I like Ada Palmer, but here she is completely wrong.
It’s vogueish now in the world of history to claim there were (and can definitionally never be) dark ages or renaissances, and that the Renaissance did not exist. Too much to go into here, but this is the au courant belief for a variety of reasons, among them that these historians are attempting to push back as a political project against the idea that society can be improved as that implies some eugenicist goals.
People like Palmer misrepresent both the causes and the advent of the Renaissance. They portray the people like me who believe the Renaissance is a useful way to divide up history as believing that one morning, people woke up and were like, “Hey, it’s the Renaissance! Awesome!” No one, of course, believes that. It was a gradual transition from the Middle Ages, which used to be (for very good reason) referred to as the Dark Ages.
But the reality is that the Dark Ages occurred, and so did the Renaissance, no matter how much clownish historians deny them. For instance:
And no handy-dandy chart, but after the fall of Rome people forgot to how to bake fucking bread. And pottery quality reverted back about two thousand years. Among many, many other apocalyptic changes.
You can actually read writing from the time of people saying, “This is the end of the world and nothing will be good again.” And they were right — for about 800 years.
I hate this modern trend of denying very clear, very obvious occurrences and historical changes for political reasons. Come on, Ada, ain’t nobody gonna CRISPR your baby to have blond hair because you think the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happened.
(@Noahpinion)