Renaissance Lessons for an Age of Collapse
On a flight to California last week, I read a review of two new books on the Renaissance that made me think differently about the times we live in. In Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer dismisses the idea that the Renaissance was a golden age. That notion, she writes, was shaped later by admirers of a few remarkable figures. It wasn’t a grand rebirth after the Dark Ages but a period like most others—characterized by ordinary, self-interested people while most lived poor, violent, and chaotic lives.
In contrast, in The World at First Light, Bernd Roeck argues that the Renaissance wasn’t just a transition between medieval and modern times, but the birth of modernity itself. A unique combination of craft, intellect, and competition that set in motion the science and innovation we now call the Enlightenment.
Both books remind us that our view of history should never fixed. Two credible researchers use data to support very different interpretations of the Renaissance. Reality is shaped by what we choose to believe.
“Objectivity is always someone’s position, with assumptions built in.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
Today’s debates on climate change, artificial intelligence, economics, and geopolitics remind us that strongly held views often rest on deterministic stories about how things developed, and an astonishingly misplaced level of certainty about how they must end.
The Renaissance developed in a period repression and turmoil. The late Middle Ages was an age of poverty, inquisitions, and endless war. Social unrest was pushed outward through the Crusades and inward through the Church, which enforced orthodoxy by policing thought under threat of torture or death.
The Renaissance was no serene rebirth—it was violent, poor, unstable, and dislocated. Wars and plagues were constant, the climate turned colder, and superstition and witch hunts were the norm. Yet out of that insecurity came invention—new perspectives in art, new ways of reading and thinking, and the beginnings of modern science.
Apocalyptic thought runs deep in Western history. The prophets of the Old Testament promised judgment and punishment by a vengeful God. The Book of Revelation cast history as a cosmic drama of collapse and redemption—possible only after the old order was destroyed by divine force. From this came our habit of seeing everything on the brink of disaster, of treating time as a straight line driving toward an end instead of moving in cycles, and of dividing the world into sharp opposites—good and evil, right and wrong.
When Jesus didn’t return at the millennium after his death, the disappointment was profound and widespread. Troubadours singing of romantic love disrupted the rigid order of kings and clerics. The Renaissance itself carried the shadow of collapse even as it celebrated rebirth. The Reformation tore apart the world order both spiritually and politically, driven by its own urgency about the end of times. Modernity stripped away the theology and let “God out of the box”—unleashing unconscious forces into daily life without the old guardrails of tradition.
But the apocalyptic pattern never went away: the Enlightenment’s faith in progress, the Marxist revolution, utopian science, today’s climate collapse narratives—all repeat the same story of crisis leading to rupture and a transformed future.
All of this affects how we talk and think about upheaval now. Whether it’s climate change or AI, we imagine tipping points and existential threats, as the song of renewal plays in the distance. We frame change in apocalyptic terms—either catastrophe that can only be avoided by retreating to the past or by discovering some new technology to save us from what seems like impending doom. What’s missing is space for the middle ground. We swing between despair and utopia, collapse and rebirth, rather than facing messy, incremental change. Yet our sense of suspense and urgency also carries the potential for bold action when we might otherwise drift.
It’s risky but fair to say this time may be different. Past eras felt existential; ours likely is. The dangers are now planetary, moving faster, and tightly bound together—energy, ecology, economy, and geopolitics feeding off one another. Still, for someone living through the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution, the Irish famine, or the world wars, it must have felt every bit as apocalyptic as today feels to us.
I have little doubt the world is in deeper, longer-term danger now, though I understand why others see it differently. It’s hard to find thoughtful people who don’t sense something is horribly wrong. History doesn’t give us much hope that collective action ever truly altered the course for long. That doesn’t mean despair—it means realism.
At the risk of simplifying, I see three camps. One believes progress is inevitable, that technology and markets will solve or muddle through our problems. Another admits political and economic trouble may overwhelm us but insists climate and ecological risks are exaggerated. And the third—where I stand—accepts that we are in serious trouble on all fronts.
If I’m right, we need to stop pretending this can be “solved.” It’s time to move from search and rescue to search and recovery—focus on lowering the odds of cascading failure and carrying forward what really matters. In the next 3–5 years, that means hardening substations and water systems, setting up shelters for extreme heat and cold, retrofitting buildings, building microgrids for hospitals and water treatment, and keeping regional reserves of grain and medicine. It means cutting carbon where it’s realistic, strengthening coastal defenses and wildfire buffers, running civil defense drills, and rebuilding some domestic manufacturing of critical materials. It won’t be cheap so we’d better get over that.
