12-30-2021, 08:26 PM
Howe and Strauss (and now only Howe, for obvious reasons) go no further back in history in the study of generations to the Civic-like generation of Christopher Columbus and Leonardo da Vinci. Before then, the medieval world operated on the assumption that those who owned the means of production had absolute power of career and life-and-death over everyone. When any form of religious, political, scientific, or cultural dissent can get one burned at the stake, broken at the wheel, impaled in an iron maiden, or enclosed to die of thirst or suffocation, there isn't much room for innovation. The order is a command economy as pure as North Korea today. Conformity and blind obedience are the ways of animal-level survival. Even the clergy are obliged to offer a horrific Hell to scare everyone into slavish compliance. People live solely to avoid eternal damnation.
It may have been the Black Death that broke some of the assumptions of the medieval world. The pious and the profligate alike could die of the Plague, so people could no longer believe that mass death from disease was a Divine Judgment. The Black Death created a labor shortage and ensured that such agriculture that survived could lose labor without losing output. The medieval guilds in which only a few people operated became more powerful, and people could start businesses.
Aside from printing, still practically a laboratory curiosity due to mass illiteracy, the first semblance of manufacturing appeared in textiles. Bankers started lending against land to finance textile mills. Note well that the English word fabric suggests the material that emanated from textile mills and that the Italian, French, and German for factory are fabbrica, fabrique, and Fabrik. English uses the word fabrication to describe making things in factories. Shipping became more important for connecting the New Rich to foreign luxuries, and thus began the age of navigation. People start traveling for commercial gain instead of for desperate survival.
It may have been the Black Death that broke some of the assumptions of the medieval world. The pious and the profligate alike could die of the Plague, so people could no longer believe that mass death from disease was a Divine Judgment. The Black Death created a labor shortage and ensured that such agriculture that survived could lose labor without losing output. The medieval guilds in which only a few people operated became more powerful, and people could start businesses.
Aside from printing, still practically a laboratory curiosity due to mass illiteracy, the first semblance of manufacturing appeared in textiles. Bankers started lending against land to finance textile mills. Note well that the English word fabric suggests the material that emanated from textile mills and that the Italian, French, and German for factory are fabbrica, fabrique, and Fabrik. English uses the word fabrication to describe making things in factories. Shipping became more important for connecting the New Rich to foreign luxuries, and thus began the age of navigation. People start traveling for commercial gain instead of for desperate survival.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.