Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Foreign Exchanges, the podcast. As always, I'm Derek, and I want to thank all of you for checking out the show and ask those of you who aren't familiar with FX to please check out our internet home at www.foreignexchangesalloneword.news.
There you can sign up for my newsletter, which covers international news and US foreign policy via nightly news roundups and periodic features. I also occasionally get to interview scholars on things that thankfully have as little to do with current events as possible, which is what I'm trying to do today. In a moment I will be joined by Ada Palmer, associate professor of early modern European history in the college at the University of Chicago. She's written a fantastic new book called Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age that is both a history of the Renaissance and a few of its more interesting figures, but also a look underneath the hood at how the discipline of history crafts narratives about golden ages, Renaissances, and how those narratives survive even when the evidence may not support them.
I'll have links to purchase the book in the show description. I'm very excited to speak with Dr. Palmer, so let's get right to it.
So I am now joined by Ada Palmer. She is the associate professor, as I said earlier, of early modern European history in the college at the University of Chicago and author of Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. Ada, thank you so much for coming on the program. It's so great to have you.
So the usual first question for interviews like this is what prompted you to want to write this book, and it seems silly to ask that question about why did you write a history of the Renaissance of all things. This book tries—this book is more than that. It's not just a history of the Renaissance. It's a—it tries to help people understand how a concept like the Renaissance really takes root for historians and becomes such an overwhelming kind of thing that we don't ask that question. We don't ask why did you want to write a history of the Renaissance? It's just assumed. Everybody wants to know the history of the Renaissance. And that's what I really—what I really liked about it. So, I guess I'll start with what made you want to write about the Renaissance in this way, to take the kind of—take the hood off of the history lab and let people get a look inside.
Right. And this book, you know, it is a peculiar book for which I was in the middle of a different book and then I delayed that book to write this book.
And yeah, I'm working on a history of censorship and the Inquisition, which was what I should have been working on. It is what I'm working on now. But in the summer of 2020 during COVID, I got journalist after journalist contacting me and other colleagues who work on the Renaissance to ask the same question, which was if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, is COVID going to cause a stock market boom and an economic boom? And it was such a profoundly complex bad question. It's not a simple bad question. It's a really deep bad question. And when I sat down to try to write a blog post to answer that bad question, it hit 40,000 words and I realized this is not a blog post level question. Because sometimes the worst questions are actually doors that open to big ones. And when you ask the question, did the Black Death cause the Renaissance and therefore will COVID cause a golden age? You're basing this on so many assumptions. That the Renaissance was a golden age. That if it was a golden age, it was caused by a crisis having come before it and regrowing from it. Even the assumption that there is a natural outcome when a plague hits and that when a plague hits, there will be one path forward that is the sort of inevitable gears of history kick in, and this is what happens.
And all of these deep, deep, deep assumptions—not about what the Renaissance actually was, but about how history works. And I realized that answering the question was actually answering a question about how history works, how historical change works. And taking the lid off of the fact that people tend to think that historians' job is to find out historical facts. And that what a historian does is sit down to look for rare manuscripts that will say, 'Guess what? At this—'
At this particular date, Michelangelo's salary was late. And they're like, 'That's neat. Cool. Thank you for adding to the stack of facts that we have, right?' But what historians actually do is try to figure out how the world changes. And what the mechanisms of change are. And when something shrinks or grows or strengthens or weakens or an idea comes into being or an idea is already there but is unpopular and changes from being popular to being commonplace. What are the mechanisms that make that happen? Is it, you know, one person acting? Is it grassroots organizations? Is it bottom-up? Is it top-down? Is it all economics? Is it all ideas? Is it all predetermined by social realities? Is it incredibly chaotic and determined by every individual action people take? And you know, if historians were just hunting for facts, and our job is to find as many facts as possible, we would need hundreds of thousands more historians. Because there are so many facts to figure out—every fact about everything everyone everywhere ever did ever is a full-time job for all of humanity. Because every time we do something, it becomes history, and then you need more humans to figure out what it was. And while I would love to have hundreds of thousands of more historians, I think a world in which a third of the human population are historians would actually be a fully employed wonderful world. Historians are actually about trying to figure out how history changes, how power works, how much control we can or can't have over when a big shock hits a society. Can we make sure that the changes and shock waves that happen are for the better and not for the worse? How can we do that? These are big history questions. And when trying to answer did the Black Death cause a Golden Age, that meant unpacking decades and in fact about two centuries of historians starting in the 19th century working on the question of cause. What is cause when we talk about history? Golden Age, what is a Golden Age? Why do we think this era was a Golden Age? What propaganda makes this era get to be the special one that we all envy? And that's a process of people. So, you know, the book has, as you know, a history of the Renaissance and it talks about things that happened, but it's woven through with history of historians sitting in our conferences, having lunch with each other and dinner with each other, arguing about things. Historians as early as 1380, historians as recent as the year the book came out, historians of every generation in between, that debating and discussing, is it appropriate to call this era a Golden Age? What does it mean? Do we believe in it? If so, what caused it? And changing our minds and arguing about not just what caused it, but what kind of cause it has. Was it an economic cause? Was it an intellectual and ideological cause? Was it a social and political cause? Which is more powerful, economics, ideas, or politics? That's what historians are really debating.