At the core is energy. Energy is both the basis and limiting factor on all life. Whatever you think of climate change, most agree energy will be a problem in the decades ahead. Alternatives offer little hope because they keep the growth machine alive—and growth itself is the root of the trouble. Even if we keep the lights on longer, we will degrade the environment that sustains us.
We need honesty in how we frame this. We should steer clear of purity tests and “last chance” determinism. We are capable of holding two truths at once: grief for what’s ending, and discipline in building what comes next.
We need to resist both the fantasy of salvation and the paralysis of despair. The work is mitigation—preserving what can’t be replaced and experimenting with forms that can outlast turbulence. If the future is to be, as Nate Hagens says, “better than the default,” it will be because we finally learn how to live with our apocalyptic instincts without letting them blind us.
That’s what we should do. What we’ll probably do is much less.
Adam Gopnik, reviewing the two new books on the Renaissance, draws different lessons than their authors. He points out that if Necessity is the mother of invention, Chaos is its father—people are often at their best when circumstances are at their worst. He also notes that times of great change are marked by melancholy and nostalgia, something we see today in the populist wave.
Doubt and anxiety, he suggests, bound people together socially, as they shared their uncertainty together eight centuries ago. His sharpest observation is that for all the Renaissance achieved in economics and science, it was the arts—especially painting—that defined the age. For the first and maybe only time in Western history, art eclipsed science and philosophy as the main arena of intellectual energy.
It may be the same in our time. Small groups trying out new ways of living in intentional communities could end up defining the age. Artists, as interpreters of reality, might give shape to those visions—offering the rest of us something to hold onto if we’re willing to listen once things fall apart.
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There is very little art today, in the classic sense of the word. True art doesn’t care how it’s received; its purpose is not to be liked, to appeal. Most of today’s so-called art is entertainment at best.
As tensions and frictions increase, the chances are that real art will emerge and, hopefully, change the course of history. For the succession of how change happens is artists propose something first, philosophers develop it, engineers provide the technology, and people make it and use it.
Can’t wait (says the musician in me, frustrated by the present-day conventionalism).
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Paul. Art is crucial.
All the best,
Art
Art,
In the last few years both the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Arts(formerly the Philadelphia College of Art) closed their doors. They were well established institutions. I graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977 with a BFA in Painting. I subsequently received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. The famous American painter Thomas Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy at the turn of the 20th century. These institutions were not jeopardized by various business cycles, including the Great Depression. I am still painting and have no regrets for choosing my vocation. I share your hope for a renaissance of the fine arts. But we seem to be at a nadir, or fast approaching one, as far as a cultural Renaissance here in the US. Maybe we have to hit bottom in order to reassess? Perhaps this relates to your general diagnosis of collapse, or lack of wholeness (psychological)?
Joe,
Thanks for your comments.
We need to be at a nadir for radical transformation to happen. That is my take on history.
We collectively keep making the same basic mistake–adjustment of norms and intitutions without attention to psychological changes needed to support them.
All the best,
Art
Hi Art,
thank you.
related to your article here I see you contributed to this by Jack Alpert on Civilization’s Running out of gas Predicament
I thought your readers may find it useful too, only 10 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5z5R6xqEG0
Sean,
I’ve known Jack Alpert for a long time. While I agree with most of the basis for his work, his views on population control are so unrealistic that I don’t recommend that other readers waste their time on him.
All the best,
Art
It’s funny that everyone paints the Middle Ages as bleak and dark, and sure, there were bad things that happened. But overall, life was far more sustainable; it was simple and hyperlocal and the focus was on community. In many ways, we should be looking at the Middle Ages as a blueprint of what we should do (i.e. simplifying and localizing our lives, building self-sufficiency), and a warning about the wars and plagues and famine that are coming our way as collapse takes its toll.
The “innovations” of the Renaissance led directly to the technology we now use to convert the living into the dead, nature into commodities, at an ever increasing pace, and to catastrophic overpopulation of humans and our domesticated animals, and ecological overshoot. Presumably both these books treat the Renaissance as a “good thing” from that perspective, not realizing that the hyperlocal, simple lives, and reduced population of the Middle Ages would have been a far better way of life to extend into the future for both our species and others. Not, ultimately, sustainable in the way that hunter/scavenger/gatherer human lives were, but far better than the lifestyles that the Renaissance wrought.
