The Renaissance Belongs to You

Ordained Rabbi and practicing Family Therapist Edwin Friedman noted long ago, “Chronic anxiety escalates as society is overwhelmed by the quantity and speed of change.”

When Edwin Friedman wrote about our collective anxiety in the mid-1990s, the internet was relatively new and there was no social media. Many of our news outlets and government leaders tended to exhibit integrity. And we weren’t hounded by algorithms and A-I.

No one can dispute that today our collective anxiety has intensified.

We really can’t stop the flow of disinformation. And choosing to completely stop the barrage of clutter is not going to be in our best interests in the long term. We still need to filter essential information to know what is going on in the world, so we can take care of ourselves and survive.

How we separate the wheat from the chaff is up to each one of us to decide. Beyond our quest for survival, there is a way to flourish through the most difficult, anxious, and darkest of times. Take a lesson from the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is said to bookend the beginning of the 14th century through to the middle of the 17th century. This span of three-to-four centuries was noted for the flowering of art, architecture, literature, music, science, medicine, and technology.

These swelling waves of creativity and innovation didn’t arise from a spontaneous eruption. The Renaissance was a backlash, pure and simple, from the crisis of the late Middle Ages, a phase in history that was rife with darkness and destruction.

The Middle Ages have often been called the dark ages because of the illness, famine, and death that beset the world. The pandemic of the 14th century, known as the bubonic plague or black death, killed as many as 50 million people, half of Europe’s population. The black death is considered to be one of the most lethal pandemics ever to beset humanity.  

The black death wasn’t the only disaster to afflict Europe during the Middle Ages. The great famine of 1315—1317 is estimated to have killed around half of the European population as well as a third of the people in the Middle East. Political upheaval, religious wars, and further outbreaks of both the plague and famine took its toll. Europe did not completely regain its population until the latter part of the 16th century.

The dark ages weren’t only known for death, famine, war, and insurrection; there was also a brain drain, a rapid decline in creative intelligence that produced stagnation among art, architecture, literature, music, science, medicine, and technology.

While no one is absolutely certain about how the black death swept through Europe, rats were abundant in the cities as well as in the rural areas during the Middle Ages. There is strong evidence that the plague was spread by fleas infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis that lived on rodents.

In the postmodern age, time is greatly accelerated. Events, trends and societal transitions, including the mood shifts of the population, change mercurially, as fast as the speed of technology. A thousand years during the Middle Ages is more akin to a thousand days in the first quarter of the Twenty-first century.

All of this is set forth to say: No matter how dark things appear, another Renaissance can be right around the next corner. When time is accelerated, there is a rapid cycling of darkness and light. We move through the darkness and reach the light faster than we ever have before.

Whether dark ages last a thousand years or a thousand days, darkness spurs tremendous creativity. Note that some astonishing work has been created as a backlash to recent dark ages.

Italian author Elsa Morante created her own Renaissance during a time of great darkness. Morante fled Rome during the German occupation of Italy in World War II. Her Jewish heritage put her at risk to be rounded up at the Tiburtina Train Station in Rome and transported to the death camps. Morante sought refuge in the rural area of Southern Lazio, and lived among poor shepherd families. She gathered the experiences that later became essential to her greatest novel La Storia, a work as profound as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  

Another great author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wrote three massive volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, documenting the Soviet penal system, and his time spent in prison for being deemed a dissident and a danger to the communist regime.

Solzhenitsyn did more than repeatedly warn the world about the dangers of communism. He also cautioned the West, especially the United States, where he lived for a brief time, not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen.”

Solzhenitsyn was a gadfly to the Soviet communist leadership, as much as Alexei Navalny was a vocal critic of Putin’s oligarchical regime. Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the West focused on the spiritual vapidity of pop culture, including television, which he called “TV Stupor.”  

Had Solzhenitsyn lived today, he would be outraged at the 21st century tyranny of technology over our hearts and minds. He recognized the essence of  a Renaissance, "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits....” He always made it clear that he admired the highest ideals of humanity and political liberty.

