A Turnip by My Side

 

If wishes were horses here’s what I’d ride:

The voters of the United Kingdom are in a terrible spot. The Conservative Party has let them down tremendously; but the only viable alternative is Labour, which is bound to be worse on the wokery.

The outcome I would hope for in the current campaign is for the Conservatives to be surpassed by Reform in the popular vote, so that at least at last a real alternative might exist. Then get Farage, Tice, Johnson, Truss, Rees-Mogg, Braverman huddled together there. Such shifts have happened in the past; Labour took out the Liberals long ago on the left.

America has reason to hope for a Trump win; and that is good. But even better if Kennedy were to actually outpoll Biden, and so free the American left from the backrooms and special interests. There used to be an honourable, hopeful, genuinely progressive left, in the days of JFK, of John XXIII, of the fight for civil rights, of the folk revival. It would be glorious to see it live again. 

In Canada, we are lucky. We are on track for the best result: a historic humiliation of the Trudeau Liberals at the hands of a competent and genuine opposition in the CPC. Should the CPC turn out to be a sham, like the UK Tories, we have the PPC at their heels. I feel it is vital to Canada’s future as a healthy democracy that Trudeau not only lose, but lose badly enough that he becomes a cautionary tale of how not to behave as prime minister; like Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon are remembered in the States. This looks as if it is likely to happen.

Can we have, after that, a rejuvenated Canadian left? Are there any honest leftists, in the Kennedy mold, still alive in Canada? Anyone left in the honourable if misguided line of David Lewis, FR Scott, Bryce Mackasey, Eric Kierans, Lester Pearson? Singh has destroyed the legitimacy of the NDP; no sparks there. There is Elizabeth May, Jane Philpott, Jody Wilson-Raybould, maybe Tom Mulcair. But they all seem now like figures from the past, not possible futures.

In the Vatican, I could wish for Pope Francis to have a conversion experience—we are, after all, in the business of miracles. That would be best. 

Second best, he dies soon or resigns. The conclave, aware of the problems, picks someone quite different; someone charismatic in the mold of JPII, with the doctrinal clarity of Benedict XVI.

I do think all of this is possible, if not likely.

Death and Renaissance

 

My daughter’s history text suggests the primary cause of the Renaissance was the Black Death. The logic goes that this catastrophe shook people’s faith in Divine Providence, prompting a turning away from religion to a new, more humanist perspective.

There are two problems with this argument. First, in troubled times, people run towards religion, not away from it. “There are no atheists in foxholes.” People rarely renounce belief in God on their deathbed. Second, the Black Death swept through Asia as well as Europe. Why did the Renaissance happen in Europe, not in India or China or the Middle East?

Britannica suggest the Black Death actually retarded the Renaissance: people preoccupied with dying and caring for the dying had less time, logically, for study, trade, the arts, or philosophical speculation.

So what does account for the Renaissance? 

The trade along the Silk Road may have something to do with it: new ideas as well as spices travelled from China to Europe by this route. However, this does not work: the Silk Road was in operation already in pre-Roman times. Moreover, if the mixing of cultures was the key, why didn’t the Renaissance happen in Central Asia? Being equidistant from each terminus, it got the most mixing of cultures and ideas. And Europe would have gotten no more than China.

Some suggest that contact with the Levant due to the Crusades did it; some suggest it was the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, which forced Eastern scholars to flee west.

But that contact of two cultures had been going on since the seventh century, in Spain as well as in the Levant, and all around the Mediterranean basin. Contact with Islam was nothing new to the 14th century. And it leaves no reason for the Renaissance to happen in the Christian rather than the Muslim lands: the Crusades surely prompted a similar flight of Muslim scholars east, and Muslims would have garnered roughly as much from Christian culture by taking Constantinople, Egypt, Spain, and Asia Minor as the Christians did of Muslim culture by taking Jerusalem and the Levant.

Which leaves the invention of the printing press and movable type. This must have made the crucial difference.

Movable type had already been invented, independently, in China and Korea. However, there it was not used for wider circulation of ideas, but to ensure accurate reproduction of the sutras, the core religious texts. In the West, Gutenberg did not stop at the Bible. It was used to more widely disseminate writings in general. Hence, new ideas.

Which leads to the next speculation: if movable type, making books more widely available, led to the Renaissance, what can we expect from the Internet and the World Wide Web? 

They are a vastly greater revolution in the dissemination of ideas and information; on a par, perhaps, with the invention of writing itself.

Why Italy?

Prince Henry the Navigator, true father of the Renaissance, and quite possible the most influential European who ever lived. Certainly worth the longest picture caption in the history of Od's Blog, in any event.

Okay, I know what you're thinking. You needn't say a word.

You want to know why, if the Renaissance was caused, as I say in my new Grand Theory of History and Everything, by the early explorations of Henry the Navigator of Portugal, the Renaissance started in Italy instead of right there in Portugal. Granted that all of Europe was wired together, still, why Italy?

Here's why. Nominally, Henry's expeditions were Portuguese, but in real terms, the Portguguese mariners were mostly the agents of Florence and Genoa. The Florentines were the financial backers for the expeditions. When the enterprise proved valuable, the Florentines were the first to profit and the first to know. Then, once the new trade routes had opened, who had the kit and the expertise for the cargo trade? Not the Portuguese; they were fishermen. The Genoese and Florentines had been in the business for centuries around the Mediterranean, along with Venice. As soon as Madeira was discovered, it was the Genoese traders who brought in and planted sugar cane and sugar beets, opened the entrepots at either destination, started the various supporting businesses, and hauled the “sweet salt” back to Europe, in Genoese and Florentine ships manned by Genoese and Florrentine sailors.

Henry took the trouble to train his own shipbuilders and navigators. When other European monarchs wanted to get in on the action, they took the quick and dirty route. They hired Genoese and Florentine captains, Europe's most experienced. The Spanish contracted with Christopher Columbus, and the English with John Cabot, both from Genoa. The French cut a deal with Verrazano and the Spanish another with Amerigo Vespucci, both from Florence.

Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas are named. Kind of like naming an entire hemisphere "Bob," actually.

In sum, once the rush to the new lands began, it was the Italians who had the greatest opportunities, as sea captains, sailors, traders, and merchants; as everything but farmers. The opportunity to settle and farm was open to just about anyone in Europe, but the Portuguese themselves did not seem especially eager to seize the chance. Flanders, then also under the Spanish or Portuguese crowns, seemed more active in sending actual settlers—perhaps not coincidentally, Flanders became the second great site of the Renaissance.

Kind of makes you think.