End of History Fallacy

When exactly did the Middle Ages end? This question hooked middle school Sunghyun Cho (yep, me). Compare how the Renaissance saw the Middle Ages with how we see the Renaissance today.

"Medieval" is a historical label for roughly the 9th to the 15th century, thought of as sandwiched between the glory of antiquity and the intellectual rebirth of the Renaissance. Renaissance people coined the term Middle Ages (medium aevum in Latin, the middle age) when they got excited about Greece and Rome all over again. They saw themselves as heirs of classical knowledge, and the centuries that cut them off from antiquity as stagnation and decline. Compared to the ancients and to themselves, that period looked like it had no great achievements and no intellectual muscle. So they called it the Middle Ages. The name stuck, and we still carry a lot of their original view.

The closer historians looked, the less the Middle Ages looked like a time of darkness and ignorance. Science, technology, philosophy, and the arts all moved forward. Universities were founded. Classical scholarship flourished. Medieval scholars preserved and spread classical knowledge just like their Renaissance successors, and made breakthroughs of their own. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Hildegard of Bingen shaped Western thought.

Ironically, we look at the Renaissance the same way the Renaissance looked at the Middle Ages. We recognize what the 16th century gave us in art and culture. But we're endlessly critical of its science and engineering, its lack of justice, and its underdeveloped civil society. Renaissance humanists put classical texts and the pursuit of knowledge first, but they also leaned hard on Aristotle and Ptolemy, which held back new scientific methods. We value evidence, experiments, skepticism, and the scientific method over authoritative texts, so to us the Renaissance looks like it lacked the rigor and precision of modern science. And its engineering, impressive as it was back then, looks small next to ours. St. Peter's Basilica is a feat, but it shrinks next to a space station or the Large Hadron Collider. So the Renaissance is medieval in its own right, stuck between ancient technology and ours.

We will be medieval too, around the year 2500. However much we think we're at the peak of science and technology, history is always subjective and relative. Look at the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and how we see both, and human history reads as one tangled, connected thing.

The same goes for us. We often think we're close to done growing, that we'll stay the same from here on, that it's too late to start fresh.

But remember, your today is also your middle ages. Eventually, Diligent Immatures build the Future.