Michael Miller
We're living in a renaissance.
What!? This can't be a renaissance; today's politics is nauseating!
It sure is! But bad politics is no objection. Check out the politics of the original renaissance! The politics of Renaissance Italy would gag a maggot, and probably poison it!
Actually, today's politics are improving. The British had Thatcher. The Americans had Reagan and Gingrich. Albertans have Klein; and Ontarians, Harris. They look pretty good compared to the non-entities or worse that preceded them.
These men are just a start. Whether they know it or not, they are the first above-ground shoots of a movement that has been growing invisibly underground for about 50 years. It seeks individual rights, free markets and dramatically smaller government.
But the newspapers never told me about that! I'm sure they didn't; they don't like to talk about it! The establishment is waging a war of silence against these ideas, in the hope that they'll just go away.
But these guys are conservatives! They want to go back to the past, and a renaissance is a step forward.
Renaissance means rebirth. A renaissance aims to recover the wisdom of an earlier age. But wisdom grows from wisdom, so the rebirth of old wisdom always releases a flood of new wisdom. Wisdom--long shelf life knowledge--is potent stuff! (1)
A renaissance is marked by a movement to brush away errors and reclaim old wisdom. The original renaissance reclaimed the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans; this one seeks to reclaim the wisdom of the Enlightenment--the era that saw the founding of the US and the move of Britain toward democracy and free trade. And it aims to reclaim the wisdom of the first renaissance.
Leaders of the first renaissance called their ancient teachers "classics" as a term of honor. Thus we still speak of "classical Greece," and "the ancient classics."
The word "classic" also crops up in the new renaissance. It is used by defenders of the status quo to hint that old wisdom is out of date, but it has still become a term of honor.
"Classical liberal" has come to mean an advocate of liberty, as opposed to the modern statist "liberal" who never met a tax, regulation or government program he didn't love!
"Classical economics" has come to mean economics which is based on the primacy of reason and self-interest--in contrast to modern economics which pretends that men's self-interest can be evaded if government is sneaky enough or brutal enough.
Even "classical physics" is being re-thought. The experimenters of modern physics have learned many wonderful things, but the theory of modern physics is a mess. Now a few scientists are seeking classical explanations of 20th century discoveries. They are a tiny scorned minority, but so were Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.2
Doesn't a renaissance have something to do with art? Yup. Have you glanced at an art gallery window in your local mall lately? The awful crud of the 60s and 70s has almost vanished! There are pictures there now!
New technology will accelerate this renaissance as it did the first one. Both have produced spectacularly powerful means to spread knowledge.
Printing (invented ca 1450) propelled the ideas of the first renaissance. It dropped the cost of books to a tiny fraction of the cost of hand-written books. Knowledge which had been the preserve of a few scholars became available to tens of thousands. New ideas were scattered by printing at speeds which appalled the establishment of the time.
Pamphlets, leaflets and broadsheets appeared. When Luther offered a few pungent religious ideas in 1517, printing spread them across Europe on a time scale of weeks.
Half of Europe promptly left the old church! This event (the Reformation) was the unpredicted, shocking Earth-shaker of its age: a rough equivalent of the Soviet collapse in our era.
That Soviet collapse was also hastened by new technologies, notably photocopiers and fax machines. It is said that they were injected into Poland with the deliberate aim of bringing down Polish Communism. If so, this brilliant strategy worked past perfection! The collapse of the Soviet Union soon followed.
Potent as are printing presses, fax machines and copiers, the internet is the 800 pound gorilla of idea-spreading technology!
When the Soviets collapsed, internet was a baby. It's been doubling every year since then--roughly a 30 fold increase in five years. About 50,000,000 people are now (spring 1996) estimated to be connected, say 2% of the civilized world. Expect that fraction to reach 30% in only 4 more years, as internet continues to double annually.
At that point, expect rapid changes in almost everything. Knowledge is power, and internet changes almost everything about the spread of knowledge!
Do you need a part number? An owner's manual? Some obscure bit of knowledge? A net search will probably tell you more than you ever wanted to know about it. In minutes! Without leaving your desk!
Do you want something good to read? Legions of the classics of world literature and wisdom are already on the net. More appear all the time. You can download them for free, print them and read them at your leisure.
Do you have something to say? For about the price of a daily classified ad in a local newspaper, you can post 10 megabytes of knowledge to your own website for the entire world to read. (That's about 1,000 articles the size of this one!)
Do you want someone to talk to? If your interests are shared by only one man in a million,3 you can hope to find 50 of them to trade knowledge with by email--and twice that many next year!
Wars of silence are obsolete, as futile as a cat's attempt to cover its mess in a parking lot! Wars of silence succeed only if they can stop those who embrace blacked-out ideas from discovering one another: each then feels isolated and helpless. Internet makes it easy to discover allies! The plotting, planning and refining of ideas can then begin!
And now money can follow ideas! E-gold is growing (spring 2000) even faster than internet was growing 4 years ago. Individuals can discover and pay philosophers, scholars and activists anywhere in the world with the ease of a few mouse clicks! As they do so, they will call into being new generations of independent thinkers. Thinkers can now not only hope to earn a living through their work, but can aspire to riches! Progress will accelerate in all fields.
A renaissance is an age of fundamental change. The first renaissance completed the change from the Dark Ages to the modern world. This renaissance is a transition from the Dim Age of the 20th century to a brighter age.
And the pace is accelerating.
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1 See Quackgrass Press #24: Shelf life.
2 For a classical explanation of many modern discoveries see Einstein Plus Two, by Petr Beckmann, Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306. (Requires advanced undergraduate math.) See Quackgrass Press Outside Links!
3 Of course this includes women! No femspeak here!
Michael Miller is an engineer and Objectivist filosofer with thirty years of experience. He had been a member of Boycott Alberta Medicare in 1969 and of the Association to Defend Property Rights from 1973 on. He writes in-depth philosophical theory at his publication, Quackgrass Press, which can be accessed at http://www.quackgrass.com.
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