Elisabeth,
I agree the Middle Ages had elements of resilience — small scale, local self-sufficiency, tight communities — that we’ve lost.
But we shouldn’t romanticize them either: famine, war and plague were brutal realities.
The real lesson is not to go back, but to carry forward the sustainable parts — limits, locality, and community — while avoiding both the exploitation unleashed by the Renaissance and the precariousness of medieval life.
All the best,
Art
Mr Berman,
that’s an interesting take on the interpretation of the so-called Renaissance. One can so easily paint any picture of any period in history, depending on one’s own view at a certain time. One should never forget though that the majority of humans, regardless of the label that we put on a particular time period, lived a live of misery and poverty.
I agree with you that this time we are in trouble on all fronts. James Kunstler would call it a clusterfuck of the highest order I presume. Earlier I also thought that we’ll adjust somehow to the coming upheaval. If the 30 years war and worse calamities in history could result in something better or more stable, at least for a while, then it’ s logical to think that we’ll muddle through this one too. But this time is indeed different, massively different. We talk about orders of magnitude different. If one only looks at the graph of our population explosion and the ravaging of the natural world, the basis of our existence, then one feels, rightly or wrongly, that this time we won’t be able to recover from the coming collapse. Maybe it’s not a bad idea for individuals or small groups to pretend that, by taking what seems to be appropriate measures now, we can soften the blow somehow. At least it can keep the illusion alive that the coming bottleneck is survivable. As a species we survived a few severe bottlenecks and it is a miracle that there are still hominids, like us, on this earth. But everything points to a future where this time it might be really very different.
Ray,
Modernity’s reductive perspective suggests that there is no way out of the predicament.
I’m not suggesting a don’t-worry-be happy optimism but reflecting that massive shifts in awareness and perspective follow trauma. If there is a vanguard who has already experimented with new ways of living and being, that can be a force for redical change.
That is the essence of the hero’s journey that Campbell describes. Theseus confronted the demon in the labyrinth alone and against the advice of all, returned transformed, and everyone wanted to learn from his experience.
All the best,
Art
“cutting carbon where it’s realistic”
What do you consider to be realistic when it comes to cutting carbon, specifically?
“Alternatives offer little hope because they keep the growth machine alive”
What is the basis for this assertion? Are you assuming solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass can only be utilized in a growth scenario, but fossil fuels and nuclear have no such limitations?
Will,
I’ve made my views very clear in dozens of recent posts.
Climate change is a big problem. Renewables are not even close to a solution.
All the rest is noise. There should–but won’t–be an acknowledgement that renewables are a failed solution, and that something else must be done.
Reductive renewable evangelists like you refuse to admit the truth. Jonestown redux IMO.
Art
“Past eras felt existential; ours likely is.”
There are parallels. Mediaeval Europe got prosperous and increasingly literate. Then, coupled with bad harvests, advancing trade brought a pandemic. The next you say , seems to follow, ‘The Reformation’ in Western Christianity. The 30 years War appears to have been a critical post-reformation ‘hinge moment’, along with an environmental background. Afterwards, Western Europe went ‘Science’ while ‘bigging-up’ proto-capitalism with maritime expansion, while almost instantly subduing and largely abandoning Renaissance ‘magic/intellectual’ philosophical inquiry, (alchemy, astrology, numerology), parked religion with deism, nevertheless retaining Comenius on ‘universal learning’. All done from an agrarian base. Next hinge moment I see was in post-revolutionary Western Europe and North America, (modernised governance and law after population doubling, Industrialisation accelerates from early 1800s with shorter doubling times than population and urbanisation. Which globalised and urbanised more than 50% of world, and gets us to here.
Many thanks Art!
I appreciate your comments, Phil.
All the best,
Art
Bonjour mr berman, juste une question, que pensez vous des potentiels concernant le petrole et le gaz de schiste dans les pays comme le canada, l algerie , la chine , l arabie saoudite et l argentine.
A en croire un article que j ai lu sur “oil price today” , ce serait la prochaine revolution après les etats unis.
Merci d avance pour votre reponse.
David
David,
l’Argentine et l’Arabie saoudite sont bien réelles. Le schiste de Montney au Canada, c’est du vieux dossier d’il y a 15 ans. La Chine a essayé, mais avec un succès limité.
Essaie de chercher sur Google — tu pourras répondre à tes propres questions.
Art