The loss of much of the Romans’ practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. At that time, these more worldly values were reborn due to a number of factors familiar to scholars (e.g., the fall of Constantinople, the rise of science, the discovery of the Americas, etc.). Or perhaps, in another more causally focused view, we could say that the Christian way, which required every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society’s levels of overall economic and social efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization now called the Renaissance inevitable. The new hybrid value system worked: Greek theoretical knowledge and Roman practical skills in a Christian social milieu.

                                                              Hanseatic League, city of Lubeck

Western culture finally integrated its most fundamental value systems, classical and Christian. It took over a thousand years for people whose lives focused on worldly matters instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as admirable, moral, Christian citizens in the eyes of the community. Artists and architects, even merchants and conquistadores, finally could do what they did to glorify God. But in evolutionary terms, a thousand years is almost nothing.

Handling and mastering the physical world through commerce, science, and art gradually became acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views, values, morés and behaviour patterns—the total culture package of Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being—was finally integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, both abstract and practical, that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough unleashed a deluge. Individuals who rose above society’s conventions—in “inspired” ways—began to prove that they could be valuable to the greater community, even if at first they upset the order sought by less daring people.

It is interesting to note the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies that seem to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted world view, values, and morés. These people and their disciples are often the young, which suggests adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society. Teenagers make us look at our values and, once in a while, we realize that one of those values is due for overhaul or even retirement. Teenage revolt serves a larger purpose in the evolutionary process of cultural change.

However, it’s more important to understand that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only a very few see them as great humans. It is even more important to see that the numbers involved on each side really don’t matter. What does matter is whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and whether the ideas work, which is to say, whether the followers then live better, healthier, happier lives than the rest of the society.

A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many citizens in its establishment may resent the means by which it does so and may do everything within their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the practical, effective features of its classical values were integrated with its more humane, respectful Christian ones, Europeans largely did not support thinkers with ideas and morés that focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest forward in a timely way toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that not only tolerates but takes pride in its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness and acceptance of those who are different. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to “get its act together” and meld all of its values into a single smoothly functioning whole.

To survive, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the physical universe grow harsher or when the competition gets fiercer. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned. But the peaceful mechanism can also work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed, and it can be seen that they live better. At that point, the majority begins to pay attention.

In the more tolerant society, other citizens, by their own choice, begin to take up the new ways. Gradually, more choose not to be left behind in what appears to be becoming a stagnant cultural backwater. This market-driven way is the way of peaceful evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Worldwide, we have taken a long time to reach it, but as a species, we are almost there.

                                    Renaissance pocket watch (from a painting by San Friano) 

Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in humanity’s creative potential with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a man could be moral, venturesome, independent, and patriotic. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity could be blended in a way that was practicable and consistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

                   

                                                             Replica of Gutenberg’s printing press

The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g. the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War), but these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of reason’s darling child, science, and science’s material world view. Material acts done right did glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the Enlightenment.

                                       Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years’ War (painting by Ferrer-Dalmau)

To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church’s traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more of the citizens in each new generation.

                   

                                     English physician William Harvey (from a painting by van Miereveld) 

Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g., navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture within Europe’s nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old Church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, science continued attracting new followers because the miracles of science can be replicated; science works.