City Of God 46

What gave rise to modernity? I would imagine that enough people were just sick and tired of the brutal difficulty of their short and thankless lives on an earth that seemed to care even less than the indifferent universe they found themselves existing in. There were no toilets, no plumbing, no indoor privies, no running water. All human waste was thrown into the street below and if people got sick from it, it was blamed on witchcraft and the tyranny of the church ensured that those poor hapless women would be burned to death at the stake. The church and king together were determined to keep the people stupid and uneducated and thus pliable and easy to rule. Medicine was frowned upon and considered another manifestation of witchcraft, sending even more innocents to the stake. Women died often in childbirth and not many children made it past their fifth birthday, and women were expected to obey their loutish and often abusive husbands and keep on breeding and bearing children to beyond the tenth, the fifteenth, sometimes twentieth pregnancy. People were ripe for modernity. The conditions that they were expected to accept as God-ordained were intolerable during the best of times. Almost everyone was infested with fleas, lice and scabies. Bathing regularly simply did not happen. There was never enough water available, so everyone lived with their and each other's stench. Most crimes were either capital offences or would be punished by torture and long imprisonment. You could not say even one word remotely critical of king or church without consequences. And there was war, constant warfare and deaths upon deaths upon deaths, and this had been going on for hundreds, for thousands of years. Privacy was nonexistent. Only kings and princes and bishops had the privilege of private bedchambers. People were ripe for modernity. Coffee is credited for having helped push us forward. Until the discovery of the magic bean, everyone stayed drunk and stupid on beer and wine, since the water was usually unpotable. Try educating a people that is perpetually wasted. Caffeine got the brain going, it opened up the neurotransmitters and coffeehouses opened all over Europe, and the chattering and scheming began. The merchant class was becoming literate and upwardly mobile. Education became more available. Scientists, despite the church's opposition, resistance and punishments, were making sudden and rapid advancements as they discovered the truth of the cosmos (the sun is at the centre of the solar system), microbes and then came the need to discover and invent effective medicines. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, later Shakespeare was writing plays and Cervantes was working on Don Quixote. Then Vivaldi was composing concerti. And meanwhile foreign lands were being discovered and colonized and native and African peoples were enslaved, exploited and massacred or converted to a degraded and disgraced form of Christianity brought over from the Spanish Inquisition. The rise of the bourgeoisie began to displace the aristocracy, then the Industrial Revolution created a new underclass of abused and mistreated workers. There were revolutions. There were new discoveries, new lands colonized and robbed of their wealth and settled by desperate and greedy white folk from Europe. In lurches and forward thrusts life was improving, for a few people, then for a few more, and eventually for many. Every decade brought with it the expectation that things would improve, that people's living conditions would become more tolerable. In the twentieth century we survived the most devastating wars in human history. Technology knew no bounds, and life became not only tolerable but rather sweet. For the many. Toilet paper, indoor plumbing, clean and potable running water, clean homes with private bedrooms, for everybody. Horseless carriages, later known as cars, run on environment destroying fossil fuels were within the reach of almost everyone, and if not everyone, then quite a few could now own their own little parcel of land with a house on it. Cities were clean and full of trees and parks and beautiful, or at least very efficiently designed buildings. Everything got better and kept getting better. Now, we almost all live in such conditions as two hundred years ago, would only be expected for gods or royalty. And we're still not satisfied. We still want it all to be better. We want to be better, stronger, healthier, more intelligent, more competitive, more successful. We don't want to be mere mortals. We want to be gods inhabiting Olympus.