So, my background is in Islamic history and the search for the golden ages is so potent in that field even when you get, you know, more recent scholarship has tended to, you know, poke holes in these things like this wasn't a golden age or, you know, the whole concept of a, you know, golden age followed by the decline and fall is just not all that explanatory, but these things have taken root. To what do you attribute this sort of fascination across, you know, disciplines of history, across fields, across geography and time periods to try and pick out the golden age like this is the golden age of this particular civilization or this particular dynasty and then, you know, that kind of takes root and it's hard to then poke at it and I guess, you know, how do we get to that point with the Renaissance specifically?
I attribute it to the dual human appetites for storytelling and propaganda. So, the storytelling half of this is that it's really narratively satisfying to believe in golden ages and falls and dark ages and the restoration of golden ages. It makes for an easy to understand dramatic and exciting narrative. And if we look not at non-fictional but at fiction, you know, in the world of science fiction and fantasy which I also move in as my other hat as a sci-fi fantasy novelist, practically every future that we make up or alternate world that we make up when we're making it up, we make up and there was an ancient golden age when there were owls or men, there was an evil dark lord and then these bad things happened and then he was overthrown and there was a second golden age and then that was overthrown and now we're in the age of some evil wizard, right? This is a very narratively compelling way to structure a history. And it's easy to explain, it's easy to believe in, it looks like there being gorgeous ruins and awesome leftovers from both the golden and the dark ages. It creates heroes and villains, which we can evoke in our storytelling. It's really satisfying. And for the same reason that it's satisfying in a novel, it's satisfying in our non-fiction. And when somebody sits down and says, 'I've never read about the—insert people here, right?' I've never read about the Hittites. It's really narratively easy to wrap your head around these people you've never read about if you know this was the golden age or this was the fall or this is what made the fall happen. And decline and fall or a precipitous fall is in there. It makes it really easy to wrap your head around, feel like you understand it, and explain. So, it's a tool we reach for when telling both fictional and non-fictional stories because it's very satisfying and people are happy with it.
The other half of that is that it's really politically useful. And the rhetoric of my political party/candidate/corporation/ideology/bank/whatever it is will bring about a golden age and restore something and be like nostalgia-flavored period. And my rivals will be like the bad, no-good dark ages is a really compelling propagandistic position to give yourself. Right? And it's hard to say this today without people thinking about America at the moment, but let's go to the moment in the mid-20th century when there was a popular theory advanced from economic historians that what caused the Renaissance was the advent of innovations in finance and banking, new ways of lending money at interest, new ways of doing exchange rates, the economy starts booming. That's what makes people and goods move and ideas get exchanged and the whole economic explosion turns into the cultural explosion. We get the Renaissance because of proto-capitalism. This is really popular during the Cold War when you can use it to write an op-ed for the New York Times about how this proves that the capitalistic West is the continuation of a golden age and the bad no-good communists are doing bad no-good medieval dark agey things like the communal Middle Ages. And therefore the West can use this triumphantly to celebrate itself against communism, right? And so that particular reading of what could have caused the Renaissance briefly became super popular and filled with op-eds and enters the popular consciousness because it lets somebody say my way of doing the modern world is the continuation of the Renaissance and will make a golden age and my rival's way of doing the modern world is like the bad no-good dark age. And that is rhetorically useful. It's rhetorically useful in many ways to many people. Anything you can do, even if it's designing your logo for your corporation to have a building with a pediment on top, right, is claiming that you will have a golden age of stability and power like Roman antiquity and like the Renaissance which derived those visuals. And therefore that your rivals are experimental, uncertain, etc. and you are stable, classic, and golden agey. So the narrative compellingness of this, which is useful propagandistically and also useful if someone is sitting down to figure out how their elf king became the elf king. Those two reasons for this to be so compelling just mean we constantly want to use dark age, golden age in whatever we're talking about. And therefore we use it in histories and people expect it in histories because they're used to it in other contexts, too.
