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> It began the erosion of the Feudal system breaking up strict social hierarchies.
That happened in the twelfth century, if not before. The decisive early moment in the rise of the Italian cities against the Holy Roman Empire is the Battle of Legnano, 1176. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…)
> It undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, le…
> It began the erosion of the Feudal system breaking up strict social hierarchies.
That happened in the twelfth century, if not before. The decisive early moment in the rise of the Italian cities against the Holy Roman Empire is the Battle of Legnano, 1176. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Legnano)
> It undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, leading to the Reformation and the end of the Church's monopoly on absolute truth.
The first major anti-Catholic religious movement of the medieval era that I know of is well before the Black Death (1209), and they keep failing until the printing press comes in (1450s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollardy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
> It was likely a causative factor in the emergence of the Renaissance and the rise of Merchant Princes.
The rise of the merchant princes of Venice was started in the eleventh century, if that late, with the Byzantine–Venetian treaty of 1082 and decisively settled as a fact in 1204 when the Venetians and their Crusader allies took Constantinople.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Venetian_treaty_of_1082
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade
Your history, where I know it well, is bad. In an attempt to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia I therefore assume your history, where I do not know it well, is bad.
I wasn’t aware of the Battle of Legnano, but I knew about the rest. I’m sure you’re aware, with the exception of military campaigns (which have turning points, but which also tend to occur before most historians claim, for example, Barbarossa), most of history is a matter of pressures, competing power groups, culture, and the blind chance of pivotal individuals managing to accumulate extraordinarily powerful influence networks.
In this case the competing powers were aristocracy and the rising merchant class. The Black Death strengthened the aristocracy at the expense of the merchants.
I wasn’t talking about temporal power in relation to the Catholic Church. I was referring to what economists term ‘psychic’ considerations- for example, the psychic profits a Swedish’s feels from an intellectually challenging career of value to others, despite years of living expenses accrued during lengthy education and generous Rawlsian redistribution meaning their lifestyle won’t exceed that of a forklift driver for around 15 years.
In this case, the Catholic Church had centuries to try to explain why Europe suffered under wave after wave of unremitting misery and death. Generally shocks tend to galvanise the faithful, bring them together, but longer and more enduring suffering tends to make people and populations question their a priori assumptions. Even the clerisy itself was likely full of doubts.
Good point about the Printing Press though. Other than writing itself, the Printing Press likely stands as the most important human invention in history.
Niall Ferguson has obviously stressed it’s importance, but have you watched the Stephen Pinker documentary The Violence Paradox? People tend to overestimate the extent to which human nature can or does change. Fear stands waiting in the shadows, ready to rule and ruin us in equal measure. Mass literacy is the exception- it allowed us to feel our way beyond our narrow horizons with imagination, beckoning to empathy.
"In this case, the Catholic Church had centuries to try to explain why Europe suffered under wave after wave of unremitting misery and death. "
According to the Penguin _Atlas of World Population History_ , European population reaches its minimum in 600, rises continually from then until the Black Death in the 14th century, by which time it is about triple its post-Roman minimum. I take that as evidence that by contemporary standards things were going reasonably well.
Medieval Europe was desperately poor by our standards, but so was nearly every society prior to recent centuries. What is your basis for "wave after wave of unremitting misery and death?"
Excerpt:
‘The Church also had a monopoly on religious knowledge and interpretation, dictating what people should believe and how they should behave.
But after the Black Death, the Church faced a crisis of confidence and authority. The Church failed to provide an adequate explanation or solution for the plague, which many people saw as a sign of God’s anger or punishment. The Church also failed to protect its own members from the plague, which killed many clergy and monks, leaving some parishes without priests or sacraments. The Church also failed to live up to its own ideals of holiness and charity, as some clergy fled from their duties or exploited their flock, while others indulged in corruption or immorality.’
https://medium.com/flamma-saga/the-black-death-how-a-plague-changed-europe-forever-06f64a0cfc6f
https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/ib/history/how-did-the-black-death-affect-religious-institutions
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death
I think I misread your comment. I thought you were talking about the centuries leading up to the Black Death, not about the period after.
