the power humans acquired over the environment. Humans created damage before but it was too small to matter so they got into a symbiosis with the systems around them. After the industrial revolution the scale begun tipping massively. We don't really notice because we can't make the comparison, our lifespan is limited and we are all more or less submerged in our own ideologies.

I'm not against technology, I am on the internet too, I have electricity, running water and all the modern facilities and I admit it is quite amazing for us to be living with all these but there is a cost to these and i'm not afraid to feel responsible and ready to scale back.

Aside from carbon emissions - which some say it's unavoidable and I halfway agree - we have polluted the planet and spread our plastic things everywhere. Despite knowing this we are still using plastic and discard it with no care like there is no tomorrow. Think about the next generation. Do you have children or grandchildren?

They might ask: Where are all of the happy people? Why does everyone still have to work so much and why do they all want more than they have?

I personally am happy to be alive, which I would not be without antibiotics, and I am happy that infant mortality is negligible rather than approaching 50%. A glancing knowledge of history would have any theist on their knees thanking God they were born now and not earlier. Calvin Coolidge was one of the most powerful men on Earth and his son died of an infected booster acquired playing tennis.

They might ask why we don't live in human-scale communities where our friends and family are a short walk, for one. Where and when are our festivals, and why do we separate grandparents from grandchildren, to live lonely lives of isolation with the meager substitute of electronic communication for human contact?

I wonder if you really tried to put yourself in the shoes of one of your ancestors, and imagine the kind of world they lived in and the kind of things they valued would your belief change any? This is a common line of discourse, but it always seems to me to lack empathy beyond this present moment. Could you sell them on how the sausage was made and not just the sizzle?

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to death. There's no way climate change is bad enough to make a world where shirts are luxury items preferable.

Or plagues and/or wars that killed a third or more of the population. The Black Death and the 30 Years War are both in this category.

Didn't world wars and modern oppression from various regimes kill many?

They did, but wars and oppression aren't an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Premodern leaders were very capable of killing and oppressing people at scale when they put their minds to it.

To put that further, the wars and automated atrocities of the industrial age wouldn't break the noise floor of human suffering in pre-industrial history.

By some estimates, Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people, and all he had were horses.

Europeans coming to North America led to the deaths of ~50 million people in the 16th century, mostly by accident.

"Human suffering" seems difficult to assess, and all Industrial Revolution effects will only be known during post-industrial history (maybe after some thermonuclear/bacteriologic war).

Many/most Genghis Khan "victims" are highly debatable: "most of them were victims of plague, floods and famine long after the war in northern China was over in 1234 and were not killed by Mongols" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#In_China](Source)).

Even the most certain Genghis Khan victims, resulting from systematic slaughter in non-obedient zones, are postmarks in history because they were very unusual (and probably exaggerated). There are few other pre-industrial similar events, however there are many post-industrial similar ones (extermination camps, genocides, battles of Stalingrad/Verdun ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_by_casualties]..., ...).

IMHO "mostly by accident" invalidates your point.

> Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to death.

On a historical level what’s unusual about the Irish Great Famine of 1845-48 isn’t that a quarter of the population died, it’s that that was the last time that happened.

Also that the same famine struck other places but the administration handled it in Ireland catastrophically poorly.

The realm of anti-enlightenment inquiry I am interested in right now is not the "tragic mistake" but rather the shift to a mercantalist view of the world. The later medieval period in Europe saw major scientific discoveries, and an argument sometimes made of the capital-R Renaissance was that it was more flashy than productive.

But the mercantalism, I think, was precipitated by the plague years and the resulting labor shortages. These are often seen as a good since they produced wage increases. But they also motivated development of stronger controls over the person - the nation is tied to the individual via legible identity as a wage earner, rather than as a member of the village, and slavery thus reemerges as a way of shifting around the accounting by denying identity. And so by the 1600's, you have press gangs kidnapping people, and debtors becoming indentured servants, as well as the slave trade.

In this light, this whole thing of civilization has been a seesaw of problems since antiquity.

As a reaction it is a highly silly example of scapegoating that looks for simple solutions. Granted there is ample historical precedent of such anti-intellectual scapegoating. To be frank the behavior resembles a "shit rolls downhill" cycle of abuse where they will blame and harm whomever is weaker but able to be a target of envy.

Lack of progress doesn't make it more sustainable. Very early farming was a semi-sedetary "slash and burn" the forrest and then relocate once the soil is depleted and let the forrest reclaim their abandoned buildings while they go to despoil someplace else.

> Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance.

Straw man indeed. As a layperson, I didn’t imagine Renaissance Europe to be an abrupt transition from medieval to 21st century living standards or political stability. Of course there were atrocities and quality of life was dramatically poorer and more brutish than it is today. What would be remarkable to my lay mind is some interpretation of that brutishness as a development or consequence of enlightenment developments (as opposed to an extension of medieval conditions); however, I doubt such a case can credibly be made.

I think that is the point even if it's overdone. Many people do think the renaissance and enlightenment were smooth upward transitions when in reality they were periods of profound political and social turmoil.

While I do think the enlightenment was mostly a step forward, it wasn't all light any more than the dark ages were all dark.

This is something we should keep in mind as we enter the real information age whose transformations and upheavals we have barely started to feel. We haven't seen anything yet.

The “Dark Ages” does not mean what most laypeople think it means. Most historians don’t use the term anymore, because it’s too difficult to shake off the misleading connotations it has to the public.

Nobody ever used that name in Italy, it's Middle Ages here (Medioevo) which started with the fall of the Roman Empire and barbaric invasions (and the settlement of many of the people that eventually became modern Italians.) Anyway we had invasions as long as the 19th century, maybe the 20th as well if you think about WW2, so it's a kind of normal business here and in most of Europe. We also had a constant improvement of arts and technology after the first few bad centuries. Not very dark at all.

“Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader” —- wasn’t exactly what I was thinking. How about the modern press where the elite members have ‘Au Pairs’ or underpay both legal citizens & undocumented workers to take care of their homes? There are even true indentured servants in the US and all around the world.

Yet let’s ‘contextualize’ the darkness of the Renaissance.

I think having a lot of small but wealthy states, competing for prestige is a big factor for the art side of the Renaissance as well as for the heavy warfare part

Yeah what a pity the dark ages came to and end. /s

The term “dark ages” is a periodization popularized in the mid 19h century. It’s not commonly used in academic discourse because it is nonspecific and subjective in its definition.

and on top of that, that period was only dark for northern and western europe, the rest of the world (including southern europe though its connections with north africa and the middle east) was doing pretty good.

read a book

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