And you talk about—you give this really interesting example of the Vikings in Greenland. But thinking about that example, but also in terms of your work in the Renaissance, how hard is it to try and pick these narratives apart or, you know, kind of overcome them with evidence once they've taken hold? Like how difficult is it to come in and say, 'No, actually the way that you've been looking at this for the last, you know, 50 years or 100 years is incorrect. It's not supported by the evidence.' And does that actually, you know, both in terms of academia and with something like the Renaissance when it takes root in popular consciousness, how uphill a battle is that to fight?
So it's a very uphill battle in three different spheres. It's fairly easy within your own narrow academic discipline, right? And when I talk to historians specifically of the Renaissance who specifically are historians, none of them talk about this as a golden age following a dark age. That's not there. Everyone is familiar with the fact that it's a problem, everyone's tired of talking about it. But it's not there. But it becomes a problem as soon as you get anywhere beyond that narrow center, whether it's a historian of another time and place thinking about ours, whether it's somebody from another discipline like an economist or a mathematician or a scientist, right? Or somebody even from comp lit coming across from a comparative literature point of view to talk about the Renaissance, they'll have golden age in their head. And certainly in the popular consciousness. And the answer is it's harder to combat a historical error when that historical error feeds into something that we want to be true, something that is satisfying and makes sense to us at any given time. And you mentioned that I talk about the Viking, or rather Norse settlements in Greenland, and we've had different theories about why the Norse settlement in Greenland died out. And it becomes hard to get rid of a false theory only when that false theory seems like it supports something that's exciting. So, one of the theories for a while was that it was climate change, and that the Little Ice Age hit and changed fish migratory patterns and changed weather in a way that made what had been a habitable place uninhabitable. That theory really hits a zeitgeist that people are trying to convince people that climate change is real. And ripples far beyond Norse studies into, 'Hey, hey, hey, look, the Norse settlement in Greenland died out. We're going to die out just like that too, if we don't take climate change seriously.' This is very narratively satisfying, so when someone else comes and says, 'Actually, we studied the thing and the particular fish that they happened to eat weren't affected by the climate change at that time, and it wasn't actually that, and climate change is still real, we promise. It's just that not specifically this two dozen guys in this little place was not affected by it, you know.' And people are like, 'This is not interesting. This is not an interesting article. Thank you for telling me that these two dozen guys didn't die of not having this one fish and having this other fish instead.' It's just nowhere near as interesting as the original, 'Hey, the Vikings died because of climate change.' And so, people will never reshare that correction as far as the original, because the original is tied into something we're excited about, which means you can only replace it by something else we're excited by. Right? And so, if you had the thesis the Vikings were wiped out by climate change and then you replace that with the Vikings were wiped out by authoritarianism, people would be super excited by that, right? Because it's something we care about right now. And indeed, the 'Vikings were wiped out by climate change' one displaced an earlier one, which was the Vikings were displaced by not using the land properly and not being as wise as the indigenous people who were there before them who used it to depend more on the sea than on the land, and that foolish Vikings tried to depend upon the land and not the sea and therefore they died. And the climate change one displaced that one. That one was also false. It turned out that they were using the sea after all. We just did a bad job finding their fishing gear because fishing gear tends archaeologically to end up at the bottom of the sea because it's fishing gear and it's therefore hard to find. And if you find their fishing gear in the village, it doesn't mean they weren't fishing. It means that their fishing gear was used correctly and is therefore at the bottom of the sea.
So, with the Renaissance, the only way we can displace Dark Age Golden Age is if we come up with some narrative of the Renaissance that happens to both A, be true and B, be more awesome than Dark Age and Golden Age. And that's a high bar because Dark Age and Golden Age is really awesome. And so, coming up with something that is even more narratively compelling than that and also true is a high bar, which is why it's been impossible to eradicate even though we've been working at it for decades and decades. And it may be one of the hardest historical myths ever to eradicate because it's one of the most narratively satisfying and the most continually narratively satisfying, right? I can imagine 150 years from now when the worst of the climate crisis has come and we have implemented technologies to try to mitigate it and the world is more stable again and climate change is not as much on people's heads, people may completely no longer care about the climate change myth with the Vikings, but Golden Age and Dark Age is probably going to be still just as narratively satisfying in 150 years and in 350 years and in 550 years as it is now because it dives into the idea that there are cycles of history and lets us make judgements about which bits of the past we want to say we are the descendants of and claim the good ones and reject the bad ones as we redefine ourselves in terms of we are the inheritors of A but not B. We like A, we don't like B. It's hard to imagine a circumstance in which humans would not find the myth of golden age and dark age really useful. And therefore it may be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, historical myth ever to eradicate.
