Renascence
Today I listened to an audio tape by a couple very famous academic lecturers about Renascence literature. I got the tape from our local library. To purchase it would have been quite expensive. The lecturers taught at Brown and Princeton and Yale and etc. They were the established authorities at least at the time of making the tapes, maybe about ten years ago.
The problem in the Renascence was that the medieval world order was breaking down. Smart people knew that. The discovery of antiquity (Greek and Roman thought) challenged Christan conceptions.
There was great respect for reason and the idea that the individual man was the measure of all things, At the same time there was a great recognition that sense data was unreliable, that people had great powers of self deception, that the bright and the true did not always triumph in human affairs. Erasmus turned everything that we thought we knew into shadows and vanity. Cervantes said that the fictional interior world kept us going and made our lives possible.
Today, no one knows anything of that. Today, science, literature, even mathematics is about politics, as it was in the Soviet. A new dark ages.
I do not call myself a conservative, I call myself a “child of the Enlightenment” or a supporter of the Enlightenment,