7 Signs of the New Renaissance

A lot of people are saying that we are living through the death of culture and I think they're wrong. I think that we are standing at the edge of a new renaissance. Yes, the literacy rates are declining. Technology is advancing unchecked.

Political discourse is becoming increasingly polarized and incoherent. And all the while many universities worldwide are defunding the humanities. And yet history suggests that this is exactly when a renaissance begins. Now I've studied the literature of what I'm calling renaissance moments.

These are times in histories when a culture is fundamentally renewed by art and literature. Whether it's the European Renaissance, the Romantic Revival, the American Renaissance, uh the modernist movement, they all events the same signs at the beginning, right when they start. And when you look back, every great renaissance follows every great renaissance and every great cultural revival follows a very recognizable pattern. So in this video, I want to identify seven distinct and recognizable signs that have historically be tokened the start of revival of some kind of cultural renewal.

And our moment is no different. Uh and if we can learn to recognize these signs and if we can learn to participate in them and further them, then what feels like cultural collapse may in fact be the threshold of a new renaissance. So before I get into those seven signs, I do want to address a question I get quite a lot uh an objection really. And this is the question.

Can students, readers, uh, everyday readers, parents, self-learners, uh, long-distance commuters, frontline workers, retailers, small business owners. Can all of us really bring about a new renaissance? And the answer is actually emphatically yes. It bears repeating that history reminds us that revivals of learning are rarely begun within institutions.

So if you think of uh Fino's Platonic Academy in Florence, it was one of the great sparks of the Renaissance um in Italy. It was born among patrons, among readers and artists. The romantic revival came largely from poets uh who were not credentialed experts at all. Uh William Blake was an engraver.

Samuel Taylor Cage, the restless and jobless visionary, studied at college but was not degreed um at the University of Cambridge at Jesus College. And Shelley was a political exile and an academic exile. John Claire and Keats were workingclass men who changed the course ...