And one of the other problems that it seemed to me, you know, reading especially the Viking story made it clear, is there's a problem kind of processing information across disciplines, right? Like there's sort of a problem with, you know, another field might discover something that impacts on history but it's a big question whether that ever makes it from, you know, that discipline's office down the hall to the history office or vice versa, or you can have different people, you know, studying the same field in different ways and maybe, you know, one's at one university and their stuff doesn't permeate out. It's also a problem of communication, right?
Yeah. And you know, to give two concrete examples, one of the forms of communication trouble is just the period when there was a feud at Oxford between the anthropology/archaeology department and the literature department which meant the literature people wouldn't look at the archaeology and the archaeology people wouldn't look at the literature, which leads to decades of the archaeologists being like, 'This one grave is so weird. It looks as if the person was buried sitting up. Why would that ever happen?' When over here there's a text that described Beowulf, a person sitting up. But it's off-limits for the archaeologist because it belongs to the literature department. So, there's that kind of silliness, which is, you know, we need to break down institutional barriers, which we mostly have, right? And the whole point of a university is to have the literature people and the archaeologist down the hall from each other so they can get together and meet. But the other will be who cares about what? And I talk at one point in the book about how for a long time when people discussed the character of Lorenzo de' Medici and whether to see him as a philosophical patron and cultivator of the arts or whether to see him as a tyrant who through economic capture took over his state, one of the things he's accused of is embezzling from a fund—from the dowry fund to help girls get married, which would be equivalent of embezzling from food stamps or embezzling from a life insurance pool, right? And there's an economic historian who did the work and proved definitively that he didn't embezzle by just counting every single coin that went in and out of the system and proving that there was no embezzlement. But that historian didn't care about whether Lorenzo de' Medici was a good or bad person, so he just has this in a footnote on page 400 of an 800-page book. So, even the people who write about Lorenzo de' Medici, unless they happen to read this giant tome about economics, won't run across that detail because even the historian who found it wasn't interested in the questions they're interested in. And so it didn't make it across even from one historian to the historians meeting in literally the next room at the same conference because we ask different questions and therefore we read different stuff. And we have the happy problem that there are a lot of historians who write a lot of books. We don't have time to read all of them. This is an embarrassment of riches problem, but it is an interesting problem and it sometimes means that the great revelation comes from when the right person sits down and reads the same three books and triangulates between them, rather than going off to a dusty archive to find a lost text that reveals something.
So, I want to get a little more into the Renaissance specifically, but I guess one of the things that really stuck out to me in the first part of the book was the challenge in just defining what the Renaissance is. And like basic stuff, like when does it start? When does it end? Where is it happening? What are the important places? And how all of these different disciplines have radically different answers to these questions? Can you talk a little bit about that? Like what are some of the contenders for like what is the Renaissance, basically?
