“Narcissistic and Depressed” (or, one of the great many letters I wish I had the guts to send to my Religion professor.)

Dear Professor —— :

I have a lot of suggestions for how this course could be improved, in order to be more sensitive to the diversity among the members of the class, but right now I want to talk about when I first realized this class was not the right place for me. It happened roughly thirty minutes into the first class session, which was the amount of time before you began pontificating about how and why my generation are all ‘narcissistic and depressed’.

“I’ll tell you why we’re all depressed,” I thought immediately. “It’s because the world is dying and we can’t fix it because we’re all slaves under late-stage capitalism.”

Humanism's Growth from Renaissance to Reformation

From about 400 AD to 1400 AD, much of the European population lived in parochial and prejudiced societies. Hereditary monarchs ruled with little regard for their subjects, affluent church leaders made life—and death—altering decisions for all of “civilized” humanity, and the vast majority of the populace scraped out a living in support of the more fortunate nobility.[1] Then, in the Renaissance, that began to change. New ideas based on ancient ones crept into society, introducing the new concept of humanism, the idea that people and their decisions mattered. Although at first humanism was severely limited in its scope, this philosophy gradually spread and became foundational to later continent-shifting events.

Renaissance humanism did little to change the feudal social structure, but it paved the way for later changes.