According to Ada Palmer, yes. But slowly. And sometimes good things have bad consequences for a while.
I’d like to quote chapters 66 and 67 from Inventing the Renaissance in their entirety, but that’s probably not within fair use etc. Let me try to pick some good quotes.
So when I hear, Has social progress failed? my zoomed-in self, my scared self living in these terrifying years, does feel afraid, but my zoomed-out self, my historian self, answers easily. Progress has done wonders! But it has also done what all change does in a dynamic system: had complicated consequences. Petrarch, Bacon, Marie Curie, all added something to the fish tank with many results. The same celebration of classical education which popularized the Platonic idea that sometimes humble parents produced kids with souls of gold both resulted in the Enlightenment ideal of universal equality, and fed the no columns, no culture side of European supremacy which enabled the atrocities of colonialism.
But if the consequences of our actions are completely unpredictable, would it be better to say that change over time is real, but that anything like human-controlled progress is an illusion?
No.
Why?
…
Because my mother’s cataract surgery—after 2,000 years of practice—saved her sight.
Because some of our civil rights have come by blood and war, but more recently more and more have come by negotiation and agreement.
Because my students who burn down imaginary Europe every year understand better afterward how to avoid collateral damage, and avoid burning things down in their own world. A lot of them even volunteer to come help with the next simulation, advising their peers on how to see the patterns, giving advice much more prudent than when they braved 1492’s Scylla and Charybdis the first time.
We have achieved some of what Machiavelli and Bacon wanted: a new method to make the next generation’s experience on this Earth a little better, and to help us avoid those moments when we lose so much so quickly.
Plague wasn’t the Horseman of the Apocalypse Petrarch hoped to defeat, but the man whose Remedies Against Fortune offered consolation, even for those who lose their homelands to war, would weep such happy tears to hear the plague for which he had no consolation is defeatable.
There was a baby in the bathwater of Whig history. We can find metrics for comparing times and places which don’t privilege particular ideologies. Metrics like infant mortality. Metrics like malnutrition. Metrics like the frequency of massacres. As I said, one of my favorite questions to ask an era is: What portion of the population can be murdered by a different portion and have the murderer suffer no meaningful consequences? The answer, in my homeland of America today, is not zero percent, but it’s not ninety percent, the way it was in the patronage-dominated Renaissance, when Benvenuto Cellini could stab you in the back and, if he’s working for the pope, there won’t be justice. That is progress. That, and infant mortality, and the conquest of smallpox, and soon of polio, and broadening access to education, these are genuine improvements of the sort the Try Everything Age believed would come if they kept striving to reveal the secret motions of things.
Progress is not inevitable, but it is happening.
It is not safe, but it is beneficial.
It is not linear, but it is ongoing.
It is not simple, but it can be studied.
It is not controllable, but it is us. In fact, it is nothing but us.
I mentioned earlier a debate, in the History Lab, between my friends Chris Celenza and Rocco Rubini, about whether Machiavelli is a modern man. Chris had just published his biography of Machiavelli, and he, much like me, described Machiavelli as the product of a desperate time, shaped by the profoundly un-modern violences and chaos of his day. Rocco objected that there are more murders in Chicago now than in Florence back then, so does the violence really make Old Nick un-modern? It is an important question, especially since so much of our own era’s daily violence tends to be erased or pushed off-camera, so to speak, by the social apparati which perpetuate it (racism, systemic inequality), in contrast with the grim glitter of Renaissance violence which TV dramas love to magnify. But there are also differences. It would have been easy for Chris to cite population, to say modern Chicago has thirty times the population of 1500s Florence, that our bloodshed is proportionately smaller. But Chris didn’t. Instead, pausing, smiling warmly, thinking through, Chris answered that we today believe the murder rate in Chicago is not acceptable, or natural, or immovable, that we believe we can fix it if we study and try, that we aspire to change it for the better. That we feel a humane duty to do better. Machiavelli didn’t think that was possible.
The year 2020 was the first time this planet faced a pandemic knowing what it is, and how to act. Forget 1348, even in 1918 we didn’t understand how influenza moved, and hand washing was still controversial. We didn’t take perfect action with COVID, and we should be condemning the failures, but I’m not just a historian of the plague of 1348, I’m a historian of the plagues of 1435, 1485, 1494, 1503, 1596, 1630, and 1656, those many generations who lived without hope that it could ever stop. We do have hope. Within two years we learned how to treat and vaccinate, achievements any other age in history would hail as miracles.
We also know about mental health now. We’re studying the mental health costs of pandemic, poverty, racial injustice, fear. The concept of mental health alone empowers us, as do related concepts: social safety net, welfare, social services, tools for thinking about how society can put structures in place to relieve suffering. There were social services in 1348, hospitals, city grain supplies, orphanages, but Florence’s public health response to the Black Death was to double the fine for selling meat from male and female animals in the same butcher’s booth, thinking that the mix of generative juices birthed disease. In Florence’s orphanage there hangs a painting by Michelangelo’s teacher Ghirlandaio, an Adoration of the Magi with the Virgin and Child and city’s patron John the Baptist, all surrounded by the Innocenti, dead babies and toddlers from the Massacre of the Innocents, tiny kids still in their swaddling clothes standing among the city’s patrons in poses of power—they’re there as role models to teach the orphans how to imagine their dead friends still watching over them, and how to imagine their place in the world after their deaths, since most of these kids would not survive to leave the orphanage. Our child services are far from perfect, but we aim higher than preparing kids for death.
Some say of science that Bacon built the scaffolding and Newton raised the cathedral, but it wasn’t as quick as that. Petrarch’s generation started us gathering materials, precious libraries, making worldly and social questions central to human inquiry at last. A century later, Machiavelli laid out the foundations, proposing a new way of using those libraries, and challenged the myth that there was nothing to be learned from that long, ever-changing Middle Age that followed Rome. Century three, Thomas Hobbes was starting on the ground floor, mixing Machiavelli with Bacon’s empiricism and social analysis. A century later Enlightenment voices—Voltaire, Beccaria, Montesquieu, dear Diderot—raised the upper sections of the wall, convincing people and nations to try changing their world on a large scale. It took another 100 years to realize big social experiments often had collateral damage, and readjust those upper sections to be safer and better, so they didn’t make the rain runoff flood other parts of town. Hope of a golden age to live in is still underway: it’s our job now to do the hardest part and build the dome. It took a long time to raise this cathedral, to get from Italia Mia via The Prince and the New Organon to RNA vaccines, but it’s the same project. Will we do it perfectly? No. Will we finish in our lifetimes and enjoy our golden age? No. We will add our layer to the structure, but there’s more to come, the trim, the lantern and the ball on top. Florence’s cathedral, begun 1296, is still not done today. But it is a wonder, as is every hand that helped to build it. We have tools in our hands now—tools that Machiavelli, Petrarch, and Alessandra Scala would have given anything to have. We can aim for better than the Renaissance, which is what our Renaissance friends did too.
Let’s try.
Stuff from ommadawn.dk (Lise Andreasen) 