Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Huffington Post author and historian Evaggelos Vallianatos, climate wisdom ended when the rise of technology displaced Renaissance appreciation of the Greek Gods.
Global Warming Is a Slow-moving Civilization-ending Catastrophe
12/26/2017 02:38 pm ET
Evaggelos Vallianatos, Contributor
Historian and environmental strategist
Ancient Greeks worshipped the Earth. In the fourth century BCE, Plato’s cosmological dialogue, Timaeus, left us a picture of a mathematical, rational, and beautiful cosmos, including a spherical Earth, “the maker of day and night and the first and oldest of the gods.”
However, eight hundred years after Plato, the world changed dramatically. With the support of Roman emperors, Christianity triumphed over the many gods of the Greeks. It denounced Plato and nearly destroyed Greek civilization.
After nearly a millennium of darkness, Europeans put a break on Christianity, which gave birth to the Renaissance. This meant scholars rediscovered Plato’s vision of the heavens and Greek learning.
The Renaissance brought our modern world. Unfortunately, modernity sidelined Greek wisdom for narrow technical achievements like burning fossil fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas) for energy. In fact, in the twentieth century, “civilized” Europeans and Americans fought WWII with unimagined savagery that culminated in the development and use of nuclear weapons.
The savage thinking that legitimized nukes also legitimizes the burning of fossil fuels. In both cases, human hubris triumphed.
…
The federal government is now hiding the risks of global warming. Indeed, it is resurrecting the “1984” terror world of George Orwell. The Trump administration “sees burning more fossil fuels as the path to global energy dominance.” This kind of thinking and policy defies reason and national security. It delays actions against fossil fuels. It fails promoting life-saving conversion to solar power and other technologies that might minimize the violence of global warming.
How are Americans reacting to this macabre reality? Unfortunately, not as they should. After all, they elected Trump. Fact has been drowned by the fiction of the Trump administration, the industry and its media. But not everything is lost.
…
Why are they not leaving fossil fuels in the ground? Don’t they love their grandchildren?
The Renaissance was in many ways a flowering of Western civilisation, but it was also an age of early death, near constant warfare, slavery, disease and brutish poverty. A good time to live if you were a member of the elite, with the idle wealth and leisure time to explore the wonder and beauty of newly rediscovered Greek culture – at least until you got sick. Not so good if you were one of the far more numerous menials or slaves, who mostly lived their short miserable lives hoping for a painless death.
A transition time, so much better than what came before, but so much worse than what most of us have now.
This romantic worship of pre-technological “goodness”, an imaginary golden age before we spoiled the Earth with progress, in my opinion is endemic in the green movement. Many of them would roll back progress and modernity if they could.
In my experience, the people who imagine returning to an idyllic peasant lifestyle living off the bounty of the Earth are mostly people who haven’t tried it for themselves.
Growing a few weeds in the back yard is not the same as trying to feed your hungry family from a small patch of farm, without the benefits of modern farm equipment, fertiliser and pesticides. Working the land with hand tools on any kind of scale is hard work, a constant back breaking contest against weather, weeds and pests. Fall sick a few weeks, injure yourself, or simply suffer a little bad luck, and all your hard work is for nothing.
Update (EW): Clyde points out that providing people survived infant mortality, military service or the dangers of giving birth, people in the Renaissance lived to a similar age to today.
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Evaggelos would appear to be Greek. Now that stuff is nostalgic indeed, Im sure! Only thing Ev old boy, the pap of this essay supports the idea that you wouldn’t be one whose name survived to be in the history books from the time. I trust you recognize that you can barely, only semi-literately, extol the philosophical prowess of the greats of these times (and few names from that fabled land have been heard from for over a millennium – ruins indeed) but you would have been definitely in the dweebe plebe ranks. Even my grandchildren would have groaned and put some barbs to you if this is what goes on in your classroom. It was the “Don’t they love their grandchildren?” homey homily that underscored the grade school drivel and attracted HuffPuff folks to it. I’m even disappointed in Huffpost for lowering their standards for this.
It’s the plague of the arts majors again.
It also, I think, helped greatly that the English escaped the Classical Justinian Law of southern Europe, and developed parliamentary democracy and individual rights. The technological and scientific developments can hardly be thought of as disconnected from the freer societies, where inventors enjoyed the rights to their discoveries and useful arts.
Oh how they would love to turn back time on that one.
I agree with you completely on this one. The English had their political revolutions early: the first by holding King John up at sword point and demanding he ratify the Magna Carta, and the second by the English Civil War and beheading Charles I. Ideas are one thing, but ultimately changes are only made because of results on a battlefield.
Zeke said:
“And I also pointed out that the Roman Church, in the 1200s, forbade any translation or reading of the Bible outside of Latin. It could not be translated into native languages any where in Europe. Many in England tried to make Bibles in the English language, and paid for it with their lives — even before the printing press. So indeed the Roman Church kept all learning in a dead prestige language, Latin. That is why it is very important to look at the effects of the printing press. This allowed people to read, and to read in their own language. Literacy began its work in places that were throwing off the Latinists.
Why bother talking about this? Because it comes down to literacy. And it so happens that in the Protestant countries all classes of people began to learn to read.”
Zeke wouldn’t be a Protestant by any chance? He certainly likes perpetuating myths long-peddled by Protestant apologists.
He should try a number of things.
Look up how many translations of the Bible into the vernacular language there were before 1517. Hint 1: Look up Bede and Bible. Hint 2: Luther’s translation was not the first into German.
Nobody in England paid for their life by translating the Bible into English. Tyndale, for example was executed and he translated the Bible into English but that does not mean the two things are related. His problem was that he went round publicising heresies. That’s what got him into trouble, not translating the Bible. Yes, there were objections about his translation as he deliberately mistranslated the Bible to support his heresies but it was the heresies that got him into trouble, not the act of translating.
It wasn’t the Church that forced Latin onto everybody else. That was the language used by everybody who could read and write. Even Luther used it. His 95 Theses were originally published in Latin. When I was at school you had to pass an exam in Latin before gaining admission to many University courses.
The printing press was invited some time before the Protestant Reformation. The printing presses were churning out all sorts of religious texts that were used by Catholics who could read.
Zeke should try reading “The Stripping of the Altars” by Eamon Duffy. This book shows that most of the myths about the state of religion in England prior to the Protestant Reformation are completely wide of the mark.