Paradigm Shift
Paradigm Shift
How the Printing Press Destroyed the Very Fabric Reality
This essay is part of a series comparing the twilights of (1) Rome's slave-based economic system and (2) the Middle Ages' feudal system to (3) today's capitalist economic system. In addition to the broad life cycles of these economic systems, we'll note similarities between infectious diseases and changes in communication technologies common to all three eras. Finally, we'll see how belief systems rise and fall in tandem with these broad economic systems. When these systems seize up and stop functioning, people begin questioning authority. And that, in turn, leads to collapses of bedrock conceptions of reality itself.
Introduction
The printing press dealt a mortal blow to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which, during the Middle Ages in Europe, monopolized the flow of information. The ability to rapidly reproduce text destroyed that monopoly and marked the turning of the age from Medieval to Modern. The story of the printing press bears a remarkable resemblance to other advances in communication technology, both past and present. But the most notable parallel is that such advances lead to disturbing shifts in popular conceptions of reality itself.
The Printing Press
In the mid-1300s, the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church was savaged by the plague. Lacking any germ theory of disease, Europe had only a “Wrath-of-God” theory of disease to work with. Seeing that the Church was manifestly powerless to stop the dying, people began to entertain grave doubts about whether the Church actually possessed its claimed inside connection with God.
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press made matters considerably worse for the Church. Bibles in common languages people could actually understand went into mass production across Europe. They came off the presses faster than the Vatican could confiscate them. These “vulgate” Bibles were hot contraband; people swapped them like drugs on black markets.
By banning all but the Latin text, the Church successfully hid the radically negative view of wealth accumulation contained within the New Testament. It used its very real monopoly over the flow of information to perpetuate a fake monopoly on access to God. The Roman Catholic Church spent the Late Middle Ages monetizing this fake monopoly by shamelessly charging people for sin forgiveness. These so-called sales of indulgences became a flashpoint in the looming Protestant Reformation and the chief complaint of Martin Luther, the Mad Monk of Wittenberg himself.
Apocalypse
The Black Death set in motion a chain of events that ultimately ended the dominance of the Vatican over European geopolitics. Like a one-two punch, the plague exposed the Church’s fake monopoly on access to God, and the printing press disrupted its monopoly over the flow of information. All this while an acute labor shortage caused by the pandemic upended the old feudal economic order. Amidst the mounting chaos, Europeans were filled with dread. They naturally assumed the Apocalypse was at hand.
The role of the printing press in the Apocalypse of the late Middle Ages mirrors the role of the bound book during the Fall of Rome—another era of plague—when that emerging piece of communication technology also helped facilitate a challenge to power.
The Roman Catholic Church was born, ironically, after early Christians from across the Roman Empire used the new-fangled bound book to coordinate a unified ideological movement. They were so successful that Christianity became the state religion as the tide of Roman civilization swept back from the Italian peninsula, leaving the papacy behind to rule Europe. The Apocalyptic mood of that era has been immortalized in the Bible, the bound book that conquered Rome.
Collapse of Authority
Today, an Apocalyptic mood once again hangs in the air like a miasmal fog. When economic systems hum along efficiently, few stop to question authority. It’s only when dysfunction mounts that people squint suspiciously at emperors to see if they’re wearing any clothes.
New pieces of communication technology—like the bound book and the printing press—are called for and developed during these times. Today, the internet is the latest example of comms tech exposing naked emperors. Popular votes for Brexit and Trump are not only signs of mounting economic disorder, they’re also demonstrations of another political establishment losing control over the flow of information.
All the classic horsemen of the Apocalypse are present and accounted for today. In addition to the internet mirroring the role of bound books and the printing presses in prior eras, there’s also been a new pandemic to match the historical episodes of the Antonine Plague and the Black Death. COVID-19 was nothing like its predecessors in terms of mortality, of course. But it’s undeniably true that for better or for worse, popular faith in our scientific authorities has been badly shaken; just as it was during the Fall of Rome and the Late Medieval periods.
Paradigm Shift
Things get really weird when people en masse start to question the authorities whom we normally trust to tell us what is true and what isn’t true. These people shape bedrock conceptions of reality for the rest of us. Questioning priesthoods of truth is nothing less than a fundamental re-examination of reality itself.
The disturbing truth is that there is always a gap between what the powerful want us to believe, on the one hand, and what is actually so, on the other. When the powerful enjoy a monopoly over the flow of information, they naturally promote beliefs consistent with their own economic self-interest. The highly lucrative sale of indulgences is the most famous historical example of this.
However, once the printing press destroyed the information monopoly of the Church, it became possible to entertain views other than those of the Vatican. Eventually, the resulting scientific revolution inverted reality for the astonished people who lived through it.
The discovery that the Earth orbits the sun, and not vice-versa, has come to epitomize the transition from the Medieval to the Modern historical eras. Before that discovery, any fool could see the sun “moving” across the sky. But the Copernican Inversion flipped reality on its head just as the feudal economy of the Middle Ages, with its lords and serfs, gave way to the Modern Era, with its employers and employees.
Conclusion
There is a historical connection between collapses of broad economic systems and collapses of reality itself. During such times, gaps are exposed between what the powerful want regular people to believe and what is actually true. As numerous historical parallels mount between past eras of great change and our own increasingly turbulent time, we should expect that our own conception of reality is overdue to be overturned. Nothing is more disturbing than when the firm ground—previously considered bedrock—starts shifting underfoot. But to the historically literate, the collapse of reality itself is just another sign of the changing times.
Further Materials
The religious revolt offered the tillers of the fields a captivating ideology in which to phrase their demands for a larger share in Germany's growing prosperity. The hardships that had already spurred a dozen rural outbreaks still agitated the peasant mind, and indeed with feverish intensity now that Luther had defied the Church, berated the princes, broken the dams of discipline and awe, made every man a priest, and proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man. In the Germany of that age Church and state were so closely meshed- clergymen played so large a role in social order and civil administration that the collapse of ecclesiastical prestige and power removed a main barrier to revolution. The Waldensians, Beghards, Brethren of the Common Life, had continued an old tradition of basing radical proposals upon Biblical texts. The circulation of the New Testament in print was a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto. Peasant and proletarian alike found in it a divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished, and the poor would inherit the earth.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, Page 382