Comments on: Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 05:45:44 +0000

I don’t know about Florence, but Athens was the head of the Athenian League and got a lot of money out of it, spent on good statues and buildings. Francis Drake came back with so much loot that Maynard Keynes dated the British Treasury up through the 1930′s to investments made off Drake’s loot. It helps to have money.

Le4wis thought Elizabethan poetry was Golden because they were coming out of a period of very bad poetry, written in ‘poulter’s measure’ which he called the Drab Age. Then they got into blank verse and knew exactly what to do with it, until they used up all the Golden subjects like Ideal Love, Ideal War, and charming clever dialog.

By: Harper’s Notes

Harper’s Notes — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 06:48:07 +0000

Crisis is the test of character. Without the crises of wars and revolutions it is a rare thing where those who are virtuous and strive for excellence can find each other to form the socio-political and economic networks which lead to peak civilizations, and even then it is often only for a generation or two. In hard times trust is earned and is less of a matter of being mandated by laws and shaped by those who make pretty speeches. It seems that it is not so much that ‘hard times build hard men’ as that the test of crises enable hard men to discover each other and so to band together. This puts the relative high frequency of wars on the European subcontinent in an interesting light.

By: Wang Wei Lin

Wang Wei Lin — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 03:09:23 +0000

Some years ago I asked myself this question, “Where else would I rather live than the United States? My choices were Western Civilization countries. As I considered this, I surmised the familiarities of shared history, culture, languages and race were biasing my choices, so I eliminated all Western countries from the list. To be honest, most everything left on the list were crap hole third world countries, except for Japan and maybe China. Although my Chinese friend says China is third world. To me what makes the West special is two things, Christianity and Greek philosophy. Take that heritage away and the West would have never happened. As we drift from our Greco-Christian foundations the West will take its place with the rest of the world. So for a few centuries, the West rose above the average experience that Hobbes describes as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Now we will return to the mean experience of history.

By: David Foster

David Foster — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 23:14:13 +0000

Paul Graham has written about this topic frequently..for example:

“The inhabitants of fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Milan at the time was as big as Florence. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name?

Something was happening in Florence in the fifteenth century. And it can’t have been heredity, because it isn’t happening now. You have to assume that whatever inborn ability Leonardo and Michelangelo had, there were people born in Milan with just as much. What happened to the Milanese Leonardo?

There are roughly a thousand times as many people alive in the US right now as lived in Florence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. If DNA ruled, we should be greeted daily by artistic marvels. We aren’t, and the reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.

Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

By: Felix

Felix — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 21:29:23 +0000

Fascinating question. But, it might be better to gather a *lot* more examples than 3. E.g. Unless it’s just art that’s examined, how about the Santa Clara area post 1960′s?

Lots of good ideas for explanation. Gotta watch out they don’t “explain” a viral outbreak by noting those who suffered were not virtuous enough.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 20:02:44 +0000

Now do Bach—Wagner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC24gV1o7XQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw497_S0bFk

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 17:00:01 +0000

Apparently "New Learning and New Ignorance" is the introductory essay in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and it addresses these topics:

The popular indifference to the new astronomy and the age of discovery.
The surprisingly unhumanistic nature of the early humanists and their lingering effects on our own culture.
The equally surprisingly unpuritanical nature of the early puritans.
The original nature of renaissance occultism.
The 16th-century shift in political theory that, in some forms, lingers yet.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 16:20:11 +0000

CS Lewis, ‘New Learning and New Ignorance’, on why there were so many men of genius in 16th century English literature:

‘I do not claim to know why there were so many men of genius at that time. The Elizabethans themselves would have attributed it to Constellation.’