There are countless writers, artists, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, musicians, every type of creative under the sun, whose work embodies the Renaissance ideal. Renaissance is derived from the Latin root word Renaistre. Rebirth, revival, new beginning, the Renaissance mindset means leaving behind fixed ideas to allow one’s self to be led by curiosity, boldness and bravery to behold a new wondrous work of art. It means taking a risk in the darkness where no one else can see.

The writer Manny Frishberg described a time when he wrote for the newspaper The Jewish Transcript (later known as the JT News.) He remembers interviewing an older Jewish woman who lived on Mercer Island, due east of Seattle. The woman was a sculptor who had survived the concentration camp Auschwitz. She recalled how she became a sculptor. During daily rations, she was given a chunk of white bread. She rolled the bread in the palms of her hands, until it darkened from soot, becoming a soft mass of gray. From this lump she formed the shapes of living things, her first sculptures. 

Irish singer-songwriter and activist Bono has devoted a large part of his career searching for meaning and transcendence. Bono was soon to turn twelve when the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland took place on Sunday, January 30, 1972. The demonstration turned violent when the British military opened fire, killing fourteen, injuring many others.

Two years later, Bono’s mother died after suffering from a cerebral aneurysm. Losing his mother left him traumatized and on his own much of the time. Bono’s work and achievements are nothing less than a Renaissance personified. Bono’s legacy as a man of Renaissance persuasion is of particular importance because he thrived during a time in Irish history that is similar to the state of mind of the America of today, where tribalism is running rampant.

It is unlikely the United States could erupt into a Civil War with the clearly defined geographical boundaries that existed in 1860. There is, however, ample reason to believe that warfare could pattern “The Troubles,” the Northern Ireland conflict that lasted from the 1960s to 1998.

Skirmishes, killings, and bombings, here and there, seemed to be random acts of violence, but all were committed by tribes intent on destroying lives and creating terror. The violence of Northern Ireland ventured beyond that nation’s boundaries and into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and continental Europe.

Edwin Friedman stated, “Ironically, the very advances in technology that mark our era tend to intensify the ‘herding instinct’ characteristic of an anxious society.” When people are scared and anxious, they herd into tribes to protect themselves. People herding into tribes is not only symptomatic of vitriolic American politics. Tribalism has taken root all over the world. The danger is clear. Eventually tribes go to war with one another.

American biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson wrote that an enduring society required three essentials: cooperation, cohesiveness, and altruism. The current dark age in America is seeing increasing polarization due to extreme cultural and economic differences, with points of view so far apart that there is no room for compromise. Warring tribal factions might very well explode into greater conflict.

We live in an age of tremendous anxiety—and that is an understatement. In the mid-1990s, Edwin Friedman asserted that the American culture was experiencing an emotional regression; societal regression was the new normal. He said, “In contrast to the renaissance spirit of adventure that was excited by encounter with novelty, American culture’s emotional regression has perverted the elan of risk taking discovery and pioneering that originally led to the foundations of our nation.”

Should a greater darkness befall us, due to economic woes, war, violence, tribalism, and the many impacts of climate change, we can trust that great writers, artists, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, musicians, every type of creative under the sun, will continue to create work that embodies the Renaissance ideal. A true Renaissance always finds its voice among the brave. We can trust that great art will emerge. Great art always illuminates the darkness. We can only hope that everyone else will see the light.

 

Research Sources

Articles:

Scammell, Michael (11 December 2018). "The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 1 January 2022. 

Ericson, Edward E. Jr.; Klimoff, Alexis (2008). The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn. ISI books. 

Ericson, Edward E Jr; Mahoney, Daniel J, eds. (2009). The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005. ISI Books.

 

The Story of a Lesson in History by Patricia Vaccarino

https://www.prforpeople.com/news/world-views/story-lesson-history

 

Books:

A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury, 1997) by Edwin Friedman

La Storia by Elsa Morante (1974) (History: A Novel, trans. William Weaver, 1977)

The Gulag Archipelago.  (3 vols.), YMCA Press (1973–1978) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

The Origins of Creativity, 2017, Liveright, by Edward O. Wilson

 

Additional research:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peace_activists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance