Revolution, Renaissance & Enlightenment: the Marxists are Wrong.

i received a well-intentioned series of
questions from a long-time viewer of the channel asking me to comment on the relationship between gdp growth and revolution this is someone writing in with the assumption that revolutions in our western european tradition and then the traditions that have devolved from european colonialism in you know former provinces of european empires like the united states canada australia and so on around the world that our tradition of revolutions has a cause-and-effect relationship with poverty when the french revolution happened in paris was paris france was that the poorest part of europe the people who participated in the french revolution in in paris were they poor by french standards by european standards by global standards can you think of examples of countries and cultures within europe or all around the world where people were poorer sometimes much much poorer but where they had stable economic and political regimes during that same century let's say were people in france poorer than people in the ottoman empire at the same time were people in france more or less oppressed than people in the ottoman empire this is not the most extreme example i could offer i tried to reply to this guy briefly saying look i have talked about this on a live stream recently but what a lot of people are struggling with are very fundamentally profoundly stupid misconceptions about history and economics and revolutions that were created by marxism and the shame of it is that most of these people don't think of themselves as marxists they don't think of themselves as ex-marxists they don't think themselves as even educated in marxism but their assumptions on a really deep level about economics and the progress of history are a kind of bad marxist stereotype all right uh none of our revolutions in this sense western europe and its its colonies none of them have a cause and effect relationship to poverty you could make the opposite argument that they're caused by privilege a real sincere history of ideas of the origins of the french revolution would in my opinion begin in 1347 with the revolution in rome 1347. now why started that that early because really the ideology of revolution that we have is profoundly tied to the idea of a renaissance this is renaissance with a capital letter r in the european tradition which is very hard for people in japan to relate to or people in china this is really a uniquely western european you know cultural political economic tradition right um and then that concept of renaissance of course is rooted in classicism in classical moral political philosophical values and not all classicism is overtly pro-democracy or democratic plenty of it is elitist and imperialist plenty of it just aspires to recreate the greatness of the roman empire and the leadership of figures like julius caesar or what have you thought of uncritically without any emphasis on the the democratic element of that classical heritage and some schools of thought within that renaissance tradition that way of things some are emphasizing a return to democracy or some elements of democracy that they that they idealize okay so in 1347 in my opinion we have the first major revolution that really demonstrates this pattern and that revolution 1347 what actually happened was much less important than what famous authors wrote about it it was romanticized it was glamorized it was propagandized poems were written about this event i am completely willing to believe that the real world historical experience of people who were alive in rome at that time the people would be able to say look this was just another crazy coup d'etat this was just another pretender to the throne this was just another grubby example of one group of people with some money and weapons trying to take over the government such as happened throughout the dark ages this was no no different no better no worse but even if that were true or even that were largely true a literature grew up around this particular coup d'etat that made it into a revolution in this sense in the same sense as the french revolution in the same sense that we continue to idealize revolution now in the 21st century in the year 2020. all right i would say the next big example of this would be corsica again it's not really it's not really the events of the corsican revolution it's not really the reality of the short-lived um dictatorship of pasquale paulie that's not really what happened it was what famous authors said about what happened um in this case especially a guy named boswell boswell whose name is now indelibly linked with uh johnson uh boswell wrote an account of the corsican revolution and he was not the last he began the romanticization of or the creation of propaganda around this and again this was this tremendously influential i mean again it's not it's not that the events were influential it's that the literature that surrounded the events became uh influential and um to give an example of an author you may have heard of jean-jacques rousseau was very much influenced by this okay now the next big hurdle is the english revolution and when i say the english revolution i mean the same events that are often referred to as the english civil war whatever you want to call it right um which people have more difficulty romanticizing or attributing uh classical greek and roman values to but nevertheless and then it's just about a little bit more than a century after the english revolution we have the french revolution these are the big these are the big precedents in sequence and there are there are smaller uh presence here but what do they what do they have in common right i think on the on the deepest level you can say that the dark ages were defined by regarding antiquity with all regarding what the ancients accomplished as something impossible for people to accomplish today um still today in the south of france you live surrounded by the ruins of the ancient roman empire and it was true throughout a large part of it we were in we were in central germany and it wasn't like the southernmost edge of germany or something it was remarkable you know just how much of tangible legacy of the roman empire they were pretending depending on where you were within europe whether it was spain or italy or what have you um the roman imperial past remained tangible and visible of course if you were further east it would have been the legacy of ancient greece and the so-called eastern roman empire byzantine empire what do you want to call it um this sense that not merely architecturally but in every way um for example their knowledge of world geography that they had traveled to and explored places that people today could never possibly go to and explore or write a description of it was impossible to compete with the ancients in virtue the renaissance mentality is the opposite say no we can do this we can do this again we can even do better and you know this is included in this is the process of architectural sketches and paintings showing look it would be possible to make another great coliseum like the colosseum of engineering we could make them in every city in europe even like this is attainable it's not the case that they were physically or mentally superior to us in ancient times we can reorganize our society change our way of thinking improve our quality of education everyone think about it we can have a kind of revolution we can have a kind of renaissance and we can escape from the dark ages however those are are conceptualized now um it's very important to note the first written use of this concept of the dark ages and of europe emerging from the dark ages to return to the glory of ancient times of classical antiquity ancient greece and realms ideals that was precisely in the the revolution of 1347 right so these things that it was a very politically real context for these seemingly nebulous impalable ideals to be to be demonstrated and again at least on paper at this time people learned about the news not through radio and not through television they read about it as it was written about there was this exciting prospect that at least um the language of ancient democracy that again societies would be led by people called tribune and consul that it's some of those democratic ideas uh you know have forgotten from the history books that those could matter again in rome in the same city of rome of the same architecture and yeah it did include the idea of just physically building bridges and roads and buildings and building an empire all right now um one of the things i notice in 21st century in our kind of post-marxist period is that a lot of people will try to diminish and dismiss the significance of renaissance thinking and of revolutionary thinking by pointing out the extent to which this sort of progress in europe is ineluctably linked to the rise of european imperialism european conquest of north america south america bits and pieces of asia you know eventually all of india or most of india and so on but the extension of european power around the world not just through trade but through the slave trade through piecemeal conquest genocide so on and so forth and there's this sense that the so-called progress toward freedom and democracy in europe should be seen in the shadow of the rise of this terrible global slave trading empire these terrible genocidal armies marching out around the world um that is half true okay the half of history it's ignoring is precisely the strength of the ottoman empire deep deep into the period that we call the renaissance the ottoman empire is still expanding and in reality europe as we know it is shrinking less and less of the mediterranean is under the control of european powers more and more of it is under the control of the ottoman empire the ottoman empire grows and grows and grows until it crumbles right so you're only looking at one half of the equation if you're looking at the fact that you mean on a map all of a sudden a huge amount of territory for example in canada canada and the united states is taken over by european powers the french and the english huge amount of territory taken by the spanish and the portuguese in south america then again the map is a little more complex when you're including the colonization of asia but huge huge you know what else you know what else is huge greece during those same centuries decade by decade look at a color-coded map of how much of greece is controlled and conquered by the ottoman empire and when and how just barely greece manages to retain it manages to regain its liberty or its its independence right like you really think greece is a small or trivial place compared to quebec you know really you know when you really think about it and during these centuries you know what really matters um and during these centuries large large parts of christendom large parts of christian europe continue to be at war uh with the ottoman empire and you know one of the most important frankly is russia and that's why the russian empire ends up shaped in the way it is the bizarre borders of that russia still has to this day um you know it's it's not the case that europe is ignoring the ottoman empire while going and looting and pillaging and enslaving people on the rest of the planet right europe is losing to the ottoman empire all right and the reason why uh cities in italy become less and less economically significant is in part that they indeed are building gunships to try to keep away pirates and looters and raiders they're in a state of of constant war and not even cold war with the surrounding uh islamic empires that rule a large part of the the mediterranean around them parts of the mediterranean that were in the ancient hellenistic world in the western roman empire eastern europe that were very much part of europe and no longer are right so it's very easy to misrepresent this as a period of uh imperial expansion right when you keep the map centered on the same part of the world that the roman empire occupied eastern roman empire and western it continues to be contraction it continues to be failure continues to be collapsed right and it's both both are true so europe is changing and europe is going out and changing the whole world but in some ways you know europeans going out and massacring people in australia in indonesia in india in sri lanka i mean it's it's mind-boggling how almost every almost every corner of the world faces some kind of pressure or invasion from europeans if not outright enslavement genocide so it's a different story in each case but nevertheless and yet all of this can be considered in the context of the frustrated ambition just to reconquer jerusalem right there was a time when the crusades really did matter to all of the kings and popes in europe and that was the definition of what it was to be european was to contribute your soldiers to the attempt that failed every time to reconquer what they considered the holy land to re-include in europe you know jerusalem itself if not the area we think of as israel and palestine you know etc they never did it they never succeeded they never won that right so you can call it a renaissance and you can call it the golden age of european imperialism something imperialism but there's a very very strange like self-selected blindness to the ways in which during that that period europe is much weaker than it wants to be in which it's losing on a really important front that's right there in the center of europe greece was not the periphery of europe it was the center you can't think of this as something far distant from england england really was the periphery england was a place of absolutely no importance say in the year 1500 and certainly in the year 1000 right it was of no significance at all it becomes significant rapidly at the very end of this this period time at the end of the renaissance if you like or even even later depending on when you when you consider to be the end of the renaissance okay now um i had a spontaneous conversation on a live stream talking about this marxism can be refuted when it presents itself overtly and sincerely as marxism if someone says to you that they believe revolutions happen if and only if the people are so poor and so oppressed that they have to rise up and tear down the government right and they believe this because they read it on a certain page of the works of karl marx or ingles now if someone says that to you you can at least criticize it you can express your grounds for doubt you can cross-examine them you can demolish it what's much harder to do is to address these beliefs when the people who believe them aren't even aware of them right they think of revolution um like shaking up a carbonated beverage and then it explodes right as if it's the oppression itself it's the repression it's the poverty that causes this explosion all right and there's no sensitivity to there's no curiosity for the historical reality that what we call revolution and what we call renaissance and what we call enlightenment really needs to be appreciated as innovation right innovation isn't caused by poverty it's not caused by wealth either right the island of corsica was a place of absolutely no significance when pasquale paoli led his revolution there and went as it happened a bunch of intellectuals mostly british some french decided to write about this and describe it in terms of return to the democracy and classical values of ancient athens and rome and so on and this became this massively influential thing um you know it became important because there were new ideas about how we could lead a better life the french revolution fundamentally was created just by the necessity of tax reform at the beginning the revolutionary period aristocrats didn't pay taxes by the end of the revolutionary period they did that was the fundamental problem was that aristocrats were tax exempt and otherwise in many ways they had a fantastically successful society it wasn't caused by poverty would have they could have just had a tax reform and trundled on through history without any other changes right people had new ideas right people wanted to innovate people wanted to achieve a better life for themselves as individuals and for themselves collectively you know as a society i answered the question i was asked in an interview a few weeks ago what is politics with the answer when we talk about ethics we talk about ethical philosophy we're talking about the question of how can i lead a good life and when we talk about politics we're talking with the question of how can we lead a good life revolutions happen when people have fundamentally new ideas about how we can have a better life and when they're willing when they're willing to take terrible risks and pay a terrible price to try to make that happen