You have a right to be pessimistic

In the spirit of "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," you can't help but wonder if the 21st century isn't shaping up to be a repeat of the 14th.

At least, you can't help but wonder that if you have a blog and are all too willing to pontificate about stuff you don't know much about, exploiting the (slight) advantage in knowledge that you have about the Middle Ages over (some of) your readers.

But I digress.

So western Europe had a great run from the 11th through the 13th centuries. The Vikings settled down. Not too many famines. Hamlets became towns, and towns became cities. Kings flexed their muscles way off in the Holy Land.

And then in the 14th century there were so many more people in Europe that all those hungry mouths overtook the good weather and the new, improved farming implements. And then weather got bad, and people starved. And then the Black Death came.

Now this is a cautionary tale. Even many of us who are smart enough to decry the liberal myth of progress operate, if at an unconscious level, under the assumption that things really will get better, eventually. The economy will bounce back. It always has in the past.

But I wonder if these last 200 years haven't been modernity's version of the High Middle Ages, and while it's been a nice run, it's definitely run its course. So global warming = the Great Famine of 1315-17, and the Black Death = I dunno, an asteroid?

Comments

[Mike]

(The Black Death = SARS ) OR (The Black Death = Avian Bird Flu) OR (The Black Death = ecophagy, a scenario in which out of control molecular nanotechnology eats the the environment while replicating at an exponential rate)

Really, the possibilities are quite numerous.

It's fascinating to me that everyone simply assumes the world will continue as it always has. Which, of course, is true until, you know, it isn't.

[Jennifer]

Asteroid! Oh my goodness, it's Deep Impact, but for real, with an African American President even!

[Elliot]

Aww, geez. How depressing. This sort of thing was a lot more fun to think about when I was a millenarian Jehovah's Witness.