praxistheologia.com

I recently finished Neil Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. A massive 3k page corpus of interwoven historical fiction set at the end of the gothic era, and the beginning of the baroque era. Wonderfully composed, if a bit verbose the three volumes in the cycle chronicle the lives of several historical figures from the King(s) of England and France to eminent “natural philosophers” such as Sir Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren. Interwoven with their historical lives are the fictional, yet plausible characters of Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. While the story itself is worth the read what is most interesting is the subtle, but constant shifts that evident throughout the cycle leading the world from the gothic kingdoms to the “new system of the world.” The Cycle starts out with a few of the main characters escaping a religious war and overseeing the alchemical distillation of silv er ore from abandon mine shafts into silver ingots. Stephenson goes into great detail to describe the economic reasons for this venture and the gains that will be received despite the large amount of manpower required to carry out this process. Silver is hard currency with inherent value. Yet at the end of the cycle, that same character carries a cheque from an investor to “the company devoted to the engine for raising water by fire” That character spends the final moments of the book investigating a steam engine, raising water from mines by the use of fire. So many changes fill the cycles books. From the economic shift away from hard currency and the reign of spanish pieces of eight and further to the idea of currency as a flowing, living thing to the shift from manpower and the reign of slave traders to the mechanical age where machines replace human workers.

As I read through this cycle I began, I think unconsciously at first, to compare the changes from gothic to baroque described on the pages to our current situation. I am no historian but I believe that there are several key innovations from the late gothic and early baroque era that are being paralleled in our contemporary age. Below are some of the comparisons I’ve linked in my mind. I’d love to hear feed back on these as I’d ultimately like to use this as the basis of a theological ethics article: Baroque Ethics.

In the late Gothic age the printing press made the mass dissemination of information available. As evidenced by the very presence of this blog, the internet has created a place where the judgement of worth in the hands of the author instead of the publisher. No longer do the commodity economics of a printing press hinder, or help the dissemination of information. Furthermore, the printing press circumvented the political control of the Church and fledgling nation states. Because the shift between hand copies of manuscripts and the printing press removed political control in a similar way that the internet has removed economic control from the capital holders.

More tomorrow, when I talk about money and other such innovations