Ah no! Sorry. I was trying to paint the broader picture. In my youth it was a common argument amongst historians that the Black Death whilst beak, did bring about positive economic changes, because the labour shortages increased wages and changed the power of merchants relative to the nobles (here in the UK, we tend be somewhat obsessed about such things).
I was merely extending the argument to cover the Catholic Church, because the Enlightenment required two key cultural factors: an end to the absolute power of sovereigns over the economy, and an end to the Church’s monopoly on truth. It wasn’t by accident that the economic benefits of the Enlightenment were first seen in the Netherlands and England. I was just pleasantly surprised to see quite a few academic sources positing the same thing.
Besides, a variant of the argument was quite common in America about a decade ago- the theory that periods like the one seen in America during the mid-Twentieth, with an affluent and rising middle class, tend to be rare and precarious moments in human history.
The problem is immigration has acquired the status of a moral argument. I was exactly the same. I voted Remain and opposed Brexit, mainly because having worked in manufacturing I knew exactly how important frictionless trade was to an awful lot of jobs.
Luckily, I had recently read The Righteous Mind, because I had seen Jonathan Haidt on TED. I knew there was more to the story than racism/bigotry and ignorance (it helped that mass migration in the UK had been mainly Eastern European at the time). It also helped that a quite traumatic car accident had ended my undergraduate degree quite abruptly, 16 years earlier. In the technical job in manufacturing I eventually landed, I worked quite closely with ‘Salt of the Earth’ types and grew to like them.
The problem is ingroup is incredibly hard to shift. It’s drilled into kids by peer group associations quite early in life. People like us, with high trait Openness to New Experience are quite lucky- we get to explore worlds of culture and history, comfortable in our own skin.
Ingroup doesn’t necessarily lead to outgroup hostility, but it requires a few key ingredients to which our current cultural zeitgeist is diametrically opposed. Equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome. What Haidt calls Procedural Fairness. A public policy of integration and respect for the host culture, as well as an insistence upon observance of civic values and seemingly trivial customs. Finally, the unifying ethos of particular nations. Besides the evidence shows that the most highly educated, the most bicultural, enjoy the greatest degree of economic success!
Most of our elite culture and institutions are Left dominated. The message of modern multiculturalism, as opposed to the eminently more sensible ‘melting pot’ multiculturalism of the past, is almost exactly calibrated to rub the bottom 60%/70% of the population up the wrong way.
Populism isn’t a particular American or British thing. It’s happening across Europe. The irony is that at exactly the same time Labour is scrapping the Rwanda policy, Germany, France, Sweden and several other European countries are in the process of introducing theirs.
We could have managed everything up until a couple of years ago if the pre-2008 era was still in place, but almost every force- cultural, economic, and political- predicts against it.
I haven't watched it; I don't watch television, I read books and listen to podcasts. I feel like you're changing the topic away from claims that can be settled based on historical facts and into moods, which are unfalsifiable.
Well, to be fair the central thesis of Haidt's book is Moral Foundations Theory, model which has gathered data globally. Despite fierce efforts to critique the work in peer review, nobody succeeded in serious disputing it's theses. It now has 2983 citations, despite being relatively recent. Social Integration Theory dates back to 1979. It's well-established and doesn't fall into the category of work in the social sciences facing a crises of replication. Recently, it's been used to critique police-civilian interactions and has even been important in establishing specific exceptions to 'discrimination only on the basic of ability' employment law.
The other certainty is that fairness works better than attempting to jury rig equality through interventions. Here in the UK we focused on investing attention in the educational pipeline and it certainly helped that everyone had access to healthcare. Your SAT racial gaps haven't really closed and Pew Data in the income gaps by decile for Whites, Blacks and Latinos is awful. Fairness appears to work, whilst jury rigging opportunity seems to have fallen flatly on it's face in America, which makes it all the more appalling that we seem to be in the process of importing the American approach.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56585538