Right. And this is our clue that the Renaissance is super made up, right? Because some historical events definitely occurred and have a date. Like the French Revolution. The French Revolution occurred. It has some dates. We might debate like when its earliest roots are and how many stages it has and how much it's exclusively French, but like stuff happened in 1789. Everybody can agree that some stuff happened and that it happened in 1789. This is a real thing that really occurred, right? And whether we define it as good or bad or top-down or bottom-up or whatever, we can debate, but it is super real, right? But if I come out of my office front door on campus and I turn right and I go to the English department and I ask them when the Renaissance is, they'll say, 'Oh, the Renaissance is Shakespeare.' And so, it comes to its peak in 1600 when Hamlet debuts at the Globe. And it's really getting going by 1550, you know, and it has some precursors in the early 1500s. And I'll say that's great. And if I turn left out my office door and go down the hall to the Romance Languages people and talk to my Italianist, they're like, 'Oh, well, the Renaissance, you know, is Dante and is coming to its peak with Petrarch right after the 1348 plague, and you know, is definitely at its maximum at 1400 and starting to decline by 1450, and is definitely over basically before 1500. So, it's over before Shakespeare's grandparents were born.' So, what even is this thing? It's totally—
a very amorphous thing that begins somewhere between 1250 and 1550, and ends somewhere between 1500 and 1700. Because everybody defines the Renaissance as the period in which some stuff happened that was good that makes the difference between the Middle Ages and modernity. And whatever it was began and triggered a series of changes in what people are and what it means to be human and how everything works that moved us to the modern age. Which means people's definitions of the Renaissance aren't about the Renaissance, they're about the modern age, they're about what people think defines modernity. And if you think that modernity is defined by capitalism, then you're going to go for when the economic changes happen. If you think modernity is defined ideologically by science and radical free thought and separation of church and state, then you're going to go for the beginnings of intellectual changes that you can connect to those trends. If you think that modernity is defined by the nation-state and the coalition of peoples into nations and the first expressions of nationalist identity, then you're going to go for different dates and different places. And, importantly, most regions are going to go for the Renaissance was when our people did our best thing. So, for England, that's Shakespeare, and therefore the Renaissance peaks in 1600. For Italy, that's, you know, either the artists who are peaking in 1500 when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are all alive at the same time and we have Ninja Turtle o'clock, or it's a bit earlier with the intellectuals and around Petrarch and Bruni and the early blossoming of let's have a golden age around 1400. But if you talk to, you know, people in the Netherlands, it'll be the northern Renaissance painters and when they come to a peak or it'll be the musicians and when they come to a peak. And if you talk to France, they're like, we're super excited by Montaigne, so we want to make sure the Renaissance stretches long enough to include the 17th century and the late 16th century. Every region had its own French Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, English Renaissance, Spanish Renaissance, and those will get different dates because there will be a particular different art form or different set of figures that are for them the defining feature. And if Erasmus is the Renaissance for northern Europe, and Erasmus is 100 years after Petrarch and Bruni, then their Renaissance peaks and is defined by a different moment. Since when someone said, 'Hey, rebirth, golden age, excellent thing,' you always want to center it at the moment that your nation's artists and thinkers, et cetera, are at their peak.
So, related to this, another thing that was interesting to me that you come back to a few times in the book is the difficulty of thinking of the Renaissance, however you want to define it geographically or across time, as one period because most of these definitions, regardless of where they start and where they end, they define a period that lasts centuries. I mean, you know, you start in 1400 and end in 1650 or you start in 1350 and end in, you know, 1550. It's still a very long period of time. And as you note in the book multiple times, we don't do that when we think of modern stuff, right? Contemporary periods are like a decade or, you know, like 50 years maybe, but they're not these centuries-long periods of time where you have generation after generation living this experience and yet we're supposed to think of it as all—they're all like in one match of a period. And so it got me to thinking about like how our perceptions of time affect how we view these sorts of things. And another thing that was interesting is when you mentioned Henry V, who's very medieval coded, but died 50 years after Petrarch, who is very Renaissance coded. And it just gets into how we perceive these things and how we perceive different times or how we break them up and how that can affect our views of history.
Yeah. And yeah, when I mentioned before how some people talk about the Renaissance as being caused by the birth of nationalism and the first articulations of a people and a nation, right? And when they do that, they'll point to two people as having articulated this. The first is Petrarch, the second is Machiavelli. And Petrarch articulates it in his Italia Mia. The time jump from Petrarch to Machiavelli is the time jump from Napoleon's childhood to the Yuri Gagarin space flight.
A little bit of a jump, yeah.
And yet people talk about the—
as if they're happening at the same time. And it's just, you know, absurd. And I do think very much that this is the illusion we make that somehow history is changing faster in the present than it did in the past. If you go into a classroom and it has a timeline on the wall, the modern era of the timeline will get dilated and each sort of decade is as wide as a century was in the earlier parts of the timeline. As if we are saying, yes, it's true somehow that time is moving faster now. And I think this has to do with the fact that so much of history we imagine in terms of settings. Right? That there are different settings. World War II is a setting and the Renaissance is a setting and Ancient Rome is a setting and Vikings are a setting. And if I go to a TV network and I pitch a book show about Constantine, they'll tell me, oh, that sounds really cool, but you know, we're already doing a show about Augustus. So it's the same period and we only want to do one Roman show. And I'll say, well, those are in fact 400 years apart. Or 300 years apart, and they'll say, yeah, but they're the same setting, so we don't want to do it. But if you go pitch a Roaring Twenties show and they already have a World War I show, they'll be like, oh, Roaring Twenties and World War I are totally different settings. We can totally do these two shows at the same time, even though they're only a decade apart. Because 20th century eras are a decade and earlier eras, we claim, are centuries long as if there's no difference between the different generations who live in them. And I think this is a huge part of some of the weird historical thinking that you sometimes hear articulated in discussions especially of Golden Age and Dark Age. And I was chilled the very week Inventing the Renaissance came out, there was a Washington Post interview with Trump about his economic plans because the tariffs were causing all sorts of chaos. And he actually said, well, we're going to have, you know, some pain for a while and a bit of a dark age and then we're going to have a golden age. And when you talk to people who have this idea of creative destruction, that if you sort of shock a field by slamming it with something and then new things will regrow like trees after a forest fire. Or indeed the people who are asking if the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID cause a golden age? Their expectation is that COVID should cause a golden age within 5 or 10 years. Whereas the Black Death, if it caused the Renaissance, caused it on the centuries scale. But of course time moves faster now, so a dark age now should only be 5 to 10 years, right? If we cause a dark age, that dark age is one setting, it's one time period unit. Therefore, it will regenerate within 10 years and we'll live to see it. It won't be a multi-century dark age like the historical dark age, right? And the answer to that is no, of course not. History is not moving somehow faster now. Information is moving faster. And the deployment of new inventions are moving faster, but fundamentally the difference between generations is similar.
And I remember thinking about this when people talk about the Wars of the Roses. And how, you know, to us the Wars of the Roses is one thing.
But the people who are living in the Wars of the Roses were not calling it the Wars of the Roses. Each of these wars is a totally separate war. And every time they made peace at the end, they were like, 'Okay, thank god, peace. Now we're going to have peace.' And then there's another one. And they aren't thinking of it as the same thing, right? And in one of my science fiction novels, which takes place in the 25th century, I have a moment where a character mentions that historians in the 2040s are debating whether the First World War ended in 1945 or 1989.
Well, that's—I mean, that's one of the—like I was thinking about the Hundred Years' War and compared to World War I and World War II, supposed to be these very discrete events, the Hundred Years' War is at least three wars that we lump together in this 116-year long period. Like, what, you know, it really is kind of amazing when you think about it that way.
Yeah, future eras are totally going to consider World War I and World War II one thing.
Yeah, they have a gap in the middle and to us they're totally different and that gap in the middle is two time periods, right? Because it's the Roaring Twenties and the Dust Bowl.
Two whole time periods happened. The Great Depression. Two whole time periods get to fit into this gap that future generations will not believe even exists. And when I read the personal letters of people living in the Renaissance and they are talking about, 'Oh my goodness, how different the 1490s are from the 1470s.' And they sound like people talking about the 1990s and the 1970s. And these changes felt as different to them as they do to us. And when I read letters to and from Machiavelli talking about how the world ended in the years between 1493 and 1503. We don't even have that blip as a note in our timeline. It doesn't exist, but to them it was as devastating as the world wars were to us. Zooming back in and reminding ourselves of the lived experience and that every decade of the Renaissance felt as different to the people living in the Renaissance as the decades of the 20th century feel to us is the only way to get people to realize when we talk callously about deliberately causing a brief dark age so that it'll make a golden age. Imagining somehow that this is happening on the level of electoral politics within years or even within one lifetime is an absurdity. Big large systemic changes are multi-generational. And our thinking needs to be multi-generational for it to understand what history is. So, I quote, as you remember, that letter that Machiavelli got in 1506, I think it was, from Ercole I d'Este of Bologna, who was a friend and mercenary captain who had led armies for Machiavelli's homeland of Florence. And Machiavelli had written the first half of a history of the decade they just lived in, the decade surrounding 1500. And in the letter, Bentivoglio says, 'Machiavelli, you must continue. You must finish this history of these years, or future generations will never believe how bad it was.'
And they will never forgive us for having lost so much, so quickly. And he's talking about the decade in which Michelangelo carved the David, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, Raphael debuted and did his earliest frescoes, Josquin des Prez is composing the music that we consider to be the cutoff at the end of medieval and beginning of modern music. All of this is happening in the decade that if you lived through it, felt so bad that future generations would never believe in it. So what do we mean when we say golden age? Because we certainly don't mean that it felt nice living through it. What we mean is it left us really cool things that are in museums. And we see them and we say, 'Wow. Those things are great. That must be a great time period.' And the earlier histories of that time period also slur over apocalyptic politics and say, 'This is a moment of intellectual awakening, free thought and discovery, of, you know, states investing in wild experiments in new technologies and library building.' And, you know, when else did states experiment in moon shots? The Cold War, when we were pretty much sure we were going to blow up the entire planet any minute now.
